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Coming up on Washington Journal this morning, your calls and comments live.
Then, Moody's Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandy will talk about the state of the U.S. economy and outlook during the new Trump administration.
And policy manager at Transportation for America, Corrigan Salerno, talks about the state of the nation's infrastructure and the implementation of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal is live next.
Join the conversation.
Good morning.
It's Wednesday, November 27th.
On January 20th, Donald Trump will be sworn in as Commander-in-Chief.
His pick to lead the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth, has spurred some controversy.
And around the world, there are wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
The president-elect has also implied that he'd use the military domestically.
This morning, we're asking military members and their families only for your priorities for the incoming Trump administration.
What changes would you like to see at the Pentagon?
Here are how the phone lines are split up.
Active military, and that includes Active Guard and Reserve, it's 202-748-8000.
Former and retired military, 202-748-8001.
If you have a family member currently or formally in the military, the line is 202-748-8002.
You can also send a text to 202-748-8003.
Include your first name in your city-state.
You can post your comments on social media.
It's facebook.com slash C-SPAN and X at C-SPANWJ.
Welcome to today's Washington Journal.
Before we get started with your calls, there was news from the Middle East about a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
And here are the front pages of the major national papers starting with the Washington Post.
Israel-Hezbullah reach ceasefire agreement.
Here is the Washington Times.
Ceasefire deal with Hezbollah brings hope to Israel.
Lebanon, Biden-Hales, late-term retreat of battered militant group.
The Wall Street Journal.
Israel-Lebanon agreed a truce.
Ceasefire would narrow the fronts in Israeli fighting and diffuse a broader regional crisis.
And finally, the New York Times, Israeli ministers approve a truce with Hezbollah.
Deal is for a 60-day halt to Lebanon's deadliest conflict in decades.
President Biden was at the Rose Garden yesterday and he made these comments.
Last year, security for the people of Israel and Lebanon cannot be achieved only on the battlefield.
And that's why I directed my team to work with the governments of Israel and Lebanon to forge a ceasefire to bring a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah to a close.
Under the deal reached today, effective at 4 a.m. tomorrow local time, the fighting across the Lebanese-Israeli border will end, will end.
This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities.
What is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed, well, I emphasize, will not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.
Over the next 60 days, the Lebanese Army and state security forces will deploy and take control of their own territory once again.
Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure in southern Lebanon will not be allowed to be rebuilt.
And over the next 60 days, Israel will gradually withdraw its remaining forces.
And civilians, civilians on both sides, will soon be able to safely return to their communities and begin to rebuild their homes, their schools, their farms, their businesses, and their very lives.
We're determined this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence.
And so the United States, with the full support of France and our other allies, has pledged to work with Israel and Lebanon to ensure that this arrangement is fully implemented.
The agreement totally implemented.
You know, there will be no U.S. troops deployed in southern Lebanon.
This is consistent with my commitment to the American people to not put U.S. troops in combat in this conflict.
Instead, we, along with France and others, will provide the necessary assistance to make sure this deal is implemented fully and effectively.
Let me be clear.
If Hezbollah or anyone else breaks the deal and pose a direct threat to Israel, then Israel retains the right to self-defense, consistent with international law.
And we are taking your calls this morning from military, current, former military members, and their families on priorities for the incoming Trump administration when it comes to the military, the Defense Department.
What changes would you like to see at the Pentagon?
We're taking your calls, and this is an article from Responsible Statecraft that says: in 2024, veterans voted for Trump.
Some say Harris's attempt to embrace old Iraq war hawks have had the opposite effect.
According to exit polls on Election Day, 12% of voters in this presidential election had served in the U.S. military.
65% of them said they voted for Donald Trump, while 34% said they voted for Kamala Harris.
It says we still need a breakdown of age to see if this was generational.
Some suggest that younger Republicans, especially more recent veterans, are among the biggest resistors to the war party orthodoxies on Capitol Hill, including now Vice President-elect JD Vance, who served as a Marine in Iraq,
former Democratic Congresswoman, and Iraq veteran Tulsi Gabbard, who campaigned for Trump and recently turned Republican, and also been a fierce critic of Biden's Ukraine war policy and Washington's militarism overall.
Well, President-elect Trump's nominee for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, appeared on a podcast and was asked about his views on women in combat.
And here are his thoughts.
This is from earlier this month.
Everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated and complication in combat means casualties are worse.
And when you actually go into the hood, again, and I got response, I've got 99% positive response to this, a few, a little bit of pushback.
But when you actually break down what they did in the studies to open the door for women in combat, I mean, they just ignored them.
So the Marine Corps was the only service that actually tried to fight back and say, no, obviously I'm exempting special operations, which thus far has held the line fairly well.
Because if they were lowering the standard to become a Navy SEAL, just to let women inside the Navy SEALs, that's going to change the capabilities and ethos of the Navy SEALs, except for a very small example of some female super soldier who's capable of doing it.
But because of how Washington works, they're going to change the standards.
They're going to push for quotas.
We have numerous quotes in the book of, no, no, these standards aren't changing.
They're just evolving.
They're just evolving to meet the needs of today.
They're not getting tougher, right?
They're not getting tough.
They're getting tougher.
No.
So they're getting lower.
Take someone like Millie.
I mean, he was calling down to individual units to make sure they had female company commanders after they graduated from Ranger School.
Like, what's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs doing pushing company command slots?
It's all an agenda.
It's all to say, oh, we have this first or we have this, that.
So that's proliferated everywhere.
The reason women started getting in combat is because of forward support companies and they were, you know, we were integrating a lot of the rear echelon activities into BCTs, brigade combat teams that were now deploying forward as an entity.
And so you had women truck drivers or fuel or mechanics on these convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And then they'd be ambushed or hit by IEDs and suddenly now you have women in combat.
That's maybe a modern reality in a 360 battlefield.
That's different than intentionally saying we're going to put women into combat roles so they will do the combat jobs of men, knowing that we've changed the standards in putting them there, which means you've changed the capability of that unit.
And if you say you haven't, you're a liar.
Because everybody knows between bone density and lung capacity and muscle strength, men and women are just different.
And we are taking your calls this morning.
This is an article from Fox News with the headline, how does Pete Hegseth's experience compare to previous defense secretaries?
It says that the nomination of Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host, former captain in the Army National Guard, and President-elect Donald Trump's stunning choice for defense secretary, has sparked concerns about whether he has the practical experience to manage a large department with an enormous budget.
And you can see that at live nowfox.com.
And we'll start with calls in Rory in Rancho Santa Margarita, California.
Good morning.
Good morning.
As for Trump in the military, 52, 50 years ago, I was in Vietnam and we hit a draft.
Is he going to bring back the draft?
And also, will it include women this time?
And what do you think about that, Rory?
Well, I was made to join the Army instead of being drafted because I found too many people were being killed as draftees.
And I think it may be necessary, but I sure feel pity for the people that have to do it.
And also women this time, maybe not in combat.
But I heard talk that up to age 39, they may be drafted in non, we call combat areas, and the men up to age 45 to build up the Army.
I think it might be a necessary evil.
All right.
And this is Dave in Clifton, Texas.
Good morning, Dave.
Hey, good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
As regards women in combat, you know what?
I'd like to see them playing in the NFL.
I'd like to see Ohio State field women on their football team.
Now, they score points.
In the military, you keep score by killing people.
How dare you equate diversity, equity, and inclusion in the military and not condemn not having it in football, basketball, major league baseball.
In my time, you could be drafted or you could enlist, or a judge could tell a 17, 18-year-old, hey, you can go to jail or you could join the Marine Corps.
You know, that straightened a lot of young men out.
So what happened with you, Dave?
Were you drafted or did you join?
I enlisted.
I served proudly.
I was wounded.
And how dare people equate combat to diversity, equity, and inclusion?
I don't understand it.
It doesn't work.
All right.
Yeah, how can you defend yourself against an enemy when you can't defend yourself from rape by your own?
This is Dave on Facebook.
He's an Air Force veteran.
He says his suggestion is quit nominating Russian assets for cabinet positions.
And this is Robert in Escondido, California.
Good morning, Robert.
Yes, good morning.
My son-in-law right now is stationed in Iwakuni, Japan.
He's a fireman, and his priorities are that he will not say the word politics.
He will not talk politics.
And that's our company.
That's good.
He keeps politics out of it.
His problem, I guess, is women.
Being a fireman, he's a master gunner.
He has about 65 people under him.
And he has not one woman.
They cannot pick up when a plane goes down or something like that.
A woman cannot pick up a body.
They cannot rescue people.
And that's his problem.
And he said the woke thing has got to him.
I know that.
This DEI, it doesn't make sense.
But, you know, I just wish that our priority is really for our strengthening our country and not strengthening a movement such as woke and women's rights in the military.
I hope people see the same thing I see.
And that's about all I want to say.
Well, here's a woman that was in the military.
This is Illinois Democratic Senator and former combat veteran Tammy Duckworth.
She talked about her views on Pete Hegseth.
He's a retired major in the Army National Guard, Bronze Star recipient.
He served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
You say he's deeply unfit and wholly unqualified despite those credentials.
Why?
He never commanded a unit.
He never commanded a company, let alone battalions, brigades, or whole armies.
He was a platoon leader.
He served at a very low level in the military.
And we're talking about an organization that is 3 million servicemen and women and civilians and a budget of over $900 billion.
He does not have the experience to run an organization of that size.
So just based on those requirements alone, he is unqualified for the position.
You are, as I mentioned, a combat veteran.
20 years ago last week, you lost both of your legs when your Blackhawk helicopter was shot down in Iraq.
I want you to listen to what Pete Hegseth has said about women in combat.
I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.
It hasn't made us more effective, hasn't made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.
What's your response?
Well, he's wrong because the women have made us more effective.
In fact, our military could not go to war without its 223,000 women who serve in uniform.
We would have an ineffective military that was not capable of deployment if we were to pull out all the women and say you cannot be in combat.
For those women who are in roles such as the infantry or Navy CEOs, those women have met the same standards as the men in order to be assigned to those positions.
So again, this shows that Mr. Hexbeth is not qualified for the position because he doesn't understand, apparently, even after having served, that women are actually vitally important to an effective military.
That was Sammy, Tammy Duckworth.
And we are taking your calls this morning from military members and their families only.
So if you are current in the military, you can call us on 202-748-8000.
That includes Garden Reserve.
If you are former or retired, it's 202-748-8001.
And if you have a family member that is serving or has served, it's 202-748-8002.
And we'll talk to Joel next in Mountain Home, Arkansas.
Good morning.
Good morning, ma'am.
How are you doing?
Good.
Well, I would like to say these people that were allowed to come into our country, there will be many of them that would contribute to our country and what we need.
The ones that are committing crime and everything, they need to be sent back home.
Let's face it, we need these people.
And I have people that I know who thinks I'm entirely wrong, but that's their opinion.
But some of these people coming here for a better life.
And like I say, we do need these people because we got a lot of lazy people in this country now.
And we need to secure our borders.
I think he's put the man back in that's going to get it done.
And the ones that are committing crimes, they need to go to be tried, do their time in a jail, and then send back home.
They came to a good country, but these criminals are coming here, and that's what these countries do.
They let their headaches out to come here.
So, Joel, so the question is: those that are here illegally, who have not committed crimes and vetted, and, you know, as you said, they're here for a better life or to escape some hardship at home.
Would you allow them in the U.S. military?
Well, back when I was in the Army, I entered the Army in 1960, those that was allowed to come here, they still had an obligation to serve in our military.
And then in our barracks, we had a man that was drafted.
He was unhappy about it.
He was from another country, but he was allowed in our country.
And I asked him one day, why are you so ticked off at our country and the Army?
He said, well, I had done my time already in my country.
I had served my country, and I came here now in the military again.
And he got drafted.
What about the ones that, I mean, currently today, Joel, that do want to serve, but they're undocumented?
Well, I don't know.
All right.
That's fair.
We'll talk to Dale in Jeanette, Pennsylvania.
Good morning.
Yes, good morning.
I'm a Marine veteran, and the only thing I have to say about this situation is I could never take an order from a convicted felon.
Case closed.
Thank you much.
So, Dale, what would you do if you were in...
Oh, Dale's gone.
Okay.
Virginia in Janesville, Wisconsin.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I want to say two things.
Number one, the military could not have existed in Afghanistan without the women who went into the villages to organize the women in the villages.
The men could not go in there.
I have pictures of those units, all those women military standing together.
And instead of veils, they wore knit caps over their heads.
And they were in danger.
Just as much as the men, they could have been blown up on the roads.
And I just wanted to say that.
And then the second thing I want to say is what ticks me off is it's only through combat that you get the extra pay and the promotions.
If they take women out of, and you know, you don't have to label it combat.
It's just that the women who fight with their units nowadays are always going to be in combat because it's a new way of fighting.
They drive the trucks.
They are pilots.
The war is all around them.
And they're coming back with their legs blown off and all this sort of thing.
And that's the only way you get promoted and you can go up the chain and you become generals and all that sort of thing.
So I would like someone to ask, Hits, how are women going to be promoted if they're not labeled as combat with the pay and the promotions that go along with that?
All right.
And in Jacksonville, Florida, Ed, you're next.
Yes, ma'am.
I think they should leave out the diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And let me explain my experience.
I'm a Vietnam vet.
I'm an Iraq vet.
And I'm an Afghan vet.
And I was in a leader's position saying that we did have women.
And I will tell you, logistically, dealing with that was a nightmare.
The issues we had with men and women together does not work.
Remember, this will add up to dead people on the battlefield.
So what was the experience?
Why didn't it work, Ed?
What were the problems?
What were the problems?
Well, first of all, you had to logistically find the cleaning, excuse me, hygiene places for them, you know, as well.
And then you had the inner mixing of females and males, and you cannot separate that.
So I'm going to leave it at that.
So I just have a question for you.
Would you allow gays in the military or would you revoke that?
We had a situation in Vietnam.
We had that.
And from my experience from that would be no.
What about more current experience?
You said you went to Iraq as well.
I went in.
I went when it was, you know, they weren't open out telling that they were gay.
All right.
And this is Roderick in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Couple quick things.
One, former military contractor, military family.
One, anyone who is against anything DEI doesn't understand that we're in a global race now and we need all resources.
