So I can buy a house, so I can educate my kids, so I can have health insurance, and I can retire one day without being scared.
Let's get back to the basic issues of what we need to do to make people's lives better.
You know, in America, in 22 states, the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
If you make $10 an hour and you work 40 hours a week and you work 50 weeks a year, you only make 20 grand a year.
If you make $15 an hour and you work 40 hours a week and you work 50 weeks a year, you get two weeks vacation, that's only 30 grand a year.
You're not going to be able to buy a house, educate your kids, pay for health insurance, and retire one day without being scared.
Let's, as elected officials, get back to the basics.
How can we improve people's wages and their benefits and their quality of life when it comes to public safety and to the environment?
And let's stop talking about all these fringe topics and all this attacking of each other and focus on the basic things that are affecting everybody in their everyday lives.
So I think that was a great question and something we've got to work on.
And a place for us to end this morning.
Congressman Tom Swazi, Democrat of New York.
Always appreciate you chatting with the callers on the Washington Journal.
Thanks, John.
Some of the headlines from the nomination of Pete Hegseth.
This is the Washington Post.
Allegations of excessive drinking have shadowed Hegseth.
This is the headline from the Washington Times this morning.
Senators await more information on Hegseth.
The sub-headline, defense nominee vows not to drink.
This from the New York Times, the lead story today.
Hegseth asserts he won't give up as support sways, making that assertion both in appearances in the media and in an op-ed that published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
This is part of what Pete Hegseth wrote in that op-ed.
The press has been peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down.
It's a textbook, manufactured media takedown, he wrote.
They provide no evidence, no names, and they ignore the legions of people who speak on my behalf.
They need to create a boogeyman because they believe I threaten their institutional insanity.
That is the only thing that they are right about.
I have never backed down from a fight and won't back down from this one.
I'm grateful President-elect Trump chose me to lead the Defense Department, and I look forward to an honest confirmation hearing with our distinguished senators, not a show trial in the press.
One of those distinguished senators that Pete Hegseth met with yesterday as he made the rounds on Capitol Hill, Kevin Kramer, Republican of North Dakota.
He spoke to the press after that meeting with Hegseth.
This is some of what he had to say.
Well, I give him the benefit of the doubt.
I am ready to be supportive of getting him to that point.
I'm ready to get him in front of the committee.
I did warn him, I said, you know, not everybody on the committee is as friendly as I am, which I don't think surprised him.
But I also said, there's nobody on the committee that doesn't earn our respect.