| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Look at the start of presidential terms. | |
| This week, we focus on the early months of President Ulysses Grant's first term in 1869, including the treatment of Native Americans and freed slaves. | ||
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, Indiana University History Professor Juan Mora talks about the U.S. Border Patrol and how 20th century immigration laws shape the creation and development of immigration agencies. | ||
| Exploring the American story. | ||
| Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/slash history. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Joining us this morning at our desk is Steve Moore. | ||
| He's the founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a former senior economic advisor to President Trump. | ||
| Mr. Moore, let's begin with the work that happened on Capitol Hill yesterday. | ||
| The House Budget Committee passed the budget, which is the framework for a reconciliation proposal, meaning a simple majority in the Senate. | ||
| They passed their version of it. | ||
| It differs from the Senate. | ||
| Compare the two. | ||
| Well, first of all, thank you for having me on C-SPAN. | ||
| I love C-SPAN and love the job you do. | ||
| Listen, this is going to be a long process. | ||
| We're just getting started with this because Congress has to pass both a budget in terms of how much we're going to spend and then also accommodate this Trump tax cut that he wants to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. | ||
| So there's a big debate. | ||
| I'm sure a lot of your viewers have been following about whether it would be one beautiful bill, big, beautiful bill like Trump is talking about or two bills. | ||
| And that's complicated. | ||
| Some people in the Senate want two bills. | ||
| The House wants one bill. | ||
| But the main point I think people have to understand about this term reconciliation is that, as you just said, this is the one piece of legislation that only requires 51 votes in the Senate, not 60, you know, because of the filibuster rules. | ||
| So it's critical for Trump getting his budget passed and getting his tax cut passed. | ||
| I'm kind of ambivalent about whether you do it in one bill or two bills, but I do think the priority that I've been telling Congress is you've got to get this tax cut done. | ||
| I want to remind people that if failure is not an option here, if the tax bill is not passed by this fall, then everyone's taxes are going up and the average family is going to face a $3,000 tax increase. | ||
| And a lot of the wonderful things in that tax bill, and I think that the 2017 bill was quite an achievement, that would be essentially wiped out. | ||
| So we got to get this done. | ||
| I think it's going to be a long process. | ||
| I think we'll be talking about this for six months. | ||
| And these are the first skirmishes in a long debate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The House Budget Committee approves this budget proposal along party lines. | ||
| So just be clear, it was because I the budget committee passed it. | ||
| The budget committee, not the full house. | ||
| No, no, no, God. | ||
| Not the full House. | ||
| We got a ways to go, as you said before that. | ||
| But here is the framework of this, according to the New York Times. | ||
| $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, $4 trillion increase in the debt limit, and at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts. | ||
| Here is where the party internally differs because you've got the fiscal hawks who want that number in spending cuts to go to $2 trillion. | ||
| They want it bigger. | ||
| $300 billion in new spending on defense and immigration enforcement. | ||
| Those fiscal hawks are saying you cannot cut more in taxes unless you cut more in spending. | ||
| And Wezzy Means Chair Jason Smith has told his colleagues he needs more than $4.5 trillion in room to cover everything Republican lawmakers and President Trump wants to do on taxes. | ||
| Do you think that's a good idea when we face the amount of deficit that we face in this country? | ||
| Well, a couple things. | ||
| One thing I feel very strongly about, and by the way, our group is kind of leading the coalition of all the taxpayer groups and all the business groups to try to get this tax bill done. | ||
| I think the single highest priority is to make sure that we don't raise taxes on American families and businesses, that we remain competitive. | ||
| Now, you mentioned the $4 trillion estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would, quote, cost the budget to pass this tax bill. | ||
| I firmly reject that. | ||
| These are the same people who said that the tax cut when we passed it in 2017 would cost $2 trillion. | ||
| And so far, actually, if you compare how much revenue has come in versus what their prediction was, they were off by about $2 trillion. | ||