They're living in 1987 with like five dominant countries.
So I hope that mindset changes.
Number two, the military priority should be this, decoupling this country from Russia.
I grew up, I was born in 1980.
And if you had any empathy for anyone in the Soviet Union, kids and breadlines, mothers, everyone questions your patriotism from the same demographic that's now booed up and coupled up with Vladimir Putin.
I asked Trump supporters, how can this happen in my lifetime in about 25 or 30 years that you go from making the Russians and the Soviet public enemy number one in everything?
And now you just bypass that like that never happened.
And you just dismissed that.
And now they're basically controlling factions of our government.
So if you have anyone maybe who can call and actually answer that question from a military or civic overall standpoint, I would greatly appreciate it.
And thank you.
You're doing a good job.
Goodbye.
John in Donellan, Florida.
Yes, good morning.
Yep, it's me, John.
Yeah, good morning.
Last guy must have been in the Coast Guard.
Yeah, I was in the Navy for 20 years, and I can assure you that integrating women into any of our units was a nightmare.
It was a lot of promiscuity going on.
There was a lot of hanky-panky going on.
Guys weren't fulfilling the missions they were supposed to be fulfilling.
I've been on LPHs with Marines on board with women.
It's been, again, a nightmare.
And then when we got into these war zones and we were working 16, 18, 20, 25 hours a day, they just couldn't keep up.
They couldn't keep up with us.
And if they were in the units, actually, and on one ship I had, they took them off the ship because it just, it was too much.
And, you know, and the thing with the women in combat in secondary roles, I mean, that's fine.
Truck driver Tammy Duckworth, well, she was a helicopter pilot who got shot down.
She lost her leg.
And, you know, helicopter pilots, pilots, truck drivers, absolutely.
But what Pete Hegset was talking about was actual combat, running and gunning.
They can keep up.
It's just science.
You guys are built different than us, and that's not a bad thing.
As far as what I want to see in the military, is I want to see the DEI completely taken out.
It's destroying the preparedness of the military.
The military is supposed to be focused on one thing, to win at all costs, no matter what.
And if we're talking about the woman next.
Yep, can you explain the DEI and how it's implemented in the military from what you've seen?
Well, I've seen guys who are completely not qualified to lead an army of ducks that were leading, you know, platoons of men.
And I had a captain who was a female who actually got demoted finally because she was just so incompetent and the things she was doing on the ship to everybody and petty and vindictive.
I mean, you can't, you know, it's just not a good thing.
So DEI.
So, John, okay, sorry, I've got another question while I've got you.
As far as hitting recruitment goals, the services have not been hitting their goals.
I believe it was just the Marines, and that's because they lowered their goals.
So, girls.
If you were to take out women, what do you do about having enough people signing up?
Because enough men right now are not signing up.
Sure.
And the men aren't signing up because of the DEI policies.
I can assure you.
I know more of my family members and my sons are in the military.
And they say no, none of their friends want to sign up.
So, how would I correct it?
I would never tell the women that they couldn't be in the military.
The women have been in the military forever.
But we're just talking about combat-capable roles.
I mean, combat, actual combat, bullets flying over your head, running and gunning.
But so that shouldn't be a problem.
I think the problem lies in how the military is going soft.
If you've seen the commercials where they're talking about equity and inclusion and transgender this and transgender that, that's got to go.
I mean, when you join the military, you want to join the military because the commercials have got to get slicker.
Not propaganda, but the advertisements and going into the military and what you can get out of the military.
You're saying it's a marketing problem.
Yeah, I think so.
Absolutely.
All right, John.
Take care.
And here's Joey, Marietta, Georgia.
Hi, Joey.
Hey, good morning.
I believe that women can serve in the military, but I also believe that we men should do everything possible to protect them.
This means if we could avoid them getting into harm's way, we should do everything in our power to protect them because they're so precious and special to us.
But they can serve in the military and they will, and I think they should.
Just like men could wear high-heeled shoes, but we don't do it.
It's just not the right thing to do.
We shouldn't have to put women in harm's way because they are built differently.
They are differently from men.
And I just believe that God will want us to serve and to protect them as much as we can.
They are very special people, and we need to love them and cherish them and protect them for that reason only.
So just because they can, that doesn't mean they should.
Thank you so much.
And at the Pentagon press briefing yesterday, there was a question about Elon Musk talking to Defense Department officials.
Here's a portion of that.
Yesterday, Elon Musk said that he was in a meeting with senior military officers and they discuss sort of Pentagon procurement and bureaucratic sort of snafus and what have you.
Is Mr. Musk holding transition meetings with military officials?
I'm not aware of any transition meetings.
Constantine, as you know, the president-elect transition team has not contacted the department yet to conduct those transitions.
So I'm not aware of any official meetings.
Joseph, Fayetteville, North Carolina, good morning.
Good morning.
When the president-elect was 45, he took out Suleimani in Iran.
And since the Supreme Court has given him immunity, I don't see why he can't take out any other United States enemies, like Little Rocket Man in North Korea.
That will save us fighting the war, probably.
And that's what I expect of him.
Since he likes to fire people, he likes to get on WWE and talk a big talk.
And his rallies, he sounds like Mark Twain out there pontificating on everything under the sun.
Why didn't he try to win without fighting?
Then we wouldn't have to worry about DEI or sending troops anywhere.
And that's all I got to say about it.
Lee in El Paso, Texas.
Hi, Lee.
Hi.
My thoughts, some of these guys getting on here talking about females in the military and all.
You go back and look, you can see that when the first war at the Saudi, most men stopped taking their medication and all because they wanted to try to lead the war because they were scared.
I had men's that running from Scuds because they thought they were hollering and crying, saying they're going to die.
And what war was this, Lee, that you served in?
Is this the first Iraq war?
Yeah, the first one.
And they, you know, there were more men that injured themselves to get out of the war.
So what he wants of females in the military or gays in the military, I serve with it, you know.
Yes.
Okay.
And my thought is that I don't care if females are in the army.
Females are better than men.
Any changes that you would like to see in the military, in the armed forces?
Yes, I'd like to see the military be is to bring back the camaraderie with military.
Between the military and the public, the American public.
Yes, I mean, you got a guy that run for president talking about the military and all now they wondering why that no one is joining the ARMY?
Because no, what do you make of the um, the people that are critical of Dei policies in the military?
So the implication here is that people that are uh, either women or people of color, are being promoted in the military just because they are from um, an underrepresented group, and not because of competence.
What do you think of that?
My thing is, I think it's all wrong, all right, and here is Frank.
Indianapolis Indiana what uh, what do you think?
Frank, once again, I hear these guys coming on speaking about the military and I will give you some of my own personal military experience, some things I won't say, but i'm gonna try to make as clear as I can.
I went into the Marine Corps, served the tour in Vietnam, sent back to the state, spent two years in the state, sent to Okinawa Japan, spent a year in Okinawa.
Just before my deployment ended in Okinawa, I was informed that I would be going to a base, which was, which would be having the first Marine Corps vehicle maintenance officer, female and they asked me if I wanted to be attached.
Reason being.
They called and asked me because we were having so much resistance from other marines about working with women.
I told him I had no problem with that.
Afterwards he also informed me that within two months I will be receiving three female automotive mechanics who was in school at that time.
Everything came true.
I returned to my, I returned back home, I I served with these four young ladies, one was my transport officer and the three worked under me as automotive mechanics.
And what was the experience?
Frank, you know, some people are saying that it was.
It's too disruptive and logistically it's difficult to have women.
You got to have different facilities, that kind of thing.
Well, let me tell you about our facility as far as the restroom.
I'm going to get with that first.
We only had one.
It was set up a man's.
But we had a sign outside there.
When the ladies went in, they put the sign saying, hey, women's in.
So we knew not to go in.
We were smart enough to realize that we decided not to go in.
Like I say, they were my officer, female officer, she was a great officer.
She was better than, she was just as well as any man I served under.
And what they do with her, they transfer her out of there and put her in a woman's battalion.
Hits her off.
She got out of the corps.
The three women stayed.
Two of them became pregnant.
One stayed.
The other two got out.
Now, the only problem I had with them, I saw with women being in the corps in that capacity as truck drivers or as mechanics was the fact that we had a commanding officer.
He enjoyed running every day.
So he got his company and we ran.
The women couldn't keep up with us.
All right, Frank.
And this is what we've got from Ray in Aurora, Colorado by text.
My father was able to enlist in the U.S. Navy from the Philippines.
He received all the benefits that came with it, including naturalization.
At that time, Ferdinand Marcos ruled with an iron fist under martial law.
I don't think it's worth having bases outside of the U.S., especially at the expense of people of other countries.
And David's calling us from Irving, Texas.
Good morning.
Hello.
Hi.
Yeah, my priorities for the Trump administration.
Well, first and above all, he was a draft Dodger, and I think he should just keep his hands off the military.
And I think first things first, he should listen to the generals that he has in charge now, Millie, et cetera.
I think that his choice, the National Guardsman, who's a captain with zero military experience, in my opinion, because being with the 4th Infantry Division, and I was over in Mogadishu, Somalia, it really takes a special person to be in charge.
And if my life has to be under the command of someone, I would like to know that they have the experience, tolerance, and patience necessary to command.
Regarding what needs to be done in order to fill the slots for the people, to meet quota, I think that the military should lower its standards in terms of height, weight.
And I think that people with the felony, they should be admitted in the military as well.
And I don't think someone should be discarded just because they made a mistake.
I think that there are a lot of qualified people who could do very well in the military.
So DEI, there's something called the Good Old Boys Network in the Army.
I went in in 1983.
I got out in 99.
And I tell you what, back then, it was kind of hard for people of color and, you know, Asians, et cetera, you know, to get promoted because the vast majority of the high-ranking officers were Caucasian.
And, you know, they're going to promote their friend and the person that they drink beers with on the weekend.
And while it shouldn't be that way, the fact is it was that way.
And I think that we still have a long way to go in the military.
And I think that as far as women being admitted into, let's say, the Navy SEALs or the Rangers or Green Berets, I think that they should be allowed, but I don't think that the standards should be lowered.
I think that if a female can get through SRT and can pass SEAL training, I think that she should be allowed to be a Navy SEAL.
But I don't think the standards should be lowered.
So that's my opinion.
All right, David, and we'll stay in Texas this time in Mart, Texas with Matt.
Good morning.
Yes, ma'am.
I think Donald Trump is going to be doing an excellent job.
And I also think that the DEI thing, it has to go.
But that's been ridiculous.
That's just liberals wanting men in women's bathrooms.
This is just a bunch of liberal stuff.
But now I do like women pilots, you know, helicopter pilots, if they can, you know, and all women units.
Now, all women units, okay, are all right.
You just don't want to be mixing men and women together and saying infantry units and high combat units like that.
That's going to create problems.
But if you're qualified and you're a good pilot, you know, if you're a woman, I'm all for it like the wax were during World War II.
I think they did an excellent job.
But they were an all-women unit.
You don't want to mix them up like that.
That's just wrong.
But it's a DEI, so I think it's got to go.
Rodney in Columbus, Ohio, you're next, Rodney.
Hi, good morning.
Thanks for having me.
You're welcome.
Go ahead.
All right.
I am not military, but I do have a child that is military.
I raised five children, four of which went to college.
One decided she wanted to go to the Navy.
My first experience in the Navy with her is during her graduation.
And what I saw was that the commander of Great Lakes, the Great Lakes region at the time, was a woman.
And so I was kind of encouraged with that and watched my daughter, as she's still in the Navy, go up the ranks.
And so to answer the question, what do I expect from this administration is that we can keep the good things going, what's been accomplished, regardless of administration, and do not look at this DEI issue as a general issue.
What I've been hearing from people on here who are military is that they've had bad experiences with one particular person and not people.
And so to say that DEI is a bad thing is to say that all people or one particular group is not worthy.
And I do not agree with that.
And we should not agree with that if we're Americans.
We're all different.
We're men, we're women.
We're black, we're white.
We all have good things about ourselves and we have bad things about ourselves.
And what I'm hearing now is that there are some very, very almost chauvinistic type people who want to continue to be chauvinistic in the things of military.
I'm sure that women could find a place in the military to do some things within the military.
And so to not include them in the betterment of our government and the betterment of our military process would be to totally change the dynamic of where we've come from thus far.
I'm done.
And on defense.gov, so let's take a look at how many women there are in the military.
The numbers that we have are from 2021.
Women made up 17.3% of the active duty force and 21% of the National Guard and Reserves.
The year before, women made up 17.2% of the active duty force and 21.1% of the Guard.
It has, since 2017, the percentage of women in active duty and selected reserves have risen 1.1 and 1.8 percent, respectively.
Steve in Webster, Massachusetts, you're next.
Good morning, Mimi.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving to you.
Thank you, ma'am.
What the Trump administration has to do is address Eurasianism.
We have always, since I can remember, looked for that Sino-Soviet split today.
We could call it a Russia-China split.
In 1979, Carter recognized Communist China severed ties with Taiwan.
Although Kissinger and Nixon proposed the one-China policy, we pulled troops out of Taiwan, hoping the Chinese would reciprocate to end the Vietnam War, and they didn't.
So they thought it was a mistake.
Anyhow, China, I consider communist China, is our largest threat today.
World War I. How do you suggest we do that?
What would you like to see?
I can go as far as decoupling.
We should not be trading with communists.
We didn't trade with the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union fell.
And regards to the fellow from Arizona who said, you know, Russia, Russia, and all this stuff.
World War I, we alienated Germany after that, and that gave us Hitler.
After the Cold War, again, we alienated Russia, I feel, at the fall of the Cold War, and this gave rise to Putin.
We have made mistakes with dictators before, and I think it is easier.
And read Gene Kirkpatrick's Dictators and Double Standards.
We stopped supporting Somoza.
It gave rise to the communists.
We stopped supporting Shah of Iran, and that gave rise to a theocracy.
And although these people were dictators, at least they were pro-American, and you can deal with a dictator.
They have more of a chance to going to democracy.
And one more thing, I know we get goods out of China, but we have proven through COVID that we can break that supply chain.
India is a large democracy.
That is the country that we should be focusing on.
The whole thing is complicated.
I understand that.
We're going to be talking about the economy in our next segment starting at 8 Eastern.
So make sure you stick around for that.
Here's Henry in Woodruff, South Carolina.
