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We're joined by Peter Morisi.
He's a National Columnist Business Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland talking about the incoming administration and economic policy.
Good morning to you.
Good morning.
How would you say are the core beliefs of the incoming administration when it comes to economic policy?
What would you say those are?
Well, they're certainly populists.
In some ways, they're similar to the Biden administration.
They both have this nostalgia about manufacturing.
They want to bring back good union jobs in the Midwest.
They want a tough line against China.
In those ways, they're similar.
Where they're different is that in leveraging up the economy as you deal with the Chinese problem, the Republicans, they're classic.
It's a classic Republican administration.
They want to raise taxes, excuse me, lower taxes, cut spending.
Whereas the Biden folks wanted to raise spending, and if they could get away with it, raise taxes.
I mean, that doesn't change much.
With regard to the rest of the world, Joe Biden did a remarkably good job of reforming and connecting us in terms of alliances.
And that was good for the economy.
Unfortunately, they're both protectionists in their core.
And neither of them see much value.
For example, in ASEAN.
ASEAN is this region from Thailand to the Philippines, extraordinarily dynamic, an alternative to the Chinese, growing like gangbusters, having problems with the Chinese the same way we are, that President Obama wanted to link us to through a Pacific trade agreement.
They both shun that.
It's a terrible mistake because it leaves an open door for the Chinese.
And that's where the growth is.
And it's remarkable.
Malaysia's got a tech sector now.
And you say, gee, Malaysia.
Well, who would have thought India would have a tech sector 25, 35 years ago?
The world is changing rapidly.
Where they're both weak is they tend to just be too isolationist.
We're going to pay dearly in terms of economics for what's going on in Europe right now.
We have to ask ourselves, you know, the appeasement of the 30s, was it really a good economic choice?
The answer is no.
And we're on the verge of that right now in Europe, and that could cost us incredibly in terms of defense spending.
Why Europe and why defense spending?
Well, quite simply, if we have to spend much more in defense because we permit Putin to achieve victory in the Ukraine, which he's about to do, then he will be emboldened.
He's got his economy on a war footing.
He's spending huge sums of money on defense or on his military.
It's not defense, it's offense.
And in turn, someone's going to have to match that.
Or we're going to, in the end, have him gradually eat up Europe.
That's going to be very costly to us.
You know, Americans don't realize this, but they talk about NVIDIA makes chips.
NVIDIA makes nothing.
NVIDIA designs chips.
And these are the most powerful chips of the world.
They're the crown jewels of the American economy.
They're the equivalent of the Model T in the 21st century.
They design those chips.
They only can be manufactured in Taiwan, which is just a brush away from China.
And they can only be manufactured in Taiwan with machinery made in the Netherlands.
The Dutch have a lock on the machine tools to make the chips.
Through RD, through certain visionary decisions they made, and so forth.
We have an economic interest, a security interest, in defending Europe.
We have an economic and security interest in defending Taiwan.
Permitting the Axis to become stronger and bolder will mean ultimately that we will have to defend those places at much higher cost than we would today.
There's a profound connection between security these days and economics.
You know, the nostalgic view of America is that we can live here in splendid isolation, make everything we need on our own.
It might cost us a little more, but it's worth it not to be engaged in a nasty and terrible world.
That's just not true.
Is that reflected in the president's current ideas for trade?
No, it's not.
Hitting the Europeans, the Europeans are reeling from a lot of bad decisions over the last 25, 35 years.
They haven't invested adequately in their economy.
You know, during COVID, the way the counties and the equivalent of our counties and states sent information to Berlin about cases and so forth, you know how they did it?
By facts.
They didn't do it through email or the internet.
They did it by facts.
The Germans make great 20th century machinery.
They haven't modernized.
They're no more capable of competing with the Chinese on electric vehicles than General Motors is.
They haven't invested in their economies.
And so if you hit them now with a 20% tariff and cut off this enormously important market to them, that could send that economy tanking into the ground in ways that we just don't want to see.