| So my point is, I completely reject that $4 trillion number. | ||
| I think it's outrageous. | ||
| I think here's the problem. | ||
| They're not taking into account the positive effect that tax cut has on the economy. | ||
| And if you take into account what's called the dynamic effects of this, I think it'll be much smaller. | ||
| So by the way, this is a big issue because Republicans in the Senate are saying we should just score this as the current policy. | ||
| In other words, the current policy is these tax cuts are in place. | ||
| We shouldn't say this is going to cost anything to extend the current bill. | ||
| I think it would be extremely damaging to the economy if we don't pass the tax cut. | ||
| And I reject the $4 trillion number. | ||
| I think it's going to essentially pay for itself because it's going to grow the economy. | ||
| Washington Post editorial, Republicans risk repeating Biden's fiscal mistakes. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| No politician wants to make the painful choices that serious deficit reduction requires. | ||
| So let's review why they're necessary. | ||
| Since the pandemic, America's debt-to-GDP ratio has leaped from an already painful 79.2 percent of gross domestic product to almost 100 percent. | ||
| You read that right. | ||
| The United States now owes its creditors nearly the total value of all the goods and services Americans produce in a year. | ||
| If we don't put our finances on a sustainable footing, debt service costs will squeeze out other policy priorities, especially if the bond market begins to wonder whether all this debt will really get repaid. | ||
| So why? | ||
| How do you respond to that? | ||
| I mean, is President Trump at risk of making the same fiscal mistakes? | ||
| Well, first of all, I mean, it's a little rich for the Washington Post to write that. | ||
| I mean, I've been writing that for the last five or six years because Joe Biden increased the debt by $7 trillion. | ||
| The Inflation Reduction Act, the Build Back Better Bill, they just louded up massive amounts of spending that we didn't need. | ||
| I do think that Joe Biden will go down in history as our most financially irresponsible president in history. | ||
| But given that, you know, we absolutely are at a huge hole, and it is unsustainable. | ||
| There's no doubt about that. | ||
| And I've been talking about this, Greta, for 40 years. | ||
| I've been coming on C-SPAN a long time. | ||
| We do have a spending problem in Washington. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| I think everybody agrees with that. | ||
| The spending is out of control. | ||
| We have to put caps on government spending. | ||
| And this is why what Doge is doing is so incredibly important, pointing out the fact that we could probably spend $2 trillion less and most Americans wouldn't even miss that spending if we could just get rid of the redundancy and the fraud and the abuse. | ||
| So as I see it, it's a two-pronged process. | ||
| First, we have to make sure we have an economic growth policy that expands our economy. | ||
| And second of all, we have to get control of government spending. | ||
| Now, I want to make one point really clear, because this is really critical in understanding the budget. | ||
| Those numbers that you're talking about and the Washington Post are talking about, if you look at the forecasts that the Congressional Budget Office makes, they're estimating that the U.S. economy over the next 10 years will grow at 1.7% per year. | ||
| Well, that's pathetic. | ||
| We can grow much, much faster than that. | ||
| The average growth rate of the U.S. economy over the last 75 years has been about 3% to 3.5%. | ||
| So why is this important? | ||
| If you take that forecast and put in 3% growth, not 1.7% growth, in other words, you grow the economy faster, then you know what happens to that curve that you're talking about? | ||
| It starts to bend down. | ||
| And the economy grows faster than the debt, and that's the critical thing. | ||
| So what is my point? | ||
| We have to grow the economy faster. | ||
| There's no way we're ever going to get this debt under control if we're growing at 1.7%. | ||
| And I guarantee you Trump is hyper-focused on that. | ||
| If it increases economic growth, it's a good thing to do. | ||
| If it doesn't increase economic growth, we shouldn't. | ||
| So tariffs increase economic growth. | ||
| So I'm a free trade guy, as I think you know, Greta, and I do believe that free trade has been a huge, huge benefit to the United States. | ||
| I was a student of Milton Friedman, maybe the greatest economist of the last century. | ||
| And Milton Friedman taught us, and so did Adam Smith, by the way. | ||
| Let's go back 200 years, that the term comparative advantage, which is huge in economics, which means, I'll keep this very simple. | ||