Good morning.
Henry.
Woodruff, South Carolina.
Yes.
Good morning, America, and happy Thanksgiving to everyone.
I'm a former African American.
I'm a veteran of the U.S. Air Force.
And just wanted to say concerning this terminology, DEI and woke and everything, how it's all just a smokescreen to divide the American public.
I would urge each and every one of you to go back and look at some of the footage from World War I, World War II, and other wars that African Americans fought in.
And though they were, let's just say, qualified and did their jobs exceptionally well, look at how they were treated.
And even when in World War II, for instance, when our German troops were captured, they were put on the train and fed up ahead of the African American soldiers.
And so I guess it all depends on how you look at this and stuff.
And so I also would like to say that as far as what I expect out of the Trump administration concerning the military, I hear this word weaponization all the time too, whether it's in the Justice Department or whatever.
And I don't want the military to be weaponized.
When I fought, I fought for the freedom of America to defend this Constitution.
And the most abhorrent thing that I have experienced was January 6th.
I cried that day because that is what we were supposed to be defending and everything.
And to see it almost come to our nation capital, not from outside, but from domestic sources.
So I don't want this administration to weaponize the military, which I already see happening.
You know, generals that are up for promotion, for promotions are being, you know, are scrutinized to the point to whereas, you know, anything that's in the military, anyone that's in the military now, have to be concerned about the political influence of it.
And so my main thing is I don't want this administration to come in and weaponize the military against its own citizens and to start just allowing cronyism and everything because it'll not only affect us domestically, but what are our allies worldwide thinking about America now?
All right, Henry.
And the nominee to lead the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth, has been accused of sexual assault.
He denies any wrongdoing.
But here's Oklahoma Republican Mark Wayne Mullen, who serves on the Armed Services Committee, on if he believes those accusations against Hegseth.
He wasn't charged.
He wasn't even kind of charged in this.
There was no crime committed.
The police dropped everything.
What's unfortunate in today's world, you can be accused of anything.
And then especially if it's something like this, you're automatically assumed to be guilty.
If you read the police report from cover to cover, which I have, and I know every reporter has too, it is clear there is nothing there.
There is clear that there was no crime committed.
And so that doesn't prevent Pete from moving forward in this.
The American people gave President Trump a mandate, a mandate because they want to change the way government has been working.
Government has been working for a party, not for the people.
And President Trump is putting people there that's going to make changes.
And unfortunately, the establishment is trying to hold that back and trying to find every little piece of detail they can to say that this person is disqualified, qualified to be the SEC deaf.
What makes that?
He is a civilian, which is this is a civilian because he's a civilian.
Dana, he's a civilian.
I'm a civilian.
He's a civilian position.
Exactly.
No, no, but let me get to it.
He's a civilian, which that first is the only qualification that the SEC deaf has to have.
Now, if you want to go more than that, he also served honorably in the service for 20 years as a decorative combat veteran.
He retired as a major.
He's had a successful career since then.
He can articulate what needs to be done, and he knows this system.
Now, outside of that, what other qualifications does it say that a SEC deaf has to have?
We're taking your calls for another 10 minutes.
This is Politico with the headline, Trump's Pentagon Overhaul.
Eight policy changes he's expected to make.
The first one that they list here is troops on the home front.
It says that Trump critics and even some former officials who worked in his administration are warning that the former president would wield the military for his own political gain after he called for the military to be used against, quote, the enemy from within the United States.
Indeed, Trump contemplated using the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty troops against protesters late in his term.
And if he continues his rhetoric, there will likely be attempts to re-examine the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act to rein in Trump's authority to use the military domestically.
Top lawmakers such as Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed, a Democrat, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, also a Democrat, have floated possible legislation.
But efforts to limit Trump are unlikely to gain steam without Republican support.
Wonder what you think about that and other issues related to defense policy and the second term of President-elect Trump.
This is John in Charleston, South Carolina.
Good morning.
Good morning, Mimi.
I'm telling you, I always enjoy when you're on.
You do such a great, fair job.
But first of all, I just want to say that when the guy was talking about the old military, you know, it just reminded me of stories black guys used to tell back in the 60s and stuff when they came back, you know, like World War II and World War I and stuff, that they would talk about black guys over there as having tails and that their tails would come out at night.
That was one of the big running things.
And it was basically being told by guys who really were on the same economic ladder as the black guys are and stuff and everything.
But one of the things I want to do is make sure that when guys volunteer to come into the military, to make sure that they didn't have to be on welfare and food stamps at the same time when they come in to volunteer.
They shouldn't be qualifying to serve their country and then qualify to be on food stamps and stuff like that at the same time.
Yeah, that is an issue, John, that there are active duty military members that are food insecure.
Yes, and that's the big thing.
All this other stuff is just, all this other stuff is just politics, politics talk, DEI.
You know, black people in the military, you know, we're always going to be seen as, I don't think they're quite good enough for this in that.
Well, see, I'm a black guy.
My first supervisor, you know, I was the first guy he ever supervised.
And he was a Caucasian guy.
And, oh, man, I remember him to the day.
I remember him till I die.
This guy was smart.
And he wanted to make sure that I was smart.
He wanted to make sure that I was protected.
And the way he protected me is by making sure that I had knowledge.
And that knowledge that he gave me was the knowledge that no matter who talked or tried to talk or talk about me or whatever stuff, I always knew that I had that knowledge and nobody could touch me because I had the knowledge.
Knowledge is everything in the military.
All right, John.
Thank you, Mimi.
And this is Vero Beach, Florida.
Shawnee, good morning.
Good morning, C-SPAN.
Good morning, America.
Good morning, Zero.
I am a military mother.
Also was a spouse for over 21 years.
I have a very big problem with the DEI.
I don't think people really understand the terminology and what it means.
It won't only affect minorities.
It will also affect women.
They're very smart, brilliant, bright women.
I believe we have pilots in the military that are women.
I think people should go back in history and realize that if it wasn't for the Tuskegee Airmen and other black companies, that we wouldn't have won the wars that we did.
Also, when the black people got out of the military, they were not eligible for their GI bill to help fund them to go to school.
They weren't able to get disability.
So we have a lot of damaged retired or disabled black people in this country that are not receiving any funding.
I don't believe Hex should be running anything for the military.
He has no knowledge.
He was not in the military.
I do not believe that the military should be weaponized.
HexFeth has served in the military, Seani.
Well, he served, but he wasn't a leader person.
So, yes, so he got to major, but yes.
Right.
No higher than the dude.
Right, correct.
And so just that's not, I don't think he retired either, if I'm not mistaken.
I'm very upset because DEI means a whole lot of things, and putting that in the military will just mean that more division.
Everyone in the military who's ever served in the military, whatever branch, is all, we all come together as a family.
There's no division when it comes to the military, whether you're in the Navy, the Army, the Marines, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, we all consider each other family.
And when you put DEI into that, you make a division.
My kids are now.
And the last thing I want to say is: if you were a felon, you could not join the military.
If you are a felon or have bad credit, you cannot get a clearance.
And I want to know how the president of the United States is able to be the president of the United States.
President-elect will be the president of the United States, and he does not, he has a felony charges.
And here is Tampa, Florida.
Michael, you're next.
Oh, how do you do?
As you say, how do you do America?
Yes.
I was born in Washington, D.C. My father's buried now in Arlington Cemetery.
His brother, a colonel, is buried there.
My father was 18 years old in the invasion D-Day, fighting the Germans.
His three older brothers were on Guadalcanal, wounded by the same Japanese shrapnel.
My priority, what I would like to see, is protecting this country around our borders, our parameter, like the National Guard protects the parameter around the United States.
That's what I want to see done.
And I just, being that I had been in show business as an actor in the Screen Actors Guild, I can't help but remember what Sinatra, Frank Sinatra, sang a song, What is America?
America is my home, the neighbor next door.
He also said in a recording, he said, let me tell you, as bad as you people have it in this country, let me tell you how bad it is behind the iron curtain when Russia was the iron curtain or the bamboo curtain like China.
So I'm for protecting this parameter.
And I've listened to many of these people and I agree with what they say about blacks in the military.
I think it makes sense.
I believe in it.
You know, I think they're correct.
All right.
And this is another Michael in Roanoke, Virginia.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, I spent 20 years in the Air Force, and I have a great time.
Now, this is one thing I can say: that anybody that's in general society has one way or another made their way into the military.
I don't care what anybody say.
You have gang members, you have racists, you have all kinds of people.
But at the end of the day, what I saw after 20 years and two deployments overseas in combat is that when it was time to come together, men and women, we did it.
And we did it, and we served our country.
So, what I would like to see the Trump administration do is go back and find out all these veterans who were not eligible for disability and try to get them disability and keep his hands off of the disability system with this Project 25, 2025, and all those people that he's putting in administration that's going to be, that were part of the 2025 that he claimed that he didn't know about.
So, at the end of the day, we are all one nation.
We are all, we're not all one people, but we're all kinds of people.
But at the end of the day, we should all come together and I don't care about all that DEI and woke and all that other kind of stuff.
That's not what I'm here to talk about.
What I'm talking about is the military and the military that the country was designed to be around and should support 24-7.
And to Louisville, Kentucky.
Robert, you're next.
Hello, I'm calling for the my priority for Trump is to fix the immigration issue.
Either deport or track down the ones who are not here, I mean, who are here and not supposed to be here, and don't just focus on the ones committing crimes.
That's a very low number as far as immigration.
As far as the women in military, we always need women in the military.
We wouldn't be able to perform without them.
There's been women nurses on the when you say front lines now, front lines don't mean anything.
We don't have a direct line as far as a hard line between us and us and the enemy.
In mass units in Korea, they served as nurses, and they were getting artillery and other things thrown at them, and they still perform.
I'm not sure about World War II other than pilots.
And Robert, where did you serve your former military?
All right, I was in for eight years.
I went through Ranger School.
I was actually a distinguished honor graduate of Ranger School.
And I hear a lot of people calling and talking about the standards being lowered.
Ranger school has always changed.
Things that our class did, we didn't do things that other classes went through.
And we didn't, you know, there used to be four different phases.
Phases have changed.
I think we were the first people or group in our class to use Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah as a desert phase.
And we jumped into that.
And other classes used Fort Bliss, and other classes didn't have a desert phase.
All right, Robert.
We're out of time for this segment, but there's more to come because up next, we've got a conversation with Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics.
We'll talk about current economic conditions and the potential impact of President-elect Trump's economic plans.
And later on this busy Thanksgiving travel day, a focus on that $1 trillion infrastructure law that was signed into law three years ago.
We'll get a progress report from Corrigan Salerno, policy manager at the group Transportation for America.
We'll be right back.
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Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back to Washington Journal.
We're joined now to talk about the economic outlook by Mark Zandi, who's chief economist for Moody's Analytics.
Mark Zandi, welcome to the program.
Thanks, Mimi.
Good to be with you.
So you said this earlier this fall that the economy right now is, quote, among the best performing economies in my 35 plus years as an economist.
Explain that.
Yeah, well, you can see from my hairline, I've been at this for a long time, 35 years.
And I'm hard-pressed to come up with a time when the economy has been performing better.
I mean, just look at the statistics, creating a lot of jobs across lots of different industries.
I've been doing that for since the pandemic.
Unemployment is low, just over 4%.
It's low across every demographic group from age, ethnicity, educational attainment, you pick it, and coast to coast, everywhere in the country.
The one blemish had been inflation, the rate of growth in the prices for goods and services, but that's moderated.
Now the Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates as a result.
The stock market's at a record high.
Seems like it's hitting one almost every day.
And if you're one of the two-thirds of Americans that own your own home, you're enjoying record high housing values.
Now, Mimi, you know, I have this metaphor in my mind that the economy is this big elephant.
And right now I'm talking about the entirety of the elephant.
Obviously, depending on which part of the elephant you touch, you can get a different picture.
And, you know, I do think higher income households are doing fabulously well.
I don't think it's hyperbole to say they're doing about as well as they ever have.
Middle income households are doing okay.
Not fantastic, not great, not bad, kind of typical.
Folks in the bottom third, they are struggling with the previously high inflation.
And they don't have much savings.
They don't have much in their checking account.
So there are distinctions to be made here, but broadly, the economy is doing fabulously well.
So as you said, the economy is doing fabulously well, but I want to show you some exit polls from the election.
And this is from CBS News.
67% of voters described the state of the economy as bad.
45% said their own financial situation is worse than four years ago.
30% said it was the same.
Only 24% say better.
53% said inflation was a moderate hardship and 27% said it was severe.
So how do you explain that, especially that top nine line number of 67% said the economy is bad?
Oh, yeah, there's this big disconnect between the happy talk you're hearing from economists like me and these surveys.
I mean, I think it's a bunch of stuff, but I think at the top of the list of things is the previously high inflation.
So if you go back two, three years ago, prices were rising for groceries, for rent, for gasoline, the direct result of the disruptions created by the pandemic and the Russian war in Ukraine.
And even though those prices are no longer rising to any significant degree, gas prices are down, rents haven't moved in two years, grocery prices are flat over the past year.
They're still up 20, 25% from where they were two, three, four years ago.
And that's what people remember.
It's like, you know, I talked to a lot of people in my work and, you know, asked the same question, how you doing financially?
And I am getting the same kind of answer.
And it turns out, at least from my anecdotes, that everyone's got one food item that they buy on a regular basis that they use as a litmus test for how things are going.
You know, ramen noodles or kombucha tea.
I don't drink that, but kombucha tea, pound of sugar, baby formula.
So I think that's what has people really irked.
It's really the high inflation.
The other thing I'll just call out very quickly is I think people, our politics are fractured.
You know, people are very heated about their political perspective and they're looking at the economy through their political prism.
So, you know, for example, the University of Michigan runs a survey every month.
You know, how you feeling?
And they just released their most recent results.
And the day, just right after the election, the Republicans that responded to the survey went from being very pessimistic about the economy to much more optimistic.
And the Democrats, just the opposite.
So we're all looking at, you know, the world through our own political prism, and it's influencing how we think about things.
Sorry, my voice.
No, no, no.
I want to ask you a little bit more about the causes of inflation regarding increased spending during the pandemic.
Right, right.
I'll let you catch it, get a glass of water.
I'll riff here a little bit.