Then how will they defend themselves and those factories in Holland that make those machine tools?
If I were President Z, confronted by the sanctions we have imposed by denying them access to the technology, the two assets I most want, the things that are most important to me, remember ball bearings factories in World War II, we have to bomb the German ball bearings factory so they can't make the machinery.
The two assets I'd really want are the factory that make those chips in Taiwan and the factory that make the machine tools to make those chips in the Netherlands.
If we don't defend those, the American economy is going to look like a very different place.
So when the President talks about using, say, trade policy to China and other countries specifically to achieve policy goals, is that a good direction to go to?
With regard to China, yes.
Yes.
Threatening our friends?
No.
We have had, well before NAFTA, since the 60s, a free trade arrangement with Canada in the automobile sector.
We used to call it the Auto Pact.
There's no American cars.
They're Canadian American cars.
The parts go back and forth.
The chassis go back and forth.
You put a 20% tariff on that.
You might as well just say the Japanese are going to make all the cars and send them here.
Because it completely gums up that supply chain.
Who was writing the script for Donald Trump when he said that?
Who was giving any thought to that?
Well, if you look at who he's appointing, he's decided that trade is going to be handled by the Commerce Secretary.
The trade representative is not going to be a particularly senior job.
He's going to take orders.
Lutnick has no experience whatsoever with trade.
Probably someone right now is explaining to him what Section 337 of the Trade Act is.
You can't have people like that making those kinds of policies.
Over at Treasury, we're not getting Janet Yellen.
We're getting a good, you know, we're getting a good derivatives trader.
Scott Bessett.
Right.
And I'm not a Democrat.
You know that.
But credentials matter.
Experience matters.
A defense secretary that does your job doesn't, if you look at the various and significant challenges the military faces over the next four years in terms of modernization, force structure that's outnumbered in Asia and so forth, compensating for that, the distance at which we will have to fight if we have to defend Taiwan.
Someone who's been a platoon leader in the military should be commended for his service, but not handed the keys to the executive, you know, to basically be made CEO.
Let me pause you for a second only to invite viewers to ask questions about economic policy in the next administration.
202748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8000 for Democrats, 202748-8002 for independents.
If you worked at the International Trade Commission.
I was chief economist.
How does that inform your view of trade now, particularly when it comes to tariffs?
You have to understand.
My whole career has been about trade agreements and tariffs and so forth.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the structure of the U.S. tariffs.
And I worked on that through my entire career.
It comes and goes.
I work on other things.
So that gave me an inside view of, you know, how, for example, these laws that Trump will have to access to impose the tariffs.
You have to perform investigations to impose the tariffs.
My office did the economics on those investigations.
I signed off on them.
My signature was on those investigations.
So my feeling is that we need people.
Like, for example, the last U.S. trade representative for Mr. Biden, she's an experienced trade lawyer.
She worked the cases.
Trump's last trade representative really carried the ball.
Initially, he was put under, I believe, Yellen's authority, but he quickly read, or no, it was someone, it was the Commerce Department, but he quickly wrestled that away because over there they had a trader as well, an investor.
But he's a trade lawyer.
I worked with him on some cases.
Economists do get called in.
He knew what he was doing.
I believe people should be loyal to Donald Trump to work in his administration.
But it would be kind of nice if would you entrust surgery to someone who kind of picked it up on the web two weeks before they met you?
Rhetorical question, sure.
I don't think so.
Let's hear from Milton.
Milton and Philadelphia, Democrats line, you're on with Peter Morisi.
Go ahead.
Okay, thank you for taking my call.
I'd like to make three points here.
One, okay, Trump is, when he comes in, he's going to make the, he's going to destroy this economy.
Let's look at, okay, he starts a trade war with Mexico, Canada, and China.
You know what they're going to do?
They're going to retaliate.
And that's going to cost even more jobs, and it's going to cause prices here in America to go up.
I don't understand how people have supported this idiot.
Second of all, okay, now he's talking about this mass deportation, right?