| If Brazil makes really good coffee beans and the United States makes really good microchips, then we should sell microchips to Brazil and Brazil should sell coffee to us. | ||
| And so international trade is absolutely critical to global economic growth and prosperity. | ||
| And I'm opposed, for example, to Donald Trump's steel tariffs and aluminum tariffs, because I think the evidence is pretty clear that when we put those into effect, what happened was we did save some steel and aluminum jobs, a few thousand, but the evidence shows pretty clearly we also lost jobs, for example, in automobile manufacturing, in construction, and so on, because steel and aluminum were more expensive. | ||
| So protectionist tariffs I oppose. | ||
| What's really interesting is what Trump announced yesterday, Greta, which is this idea of reciprocal tariffs. | ||
| And what he's saying there, and I'm still kind of getting my arms around this, but I think I support it. | ||
| What he's saying to these other countries is we in the United States have the lowest tariffs in the world. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| Maybe there's a few smaller companies, but among all the major trading countries. | ||
| So as Trump is saying to Canada and Mexico, and he's saying this to China and Japan, your tariffs are up here, we're down here. | ||
| Either you lower your tariffs so we have fair trade to the level we have, or we're going to raise ours up to the level you have in a reciprocal way. | ||
| Now, in a strange sort of way, first of all, I believe that Trump is going to prevail on this. | ||
| I think a lot of these other countries will be forced to lower their tariffs on the things that we produce and want to sell abroad to create more jobs in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and so on. | ||
| And so he's using this leverage that the United States has to force other countries to lower their tariffs. | ||
| Now, it's a risky game because if we raise our tariffs on them, they may say, well, we're going to raise, you know, we don't want to see a trade war. | ||
| But I'm pretty convinced and persuaded that because the United States is the alpha male economy, every country in the world has to trade with the United States. | ||
| That gives us a leverage over these countries. | ||
| So I think this is going to work out. | ||
| And I think in the end of the day, believe it or not, that Trump's threat of reciprocal tariffs will lead to lower tariffs around the world, not higher. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, let's get to see what our viewers have to say. | ||
| Milton in Philadelphia, Democratic Culture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I'd like to make a couple points here. | ||
| One, you know, your figures are way off base there. | ||
| One, let's look at the 2017 tax cuts. | ||
| Now, what happened was that you had these massive tax cuts. | ||
| Trump added $8 trillion to the deficit. | ||
| These big corporations went out, got these tax cuts, and instead of reinvesting that money back into hiring new workers or whatever, they took that money and they engaged in stock buybacks. | ||
| Then you had AT ⁇ T. | ||
| They got all that money. | ||
| And guess what they did? | ||
| They gave out a few bonuses. | ||
| Then a few months after getting the tax cuts, they announced they're going to lay off massive employees. | ||
| Now, as far as trade deficits, deficits never work. | ||
| When Trump instituted his tariffs against China, guess what ended up happening? | ||
| China stopped buying foreign products, right? | ||
| The farmers heard it, and the government had to come in and give them billion dollars in aid. | ||
| That even added more money to the deficit. | ||
| And tariffs only causes more inflation. | ||
| So I don't understand how you could criticize Biden for his economic policies when Trump policies gave us even more debt. | ||
| All right, Milton, let's get a response. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there is a bit of historical revisionism going on there. | ||
| First of all, that by early 2020, after three years of the Trump tax cuts, the U.S. economy was absolutely booming. | ||
| We were in one of the great booms of all time. | ||
| What caused the economy to collapse, as everyone knows, was COVID. | ||
| And we made, look, everybody agrees we had major, major mistakes in shutting down our economy. | ||
| We never, never, never should have done that. | ||
| We never can allow that to happen again, where we shut down our schools and our churches and our businesses, a catastrophic mistake that didn't save lives. | ||
| But it also, it torpedoed the economy. | ||
| But before COVID hit, we had a great, great economy under Trump, in no small part because of the tax cuts. | ||
| The idea that Trump is responsible for the deficit, yes, clearly. | ||
| I mean, there's no question. | ||
| I'm not here to tell you that Republicans are fiscal saints because they're not. | ||
| Both parties love to spend way too much money. | ||