But I think you're referring to the American Rescue Plan.
That's the COVID relief plan that was passed early on in the Biden administration.
And there's been a lot of conversation, discussion, debate about how important that has been to the inflation that ensued.
And I do think if you go back to 2021, it was passed in March of 2021.
If you go back to that summer and fall, inflation did pick up and largely because of the demand created by the benefits that were provided through the American Rescue Plan, those stimulus checks, for example, unemployment insurance.
Now, obviously, we're coming out of the pandemic and there was a lot of uncertainty, didn't know how that was going to play out.
And that relief plan was designed to be big to help in case things turned out to be worse than they actually turned out to be.
But I'll have to say, Mimi, you know, that inflation at that time was hard to remember back, but that was deemed to be good inflation because we had been through a period since the financial crisis over a decade of inflation that was below the Federal Reserve's target.
The Fed was uncomfortable with how low inflation was.
We can talk about why, but they were.
And so they wanted inflation that was higher to compensate.
And here they got it.
The real problem with the inflation came a bit later when Russia invaded Ukraine at the start of 2022.
And that's when oil prices and natural gas prices, food, agricultural prices jumped.
And that's when inflation became a real problem.
But, you know, the American Rescue Plan, that spending tax bill to help the economy through the COVID, it did result in inflation.
But at that time, again, it was deemed to be good inflation.
That was desirable.
It wasn't undesirable.
So what do you think of the Fed's handling, though, of the interest rates?
Do you think that they lowered them too much?
Do you think that the easing up on the interest rates has been too slow?
How would you rate that?
Well, it's hard to be critical of the Federal Reserve.
I mean, just think about all the things they're responding to, the pandemic, the Russian war, fiscal policy, a lot of stuff going on.
Hard to calibrate interest rates and monetary policy to get that right.
And in hindsight, the Fed was probably certainly too slow to begin normalizing interest rates coming out of the pandemic.
They kept the federal funds rate, that's the interest rate they control, at zero all the way into 2022.
And that was certainly a hindsight of mistake.
I was a bit fearful.
Of course, they jacked up interest rates in 2022 and 23 to cool things off, and they succeeded.
And I was, if I had this conversation with you six months ago, nine months ago, before they started cutting interest rates, I would have said, you know, I think maybe they're waiting too long here.
They're running the risk that they push the economy underwater into recession.
But I don't feel that way now.
They're cutting interest rates.
They're normalizing rates.
And I think they're right on track.
I want to ask about tariffs because the president has announced, the president-elect, I should say, has announced that he would impose tariffs.
And the BBC News says that China and Mexico are warning against about a trade war after Trump vows to hike those tariffs.
What was your reaction to that?
I guess this has been talked about a lot on the campaign about tariffs and their impact on the economy.
Well, I'm not a fan of broad-based tariffs.
I mean, I understand strategic tariffs, very targeted specific countries, specific products to make a point to further trade negotiations and get everyone to play fair, particularly China.
So I get that.
But I don't get broad-based tariffs across the board here.
And that's what President Trump was talking about on the campaign trail and what he announced that he was going to do yesterday or the night before yesterday about big tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China.
Those are our three biggest sources of imports.
And the fundamental reason is that it just raises the cost of living.
We all have to pay a lot more for the stuff that's being imported.
Everything from food, we import a lot of groceries to furniture to cars to clothing, a lot of stuff.
It's a tax increase, particularly hard on lower middle-income households because they devote a larger share of their budget on those kind of items.
And I'm very skeptical that those kind of the tariffs and the threat of tariffs, you know, there's a lot of talk that what President-elect Trump was talking about the night before yesterday was a negotiating ploy.
You know, I find that somewhat disconcerting as well, because at the end of the day, I don't think that works.
It's not going to achieve the goals that he's setting out to achieve.
And it creates a lot of drama and chaos and tumult around the globe.
And it makes it just very difficult to do business.
And I think it's bad for business the longer that goes on.
So we can talk about it some more.
But Mimi, I think bottom line, that's not an economic policy that I think lands us in a good place.
And if you'd like to join our conversation with Mark Zandy, he's chief economist for Moody's Analytics.
If you've got a question about the economy, you can go ahead and call us.
The numbers are on your screen.
Here is President-elect Trump from October talking about tariffs.
it is if by the the higher the tariff the more likely it is to have them come into the higher the tariff the more you're going to put on the value of that piece those goods the higher people are going to pay in shops Ready?
The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States and build a factory in the United States so it doesn't have to pay the tariff.
That would take many, many years.
That would take many years.
In fact, I'll tell you, you know, there's another theory is that the tariff, you make it so high, so horrible, so obnoxious that they'll come right away.
When I do the 10%, 10% is really, first of all, 10% when you collect it is hundreds of billions of dollars.
The numbers that you're talking about, all reducing our deficit.
But really, so there's two ways of looking at a tariff.
You can do it as a money-making instrument, or you can do it as something to get the companies.
Now, if you want the companies to come in, the tariff has to be a lot higher than 10% because 10% is not enough.
They're not going to do it for 10%.
But you make a 50% tariff, they're going to come in.
Mark, your reaction to that as far as keeping manufacturing jobs in the United States as a result of those tariffs.
Yeah, I remember that interview.
That was with the Bloomberg editor-in-chief in the Economic Club of Chicago.
I highly recommend folks to go listen to that.
You can YouTube it or find it on the web.
Really fascinating interview because the President-elect also name-called who he's going to raise tariffs on.
Although in that, he didn't mention Canada.
He mentioned Mexico and China.
Yeah, I just think that's not what's going to happen here.
I do think that businesses don't make big investment decisions and move factories and other activity into the United States because of tariffs, even if they're large, because they don't believe and don't think those tariffs are going to remain in place in the future.
They don't know what those tariffs are going to be.
Are they going to be 10%?
Are they going to be 20%?
Are they going to be 60%?
The president talked about, elect talked about 100%, 2,000%.
I'm an economist, but I also run a business.
And I know that if I'm going to make an investment decision, I have to put it down in a spreadsheet and I have to calculate a return on investment.
And I have to put numbers in the spreadsheet.
And if I don't know what those numbers are because of all the uncertainty that's been created here, and I can't put the number in the spreadsheet, can't calculate a return on investment, I don't invest.
I'm just not going to do it.
So I don't think that's going to happen.
The other thing I point out is other countries aren't going to stand still.
Just go back to the tariffs imposed in President Trump's first term.
China responded.
Most of the tariffs in that round of trade war was with what we put on the Chinese.
They responded in kind, so-called tit for tat.
And that did a lot of damage.
I mean, remember the farmers, U.S. farmers got crushed because China stopped buying agricultural products produced during the United States.
Farmers were flat on their back.
And actually, President Trump had to start cutting checks, direct checks to the farmers to help them through that period to compensate for that.
So, no, I don't think we are going to see any significant investment.
And overall, global investment is going to be lower because of the uncertainty created by just the drama and the chaos created by all of this.
So, you know, I really don't think that you're going to see any significant, meaningful increase in investment in the United States because of these broad-based high tariffs.
All right, let's talk to callers.
Bruce is in Summitville, Indiana, Independent Line.
Hi, Bruce.
Hello.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I have a question on the tariffs.
Mark is saying that the tariffs is going to cause reaction from other countries.
And tariffs have been put on our products for years and years.
That's one way to meet the Japanese were able to bring in all their cars and got such a foothold in the United States.
Also, China, companies that go in there, from what I've read, they're required to give up information on manufacturing and stuff like that.
So I don't think that happens in the United States.
But if everybody else is doing it to us, how come it's such a bad idea?
Mark Xandi, go ahead.
Yeah, they're not.
I mean, obviously, the world's a big place.
A lot of countries, a lot of trade policies.
I mean, you know, if you go to Europe, for example, the Europeans really have no tariffs.
Their effective tariff rate is pretty close to zero and has been for quite some time now.
Now, in the case of China, I agree with you that that's a very problematic relationship.
And I don't think the Chinese have played fair in trade and other economic relationships.
And so there, that goes back to my point earlier about what I would call strategic tariffs, tariffs that are very targeted.
So, for example, President Biden imposed tariffs on $18 billion worth of imports from China not long ago, things like EVs and solar panels and some other various other manufactured product.
And that's 18 billion.
So in the grand scheme of things, that's very small, but it's sending a very strong signal to the Chinese that, you know, look, you got to play by the rules.
So I'm not saying tariffs, there isn't a role for tariffs.
I just don't think there's a role for broad-based tariffs across the board.
Here's the other thing.
Canada and Mexico, they don't impose tariffs on our goods.
We have a free trade agreement with them, the so-called USMCA, which actually was negotiated, renegotiated by President Trump in his first term.
And that creates a free trade zone.
So there is no tariffs.
And those are our two biggest sources of trade, the Canadians and the Mexicans.
So some countries impose tariffs, some countries don't play fair.
And I think the use of strategic tariffs makes a lot of sense.
But most countries do.
And our biggest trading partners absolutely don't charge tariffs.
So we're in a free trade zone.
So I don't think we should be pushing them with the threat of 25% tariffs, which has happened here over the last couple of days.
Andre's calling from Sumter, South Carolina, Democrat.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Mr. Sandy, my concern is the Ukraine war over there with Russia.
Being that they are considered the breadbasket of the world, they say, how is their economy is going to affect our economy for if Russia was to retain them or either conquer them?
And how would that affect our economy there?
Well, thank you for the question.
Well, the Russian invasion of Ukraine back in early 2022 did a lot of economic damage, hurt us badly.
It caused prices for oil, natural gas.
You mentioned agricultural prices.
They all jumped because those commodities are produced in Russia and Ukraine.
And of course, Ukraine was economy highly disrupted, has been highly disrupted by the war and Russia has been impacted by sanctions.
And in fact, if you go back in June of 2022, the cost of a gallon of regular unleaded hit an all-time high of $5 nationwide.
And that's because of the Russian war.
And a big part of the surge in agricultural prices, you know, the higher grocery prices we're all paying is because of the disruptions to agriculture in Ukraine and Russia.
It turns out, and this is something that I learned as a result of the invasion, Russia produces a lot of fertilizer that goes around the world and it's important to grow crops in many other parts of the world.
And because of the war, that caused fertilizer prices to rise and thus the price of crops.
And that raised the cost of the groceries that we're buying in our stores.
So the war in Ukraine really did have a significant impact.
The other thing I'll call out in that regard, this is a little bit more technical, but because of the jump in inflation in that period, because of Russia's invasion in Ukraine, that along with the inflation caused by the pandemic disruptions, the supply chain disruptions and supply disruptions to the job market, that caused people's expectations of future inflation to jump, which got into demands for wages and prices.
And you might have heard this phrase called the wage price spiral.
That's something that very disconcerting to the Federal Reserve Board and the key reason why they started to jack up interest rates aggressively in that period.
So bottom line, I know that's a lot to digest, but the bottom line is to your point, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing conflict there is a significant contributor to the higher inflation that we've suffered since the invasion occurred.
We've got a question for you on X From Ajika, who says, What about the debt?
The stock market keeps hitting records while we hear about the debt destroying the country.
And I'll just show the U.S. debt clock.
You can see that at usdeblock.org, showing the U.S. national debt at just over $36 trillion.
Yeah, I view this as a problem, a significant problem.
You know, our deficit, that's the difference between what the government, federal government takes in revenue, tax revenue, tariff revenue, all sources of revenue, and what they spend, what the government spends on everything from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid to NASA, is almost $2 trillion a year, which adds up to about 6% of the nation's GDP.
And that's an economy, as I said earlier, that's about as good as it gets.
I mean, it's an exceptional economy.
6% is just out of bounds.
I mean, in a kind of a well-functioning typical good economy and fiscal situation, you don't want a deficit to GDP of over 2%.
So 6% is crazy.
And it's adding to our debt load, the amount of debt outstanding is rising very rapidly.
So, you know, I do view this as a really serious problem.
And I do think any tax spending policy that's made going forward really has to be, at the very least, has to be paid for.
I mean, I think it's going to be very difficult to actually cut the deficits in debt, but let's not add to the deficit in debt.
So any thinking around cutting taxes, as President Trump has talked about on the campaign trail, has to be married with other tax increases elsewhere or spending restraint or something to make it all add up.
Otherwise, the deficit in debt will continue to rise.
And ultimately, that'll be a weight on the economy that will be very difficult to bear.
We'll see much higher interest rates, mortgage rates will be higher, auto loan rates will be higher, credit card interest rates will be higher.
It'd be very, very difficult for the typical American to buy a car or to buy a home.
So I think this is an issue that's front and center, and we really need to take that on board when thinking about tax and spending policy here going forward.
On the line for independence, Michael in Will County, Illinois, you're next.
Yeah, Mimi, keep your finger off of the button so that I can develop my two questions for Mr. Zandy.
Now, as an economist, I understand that 70% of our economy, at least 70%, is based on consumer spending.
And this relates to the inflation.
I disagree totally with your analysis.
Unemployment insurance only replaces about 30% of your income.
Even with the added payments that they were giving, it never came up to the level for most people of their income.
So this and this $1,800 or so that they gave us in three payments during the COVID, how could that possibly fuel the level of inflation that we have?
It's impossible.
It doesn't make sense.
It's the tax cuts that put the money in the rich.
And secondly, regarding Medicare and Medicaid and all this, it's the price gouging on the part of the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, the hospitals, and the doctors that get us to a situation where we pay two and a half times what the next country does for covering their health care costs.
It's just all bogus.
And I don't think you're doing any service to us, Mr. Zandi, by pulling these propaganda lines.
Okay, Michael, let's give him a chance to respond, okay?
Well, no, I appreciate the question.
It sounds like you're taking umbrage with my point about the American Rescue Plan and the impact that had on inflation back when it was passed in 2021.
Let me just say, I don't think the American Rescue Plan and the impact on the demand that resulted because of the stimulus checks, because of the UI, the rental assistance, all the other support has contributed to the inflation that we're experiencing now or, you know, it was really only about the inflation that was back in 2021.
By 2022, I think it goes right back to the Russian war in Ukraine and the ongoing effects of the pandemic.
So I'm not sure we argue we're disagreeing here to any significant degree.
I don't think that that was a big deal.
I do, you know, there are many causes of the high inflation.
And I don't mean to sound like, you know, I don't want to be dogmatic and say it's this one or that one.