You go out and you deport all these illegals.
Look at who's doing the work in our country right now.
Who's picking those produce and crops from the farmers' fields right now?
They are illegals.
You deport all of them.
They work in our hotels.
They work, they do J in our restaurant.
Okay, Milton, what's the third point, please?
For these people, who's going to do them jobs?
Prices for produce, prices at restaurants, and hotels going to go through the roof.
Okay, okay, we'll leave it.
You make a good point.
I don't expect all these tariffs to go into effect.
First of all, he can't put them into effect right away, with the exception of China.
Of course, the president can do whatever he wants, and if someone doesn't challenge him in court, I mean, that was Joe Biden's strategy.
Donald Trump is no more lawless than Joe Biden.
He kept forgiving student loans, even though the courts told him he couldn't do it.
His basic strategy is, I'll forgive him, and we'll see if catch me if you can.
But if he imposes a 20% tariff across the board, I'd expect him to be challenged in court.
I don't believe he'll be able to declare a national security emergency on trade and impose a 20% tariff unless there is strong sentiment in the Congress that he's on strong ground.
The court presidents run in that direction.
I think that by and large he would get an injunction.
A tariff on China, he can go back to the prior investigations he did during his administration and invoke authority from that.
Normally that sort of thing, the authority he used there takes about a year to do.
So I think he can move pretty quick on that.
If he does that and he does it in the right way, he isn't going to cause the kind of harm you say.
On the immigration point, probably the most dangerous man in America right now to the U.S. economy is Stephen Miller because he's the architect of this deport everybody kind of thing.
When I tell Republican operatives, you know, somebody's going to have to pick the crops.
Well, we'll just pay more Americans to do it.
40% of the field workers in American agriculture are probably irregular immigrants.
They're not necessarily illegal.
Some of them have been granted temporary asylum because, you know, their cases have to come up, which then may never happen.
But we have a in macro terms, they're concentrated in agriculture, food processing, construction, the hospitality industry, in macro terms.
Through our regular program of immigration and population increase from people becoming 18, the U.S. economy can add 80,000 new workers a month once it gets to full employment.
By the summer of 2023, we were surely at full employment.
Unemployment was well less than 4%.
The thing was just right at there.
At that point, you can only add 80,000 jobs a month.
Yet from September to September of 23 to 24, we added 195,000 jobs a month.
Unless Martians were landing in the Arizona desert and releasing into the population workers to pick lettuce and to work at our hotels and to work in our construction projects in New York and so forth, unless Martians were bringing people in, those were irregular immigrants that found some way.
Now, some of them have work permits, many don't.
Let's turn this around.
What's this going to look like if he starts really deporting people beyond felons, those here who have a deportation order, who haven't left, they've just sort of disappeared.
We can find them, apparently, pretty easily.
What's going to happen is, all of a sudden, the person that cleans your house is going to disappear.
The person that cleans your office is going to disappear.
You won't be able to do an improvement on your home.
If you're buying a home, construction may stop.
The economy will stop.
What's more, go to the supermarket and try to find lettuce.
It's going to get very interesting when there are these kinds of shortages.
I don't know that Stephen Miller ever goes to the supermarket and asks himself, who picks the lettuce?
But the trust that Donald Trump has in this man to craft this kind of policy and put this kind of noise in his ear to say the things he is now saying, the election's over.
Everybody makes campaign promises.
Everybody exaggerates.
Everybody knows that.
What you're doing is establishing your theme of governance.
If he enforces the border and exercises the kind of deportation policy that he did and Barack Obama did as opposed to Joe Biden, who was let him in, let him stay, then the economy will continue to function.
If he doesn't, this place is going to grind to a halt.
Okay.
Let me get Brian in.
Brian in Massachusetts, Republican line.
Hi.
Hello.
You're on.
Go ahead.
Oh, yes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'd like to ask the professor for a comment or an answer to my question.
One of the President-elect's campaign promise was to raise tariffs, which has been in the news recently with both Canada and Mexico.
