| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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And then Matthew Boyle, Washington Bureau Chief for Breitbart News Networks, talks about the news media, the Trump administration, and other political news of the day. | |
| Also, Kristen Rowe Finkbiner with the group Moms Rising will join us to discuss public policy challenges facing mothers and families. | ||
| Washington Journal starts now. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Sunday, May 11th, 2025. | ||
| Happy Mother's Day. | ||
| House Republicans released an early version of the GOP's major tax bill on Friday. | ||
| It's a central piece of legislation key to some of President Trump's policy goals. | ||
| But how to pay for it? | ||
| President Trump briefly floated the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy, but then said the GOP probably shouldn't. | ||
| This morning, we want to know what you think. | ||
| Democrats should call in at 202-748-8000, Republicans at 202-748-8001, and Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you'd like to text us, that number is 202-748-8003. | ||
| Please be sure to include your name and where you're writing in from. | ||
| You can also find us on social media at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Now, Politico has a few more details of what we know so far about this portion of the tax bill legislation language that Republicans released on Friday. | ||
| Republicans' partial tax plan estimated to cost $5 trillion. | ||
| An early version of the House GOP's tax plan would cost nearly $5 trillion, according to a new estimate from Congress's nonpartisan tax scorekeeper. | ||
| The cost far exceeds what is permitted by the budget resolution Republicans adopted earlier this year, which set parameters for the massive package of tax cuts and extensions, energy policy, and border security investment the party wants to pass in the coming weeks. | ||
| The estimate released Saturday evening by the Joint Committee on Taxation also underscores how much hinges on the final details of the plan, which are likely to be unveiled Monday afternoon ahead of a scheduled Tuesday markup by the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Representative Jason Smith, a Republican from Missouri. | ||
| Now, one of the ways that had been considered in terms of how to pay for some of those tax cuts is raising taxes on the wealthy. | ||
| This was laid out in an article on thehill.com where that with the headline, Trump Pivots, says the GOP should probably not raise taxes on the rich in that article saying, the White House had put forward a proposal to allow the top marginal income tax rate cut that Trump signed into law in 2017 to expire at the end of the year for the highest income Americans, | ||
| which would increase the tax rate for those individuals from 37% to 39.6%. | ||
| The rest of the 2017 tax cuts would be extended. | ||
| And while the top tax bracket for 2024 applied To incomes higher than $609,351 for single-filers and $731,201 for joint filers, the White House is pitching a new higher rate that would apply to those with incomes greater than $2.5 million for single-filers or $5 million for joint filers, according to one source with knowledge of the pitch. | ||
| But after some pushback, President Trump posted on Truth Social: the problem with even a tiny tax increase for the rich, which I and all others would graciously accept in order to help the lower and middle-income workers, is that the radical left Democrat lunatics would go around screaming, read my lips, the fabled quote by George Bush the Elder that is said to have cost him the election. | ||
| No, Ross Perot cost him the election. | ||
| In any event, Republicans should probably not do it, but I'm okay if they do. | ||
| Now, President Trump was asked about this Truth Social post in the Oval Office with reporters on Friday. | ||
| Here's that exchange. | ||
|
unidentified
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Specifically, on the possibility of an increase in taxes on wealthier Americans, what do you say to conservative Republicans who argue that this is an increase on small business owners? | |
| Well, what we're doing is we're actually, if we ever did that, it would only be, and from what I hear, people would love to do it, rich people, I would love to do it, frankly, but what we'll do is that, you know, they'll go around saying, oh, this is so terrible. | ||
| What you do it is you're giving up something up top in order to make people in the middle income and the lower income brackets save more. | ||
| So it's really a redistribution. | ||
| And I'm willing to do it if they want. | ||
| I would love to be able to give people in a lower bracket a big break by giving up some of what I have. | ||
| But I'll tell you, a lot of people say don't do it because of the fact that you have the Bush statement about read my lips. | ||
| But he lost because of Ross Perot. | ||
| He didn't lose because of that statement. | ||
|
unidentified
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And then on the salt. | |
