This story was written by Teen Vogue's 2024 Student Correspondents, a team of college students and recent graduates covering the election cycle from key battleground states.
Cara Nicole spends her days picking apart aesthetic restocking videos and useless celebrity products. Her quippy front-facing videos about financial literacy have gained her a following of over 222,000 subscribers on YouTube, where she goes by the handle @thefinancialfreedomgirl.
Recently, Nicole and a group of other content creators headed to Capitol Hill to talk about a perhaps less fun — but no less important — financial issue: taxes. The event, spearheaded by Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tina Smith of Minnesota, was dedicated to highlighting the upcoming fight over the future of Donald Trump’s sweeping 2017 tax cuts. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act resulted in roughly $2 trillion in tax cuts that had major benefits for big corporations and high earners, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Several of the law's major provisions are set to expire at the end of 2025, but could be extended depending on who controls Congress next year. So Senators Warren and Smith recruited a group of content creators to help get the word out about what they’re calling the “2025 Tax Fight” to their diverse, young audiences on social media.
Teen Vogue caught up with Nicole to learn more about her experiences at the event and how she uses content creation to promote civic engagement.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Teen Vogue: What was it like to be a part of the recent tax fight event in DC?
Cara Nicole: I'd only ever seen [the senators] on TV before, and so seeing them in real life, there's that surreal moment…where you're like, “Oh, wow, they're real people. They're living and breathing. They're not just pixels on a screen.” But it was also just surreal being like a history nerd, to be in the Capitol and be in a place that I've studied for so long. Learning about tax policy and economics and the way that we're trying to communicate this to everyday people was really impactful to me as someone who makes content trying to break down complex money topics to people, and getting people to feel engaged.
TV: How would you summarize the key components of the 2025 Tax Fight for your audience?
CN: I spoke to Senator Warren about this exact topic: the idea of trickle-down economics. I heard that phrase before, but I don’t think I had fully digested or looked into it before. On the surface, there was a part of me in the past that kind of understood the logic. I was like, “Okay, well, if you give tax cuts, maybe that money goes to increasing employee wages.” [According to] Senator Warren and [an interpretation of] some of the data that we've collected since Trump's tax cuts — because [they] create[d] such a good case study, really, of whether or not this works — is that when we slashed these [taxes], we didn't see this trickle down. Instead, we just had higher executive pay and stock buybacks, [which are when a company repurchases its own outstanding stock, often increasing the wealth of shareholders]. One of the rare benefits of Trump's tax cuts is that we could see much more clearly that trickle-down economics isn't working. So what else can we do? What are some other ways? Well, maybe we tax some of the ultra-wealthy and have that money go toward programs that can really help people, like more affordable education and healthcare. And again, tax policy is one of the ways that we have to get there and we have to think about in order to reach that better future.
TV: What were some of the biggest takeaways from this event?
CN: How deeply unfair the current tax code is. Donald Trump, in 2017, put out some tax cuts. [Some of the provisions] expire next year [at the end of] 2025 and that's what this focus of the tax fight is on: trying to revise those codes and to make sure that they don't renew them, but that we create something different.… Everyday people like public school teachers, police officers, firefighters, I didn't realize this, but they are paying more [percentage-wise] of taxes than Jeff Bezos is. And it just doesn't make sense. We talk about wanting a better country. Something I love about the younger generations is that we talk about wanting better, more affordable health care and education and more affordable housing and cleaner energy — all these things that are so great. But we don't always know how that happens. And tax policy, even though it sounds so boring and so unsexy at first glance, is one of the stepping stones we have to take to get to that better future, and part of it is just getting billionaires and the ultra wealthy to just pay their fair share.
TV: What do you think your participation as an influencer says about the evolving importance of content creators in shaping the political economy and the way we perceive the world?
CN: I think influencers are really good at curating a community or building a community that they speak to and that resonates with their messages. When you're able to take influencers to learn about politics and policy changes and different calls to action, they're then able to digest that and communicate that in their own unique way to their audiences. It just becomes a more decentralized way for us to get important information and important movements across. I'm excited about how influencers are becoming a larger part of that ecosystem, and I hope it continues.
TV: Do you have any messages for government officials as influencers continue to shape our interactions with news and information?
CN: Don't underestimate the power of social media and influencers, because so much of policy changing and improving our society is through being able to communicate important messages to people, and influencers can be messengers of change. They can help you communicate complex issues that you might [see as] so obvious. Other people, like influencers, might be able to take a step back and break that down into something that is easier to understand for their audience, for everyday people.
But also, potentially, create content yourselves. I've seen some different politicians who started creating their own content and doing these like FDR-inspired fireside chats through different social media platforms. I think that's also really neat. It's just about being able to talk to people and break their topics down to make them feel more accessible. I think social media can be such a powerful tool for that.
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