But a bunch of folks lost their jobs at International Harvester.
Excuse me, excuse me, John Deere.
I got that wrong.
And Mr. Trump said that he was going to raise the tariffs on tractors made in Mexico by 200 percent.
It's been reported in publications such as Successful Farmer and magazines like that.
But what do you think of that campaign promise?
And I understand that he said something about 25 percent, not 200 percent.
What about all the folks losing their jobs at John Deere?
So I'll take my question.
Talking on the larger aspect of tariffs and then the agriculture industry.
Well, when he said 200 percent, he was talking about tractors.
25 percent was trade generally.
The Mexicans can turn around and do the same thing to us.
Then where are we?
You know, they basically deny our exports.
One of the problems that we have is Joe Biden had a very promiscuous, I believe the John Deere workers are represented by the UAW.
I was caught a little off guard here being asked about John Deere.
But he adopted a very supportive, in fact, promiscuous attitude towards the UAW when they made their outrageous wage demands.
And basically, he leaned on General Motors, much as he did the folks that run the docks with regard to the launch, as if this money would be readily available.
Well, you know, General Motors might have been able to sustain those wage increases because they were getting lots of subsidies to build electric cars.
But John Deere isn't getting much in the way of that to build electric tractors.
You have to ask yourself, why is the cost structure at John Deere so uncompetitive that these tractors, which have been made in America for generations because of their technological sophistication, these tractors today are not the ones you see from a 1940s movie on Turner Classic Movies?
These are very sophisticated contraptions, and farming has become extraordinarily technological.
Folks don't realize that.
Why is it not cost-effective to make them here?
And the entire auto belt has got a basic problem.
Up and down the line, from the CEO to the people on the plant floor, they pay themselves too much.
They simply do.
And they have a great deal of bureaucracy.
They've learned how to be good government agencies that has complied with lots of regulations.
Probably one of the toughest things that Mr. Musk had in establishing out of Holklawth a new car company, though he had a lot of government subsidies to do it, was learning how to deal with all these government regulations.
So they've become civil servants making cars at very high prices.
And they don't make economic sense anymore.
There's another sector that Chris in Alabama brings up saying that the President-elect says that U.S. steel in Fairfield, Alabama can't be sold to Japan, asking, can you explain the impact and importance of that decision?
I think it's a terrible decision that both presidents supported.
The decision not to sell U.S. steel to let the Japanese buy it was terrible.
U.S. steel is kind of like the German automobile industry.
It needs modernization.
The Japanese company was willing to come in and put a lot of money into the facilities, and it was willing to provide a lot of technology to modernize them, which is sorely needed.
There's really two sectors, two steel sectors in the United States.
There's the mini-mills, which recycle steel.
And when I say recycle, I'm not just talking about rebar to go into concrete.
They make steel for the automobile industry, which is highly efficient and very competitive.
And the old integrated mills, which basically make it from ore.
Those are not as modern as they could be.
There was no particular threat of those jobs leaving.
The reason is you don't ship steel across the ocean to make automobiles.
You make it down the street from the auto plant, so to speak.
Not quite down the street, but a lot of your steel and cars and so forth is locally sourced.
It wouldn't have made much sense to take the production of steel across the ocean.
If you look at the importance of labor in the steel industry, it's not nearly as important as the importance of technology because of the cost of transportation across the ocean.
This is very, very different than vehicles, where there's a lot of technology in it, a lot of value-added.
As we say, you have to look in economics at the weight to value ratio.
You know, in steel, the weight is very big relative to the value.
In cars, it's not.
Peter Morisi at the University of Maryland, Business Professor Emeritus.
Margaret in Wyoming.
Independent Line, you're up next.
Margaret in Wyoming, hello.
One more time for Margaret.
Go ahead, Margaret.
You're on.
Oh, let's go to Matthew.
Matthew in Michigan, Dearborn, Michigan, Democrats line, you're on.
Good morning, sir.