| We have an overspending problem in Washington. | ||
| I think we can all agree on that. | ||
| But on the idea that the tax cut caused the deficit, it simply isn't true. | ||
| That the revenues are higher today with the tax cut than CBO said they would have been if we didn't cut taxes. | ||
| So we're doing fine on the revenues. | ||
| It's just that we're spending way too much money, and that's what we have to attack, in my opinion. | ||
| Wall Street Journal editorial board, Trump's tariff stress test. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| They write. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley this week warned that Mr. Trump's threatened 25% across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada, quote, would blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we've never seen. | ||
| Mr. Trump's response, teased tariffs on autos to stitch the hole. | ||
| The better course is to negotiate bilateral trade deals, which is what China is doing. | ||
| Mr. Trump's tariff threats encourage other countries to get closer to Beijing. | ||
| U.S. businesses are huffing and puffing, but Xi Jinping is smiling. | ||
| So, Greta, you may know that I worked for 10 years on the editorial at the Wall Street Journal, so I very rarely disagree with their editorials. | ||
| And look, I'm a free trader. | ||
| I do agree there are risks to the tariffs Trump is talking about. | ||
| But I want to go back to this idea of reciprocal tariffs because that is bilateral. | ||
| You know, they're saying, well, they should go back to bilateral trade deals. | ||
| That's exactly what Trump is doing. | ||
| He's going to China. | ||
| He's going to Mexico. | ||
| He's going to these other countries one by one and saying, you have to lower your tariffs on the things that we make. | ||
| We want a fairer trading system where we both reduce our tariffs in a way that doesn't hurt American workers. | ||
| And I think most Americans would agree that's a good strategy. | ||
| Greg Ip, though, argues in the Wall Street Journal this morning. | ||
| Greg Ipp. in the Wall Street Journal in his column argues though that this tariff strategy along with the tax cuts on Capitol Hill is going to be a problem for President Trump and his promise to reduce inflation. | ||
| He says the aggregate boost to inflation from tariffs is likely to be small and from tax cuts smaller still, especially if they are offset with spending cuts. | ||
| The problem is that Trump has inherited inflation above the Federal Reserve's 2% target and his agenda risks keeping it there, making it harder to bring down interest rates. | ||
| So I want people to remember, I mean, I laugh when people say, well, Trump's policies are going to cause inflation. | ||
| That's exactly what they said in 2017 when he became president. | ||
| So let's look at what happened. | ||
| We had basically the lowest inflation rates in history. | ||
| In fact, the inflation rate under Donald Trump in the four years that he was in office, and these are just the facts, was 1.9 percent. | ||
| So there was no inflation under it. | ||
| In fact, the inflation rate in Trump's first term was below the Fed target. | ||
| 1.9 is below 2 percent. | ||
| That's point number one. | ||
| Point number two, Trump's policies are anti-inflationary. | ||
| So let me give you an example. | ||
| There's a reason they call economists like myself supply-side economists. | ||
| What we want to do is expand the productive capacity of the United States so we produce more and more goods and services. | ||
| And it's very simple, Greta. | ||
| If the economy produces more apples, what happens to the price of apples? | ||
| They fall. | ||
| They fall. | ||
| So we want to produce more output, which will cause prices to fall, not rise. | ||
| And that is the kind of key to what we are doing here. | ||
| What that means is by deregulating the economy, which Trump wants to do, that's deflationary. | ||
| By producing more oil and gas and coal and American energy, that will be deflationary. | ||
| It'll mean gas prices will come down. | ||
| By cutting the budget and the excess of that in the budget, that is deflationary. | ||
| Now, I agree that if you, and by the way, the main thing is the tax cut is deflationary because it'll increase the amount that we produce in the country. | ||
| We believe that's the best way to solve the inflation problem. | ||
| But by the way, the Fed is also going to have to, look, I think this idea of cutting interest rates right now, and I disagree with President Trump on this, I don't see how we can cut rates right now when the latest report that just came out, what, two days ago, shows that the last three months we're on a 5% inflation track. | ||
| Now, that was three months that Joe Biden was president, not Donald Trump. | ||
| All right, we'll go to John in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Republican. | ||