| But I don't think they're going to be doing it, but I actually think it's good politics to do it where richer people give up. | ||
| And it's a very small, it's like a point, but they give it up to benefit people who are lower income. | ||
|
unidentified
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And then on the side. | |
| Now, before we get to your calls on what you think of these policy ideas, let's look at a bit of polling related to taxes in America. | ||
| This one from Gallup finding that Americans' view of federal income taxes they pay, 59% think their taxes are too high. | ||
| 38% think they're about right. | ||
| Just 2% think the taxes that they pay are too low. | ||
| But when you break it down by group, according to that same Gallup poll, 58% say lower-income people pay too much in taxes. | ||
| 54% say middle-income people pay too much in taxes. | ||
| And 58% say upper-income people pay too little in taxes. | ||
| Now, let's get to your calls. | ||
| We'll start with Gregory in Sherman Oaks, California, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Gregory. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, absolutely, the rich should pay more. | |
| The people who already have most of the money and are advantaged more by everything in the modern world, including the tax structure of the United States, the people who get the most owe the most. | ||
| They're living high and mighty while huge pain is being expanded in every direction. | ||
| It's almost like the Trump administration and the Republican Party are this big broadcasting tower of misery, sending out everything that makes health care harder, food harder, housing harder, workplace protections harder, education harder. | ||
| And here we're in the last few decades and we can save a semblance of the natural earth. | ||
| It's been around for such a long time. | ||
| We need to be spending money on things like clean energy research so we don't have to pull even more crap out of the ground and fill the atmosphere with even more heat-trapping gases. | ||
| We should be doing everything the Republicans are trying not to do and doing virtually nothing of the stuff that they're doing, starting trade wars, defunding everything that makes life better for people. | ||
| I think the way to look at this, just like the living world is divided into the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, it's kind of like capitalism and commercial activity is the animal kingdom, while government and public service and the public sector are kind of like the plant kingdom that provides the ecosystem services, the oxygen, the water, the air, the planet Earth itself that makes the human enterprise possible. | ||
| That's the way to see it now. | ||
| And we're just ruining, we're ripping up that. | ||
| Gregory, there's some polling that quite a few Americans agree with you on raising taxes on the rich. | ||
| Here's some numbers from the Pew Research Center. | ||
| About six in 10 Americans, 58%, say that those taxes on incomes over 400,000 should be raised, including 23% who say these tax rates should be raised a lot. | ||
| Much smaller shares say taxes on higher income should be lowered, that's 19%, or kept the same, 21%. | ||
| As has been the case in recent years, views differ substantially by party. | ||
| Democrats are overwhelmingly supportive of raising taxes on these groups, while Republicans are more divided. | ||
| Let's hear from Jenny in Lancaster, Ohio on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jenny. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, it's Jenny. | |
| I haven't called you for a while. | ||
| Hey, listen, all that stuff you're reading is nobody's comprehending what you're reading about all those taxes. | ||
| You keep reading off all it's not your fault, but everything you're reading, it does not make any sense. | ||
| They're going to raise this, lower that, tax that. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| We have to have a certain amount of rich people in order for people to be employed. | ||
| And I don't know why we're always blaming the rich people. | ||
| I'll tell you what, there's probably a lot of people that do have a lot of money, and they probably donate money. | ||
| They just don't want everybody to know that. | ||
| The tax legislation and the pending legislation is indeed pretty complicated, Jenny. | ||
| I'm going to go over a couple of points that we've highlighted from USA Today in the Wall Street Journal about some of the tax cuts that President Trump has proposed. | ||
| He suggested extending the 2017 tax cuts that expire this year, eliminate taxes on overtime tips and Social Security benefits, also creating a deduction for auto loan interest for American-made cars. | ||
| He has also promised higher taxes on U.S. imports through a series of new tariffs. | ||
| There's also a few more details that we were able to get from the language that came out on Friday, but it is pretty complicated. | ||
| So I understand that it gets a little messy. | ||