I'd like to ask Mr. Morrissey about Trump's plan about crypto.
He wants to make crypto like a reserve currency, and I don't know, spend $200 or $50 billion or trillion.
I can't remember the number.
But I don't think that's a good idea.
But I'd like to hear Mr. Morrissey's what he thinks about it.
Well, this is like so many things.
Donald Trump wants to control inflation, but he wants to put on tariffs.
He wants to grow the economy, but he wants to take the immigrants out of the labor force.
The same thing goes with cryptocurrency.
The U.S. dollar is the reserve currency around the world.
That gives us great benefit.
What do I mean by the reserve currency?
Central banks hold dollars around the world to back up their currency.
In addition, they hold some gold, but the dollars is what they really hold.
They hold it in the form of treasury securities.
And it is also the transaction currency for most cross-border transactions.
For example, you're in Thailand and you're going to send some toys that you've manufactured to Chile.
There's not much of a market for Thai bats and Chilean pesos.
What they do is the Chileans buy dollars, then trade the dollars to buy Thai bats and pay for it that way.
So the dollar is the transactions currency on one side of an exchange or the other, and about 90% of it goes on in the world.
In order to have that, in order to have that, you have to have two things.
You have to have a sound, reliable economy whose currency is respected, and it has to be one that is respected militarily.
The global superpower has always had the currency.
People don't recognize that.
The second thing you have to have is what we call a messaging system for banks to trade the currency, to actually perform these transactions.
The SWIFT system, Citibank has a transaction system.
Those things provide that for the dollar.
In order to have an alternative currency, for example, as the BRICS Nations described, you'd have to develop an alternative messaging system.
Out of the crypto system could come that.
The second thing is, if we abandon the idea that a country should have it, some basket of currencies could do the job, like Facebook was proposing something called Libra.
A government would have to get a hold of it and back it up.
Empowering the crypto world is a great way to undermine the dollar because it's encouraging the development of the infrastructure necessary for an outside of government system.
Right now, governments control money.
This creates the capacity for an outside the government system.
Before we take our next call, I want you to comment on a piece you wrote today on the dollar saying, and this is just the headline saying families could be out $2,500 if for some reason the world decides to let go of the dollar.
Couldn't you explain that?
Sure.
Everybody knows we have a big budget deficit.
We have a bigger budget deficit than anyone else in the world could tolerate.
You know, the Chinese budget deficit, I think, like 3.5% of GDP.
Ours is 7%.
The reason we get away with that is people need dollars to perform trade.
They need dollars to invest.
If you're an Argentine school teacher and you have the equivalent of an IRA, where are you going to put your money?
An Argentine pay in the Argentine currency or the U.S. currency?
You probably want to find some way to open up a Vanguard account and put it here.
That requires dollars.
Every year, we float bonds to finance that deficit, and some of them get bought up abroad.
Those bonds function as dollars.
Through all, you don't really want to keep your dollars in dollars.
You want to keep them in an interest-bearing asset.
10-year Treasury is a nice interest-bearing asset.
It pays 4%.
Inflation in the United States is less than that.
It's going to go up in value in real terms, not down.
Your government's not going to inflate it out of sight.
You're not worried about the Russians swallowing your country, and so on and so forth.
You don't want to keep it in Yuan.
You don't want to keep it in Chinese assets.
I mean, we know at any given morning, President Z can wake up and decide he doesn't like you and take the company.
And he kind of does that.
You don't want to keep it in Saudi reals.
I mean, after all, he locked up all his relatives to get their money.
It was Henry VIII closing the Abbey.
I mean, as long as we have that Crown Prince there running the country, nothing's secure.
My feeling is the only place that are really, really secure are the pound, the dollar, the yen.
Historically, historically, that's worth about $2,500 to $3,000 a family.
Let's go to Rick, Rick in Idaho, Republican Line.
Top of the morning to you.
Pedro Pete, double up on the teach this morning.
This is Rick Agison, Nap, Idaho, Tired Marine.