There are a lot of contributing factors.
There's a long list of factors.
I would just put at the top of the list, you know, the disruptions caused by the pandemic and Russian war.
Towards the bottom of the list, I put the American Rescue Plan.
And kind of all the way to the bottom of the list is this idea of price gouging.
That I'm very skeptical of.
I just don't see it.
You know, maybe certain industries, food processing, meat packing, certain companies, you can come up with anecdotes, you always can.
But in a broad-based kind of price gouging, meaning that businesses just took advantage and jacked up prices when supply was constrained by the pandemic or the Russian war.
And Mark Sandy, he also made the point of price gouging, though, for the entitlement spending.
So for Medicare and Medicaid, that hospitals, doctors are just price gouging the patients.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's hard.
I mean, what I look at to try to gauge that is the profitability and profit margins of the businesses that are in those industries.
And, you know, they're doing well, but not to the point where you say, oh, these guys are taking advantage.
The other thing is that having said that, though, I do think there's a lot of reforms we need to make in the medical care system to make it more cost-efficient and get the price increases down in healthcare.
And some things done in the Biden administration do that.
I mean, the ability now, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, that was another piece of legislation passed in the Biden administration.
It did provide the federal government the ability to negotiate drug prices for certain drugs.
And that has seemingly worked.
It's brought those drug prices back in line, back down.
So I agree with that.
But broad-based kind of price gouging, I'm hard-pressed to see that.
On the Republican line, Nate and Franklin, Indiana.
Good morning.
Yes.
Yeah, I had a couple of questions.
First of all, with these tariffs, you're giving a lot of power to one person to create winners and losers in the largest economy in the world, and not only the U.S., but in the whole world.
It seems that that would lend itself to corruption with creating winners and losers based on whatever favors you might get.
And also, my second question is, who decides who gets exemptions?
And is that done by the president?
And I will wait on your answers on that.
Thank you.
Yeah, no, you make a great point that I think is not kind of well understood.
Implementing tariffs, certainly broad-based tariffs, is incredibly messy.
I mean, go take a look at the list of products that have tariffs on them right now.
It's just a blizzard of different products in different countries.
And you're right.
If you go back to the tariffs imposed in President Trump's first term, there was a lot of pushback by businesses saying, hey, look, if you put tariffs on this, it's a national security issue for whatever reason.
Or if you impose tariffs on that, it's going to severely disrupt my business, hurt my business.
So exemptions were provided.
They were adjudicated by a group of government officials in the administration, and they took a look at what the petitioner said, what the businesses said about the tariffs and how much damage they were going to do and made decisions around that.
You can lower the tariff or you can eliminate the tariff with this country over this period.
Very complicated kind of process and certainly not transparent, very opaque.
And to your point, that does open up the possibility that you're picking winners and losers here.
And I don't think that's where we want to be.
That's not consistent with a well-functioning market economy, certainly not over any extended period of time.
So I think that's a real issue, a real problem.
And adds to the kind of the uncertainty that I was describing earlier.
Again, a business person needs certainty.
They need to be able to calculate a number, put it in a spreadsheet, calculate a return on investment.
And if you have all these exemptions and it's not transparent why and where and when, you just can't put the number in the spreadsheet.
So I do think this is a very serious, significant problem and likely going to be a problem if we do have broad-based tariffs going forward here.
JB is in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas, Line for Democrats.
JB, are you on vacation?
No, no, I live here.
Okay.
Go right ahead.
Yeah, I was going to ask Mark, you know, you can't turn on a financial program anymore without hearing about Bitcoin.
I don't pretend to understand it.
They try to explain it as a blockchain or something, but I noticed this morning it's hovering around $92,000 a coin.
I was just wondering, not that I'm going to buy one, but if you did buy one, where would the money go when you buy a Bitcoin?
Who gets the money for that?
That's my question.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you're buying the Bitcoin from someone who owns the Bitcoin.
So, you know, there's Bitcoins are manufactured.
There's an algorithm, a process for doing it.
You've got so-called miners that, you know, running the algorithms, creating the Bitcoin, and they get the Bitcoin and then you buy it.
And then it's traded.
You know, it's just like any other, I hesitate to use the word the asset, but a stock or a bond.
So you got the owner and a potential buyer and they transact.
And so you can go on an exchange.
There's different exchanges.
Just like if you want to buy a stock, you can go, I'm just making this up.
You can go to Schwab or TD and you can sign up for an account and you can put cash in the account and then you can use that cash to go buy a stock.
There's exchanges that do that for crypto, Bitcoin being one of the crypto.
So I'll mention Coinbase, for example, because that's the one I know.
You can go do the same thing.
So the same principles, same, same general process.
Mickey in Los Angeles, California, Independent Line, you're on with Mark Zandi.
Thank you for taking my call.
Good morning.
I always enjoy it when Mr. Zandi is on your show.
I have a couple of things.
One is that the tariffs that Donald Trump has proposed, Mr. Zandi touched on this.
He renegotiated NAFTA to USMCA.
Now, I don't understand what is the issue with the trade agreement that he himself negotiated.
And the other thing is that a lot of these illegal migrants into the U.S. over the course of the last four years or so have been mainly from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Venezuela, where there is economic hardship.
Many illegal migrants living in the U.S. who were Mexican have actually ended up going back to Mexico because the economy in Mexico is good.
These factories, U.S. factories that are now set up there for decades, they're going back.
So this will have a negative impact.
You will cause those same Mexicans to want to come to U.S. for economic opportunity.
So this doesn't make sense to me.
The other thing, I'm in the import business, and I was hurt a lot when China imposed when Trump imposed tariffs on China and import area rugs.
So the area rug tariffs went from zero to 35%.
It was impossible for me to continue.
I had to shift production to another country.
It's still an import.
They're not making rayon rugs in the United States that I was taking any jobs away from them.
And then I have friends who have done extremely well in the last four years.
They're very wealthy.
They voted for Trump.
And I also know people, some of my employees, who didn't do too well the last four years, and they voted for Trump.
So I don't understand this disconnect.
And why did the Democrats not have a message about the good economy of the last four years?
Thank you for taking my question.
Go ahead, Mark.
Yeah, well, thank you for all that.
There's a lot to unpack.
I mean, back to the USMCA.
That's the free trade deal that President Trump renegotiated.
As you pointed out, that was originally NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, became USMCA under President Trump.
And, you know, I don't know that President Trump has an issue with that.
Maybe there's some tweaks there that need to be done.
It was going to have a refresh anyway here in 2026.
So I think some things around the edges might be adjusted to make the agreement work better.
I think generally, I don't know that President Trump's imposing tariffs with regard to trying to create leverage around the USMCA.
Maybe on the margin, but I don't know if that's the big reason.
He called out, President Trump did call out the reasons for the tariffs on Canada and Mexico being the illegal drug trade and immigration.
And obviously, addressing those issues is critically important to the nation.
I mean, those are very laudable goals.
I just don't think we're going to make any progress on achieving those goals through tariffs.
I don't think that means that Canada or Mexico are going to try any harder to address these issues.
And you make some good points about what problem are we actually trying to solve here.
We have seen a very significant decline in illegal immigration across the southern border over the past year, in part because of executive order that President Biden put in back in the summer around asylum seekers, but also in part because the Mexicans have also tried to control the number of immigrants coming from, as you pointed out, other parts of Latin and South America up through Mexico into the U.S.
It's not really Mexicans that are coming into the U.S.
It's other Latin South American countries where the immigrants are coming from.
And I'm really hard pressed to see what role Canada plays in illegal immigration, immigrants coming across the northern border.
I'm not sure in illegal drug trade.
So this just goes to a broader point.
Using trade policy or the threat of tariffs to achieve these other goals, while these are good goals, I just don't think they're going to be effective.
And we're going to create other problems under other unintended consequences that are going to be counterproductive.
And regarding plans for mass deportation, how reliant is the U.S. economy on undocumented immigrant labor?
Very, very, Mimi.
But how do we know that if they're undocumented and this is all kind of under the table?
Well, we can see it in the employment statistics.
There are surveys that the Bureau of Labor Statistics does to try to gauge how many folks are foreign-born or native born.
And we have some sense of how many of those are legal and how many are illegal.
It's not easy.
It's difficult.
But what we do know is this, that the economy is at full employment, right?
The unemployment rate is 4%.
It's been there for two years.
The Federal Reserve has been working really hard to get it at 4%.
So 4% is the bogey.
We're there.
That's the full employment economy.
And that's with all those immigrants that are on the job and working.
And if you, in that full employment economy, you ask those workers to leave and force them to leave, or even make life so difficult that they self-deport, then the economy is not going to have enough workers and not enough people in those jobs that they're in now right now.
And we know that those workers, and by the way, the numbers are quite large.
I mean, the undocumented, unauthorized is last estimate done a couple of years ago was 11 million, so therefore it's much higher than that today.
They work in construction trade.
So, you know, we have a very severe shortage of affordable housing, both for rent and home ownership.
We need to build more homes, but about a third of all the workers in the construction trades are foreign-born.
Not all illegal, but some are.
And if we ask them to leave, we're not going to be able to build those homes to address that shortage, which means a higher cost of living.
We've got to pay more in rent.
Our house prices are going to be higher and more unaffordable.
It's going to make it harder for first-time buyers to get into a home.
Agriculture, another obvious area where we're going to have an issue.
Manufacturing, transportation, distribution, leisure hospitality, retailing, child care, elder care, healthcare, all these things, industries rely very heavily on immigration.
Now, Mimi, I don't think there's any way to run a railroad.
I mean, I think our immigration system really needs reform.
And by the way, we got pretty close to a pretty good reform bill back last summer.
It got kiboshed in the political process.
But we need immigrants, but we need to make sure that the immigrants that are coming into our country are the ones that have the skills that we need.
Now, we need skills across the board, low skill, middle skill, high skill.
We need all of the above, but we need to make that rational.
So I'm not arguing that.
I'm just saying it would be very counterproductive, very disruptive, inflationary if at this point in time we ask a lot of immigrants to leave and force a lot of immigrants to leave the country.
On the Republican line in Vineland, New Jersey, Gerald, good morning.
Good morning.
I'm wondering what Mark Zandy, what kind of policies he would implement to bring industry back to the United States.
Obviously, we'll need heavy industry to build infrastructure and the such and the like.
And I'm not hearing anything of how he would build our industry.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's a great question.
I really like the tax subsidies that were provided in the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act for, in the case of the CHIPS Act, for the name makes it clear that the chip industry, the semiconductor industry, that piece of legislation provides tax breaks to global chip companies to come here into the United States.
And that is working fabulously well.
I mean, if you look at the number of chip facilities that are going up, they're now coming to fruition.
They're going online.
TSMC, which is a Taiwanese major Taiwanese chip producer, largest on the planet, just opened up a plant, you know, one of the most sophisticated chip producing production facilities in the world in Phoenix.
So that's been highly successful.
In the Inflation Reduction Act, also a tremendous amount of subsidy, tax subsidy to help the transition from moving from fossil fuel to clean energy, both in terms of investment and production.
And that's working beautifully.
The infrastructure law that was the so-called bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed back a couple of three years ago provides tremendous amount of money and support to build out our infrastructure, which brings many that, you know, if you build a road or a bridge or an electric grid or a broadband, that requires a ton of manufactured product that a lot of that's not produced here.
So we've been fortunate as a nation that we could use carrots, you know, tax subsidies to get manufacturers to come here to the United States and start to produce.
I'm going to give you one statistic.
I haven't used any statistics here except for the 4% unemployment rate, just to give you a sense of this.
If you go back before the infrastructure law, which was passed in 2022, the 10 years prior to that, the amount spent by manufacturers on facilities and factories was about $75 billion per annum, give or take, one year a little higher, one year a little lower.
Last I looked in the month of September, the spending on facilities, manufacturing facilities, $230 billion.
It's $230 billion.
So we are seeing a massive amount of investment.
A lot of that's coming from those tax subsidies.
One other thing that's driving all this, and that is AI, artificial intelligence, and data centers.
Data centers are basically large facilities to hold these computers that do all these calculations for artificial intelligence.
They're going up everywhere in the United States of America right now.
And that's driving a lot of economic activity.
So manufacturing is coming back.
It's come back in a very significant way.
And I think we've made a lot of progress, certainly over the last several years.
All right.
We're going to fit in one more call, Robert, in Lake Jackson, Texas, Independent.
Good morning to my fellow Americans.
And me, are you okay?
Because you had us worry for a moment.
You were going to fall out for me.
I know.
I was, Robert.
Thank you for your concern.
All right.
My question to Mr. Zandy, then that's a relief thing.
What did the tariffs, slapping prohibitive tariffs on import goods do when Trump could subsidize 3D printers and have one put in every home so that everyone could pretty much become their own manufacturer and just give Americans a universal basic income to offset the cost of these tariffs?
Oh, that's an interesting idea.
The 3D printer, you know, I don't really, it's a great technology, and I'm sure it's already having enormous benefit.
I don't know that that's a viable policy at this point in time.
But, you know, actually, maybe in this way, there was this, when I was a young economist, there was this fella, Toffler, who wrote a book about the future and technology.
And I highly recommend it.
A very cool book and got a lot of it right.
And he talked about 3D printing back 20, 30 years ago and having a 3D printer in everybody's home.
So I don't know how far-fetched that is, but that certainly would be a benefit to Americans.
And that might solve a lot of our economic issues.
But, you know, that's the other thing I'd just say.
You know, I think the American economy is an amazing thing if we just let it go and don't impede it.
It's just an incredible success story in large part because we do invent new technologies to solve problems and it makes our lives better.
So, you know, just as long as we can, you know, we can argue, we can debate the merits of this and that and everything else, but as long as we remember to let this American economy operate, we'll be just fine.
All right, that's Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics.
You can find his work at economy.com.
Mark, thanks as always for being on the program.
Thank you, Mimi.
And it is the busiest day of the year.
It's the day before Thanksgiving.
You can take a look at DC's Reagan National Airport there.
The crowds are building up as we speak.
But we will be focusing on the $1 trillion infrastructure law that was signed into law three years ago.
We'll get a progress report from Corrigan Salerno, policy manager at the group Transportation for America.
That's later in the program.
But coming up right after the break, it's more of your phone calls for Open Forum.