| Hi, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Nice to hear from you, Stephen. | ||
| I've seen you many times and listened to you, and I really follow along with you on a lot of things, and I agree with you on a lot of things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I actually have two questions. | |
| One's real easy, but the Doge system that is currently going through the federal government right now, Congress is supposed to pass 12 appropriations, and I believe the Republicans were able to get that done last year, but Chuck Schumer wouldn't take it up. | ||
| But I don't think they've ever passed an appropriation prior to that for God knows how many years. | ||
| And therefore, all of the spending that's been done that he's freezing right now never really went through a constitutional process to be authorized. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was all done through The massive bills that they did to keep the government shutting down. | |
| The second question I have for you is, we all know about NAFTA and how our manufacturing in the United States has disappeared since NAFTA. | ||
| But I heard about a year ago, and I only heard it in one place, and I can't find it, and I can't remember. | ||
| And that was that the European Union, after NAFTA went into effect, went to their hedge fund or passed a tax law over there for their hedge funds and their so-called billionaires that any income they derived outside of the European Union would not be taxed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so they started coming to the United States and buying our companies up, i.e. Anheuser-Busch and Electrolux and a few others. | |
| And I had a friend who went through it. | ||
| All right, John, I think we've got to leave it there. | ||
| We'll get a response to both of those. | ||
| Well, appreciate your call. | ||
| Appreciate the kind words, sir. | ||
| So two quick issues that the caller brought up. | ||
| Number one is, I think, oh, the budget process. | ||
| And this is a big issue that you'll be covering over the next nine months for sure. | ||
| So the question arises whether the president has the authority. | ||
| There was something that every president from George Washington through Richard Nixon had, which was called the empowerment power, where the president could say, let's say Congress appropriated $100 million for a program, and the president said, well, we don't have to spend $100 million. | ||
| We can spend $80 million. | ||
| And prior to Richard Nixon, presidents had that authority. | ||
| I believe, just like a CEO of a company, if you allocate $10 million to build a plant, it only costs $8 million. | ||
| You don't spend the whole $10 million. | ||
| You would save the money. | ||
| And so that's going to come, I believe the Supreme Court is going to have to make a decision on this, whether President Trump has the authority to not spend money that's already been appropriated. | ||
| And I hope that the court decides that just like a good CEO of a company, if you don't need to spend all the money, you shouldn't. | ||
| So that's going to be a big deal, and we'll see how that turns out. | ||
| But I have to say, I am completely supportive of what Doge is doing. | ||
| I think the American people are really happy about the fact that we finally have somebody looking up under the hood of how government money is being spent and how wasteful and redundant and inefficient it is. | ||
| And to my Democratic friends who are watching the show, I want to make a point. | ||
| If you believe in a big government and you think the government can help people by giving people benefits and these kinds of things, we all want a good and efficient government, then waste and fraud are the enemies of good government. | ||
| And I don't understand why Elizabeth Warren is running around saying this is a terrible thing. | ||
| No, getting rid of the redundancy and inefficiency and waste is a good thing to do if you believe in good government. | ||
| Now, second of all, on NAFTA, I'll just make a quick point on this. | ||
| I'm a big supporter of North America being a big free trade zone. | ||
| This was Ronald Reagan's vision going back 40-some years ago, where basically we have Canada, Mexico, and the United States as one trade zone. | ||
| I think that was a very good vision. | ||
| It was supported by Reagan. | ||
| It was supported by Bush. | ||
| You know what President signed into law? | ||
| NAFTA, it was Bill Clinton. | ||
| So it was a bipartisan agreement. | ||
| And I don't want to see trade wars with Mexico and Canada because they're our allies. | ||
| I just want to note for our viewers, Rosa DeLoro, who's the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee in the House, notes in a piece written in the New York Times today that Antonin Scalia in Train V City of New York said that the court proved Nixon wrong on the powers of empoundment. | ||