Publicly, I put in my resume for Secretary of Transportation, President Trump, and this is why.
I can cut the debt by $16 trillion, $700 billion in 38 months, two weeks, and generate $440 million every 24 hours.
Mr. Maurici, part of the puzzle with our products coming in from China is no one ever paid attention to the shipping and handling costs.
When an ocean-going cargo ship comes into port, $619 per ton, $1,827 U.S. gallons, which equates to $51 per gallon.
The way to offset the cost of our shipping and handling costs, and we're going to increase our production in the United States by 1%.
Okay, Mr. Morisi, will you look into ocean-going cargo ships to identify what they pay for bunker oil?
We'll leave it there and we'll talk about shipping overall if that fits into the conversation.
Well, you know, we use the same ships to send out our exports.
I guess what he's saying is there's a subsidy in the shipping because of the price of fuel.
He went by so fast.
It was kind of like, you know, reading the back of a theater ticket inside the theater in the dark.
If there's a prejudice there, you know, I'd like to know about it.
But it was kind of hard to work all that out.
Back to immigration for a second.
You recently wrote that when it comes to the president's views on immigration, you talked about it, but he has to moderate those views.
What's the proper view then?
In your opinion, what's the proper view?
Certainly, we don't want to have the kind of border that Joe Biden gave us.
You know, the AOC foreign policy is one of let anybody come here that wants, let anybody settle here who wants, and don't worry about crowding in the cities, homelessness in New York and things like that.
We need to enforce the border and we need to regulate immigration again.
But we probably need to have about twice as many legal immigrants as we're currently letting in.
You know, so that we can, we need another one to one and a half million workers a year over what we can provide through the programs we already have.
And we need to make that skills-based.
And by skills-based, it doesn't mean they're all electrical engineers.
We need a lot of ordinary workers.
My feeling would be that you look at where you need people and where people are willing to go to work.
That's what the Canadians do, and that's hardly a fascist society.
From Margaret.
Margaret in Wyoming.
Thanks for trying again, Independent Line.
Margaret, hello.
Yes, hello.
Can you hear me?
Yep, you're on.
Go on.
We can hear you.
All righty.
Well, getting back to the question regarding immigration and labor in economics, economically speaking, all right.
You mentioned the need for so many foreigners to come in and do these jobs, but what about the other side of the equation?
That would be the cost to the American economy for maintaining these people since many of them do not leave.
What I'm talking about is this.
What about the cost of SNAP?
What about the cost of Medicare?
What about the cost of Medicaid?
Many of these people will want to get government-subsidized benefits.
What about the cost of all of that to the economy?
That is my question.
Margaret, thank you.
The labor force participation rate of immigrants is higher than Native Americans.
They're hardworking.
They come and buy into the American dream.
They don't particularly want to get involved in identity politics.
We just saw that in the last election.
You know, ASC is running around and saying white guys are oppressing you.
Vote Democratic.
And what did they do?
They pulled the lever for Donald Trump, despite all of Mr. Trump's liabilities, personal liabilities.
Why did they pull that lever?
They don't buy into that.
You know, my family came here at the turn of the 20th century, four separate immigrants who married here and so forth.
My older brother summarized it best because we actually knew the immigrants in the 50s.
They were elderly then.
They were at the end of their working lives.
But they were still working.
One was a longshoreman, one was a buttonhole maker.
The two women were seamstresses.
And my brother says, when I see these Hispanics coming across the border, you know who I see?
I see our grandparents.
Trust me, my brother and I are hardly viewed by your progressive friends as progressive.
But the reality is these are hardworking people.
Now, you should need to screen your immigrants, just as they did the Italians when they came in.
Came in through Ellis Island, they screened you.
Are you healthy?
Are you going to go to work?
Things like that.
That's what the Canadians do.
The Canadians have a population one-tenth the size of ours, but they're emitting like 500,000 immigrants a year to staff their economy because they have the same demographic problem we do.
The birth rate went down dramatically 20 years ago, and now we're reaping the harvest of that.