You can start calling in now: Democrats 202748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002.
We'll be right back.
Sunday on Q&A, Jochen Jack Werfel, author of My Two Lives, talks about surviving Nazi Germany as a half-Jewish member of the Hitler Youth, the steps taken to conceal his identity.
and the day his Jewish mother was arrested by the Gestapo.
As we got out of the subway, which was right around the corner from where my mother lived, where we lived with my mother, I saw all kinds of Gestapo and SS cars in front of the building.
Now, this was a large building.
There were many families in there.
And my brother and I decided that rather than going in and going there with all these SS and Gestapo people, we waited on the corner and watched it from there.
And we decided to ask our mother as to why these cars were there and what the Gestapo was doing there once they were to leave.
We would go home and ask our mother.
Well, after a while, all of a sudden, to our surprise, it was my mother.
They were bringing out of the building, put her in one of the Gestapo cars, and they took her away.
Jack Werfel with his book, My Two Lives, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.
You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app.
Attention middle and high school students across America.
It's time to make your voice heard.
C-SPAN Student Cam Documentary Contest 2025 is here.
This is your chance to create a documentary that can inspire change, raise awareness, and make an impact.
Your documentary should answer this year's question: your message to the president.
What issue is most important to you or your community?
Whether you're passionate about politics, the environment, or community stories, StudentCam is your platform to share your message with the world.
With $100,000 in prizes, including a grand prize of $5,000, this is your opportunity not only to make an impact, but also be rewarded for your creativity and hard work.
Enter your submissions today.
Scan the code or visit studentcam.org for all the details on how to enter.
The deadline is January 20th, 2025.
According to Brown University Professor Corey Brettsnyder, the following presidents in history threatened democracy.
Here are his words from the introduction of his book, The Presidents and the People.
Quote, John Adams waged war on the national press, prosecuting as many as 126 who dared criticize him.
James Buchanan colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans.
Andrew Johnson urged violence against his political opponents.
Woodrow Wilson nationalized Jim Crow by segregating the federal government.
And finally, Richard Nixon committed criminal acts ordering the Watergate break-in.
Corey Bretschnider teaches constitutional law and politics at his Providence, Rhode Island-based Brown University.
Brown University professor Corey Bretschneider with his book, The Presidents and the People, Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host Brian Lamb.
BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Washington Journal continues.
Back to Open Forum on Washington Journal.
And what you're looking at on your screen is DC's Union Station.
It's right in front of our studio here at C-SPAN.
And it's the busiest day of the year.
So people are starting to, you can see Reagan National Airport there.
People are starting to leave town, come into town, and celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.
And we are taking your calls for Open Forum, and we'll start on the line for Democrats in Indianapolis.
Dana, good morning.
Hi, Mimi.
I want to understand one thing, Americans.
How is it that when we've got an economy that is gaining, lobsters closing at record numbers, jobs, unemployment is down, we still to this day have 1.5 million jobs available for that are not filled that employers need to be filled.
Okay?
You're making more money than the minimum wage, okay?
We was at premium wages before the COVID.
Right now, you guys are making X, I'm retired.
You're making excellent money, the $20 to $18, the $15 or whatever per hour.
There's plenty of work.
There's plenty of open jobs.
And you're making money.
And the economy is bustling.
Look at what she just said about your station.
People are out and everything.
People got money to spend, to put into the economy.
And he's supposed to be a leader.
Our leader.
Tell me one thing that's going to be good about imposing tariffs on our people that import and export into our country.
Tell me how there's going to be gainful for anyone to do those tariffs.
And keep in mind, minimum wage is still at $7.75.
The minimum wage has not been hyped up mandatory.
If we start going into a recession and jobs start laying off and whatnot, when you come back, you're still going to be making mandatorily the poor man wages of $7.75.
You cannot tell me you're not doing better than what the money you're making now.
All right, Dana.
And regarding tariffs, this is Axios that says Mexico's president would impose retaliatory tariffs in response to Trump's plan.
It says that Mexican President Scheinbaum said on Tuesday that she would impose tariffs in retaliation to those proposed by President-elect Trump.
And it says that the leaders from Mexico, China, and Canada have all argued that the U.S. and their countries mutually benefit from cooperative trade agreements.
Trump on Monday said he would impose new tariffs to stop the flow of drugs and migrants.
And Gene in Denver, Colorado, Independent, good morning.
This is Gene in Colorado.
Yes, you're on the air, Gene.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
I just have a little bit to say.
You watch the news, and you can see the Democrats are beating up on themselves trying to figure out why they lost the election.
And it wasn't anything that they did.
It is just the nature of this country.
When you look at it on paper, if you had those two people, Paris and Trump, apply for a job and they gave you their resume, and for whatever reason, you choose Trump, it shows that there's something wrong with the employer.
And in this case, it's the American public.
Why would you choose someone like Trump to run the most powerful country on the planet at a time like this, at any time, with the record he's got?
It is the public in this country that has a problem.
There's a sickness here, a racial issue.
They've got a financial issue, but it's mostly race.
There's nowhere in the world that Trump should be able to hold that position under normal conditions.
There's problems in this country, and it's deep-seated.
It's been there for decades, and it's not going away.
Thank you for letting me call.
All right.
And Vice President Harris had a message to supporters that she just released.
This is her speaking to reporters, to her supporters that might have been discouraged by the election loss.
Here she is.
I just have to remind you: don't you ever let anybody take your power from you.
You have the same power that you did before November 5th.
And you have the same purpose that you did.
And you have the same ability to engage and inspire.
So don't ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you.
Look, this mission that we have, it takes hard work.
But as you've heard me say many times, we like hard work.
Hard work is good work.
Hard work can be joyful work.
And in doing our work, we will remain committed and intentional about building community, building coalitions, reminding people that we all have so much more in common than what separates us.
We will be armed with the faith and the fuel that tells us what is possible and then drives us to achieve it.
So let's continue to organize and mobilize and stay engaged.
And I thank you all.
I thank you all.
We are all in this together.
All right?
We are all in this together.
And on this practical eve of Thanksgiving, I wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving with the ability and to find the ability at this moment to just remember there is so much to be thankful for.
That was the vice president yesterday.
And wishing everybody a happy Thanksgiving.
Our crews are at DC's Reagan National Airport to check out the crowds for the busy holiday season.
We are going to have a segment about transportation coming up in about 15 minutes.
And we are taking your calls.
Danette is in Portland, Oregon.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning.
Hey, I had a couple of points to touch on.
I agree with the guy from Colorado.
We should have never given a job to him.
You know, being a 34-time felon, a sexual abuser, a fraudster, everything else, he would never be able to even get a job packaging French fries at McDonald's.
They wouldn't even let him in the door when it was open.
So no McDonald's, but POTUS, that's just fine.
That just really gets to me.
The other thing I want to talk about is Joe got us out of COVID, everybody knows, and he made the economy the best in the world.
Everybody's suffering because of the pandemic, but he really got us out of it.
And it really drives me crazy that Kamala Harris didn't really talk about it as much as she should have because she had great economic record to run on.
The other thing I need to talk about is the seniors in this country.
They are not getting enough Social Security.
Now, one problem is the rich don't pay their fair share.
They only pay a Social Security tax on the first $169,000 they make.
They don't pay any more Social Security tax after that.
They should pay it on everything, and they shouldn't get any tax breaks because they've made billions of dollars on our stock market.
And our seniors are becoming homeless.
They need a raise.
I think after all the years they've gotten nothing and they live on a pauper's wage, they could get a 50% wage and still not have enough money to live.
They don't want you to pay to take care of them.
Oh, I heard Kamala Harris say, oh, we'll send people to their house.
Give us money to take care of ourselves.
Jesus, it's just not enough.
I know seniors who are becoming homeless, who are having to go two or three couples or singles in a house just to survive in this country.
When all these rich people are making so much money, they could give a little more to the Social Security beneficiaries who are not surviving, not having fun, not able to buy any Christmas presents.
Unless you got lucky and had a big stock market or wealth in your family, you're out of luck.
All right, Danette.
And this is a Republican line in Rotan, Texas.
Renee, good morning.
Thank you.
Good morning.
I'm so sorry most of America is dreading Thanksgiving with their family because of bottlenecks this year.
Personally, we can't wait.
Most of us are Republicans, and we are celebrating the results.
We have so much to talk about and everything to be thankful for.
This will be the best Thanksgiving ever.
Praise God.
Hallelujah.
Thank you, Lord.
Thank you.
Kendra in Ashland, Virginia, Independent.
Good morning.
Hi, good morning, Mimi.
Hopefully, you won't cut me off and let me get out what I need to say because you did let other people go on for a minute.
There are a few things, a few different things or a few different ways to look at the meaning of DEI.
I want to point out two specific DEI hires under Joe Biden.
The first one, of course, is Kamala Harris as VP, because Joe Biden specifically stated that he was only going to pick a black woman as VP, meaning the VP role was not open for a white woman, a Latino woman, or any other woman unless they were black.
In addition, the role was not open for any man regardless of race.
The second one is Katanji Brown Jackson.
And yes, she is qualified to be in the position that she's in, but what makes her a DEI hire is because the role was not open to anyone else but a black woman.
Now, I'm black as well, so I'm happy to see Katanji Brown in her role, but I'm just pointing out that she is a DEI hire.
Now, let me point out a couple of other people I consider to be DEI hires as well.
The first one is Joe Biden as VP for Obama because he needed an older white man on the ticket.
The second is Tim Kaine for Hillary Clinton.
The third is Tim Waltz for Kamala Harris.
And I say this because even though it wasn't specified, they actually did need a white man to be on the ticket as a second person.
And Mimi, there is one more thing I would like to say, or actually I would like to ask the viewers.
If you had a brand new business and you needed someone to run it, would you hire someone like Kamala Harris to run your business?
The answer is no.
So there is as to why Trump won the election.
I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving, Kendra.
Patricia in Maryville, Tennessee.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning.
I just want to say that they voted Trump in.
I'm just going to sit in the poor house along with the rest of us poor people.
And if they notice, there's so many in the House and so many in the Senate that are nothing but Russia oligarchs.
I know it.
I see it every day.
People are so blind, it makes me mad.
But I just want to say happy Thanksgiving and God bless Kamala Harris.
Thank you.
And here's Dalton and Colleen, Texas, Republican.
Good morning.
Hello.
I just wanted to ask a question of reference to the North Carolina hurricane people in Asheville, North Carolina.
Are anybody, I know we're a great nation and we always pitch in and help other countries and things like that, and most of the time, people with any kind of devastation.
But are any of the mobile homes, car dealers, grocery stores, furniture stores, people like that, clothing stores, are they any of those voluntarily surrendering like X amount of numbers of mobile homes to help these people get out of the tents and get ready for the winter, the cold climates and stuff that are coming?
Or are any of the automobile dealers, used car, new cars, manufacturers, are they surrendering any type of cars as a gift just to say, here, let us help you out and get you some transportation so you can get to the doctor, get out and get the foods and stuff you need.
And are any of the grocery stores surrendering and say, you know, if you're a victim in the ash field, come by.
You can get so much extra food just to eat, make sure you don't go hungry.
Children are the teachers and schools and colleges doing things to help the children still maintain and get back into school and yet at the same time the families get back up on their feet.
Because we live out here in Texas, and I'm from North Carolina.
As a matter of fact, I'm from the Federal area.
And they always pitched in and helped each other around there.
But I haven't seen anything in the news where the people that have the quality, the quantities of stuff like mobile homes, cars, and clothing, and furnitures, and furniture stores, and all of them are making good money off everybody.
And they're really high on everything.
Everybody is right now.
So they can take a little cutback and surrender some stuff for free to help those people get out of them tents, get them something warm to sleep in, something warm to stay warm inside their house or wherever those accommodations are.
I was just wondering: is there anybody doing anything like that to help these people out?
Doctors going out to visit them and check on people to see who needs what medication?
Because I haven't seen no doctors darken the doorway there.
Or some of the Democrat politicians.
I haven't seen none of them darken the doorway and I actually don't come out like AOC or Blumenthal or Elizabeth Warren or Nancy Plosey, Joe Biden, or nothing.
They haven't even been there.
All right, Dalton.
And this is in Henderson, North Carolina, Joseph.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning.
Can you hear me?
Yes, go right ahead.
Oh, okay.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the plan that the Republican Party had as far as getting Donald Trump into office.
Years ago, they started out with this thing called gerrymanding.
I'm sure everybody's familiar with it, where they go in and they redo the maps and they redistrict a lot of people.
Then they came up with the voter IDs.
They know that there's a lot of elderly people that don't have IDs that want to vote.
There's a lot of people that have different addresses on it that has to have a change of address.
And then, you know, it was just confusing to the voter out there when they came out with that, that voter ID thing before you can vote.
And it really disenfranchised a lot of voters out there that took away from this election right here.
And this is a thing that has been generating for a long time.
The people have been on the other side.
The people on the other side have been, they have a case of amnesia where they forget about stuff.
They forgot about COVID and it wasn't a big thing about it.
And millions of people lost their life from COVID.
They forgot about, they don't forgot about 9-11 where thousands of people died in the World Trade Centers in New York.
They don't forgot about it.
They just don't care.
I mean, there are people that don't care because Donald Trump has not broken every rule and book in America.
And he's still sitting up there as a convicted felon in the office.
So, I mean, you know, it's just a thing that has happened.
Got your point.
Something for your schedule for 12 o'clock noon today here on C-SPAN.
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Johnny in Kingsland, Georgia, Democrat, good morning.
Yes, how are you doing?
I'm just calling this election, who they set a precedent that a felon could become president.
I mean, we have some kind of morals that if October surprise come around, that most likely would change the election.
None of that happened this time.
We got a guy that's been married three times, felon.
He's done some crooked stuff, and yet the American people still want to back him.
I don't understand this.
And then you're talking about the American Christian folk want to back him.
So it don't make any kind of sense to say you're going.
Basically, you have three parties now.
You have the MAGA party, you have the Republican Party, and you have the Democrat Party.
Everybody wanted a three-party system.
So now you got it.
Thank you.
Ronald in Haynes City, Florida, Republican.
You're next.
Yes, I was thinking about the people that call in, and it is hard times for people that are living on Social Security and with the high prices in our country.
It's all understandable.