| Is there a specific question that you had about what's been released so far that we can maybe help with? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, but what you just read makes a lot of sense what the president's doing. | |
| He knows what he's doing. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I'm going to send him another card and let him know what a good job he's doing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Next up is John in Malta, New York on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks, Kim. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| You know, it seems like We're divided into two camps, and you kind of like it's a cure-all, you know, a panacea that the cure for our problems today is just going to be higher taxes. | ||
| I think what people have to worry about when you do tax the rich, what happens is a lot of them are just going to close their businesses and move to other countries, and that's going to, I think, as a previous caller said, that's going to affect employment here in the United States. | ||
| So, you know, I think you just can't have a knee-jerk reaction that the taxation, especially of the rich, is going to be the solution to all the problems. | ||
| I do, however, believe that modest increases in the tax code, you know, vis-a-vis the rich, would be beneficial. | ||
| At least it would show that the Republican Party is more responsive to the needs of the people, moving more toward the center and even a little to the left, you know, in an effort to benefit the people. | ||
| But this has always been the problem that, you know, taxation on the rich people is going to solve our problems. | ||
| And finally, the last thing that I'd like to point out is there is a tremendous amount of waste fraud and abuse that has to be curtailed. | ||
| And Doge might not be the perfect solution, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. | ||
| So I would hope people would just consider those points. | ||
| Thanks again for taking my call. | ||
| A little bit more detail on that plan that Republicans released on Friday, also here from Politico. | ||
| It includes plans to boost popular tax breaks like the hugely popular child tax credit, but leaves more controversial provisions to flesh out later. | ||
| They temporarily increase the child tax credit by $500 while also hiking the standard deduction by $2,000 for couples to $32,000. | ||
| Together, those two provisions aimed squarely at average Americans may help them rebut complaints from Democrats that their plans give too much to the wealthy. | ||
| And Republicans would have them take effect this tax year so that people could receive bigger refunds when they file their returns next year ahead of the midterm elections. | ||
| Republicans also want to permanently extend the roster of lower income tax rates they first put in place in 2017. | ||
| The legislation omits an increase in the top tax rate on the highest earners, something that lawmakers had spent weeks debating. | ||
| It also eases a tax on large estates. | ||
| Matt is in Wilmington, North Carolina on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Matt. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, good morning. | |
| My name is Matt. | ||
| I'm from Wilmington, North Carolina. | ||
| And I just scratch my head when we try to figure out how the tax code is written. | ||
| And one of the things that I try to tell people is that the tax code is written by rich people. | ||
| And rich people are always going to take care of rich people until tax codes or tax codes are written by regular people or accountants or something like that so that we can start working on our debt. | ||
| That to me is the biggest singular thing that we have to be scared of is going bankrupt as a country. | ||
| We've got to pay taxes. | ||
| We have to pay taxes and the rich have to pay more. | ||
| And once again, if Elon Musk has $200 billion and I can go ahead and tax him 99%, I don't care about that because he'll still have $2 billion, which is $2,000 million. | ||
| And people don't know the difference. | ||
| People don't even know what a trillion dollars is. | ||
| A trillion dollars is $1,000 billion. | ||
| It's $1,000 billion. | ||
| So that means we owe $36,000 billion. | ||
| And I wish we'd quit using the term trillion. | ||
| We'd start using thousands of billions so that people could sort of get their head around that. | ||
| And if I broke it down to millions, you guys would just freak out about how many millions it is. | ||
| And the regular person can't comprehend that money, but we've got to figure out how to get that squared away. | ||
| And people are just going to have to pay. | ||
| People have to pay, and we've got to get it squared away, and we've got to be tight on our budget, and we've got to just take care of the United States. | ||
| And if you don't like paying taxes, then don't be an American because we need to get out of this thing. | ||
| And I think that's what we should do. | ||
| Pat is in Brick, New Jersey on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Pat. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| I just wanted to say happy Mother's Day to all. | ||