| Empoundment is a fanciful attempt to give the president the powers of a king, said Scalia, and it would be a disaster for our republic. | ||
| Well, you know what president in history used the empowerment power the most? | ||
| This is a kind of, I bet you probably don't, because most people don't know this. | ||
| It was Franklin Roosevelt. | ||
| I didn't know I was getting quizzed this morning. | ||
| You're pretty good on these, I have to say. | ||
| So, Franklin, and this is a good historical lesson. | ||
| So, what happened is during Franklin Roosevelt's president, we had the New Deal and all these social programs that we created. | ||
| We can have a debate about whether those worked or not. | ||
| I don't think they did. | ||
| But the point is, then on December 7, 1941, we have Pearl Harbor. | ||
| And all of a sudden, we have to transition to a wartime economy. | ||
| And so, what Franklin Roosevelt did, thank God, is he impounded funds, at that time, billions of dollars of funds that had been allocated for domestic social programs, and he reallocated that money to the national defense. | ||
| And that was critical to winning World War II. | ||
| So, my point is, it was Democrats and Republican presidents who used the empowerment power in a very fiscally responsible way. | ||
| And I do believe, and I think most people would agree, the chief executive should have the authority not to spend money if we don't need to. | ||
| Why would you waste money if you don't have to? | ||
| All right, let's go to Germantown, Maryland. | ||
| Joanna, Democratic caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Well, first of all, we're not in a world war right now. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| All you did was build a straw man to justify what Trump is doing. | ||
| When Trump was in office the first time, he added $8 trillion to our debt/slash deficit. | ||
| Okay, more than any, all previous presidents combined. | ||
| That is it. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Let me finish. | ||
| That's a challenge. | ||
| We're letting you go ahead, Joanna. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he started to interrupt me. | |
| Okay, on top of that, I was reading an analysis of this budget that the Congress put out yesterday. | ||
| Lots and lots of ginormous credits and tax breaks for large corporations and the very wealthy. | ||
| Everybody else got crumbs while eviscerating things like Medicaid that takes care of poor people. | ||
| Of course, poor people are the enemy, aren't they? | ||
| They're just terrible, horrible human beings, and we shouldn't do anything for them. | ||
| The idea of impoundment under Trump has nothing to do. | ||
| I've gotten all discombobulated now since you brought up the FDR thing. | ||
| It's completely different. | ||
| Completely different. | ||
| But this idea, the thing I have found about Republicans, the only time you're ever concerned about the deficit/slash debt, the only time you're ever concerned is when Democrats are in office. | ||
| All right, Joanna, we'll take your points. | ||
| So a couple points. | ||
| I mean, yes, we spent way too much money under Andrew Trump as well. | ||
| And I think this woman is correct on that. | ||
| And I was complaining, you know, I'd go see the president. | ||
| I'd say we're spending too much money. | ||
| But it's important to realize that the deficit was coming down, and then we were hit with COVID, and we shut down the whole American economy. | ||
| So that meant that we had to have this massive government spending. | ||
| And as I said before, we all agree that it was a huge mistake to shut down our economy. | ||
| And that added enormously to our debt, and it put us in a bigger, deeper hole. | ||
| But you have to grow the economy. | ||
| I just want to make this point over and over again. | ||
| We cannot solve this debt problem unless we have more economic growth. | ||
| And that means deregulating the economy, cut taxes in strategic ways that bring jobs and factories back to the United States. | ||
| It means let's produce every barrel of oil and gas and produce our nuclear power, everything we can, so we're not dependent on foreigners. | ||
| If we do these things, I think we can turn the economy around. | ||
| Because you're right. | ||
| I am worried about inflation rearing its ugly head again because of the massive amount of spending. | ||
| One other quick point on Medicaid. | ||
| Just so people understand what we're talking about, what we're saying is if you are able-bodied, if you're not disabled, and you have the capacity to work, then you're going to get food stamps or Medicaid or other government benefits. | ||
| You have to have a job. | ||
| And I think that's something 90% of Americans would agree with. | ||
| And if you can't find a job, you're in a training program. | ||
| The idea we're just going to give people money, and that sounds like a radical idea. | ||