But we think about why there's not money for these people, and it's given away to these illegal immigrants that come across.
They're housed, fed, given money.
They're given everything, medical care.
They're given all the things that our citizens should be receiving, but they're taking from our citizens.
And this is a result of having Kamala Harris and Biden.
I think in a few years we'll look back and these people that are throwing off on Trump, they'll see that he's done a great job in trying to revive this country.
And, you know, they just slow down so much.
They talk about the rich need to pay their fair share.
I think the rich probably paid their fair share.
I know I do.
And I don't know a lot of people pay taxes.
There's too many takers.
There's too many people that are being given this money.
And our government has given it away to other countries before they even worry about the American people.
Jack in Arlington, Virginia, Democrat.
Good morning.
Hey, good morning.
I agree with that last caller.
I am a devoted, well brought up Democrat, and I voted eyes fully wide open for Donald Trump.
And I take offense at a lot of my Democratic callers and fellow Democrats who have this view that somehow my eyes were shut or we forget about our history.
And I'm a very pro-black black man, former veteran, father of daughters.
And, you know, people bring up all kinds of like different reasons why it makes no sense that voted for Donald Trump.
When I'm sorry?
No, you just faded out there, but go ahead.
We can hear you.
One of the key issues, right?
So I voted on issue.
Kamala Harris, right now, to me, the world is on fire.
To me, as again, I'll admit, a pro-black, pro-community Democrat, I am, just like that last caller said, watching the Democrats reglobalize the world.
I served in the military.
I served in Iraq.
I served in Afghanistan.
And it was this globalized view.
And you have people who just aren't focused on what is relevant, I think, at least to my community inside the United States.
And Kamala Harris, when I'm watching the world on fire like this, what was she pitching?
She was pitching joy.
It was like, are you freaking kidding me?
You're pitching joy.
I couldn't take her seriously.
And even in her most recent newscast, she was like, you know, hey, everybody, my daughters were in the car.
We were just listening to this this morning.
Hey, everybody, get together.
You know, love each other.
It's like, come on, man.
So anyway, my eyes are open.
I'm a Democrat and I voted for Donald Trump.
Robert in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Democrat, good morning.
Good morning.
I voted for the Vice President Common Harris, but I thought only three Democrats could have won this election, and that was Richard Whitman, the governor of Michigan, Obama, Michelle Obama, or the governor of California.
Gavin Newsom.
Pardon me?
Yep, the governor of California is Gavin Newsome.
Go ahead.
Those three could have won it.
But let me just make this observation.
Being an 88-year-old man, most in this country, the most Caucasian and white people are going to vote against the person whom the most African Americans vote for.
That is just a fact, and it's not going to change soon.
But either one of those three could have won the election act.
All right, Robert.
And that's it for today's open forum.
More to come on this busy Thanksgiving travel day.
It's the day before Thanksgiving.
We'll focus on the $1 trillion infrastructure law that was signed into law three years ago.
We'll get a progress report from Corrigan Salerno.
He's policy manager at the group Transportation for America.
Stay with us.
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Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back to the program.
We're talking about the state of the nation's infrastructure and recent investments with Corrigan Salerno.
He's policy manager for transportation for America.
Corgan, welcome to the program.
Amy, how you doing?
So just start by telling us about the organization Transportation for America and how you're funded.
Yeah, so Transportation for America is a nonpartisan advocacy organization.
We're made up of grasshop members from local communities, including county and town, regional governments.
And on top of that, we also are funded through philanthropic sources, government grants, and fee-for-service work through our technical assistance work.
So meaning we would be helping with the deployment of anything from the Southern Rail Commission's Gulf Coast Rail that will be running from New Orleans, Louisiana to Mobile, Alabama, to helping Maryland DOT to helping analyze federal spending for philanthropic grantees or funders.
And your funding?
And our funding is made up from that, both philanthropic sources as well as that fee-for-service work.
We also have members that pay for our analyses and insights on federal transportation and state transportation developments.
So let's talk about the infrastructure law that had its three-year anniversary earlier this month.
It was $1.2 trillion.
It's called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
And it was also, it's also called the bipartisan infrastructure law.
So remind us how we got that bill and how significant it is.
Yeah, absolutely.
So winding back actually to the Trump administration, the previous transportation reauthorization bill, the FAST Act, had expired and had been going on what's called an extension for several years at that point while the House and Senate were developing new policy to create surface transportation reauthorization bill,
which would determine how things like our roads, bridges, and transit systems operate in this country and how they're funded from the federal level.
So after a couple years of infrastructure weeks under the Trump administration and also intervened by COVID, kind of skewing that priority down the road, we were able to see the development of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Now, that initially started with different bills competing in both the House and Senate.
In the House side, we had the Invest in America Act, which our organization had identified as something that would be more transformative and take on a path towards our priorities, which are fixing things first, prioritizing safety over speed, and addressing access via all modes of transportation for everyone.
After the passage of the Invest in America Act in the House, we saw the bipartisan negotiations go on in the Senate with the support of the Biden administration,
really skewing the bill's priorities towards that of the Senate's version of the text, which would essentially continue the structure and policy of the pre-existing transportation program as it's kind of existed in a very roughly unchanged form for decades.
And through that, the House afterwards passed the Senate's version of the bill and Joe Biden signed it on November 15th, leading us to where we are.
And now we've just been implementing it ever since.
So coming to the law as it stands now, it's a five-year law and we're three years in.
So how much of that $1.2 trillion has been awarded?
So that's a fun question because you can get a lot of different answers out of that depending on how you consider funds to be awarded.
Recently, I believe the administration announced that over half of funding had been allocated.
There's a bit of a difference there in that you can announce grants, such as for a project rebuilding the Long Bridge in Washington, D.C., but some of that funding might not yet be obligated by the federal government, meaning all the grant agreements with the recipients and also contractors are signed.
So, in that case, the number of funding is a little bit lower than that.
So, of the surface transportation portion of the infrastructure law, our recent analysis shows that about $150 billion had been obligated as of June.
Projecting that to about today, it shouldn't be too much higher, possibly around $160 billion to $170.
So, that's really not a whole lot compared to $1.2 trillion.
So, it's important to consider how these projects are going to take a very long time as well.
But, what is the holdup?
Is this before they actually break ground on these projects?
Is that how it's measured?
In some cases, yes, but in others, these are for projects that have already been under construction or on plans from states.
State plans and regional plans will have projects listed out as far as several decades.
The first tranche of infrastructure law funding that we've seen go out has really gone towards those.
And the more transformative projects that we're going to expect to come out of this bill are really still in the works.
The average road project's completion time right now is about 2027 for those that are under $100 million.
And for those projects that take more than $100 million, you can expect those projects to be finished around 2029 or later.
And as for transit projects or rail projects, those go out all the way to the 2030s.
So, it depends on the kind of project that would be kind of really causing the delay.
But beyond that, it's just going to take some time with infrastructure broadly.
And can you tell us a little bit more about the process of awarding the grants and the role that the federal government plays as opposed to the role that states play?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, what makes up the majority of funding in the infrastructure law is formula funding, which are grants given out to states annually in several different programs that are supposed to address different priorities.
So, for instance, there's the National Highway Performance Program, which is around $150 billion in funding over the five-year period of the IIJA.
Those funds go out to states on a regular basis and pay for things like expanding roads and road maintenance, as well as safety projects.
The discretionary grant part of the bill is a bit smaller.
It represents about 10 to 15 percent of the funding in that highway portion.
And those are designed by Congress first to set out initial goals for the program.
And then, following that, the executive administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation, led by Pete Budigej, creates the sort of criteria for those grants, meaning how those grants are scored by projects and their applicants, and how well they do on those measures.
So, those measures could be anything from how well people are connected to jobs and services, how well underserved communities might be served, and how well the project is accomplishing its goals for its cost.
With Corrigan Salerno, if you've got a question about the infrastructure law about ground transportation, you can give us a call by party.
So Democrats 202, 748-8,000, Republicans 202, 748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002.
Corgan, I want to show you a portion of President Biden speaking at the White House just after the election this month about the legacy of that infrastructure bill.
Much of the work we've done is already being felt by the American people, but the vast majority of it will not be felt over the next 10 years.
We have legislation we pass that's just only now just really kicking in.
We're going to see over a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure work done, changing people's lives in rural communities and communities that are in real difficulty because it takes time to get it done.
And so much more.
It's going to take time.
But it's there.
The road ahead is clear, assuming we sustain it.
There's so much, so much we can get done and will get done based the way the legislation was passed.
And it's truly historic.
Corgan Salerno, he said, assuming we can sustain it, is there anything that the next administration can do to either slow down the infrastructure build out or redirect that money?
Well, there's a lot of uncertainty with how the next iteration of the Trump White House might treat infrastructure projects, but it's also important to keep in context that the infrastructure law was passed on a bipartisan basis, and that's a bit unlike the Inflation Reduction Act, which I think has much more present and focused priorities on things like climate and electric vehicles that President Trump might be more apt to kind of attempt to claw away.
But with the infrastructure law, there are funding pools that are essentially approved by Congress for the next two years.
And then beyond that, there is funding from the Highway Trust Fund for those larger formula fund projects that are expected to continue going through at least 2027.
Of those projects that Trump might be interested in clawing back, know that there was a discussion on X.com on the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program between Donald Trump Jr. and Pete Budigej.
And in that discussion, you saw how the program works in that it's a formula program that goes to states and the states administer it from there, which leads to kind of a slower rollout, but it's more state-directed.
You would have to essentially be taking money from states for these priorities that they've already planned for for years on how they plan to use.
So it's difficult to see how they would treat things like the formula programs.
But as for discretionary grant programs and potentially also for the transit program broadly, there could be changes.
For instance, in the last administration, we saw a slow walking of grants that kind of occurred in the first few years of the Federal Transit Administration under Trump, where grants were slow to get out, potentially costing agencies.
And for discretionary grant programs that I'd mentioned, where states and localities apply for that funding for the federal government, you see different criteria being uplifted by the Trump administration.
And we anticipate things to focus less so on equity or climate or climate resilience and more so on things like economic development.
Well, speaking of climate, we've got a question from Sally Su on X. There's been criticism over the slow rollout of government-funded electric vehicle chargers.
Can you explain why it's taking so long?
Yeah, I can.
So far, there's actually been around 700 or more announced charger sites, and each one of those sites has, at minimum, four ports that are planned to be deployed.
But really, what you're seeing is a slow rollout because we're seeing over 50 different programs being developed with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program.
States are in the lead on this and are working to build out electric vehicle chargers every 50 miles and putting one charger one mile away from each exit every 50 miles.
So that takes a lot of planning and coordination.
It also requires a lot of partnership with folks in communities and with private partners who would be host to those gas stations.
There are some requirements in the infrastructure law and also from federal rulemaking that may have slowed it down, such as that one mile requirement, which might be limiting the potential to deploy sites in small businesses around small businesses rather than around gas stations.
But beyond that, it really is just a matter of having to go through the processes of setting up a sustainable program 50 different times across 50 different contexts, such that any money that goes to an electrification program in the future can kind of have a path forward through that deployment.
All right, let's talk to Wayne in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Republican, good morning, Wayne.
How are y'all doing today?
I just have a simple question, right?
I'm a black man, right?
And I'm mostly in what y'all call a hood, right?
And a lot of people be getting jobs, right?
I'm talking about black men, right?
I'm a carpenter from New Jersey.
I worked 30 years in the carpenter field.
I had a good job.
I made good money.
But today, I see how do we keep the black man on the job?
That is the number one problem.
Keeping a black man on the job.
I have four sons.
All right.
Let's take that up as far as what are we expecting as far as jobs go on these infrastructure projects.
Yeah, well, with $1.2 trillion going straight to infrastructure, someone has to build it.
And with the amount of jobs, we've seen thousands created as per announcements from the Biden administration.
And if we take a look at the transit programs as well, you can see the creation of jobs from folks that are operating those systems as well as building them out.
But yeah, we can expect thousands of jobs to be created over the course of the deployment of this infrastructure law.
We've got a question on X from Marcus Twain-Isch.
What are the chances of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge replacement in Maryland getting funded?
Do you happen to know about that, Corrigan Salerno?
I don't happen to know the odds of that specific project being approved on a federal basis.
And I think if I'm familiar, the context of that one might revolve around Congress's appetite to lean in and help.
Anna in DeSoto, DeSoto, Texas, Democrat.
Hi, Anna.
Hi, how are you doing?
Mr. Silverno, do you have a come through Texas?
Because we are one of the third largest infrastructure money that was given in the state.
First of all, Southwest Airlines, they redid the runways there.
We have roads and bridges coming everywhere from El Paso up into Kansas.
Did you know that?
Also, Last New Year's, I drove with my son, who is a truck driver, all of the southern states there.
I don't know if they're lying to you or what, but I noticed them.
South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, all of those states have gotten the infrastructure money.
I don't know what they're doing with it, but with Texas, you need to come down and see Texas and you need to look at all of the infrastructure that is being done.
When Senator Cornyn, all of those people, they don't tell you anything, but they've got tons of money.
Housing, we're building houses like it's unbelievable.
We also, it was a lady yesterday, she talked about Florida, that they don't see the snow babies coming down to Florida.
No, because they're in Texas.
In DeSoto, we have a turbine, a company, and a solar panel company.
So that's all I'm going to say to you.
But Texas is let's talk about Texas.
Go ahead, Corgan.
Yeah, and Texas absolutely has been one of the larger recipients of funding under the infrastructure law, particularly under the highway program.
You're seeing with Texas, they absolutely are building a lot of new infrastructure compared to other states.
In fact, in our analysis, Texas has spent about more funds on infrastructure expansion than any other state in the country.
And while that might be good in terms of the jobs created, there is going to be a climate impact from that construction, as we outlined in our new report that's on our website, t4america.org, called Fueling the Crisis.
And we really get into the kind of consequences of that expansion of infrastructure.
But just broadly speaking, with the states, as you mentioned when you were driving through the South, it really is confusing almost as to what the states are spending their funds on, especially considering that many of the repair priorities are being a bit ignored by states instead to focus on what might be politically expedient wins to expand infrastructure.
So I hear what you're saying.
We've got a question for you on X or a comment about replacing the Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge.
This is in Baltimore.