Unless we want to have more babies in America, we're going to need immigrants to keep the country going.
The other thing is, who's going to pay the Social Security tax to support you in your old age if we don't admit people?
The number of workers relative to the number of old people in America is going to get too low to do that.
You know, if you want to work till you're 85, keep the Hispanics out of America and the Asians and the Africans and so forth.
Also, the kind of reaction we're getting today is no different than the reaction I saw as a boy to when Puerto Ricans first started coming here.
They lived in New York, Westside Story, true story, the prejudices and so forth, and that I felt the residual consequences of going through the school system.
You know, one day I was sitting in the cafeteria with some faculty from other departments where I went to graduate school who vaguely knew me and didn't catch my last name really well.
I listened to distinguished professors talking about how all the Italians are in the mob.
I sure wish I had those connections.
I'd have gotten ahead a lot easier.
Probably gotten tenure instantaneously.
This is from Ed.
Consele would have gone visited the dean and said, Peter should be a full professor.
This is Ed in Pennsylvania, Democrats line.
Ed in Pennsylvania, hello.
Ed.
Hello.
You're on.
Go ahead, Ed.
Go ahead.
Yeah, as I said before, we need these immigrants that are here, not the ones that are here now.
It's not been controlled like it should have been.
Okay, but what they're talking about, putting them on a plane and sending them all back to where they came from.
Who's going to pay that fee and are the countries going to accept them back?
No one's ever said anything about, will the countries accept them back?
Well, actually, people are exploring that.
One of the problems that we have in Great Britain has, by the way, look at how tough they have.
Great Britain's got a moat and it's overrun with illegal immigrants the way we are.
Think about all the bodies of water those people have to cross to get from Africa into Britain.
They have to get across the Mediterranean, which you cannot do, you know, in an inflatable raft.
And then they have to get through Europe one way or another, which is not that hard.
Once you get into Europe, you can pass through pretty easily.
And you have to get across the channel, but they manage.
No, the problem with sending them back is a country has to be willing to accept them.
If people come from Nicaragua and you send a plane to Nicaragua and the Nicaraguan government won't accept them, then you're faced with the choice of also sending a battalion of Marines down there to clear a path for them at the airport.
We're not going to do that.
The cost has been estimated, I think, sending back a million a year, and there are 13 million here, a 13 million program, would be like 87, 83, 80-something billion a year to send back a million a year.
And probably it's a lot worse than that.
Also, do you have the stomach to watch the Army, as Mr. Trump says he would do with the National Guard, knock on doors and pull grandmothers out of their beds and throw them in wagons and take them away?
Do you really expect all these folks to go peaceably?
Not if there's sympathy towards them here.
I don't know that Stephen Miller really understands the social dynamite he's playing with and how much it makes us, could make us look like places from the 30s in Europe, or how much Stephen Miller fully appreciates that he won't be able to get lettuce again if he gets his way.
This administration is badly advised on trade and immigration and likely taxes too.
I mean, we now have a Treasury Secretary who pronounced that tariffs won't raise prices.
If tariffs won't raise prices, then close your eyes and open them again in 30 seconds.
I will be 26 years old, 6'2, and I'll be playing linebacker for the New York Giants next Sunday.
Let's hear from John Johnson, Florida, Independent Line for Peter Morisi.
Go ahead.
Hello.
So earlier you mentioned that the grocery stores would increase their prices if immigrants weren't picking all our fruits and vegetables.
And Florida actually did crack down on that and stop people who were illegal from picking off fruits and vegetables.
No prices increased.
There was a small period of worker shortage that lasted between one and three months, depending on the store, and everything went back to normal.
And it actually helped the economy.
People in places like McDonald's started speaking English again, and it was fantastic.
It was the best thing that ever happened to Florida.
No prices increased, and there was even more opportunity, more jobs.
And I want to hear your take on that.
Well, I'd have to see the documentation of what you're saying, what the size of the industry was, how many people were involved.