| It was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who enacted welfare reform, and it was an enormous success. | ||
| And then what happened is we got rid of the job, you know, the work requirements. | ||
| And all Trump is saying is you've got to get a job. | ||
| And the jobs are out there for people to get. | ||
| And I think most people would say, yeah. | ||
| We'll go to Gridley, California. | ||
| Sheila, an independent. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| This isn't very well formulated, but my question has to do with how policies are set, like how the Heritage Foundation gets their ideas. | ||
| And I'm just wondering if, and I don't know how to explain where I got this idea, but if our government, if the United States of America is somehow propped up or kept strong by being enmeshed with monarchies historically from all over the world or from maybe just from Britain, | ||
| and I don't really understand my question even fully, but I do have a sense that there's more going on than most people notice. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So let me tackle this. | ||
| Thank you for calling, by the way. | ||
| You know, we've been saying all the problems that America has, and we do have big problems. | ||
| But it is also true that, I mean, what has happened in the last 40 years in this country has been the most amazing technological revolution. | ||
| It is true we're running these enormous deficits, but we have by far the biggest, strongest economy in the world, no question about that. | ||
| And we have some of the most brilliant, brilliant minds in this country, and we have some of the greatest businessmen. | ||
| And what Trump has done, I think, and this is long overdue, is said, let's bring up some of these super smart businessminds to Washington and figure out how we can get rid of all the excessive. | ||
| Look, we're spending $7 trillion a year right now. | ||
| And we did a study at Unleashed Prosperity where you just asked the average 1,000 people in a poll, how much of the federal budget do you think is wasted out of every dollar spent? | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The average answer was 37 cents out of every dollar is wasted. | ||
| And I think that's, you know, I would say maybe 30 to 35 percent. | ||
| But what that's telling you is the American people are onto this, that there's so much fraud, there's so much, you know, self-serving programs. | ||
| There's a reason why, by the way, three of the five wealthiest counties in the United States are in Washington, D.C. Because the money doesn't, it comes into Washington, but doesn't go back out. | ||
| My point is, by bringing in really smart people like Elon Musk, who's a genius, and saying, look, you've done this in private companies. | ||
| Tell us how we can save money. | ||
| Why are we spending $10 billion, not a million, $10 billion a year paying rent on empty office buildings? | ||
| I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Why are we spending all this money on USAID, which for the last 30 years has not led to any international development anywhere? | ||
| If programs don't work, we should get rid of them. | ||
| Mr. Moore, can you find enough waste, fraud, and abuse, though, to tackle the nation's debt without looking at Social Security and Medicare? | ||
| So I think that the American people are very clear on this. | ||
| Before we start talking about cutting these, you know, their Medicare benefits and Social Security benefits, which I'm against, by the way. | ||
| against doing that. | ||
| Now, I do think we can find huge amounts of, I mean, the government's own auditors have told us that they found $200 billion, again, not million, $200 billion of fraudulent payments under unemployment insurance, food stamps, Medicare, Social Security, $200 billion. | ||
| Why should we cut people's benefits when we should hunt down these criminals? | ||
| By the way, a lot of those people who got the benefits, they don't even live in the United States, for goodness sakes. | ||
| People hacked into the system and found how they could steal money from the taxpayers. | ||
| And I'm with, I think, the majority of Americans who say, before we start talking about cutting Social Security Medicare, why don't we go after the people who robbed the program? | ||
| So yes, there's huge amounts of waste and fraud, and that will solve a big part of the problem. | ||
| All right, we'll go to Holyoke, Massachusetts. | ||
| John, Democratic caller. | ||
| John, quick question from you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Give me the respect to not cut me off because you have a three or four second delay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You were talking about George Washington to Nixon. | ||
| What happened from George Washington to Nixon when there were already people here and they got genocide? | ||
| Number one. | ||
| Number two. | ||
| After Roosevelt came here and he signed the Great Deal, right? | ||