It's supposed to cost $500 billion, and that doesn't include the cost of clearing the channel of the collapsed bridge and salvaging.
Money is being sucked down one catastrophe after another with left-wingers in control.
What can you tell us about that specifically and in general about infrastructure catastrophes?
And would that the $1.2 trillion be able to be used for that?
So there are funds available that could go to that, but I think because of the nature of that issue, I'm not as familiar with the emergency funding setups that we have on the federal highway emergency funds that we have.
But again, for this project specifically, this is something that Congress would have to work with on determining how much money they want to approve.
I know the Biden administration had said that they wanted to fully fund it with federal dollars.
We'll see if that comes to pass.
But again, it very much is determined by the appetite from Congress to pay for these emergency things right now.
There are emergency funds set aside and appropriated in the in-transportation program broadly.
We saw a lot of them go to the I-95 bridge collapse that had happened not too long ago in Pennsylvania.
But there's been a lot of natural disasters recently in the United States.
So that just really shores up the reason why we need to be building our infrastructure to be more resilient to the climate and also natural disasters that may or may not be increasing in frequency.
And that poster said that I guess he had seen it's 500 billion.
But here's the Washington Post that says rebuilding Baltimore's Key Bridge expected to cost up to $1.9 billion.
It says rebuilding the Baltimore Bridge destroyed by a container ship in March will cost between $1.7 and $1.9 billion.
That's according to Maryland estimates.
So you can see that full article there on the Washington Post.
This is Robbie in Ruskin, Florida.
Democrat.
Good morning, Robbie.
Hey, good morning.
How are you guys doing?
So I want to talk about this has nothing to do to the add the gentleman who is on the show right now, Kerrigan.
I'm sorry if I pronounce your name wrong.
You're explaining everything about the infrastructure correctly.
I mean, you're doing your job as far as explaining the process of where we're at, how we spend the money.
And I think what all these callers and future callers are going to be complaining about is why aren't we having jobs?
And that's what it's a, you know, the Democrats did a bad job of explaining.
Excuse me.
You know, right now, that $150 billion is to the business to build the plan, to get everything ready, get the equipment ready, figure out what they need.
It's a small amount of workforce, you know, those people that are making $150,000, $250,000 a year.
Another two to three years, that's when the jobs start.
That's when you get the construction break ground.
You start getting those people's jobs going that they're complaining about where are our jobs.
That's when it's going to start.
And I think the Democrats were very bad at messaging that part and in saying, hey, we got Joe Biden here to build this infrastructure, to work with both Democrats and Republicans to get to where we are, to save business first, and then work as far as getting the people jobs and this and that.
We had to work on inflation.
Excuse me.
We got a little bit of a code.
But that's, I think, where the Democrats failed, right?
They should have said, hey, we had to work on inflation first.
We had to build this.
We had to get America's economy set and then work on the jobs part.
I think they also failed at, and I don't know if it was part of Build Better or the infrastructure, pay family leave, raising minimum wage.
Got it, Robbie.
Go ahead, Corrigan Salerno.
Yeah, it's very tough, I think, to message on infrastructure.
I think people expect a direct input.
You put money in, you get jobs out.
But like you had mentioned, it does take time.
And the timeline for these projects, I believe it mentioned, it's for completion.
We're still several years out from seeing finalization of these projects.
And even then, I think it's important to consider that this is not going to be, nor could it really be a full transformation of the economy just by the nature of this bill.
At the end of the day, this is a program that does very well at taking money and creating new road assets and that sort of thing.
But it's not really designed to connect people with jobs and services as a default.
In fact, our system in the Invest in America version of the bill would have made sure that people were connecting to jobs and services thanks to infrastructure investments.
But now we're still building things.
So rather than making the connection between the construction job and in the money, we could also be doing using our funds from the construction to the completion and then thereafter connecting people to jobs.
But as we see it roll out, we're going to see more construction projects be funded and more visibly funded by the bill, especially in larger discretionary grant projects.
But really, a lot of these programs that have been funded by the infrastructure law so far are being deployed by state departments of transportation already on the ground in terms of either infrastructure expansions or resurfacing, those sort of projects that happen on a very frequent basis, but they're also relatively underreported since they're kind of day-to-day projects.
So it'll take time for those transformative projects such as the opening of Gulf Coast Rail from New Orleans, Louisiana to Mobile, Alabama.
That will be happening in 2025 at the soonest under the Trump administration.
And Corgan Salerno, I want to ask you about the news out of Pennsylvania.
The AP reports that Pennsylvania Governor, that's Josh Shapiro, taps federal highway aid to help Philadelphia transit city system.
Is that typical in states that you could use funding that was, I guess, allocated for highways and use it for the public transit system?
Yeah, absolutely.
So that has been an eligibility in the federal transportation program for several decades now.
With it, states are able to take their transportation highway dollars from the federal aid highway program and transfer those to the federal transit administration programs to fund transit capital costs, so meaning replacement of buses, replacement and maintenance work, that sort of thing, using federal aid highway dollars.
But so far over the last decade, based on research, states are not really using this eligibility and flexibility to a great extent to fund transit.
You see in states like New Jersey really taking a lot of their funds and flexing it, but on average, states are only flexing about 2% to 3% of their highway dollars to transit.
Flexing highway dollars to transit is a great way to shore up funding and ensure that the programs that we have are well funded and allow for state dollars, which could fund things like operations costs, which would lead to increased bus frequency and coverage.
It would allow you to shift capital dollars from state sources to operations so that you can deliver more service.
And considering that many highway dollars have so far been used to expand highways that have not really historically done a great job at relieving congestion, an alternative strategy that has shown promise is transferring those highway funds to transit so that you can actually have alternative means to get to your destination for more people.
Let's talk to Elvira in Birmingham, Alabama, Independent Line.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I have a question regarding our rail system in the United States.
I see containers on flatbeds of trains locally.
However, I see a lot more containers on the backs of 18-wheelers clogging up the interstates.
And there's nothing more terrifying to me than having an 18-wheeler pull up behind me loaded with cars and or trucks.
And I know if that vehicle hit my car, it would kill me, just the impact of that much weight hitting my car.
Those should be, could be on the backs of trains.
Also, our governor here in Alabama has signed a bill which will allow for water transports from our North Alabama down to the Mobile Coast.
I think we need more water transportation in this country.
We have wonderful rivers that are navigable and they're not being used for transportation.
All right.
Go ahead, Corgan.
Yeah, absolutely.
The infrastructure law did make very strong investments historically high, actually, in rail, mostly around passenger rail and fixing up the lines that passenger rail could run.
But that goes hand in hand with freight rail and the railroad companies in this country, because Amtrak shares a lot of track with these freights.
And we have seen, obviously, a lot of news just about the freight rail companies considering the disaster in East Palestine a year or two ago now.
But with those investments in the infrastructure law, there are funds allocated to intermodal transportation taking in those waterways.
And those are expanding, but it is, again, going to take time.
Those are coming out of the discretionary grant programs quite often around inland ports.
But as those take time, we'll see the extent of the investment.
But as the bill was structured, the majority of the funding has continued to go to highways and widening highways in ways that would really keep those 18 wheelers on the road rather than transferring them over at a very large scale to things like rail barge ships, those sort of things.
We've got a question for you from Joe in California about the electrical grid.
And he says, EV charging stations are useless if there is no electricity to power them.
Infrastructure spending on the grid should be orders of magnitude greater than it is.
Every AI hub uses enough power to operate a million charging stations.
The way things are going now, we'll go back to the 40s and ration stamps for individual transportation capability.
What do you think of that?
Well, I'm no full expert on electrical grid, but a lot of our work does interface with electric vehicles.
As for projecting the usage of electric vehicles, multiple studies have found that EVs are capable of deploying to the grid.
We are going to absolutely need more investment in electrical infrastructure.
I know the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act did make investments in that, and we're seeing those roll out.
And as they do deploy, especially on the power generation side from the Inflation Reduction Act, we'll likely see increases in capacity of the grid.
But I can't speak too thoroughly into projecting what might happen in the future, but I doubt that we would be going to rationing for transportation usage.
Charlie in Dennison, Texas, Democrat, good morning, Charlie.
Good morning.
I have a question regarding the highway construction in North Texas has been tremendous the last couple of years, going from Dallas up into Oklahoma on a number of a couple of interstates and other areas.
If some of that $1.2 trillion that you were talking about been spent on the highway construction we're seeing on a daily basis going up into from north of Dallas, Fort Worth up to Oklahoma.
Yeah, absolutely.
A lot of that construction funds have come from the Federal Highway Administration's formula programs.
So, and Texas is a recipient of over a billion dollars per year in those programs, if not $2 billion actually.
But yeah, a lot of it.
But also, Texas has a fairly robust state gas tax as well that funds much of that construction.
And let's talk to Colin next, who's in Columbus, Ohio, Line for Democrats.
Hello, Colin.
Hello, good morning.
I'm back home for Thanksgiving in Columbus, Ohio, visiting some family.
And of course, with the train derailment in East Palestine just in the last few years.
I'm curious to know any more information about what infrastructure is being built, updated, or otherwise any issues resolved here in the sort of Ohio general area.
So on that, I'm not quite sure what has been done with regards to the exact infrastructure work to address that specific problem, but the infrastructure law did come with billions of dollars for safety and restoration of existing infrastructure in the federal rail program.
And that, again, is going to be deploying now and into the future.
As for the issue with East Palestine, they are, I believe, Federal Railroad has been investigating that with the railroad companies responsible and working on that.
Earl is on the line for Democrats, Canton, Georgia.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I'm calling about the rail here in Georgia.
If anybody's listening is familiar with the traffic here, the road hour, not just in Atlanta, but around Atlanta.
And they spent all this money on roads and they're going to continue with the roads.
And the whole thing I found out is that there's average, three roadway deaths per day in Georgia with a population of 10 million people.
Then I went to New York State, an average of one and a half roadway deaths per day in New York State with 20 million people.
Why can't they get it in their head here, these Republicans that's run this state for the last three or four decades that we need this rail?
All they've ever done is be promoted by in Atlanta when it first started.
MARTA's been here for 50 years.
It needs to be, it could have been 50 miles in every direction of Atlanta by now.
I live in Canton, which is about 40 miles from Atlanta.
And they come up here 30 years ago and the mayor up here told them, said, well, Canton's not ready for MARTA now.
And that was the end of it.
After they'd offered them six months of road of bus transportation to the Lindbergh station, they just refused it.
I don't understand it.
It's not anything to do with crime or anything, but that's their biggest thing is a crime.
Because every time there was a crime in Atlanta, Liz Marta's been here, they say, oh, it's right around the corner or down the street from the MARTA station, scared everybody to death.
And that's all I can say.
I'm sorry for it, but the Republicans are going to have to answer for it.
So thank you.
Corgan Salerno, anything on that?
Yeah, and it's not just Georgia that really is underinvesting in transit, and it's not just Republicans.
Transit is orders of magnitude safer than roadway travel.
And when we continue to spend money on things like roads, what we're doing is essentially increasing the surface area that we could hurt ourselves on.
So for every new lane, that's a new lane of high-speed travel where a collision could occur.
Whereas with transit, there is greater safety on a bus than ever on a road or on a train than on roads.
So this is not just a Republican issue.
This is really an issue that comes out of the State Department of Transportation cultures as well.
In that our practices in this country around transportation from just the fundamental texts of the discipline, prioritize the movement of vehicles over the movement of people.
And part of what we do at Transportation for America is advocate for a move towards prioritizing people and how we get around.
And part of that means investing in the rest.
So ensuring that we have used the funds in the infrastructure law to invest in things like walkable communities.
So your ability to get to just down the street so that there's a sidewalk or to having bus service to connect you to things like your job or a grocery store.
Let's talk to Francis next and Laurel Montana, Republican.
Good morning.
Good morning.
As your organization dealt with, to me, the major crisis in the country, and that is the $36 trillion of debt, in order to address that, in my opinion, the only practical way is to significantly build GMP, and that's going to take a tremendous increase in electricity capacity.
That infrastructure is, to me, much more important than almost everything else that has been discussed this morning.
Could you clarify what you had said there, GMP?
He is not there anymore.
He's possibly talking about GDP?
Oh, yeah, for GDP, I suppose with the infrastructure law, there is going to be a connection with our GDP and the deficit.
But I think with regards to the proportion that the infrastructure law, even as large as it is compared to other elements of the budget, there really isn't as much of an impact compared to larger federal entitlement programs.
But with infrastructure, there absolutely is a need to take a look at what we're getting on returns from our investments.
So for instance, with highway investments, we need to ensure that we're getting our bang for our buck and hitting the metrics that we're stating that we should hit in terms of congestion relief and making sure that what investments we do make are sustainable in the long term on a fiscal level and even on an environmental level.
So that could incorporate things like cost-benefit analyses or comparisons of alternatives and selection of the best alternative.
But unfortunately, with the current federal policy that came out of the infrastructure law, that was not part of the agenda.
So going forward in the next two years, we're going to see an opportunity to write new policy for the next iteration of the surface transportation bill that will succeed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act or bipartisan infrastructure law.
And we're going to have to evaluate what policies we care about, whether that's fiscal responsibility and economic development, as well as the climate and balancing all of those elements into the future.
Let's get one quick call in from Alan D.C., Line for Democrats.
Al?
Yeah.
1980, we had a huge glut of oil, I'm sorry, coal in West Virginia.
And now we have it in Kentucky, also over in Pennsylvania.
And then, of course, there's the Oklahoma, Texas thing I was seeing you guys talk about earlier.
What I would want to know about is we held the port of Portsmouth, Virginia in the Tidewater area hostage.
There was a 30-day waiting list of people trying to get that infrastructure of coal out.
We had the whole world hostage.
And I'm wondering, you know, they're talking about drill, baby, drill.
And I'm wondering if there's something we can do with that now to guarantee building up the points.
Okay.
Quickly, Corgan.
Yeah, I'm unfortunately not super familiar with the energy policy side of the argument there with regards to how that might change perhaps under Trump.
But yeah, as the Biden administration has worked on permitting, we will definitely see a change under Trump with regards to port approval for LNG.
All right, Corrigan Salerno, Policy Manager for Transportation for America.
You can find their work at tthenumberamerica.org.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you.
And happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
We're back again tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern.
Have a great day.
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