I suggest to you, if you take the immigrants out of the Central Valley of California, you can't find enough people in California to work in those places, even if you force them to.
Even you told, you know, we're going to get rid of food stamps and everything, and you forced people to work.
I don't think you could find enough bodies to do it.
Finding a million people to replace all the agricultural workers in the United States is a little different than replacing some orange pickers in Florida.
It's a much bigger scale.
And so I think what I frankly expect is this is not going to happen, is that cooler heads will sooner or later prevail.
I mean, Lutnick and the new Treasury Secretary are not stupid men, and they're going to go over to those buildings and people are going to start to explain these numbers to them.
And fortunately, we do know this about both of them.
They read.
Mark, in Florida, also, Democrats line.
Yeah, hello.
Good morning.
Thank you for C-SPAN.
And it's a real pleasure to get to speak to Mr. Morisi.
I am 100% behind a lot of what you've just been saying right now.
I don't know what's wrong with our country, and I don't know what's wrong with the Democratic Party.
This is my last call as a Democrat.
I will be switching back to Independent, which I switched from back when it was.
Join the Republican Party.
It's good for your soul.
No, I'm going to be independent.
You should be what you want to do.
Running a little short on time, Colin.
Go ahead, please.
Okay.
My grandparents were from the old country.
They came into Ellis Island, much like your guests' grandparents came into Ellis Island.
And it was a great thing that led to our country growing and prospering.
That's what's wrong with immigration right now.
And in fact, it's what's wrong with the Democratic Party.
They become Republican lights when they keep saying the bill, the bipartisan bill.
What we should be doing is filling up all the empty work slots with all these people that walked 3,000 miles to get here.
So they've got to have some initiative to them and let them come in through the modern Ellis Island, put one along in Texas somewhere where they could come in and get registered, get registered to work, start earning a living, start paying taxes and filling up those empty slots, and maybe that would help our country become good again.
And that's why I'm no longer going to be a Democrat because they don't support that.
Mark, in Florida, thank you.
Is there a way to revamp the immigration system in order to achieve those goals?
Oh, sure.
Look at what the Canadians are doing.
It's a much smaller country on a proportional scale.
They're admitting the kinds of immigrants and the quantity of immigrants I'm talking about.
And they're getting it done.
My feeling is this can be done, and it's a matter of getting organized.
It's just like, you know, we decided to help the semiconductor industry, and by and large, that program will be successful, save Intel.
Nothing can save Intel from itself.
It's the general motors of the CHIPS world.
But the rest of the CHIPS business can be reinforced and strengthened and will be.
And I think we can do the same thing when it comes to this.
When Americans set their mind to an organizational task, they get it done.
But you have to decide that it's a good thing to do, and you're going to get it done.
You also have to have an administration that believes in it.
It's kind of like free trade.
Right now, there are maybe 11 of us in the city of Washington, I think, that free trade is a good thing.
It's very unfortunate because trade creates jobs, trade creates wealth, creates opportunity, and it's very unfortunate that the attitudes that have developed with regard to that.
You hinted at it, and we'll finish with this, as far as the tax cuts that were passed in the previous Trump administration, what should happen currently, and what does that do for the debt of the nation overall?
Well, we probably can get away with extending them, but that's about all he can spend.
The notion that tariffs are going to replace it is just silly sauce.
If we put a 60% tariff on China and we got away with it, they didn't retaliate, we'd probably get $100 billion a year out of tops.
Extending the tax cut is going to cost about $300 billion a year, $350 billion a year.
That's about the limit that we could do.
That would give us the kind of deficit we had in 2024.
In 2025, the deficit is going to be a bit smaller as a percentage of GDP because the economy has been growing so rapidly that it could get away with that.
But that's about the limit.
One of the things to also recognize, and I want to leave as a parting thought, is that Joe Biden will tell you differently.
Donald Trump bequeathed to Joe Biden a very good and strong economy.
COVID required us to shut it down.
It was running like an Olympic athlete during Donald Trump's time.