| What happened to the big corporations, right? | ||
| Here's another thing. | ||
| DeSantis tried to sue Disney. | ||
| Why couldn't DeSantis sue Disney? | ||
| Because it belonged to the monarchy. | ||
| We're a commonwealth of Great Britain. | ||
| Number two, here's another thing. | ||
| When Anthony C. Sutton wrote about how we were going to war and we were funding Hitler through Wall Street and all the big corporations and they were giving all the big tax breaks, right? | ||
| And all the big corporations were which were old Nazi corporations that came. | ||
| Okay, I'm just going to leave it there. | ||
| His overall point, though, about corporations and our economy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we have some of the greatest corporations in the world. | ||
| You know, we want America to be number one. | ||
| And, you know, you look at these amazing companies like Google and Apple and Amazon. | ||
| Do you know seven, the magnificent seven, those seven technology companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, blah, blah, blah, those companies, those seven companies have a bigger market value than every single company in Europe. | ||
| So we are so dominating in the technology sector, and that is a beautiful thing to see. | ||
| And look, I just want America to be the most prosperous place on earth and attacking our corporations. | ||
| And I hate corporate welfare, by the way. | ||
| I do not think it's the government's responsibility to give money to our companies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hate that through tax breaks? | |
| Even tax breaks. | ||
| What I want is a low, flat-rate tax system that does not give special favors to anybody. | ||
| And, you know, my buddy Steve Forbes and Art Laffer have been talking about this for years. | ||
| I mean, we could lower our tax rates and then get rid of all those special interest provisions. | ||
| For example, why should corporations be able to write off their state and local taxes? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's just a giveaway to them. | ||
| Especially, think about this. | ||
| We have a policy today where General Motors can write off their state and local tax deductions, but the little auto repair shop down the street can't do that. | ||
| So yes, I'm very much in favor of getting rid of corporate welfare kind of payments. | ||
| I wrote a book about this, by the way. | ||
| So I'm the biggest advocate of not letting the government give money to our corporations and companies. | ||
| Our viewers can learn more about Steve Moore, his books, if you go to committee to unleashprosperity.com. | ||
| He's the founder of that group, a former senior economic advisor to Mr. Trump. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| As always, we appreciate the conversation. | ||
| Love C-SPAN. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy. | |
| From Washington and across the country. | ||
| Coming up Saturday morning, Foundation for Defense of Democracy Senior Fellow David Dayude will talk about the latest on the Israel-Hamas ceasefire and President Trump's plans for Gaza. | ||
| Then, Peter Shin and Joe Dunn from the National Association of Community Health Centers discuss how the government funding freeze is impacting clinics and healthcare services. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Saturday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now or online at c-span.org. | ||
| American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | ||
| This weekend, at 3:15 p.m. Eastern, we'll look at American presidents and the U.S. Navy with Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro discussing the naval careers of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush. | ||
| Then at 5 p.m. Eastern, a discussion on the life and legacy of civil rights icon and Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis with author David Greenberg, former clerk of the House Cheryl Johnson, and current and former members of Congress. | ||
| At 7 p.m. Eastern, watch American History TV's series First 100 Days as we look at the start of presidential terms. | ||
| This week, we focus on the early months of President Ulysses Grant's first term in 1869, including the treatment of Native Americans and freed slaves. | ||
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, Indiana University History Professor Juan Mora talks about the U.S. Border Patrol and how 20th century immigration laws shape the creation and development of immigration agencies. | ||
| Exploring the American story. | ||
| Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| C-SPAN. Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| Oh, you think this is just a community censor? | ||
| No, it's way more than that. | ||
| Comcast is partnering with a thousand community centers to create Wi-Fi-enabled lifts so students from low-income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. |