| And also, it's time to defund Planned Parenthood. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Happy Mother's Day. | ||
| Next up is Mary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| It's no question that the rich needs to pay more. | ||
| I mean, you look at a lot of times with us providing them with startup money, grants. | ||
| And I remember when President Obama in his State of the Union address notified the Republicans and the Democrats and the American people, the corporations did not build this by themselves. | ||
| People need to realize we provide more corporate welfare to corporations in this country. | ||
| We provide protection for their businesses and corporations when they go into other countries. | ||
| Of course, they need to pay more. | ||
| We need to start waking up and looking at, we did not create this $36 trillion in debt. | ||
| The corporations have major loopholes that they can write off, which end up not paying one cent in taxes in this country. | ||
| I remember when President Obama tried to get them to repatriate their money back to the United States, these corporations, and they failed to do so. | ||
| So let's wake up to reality. | ||
| They need to pay more than their fair share because we're providing more of the wealth to them. | ||
| Thank you, and you have a good day. | ||
| So Mary was mentioning corporate tax rates. | ||
| More from that Politico article on the section of legislation that Republicans released on Friday. | ||
| On the business side, they'd sweeten a special break for owners of unincorporated businesses as well as reduce rates on arcane taxes aimed at multinational corporations. | ||
| This legislation running just 28 pages is only part of Republicans' plans and does not include the surely controversial tax increases they intend to use to help offset the budgetary costs of their plans, such as an increase in tax in a tax on college endowment investment earnings or a calling of green energy tax subsidies put in place by the Biden administration. | ||
| Now, last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke out against President Trump and the GOP and their tax plan. | ||
| Let's listen. | ||
| Now, a few moments ago, House Republicans plowed ahead on a morally and financially bankrupt plan to gut Medicaid while cutting taxes for billionaires. | ||
| Republicans did just what their boss told them to do. | ||
| They closed their eyes and voted for a bill knowing damn well it will explode the deficit by $52 trillion and kick millions off health care. | ||
| They voted, voted it, knowing damn well that American families lose and billionaires win. | ||
| They voted for it knowing damn well it would gut critical investments for the American people. | ||
| They voted for it knowing damn well it would mortgage our nation's future to deliver massive giveaways to the wealthiest Americans in the country. | ||
| Republicans incinerated any credibility that remained about them supposedly being the party of fiscal responsibility. | ||
| Last week, we sounded the alarm about how the Republican budget resolution was the definition of wasteful spending. | ||
| $37 trillion, or so we thought, of the national debt. | ||
| I say, or so we thought, because this morning we have discovered it's even worse than we feared. | ||
| This morning, the Congressional Budget Office, at Jeff's request, released a new projection showing Republicans' billionaire tax giveaways will actually add $52 trillion to the debt, not just $37 plus. | ||
| It's gotten even worse, even worse. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because Republicans in the Senate didn't just copy and paste the 2017 Trump tax bill. | ||
| They added over a trillion more. | ||
| This is the Trump's tax scam on steroids, and it's going to bankrupt America, bankrupt America. | ||
| All so they can give these tax breaks to the billionaires. | ||
| It is just incredible. | ||
| Back to your calls on tax policy. | ||
| Sam is in Euclid, Ohio on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Sam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, yes. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I just have a couple of things to say. | ||
| Most people don't know history and don't know the history of how we got here and how we get out of it. | ||
| World War II was completely paid for by the United States citizens by buying bonds in the United States. | ||
| When we decided to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, taxes were not raised. | ||
| We were all told to go and buy stuff. | ||
| However, taxes weren't raised on anybody, much less the rich who can afford it. | ||
| It's like the bank robber who said, why do you rob banks? | ||
| Well, that's where the money is. | ||
| And keep going after the middle class will literally destroy this country. | ||
| General Eisenhower, after World War II, we were only six little bit over six of what we owed ourselves. | ||
| We did not owe anyone. | ||
| How do you think those historical examples should inform what we do with our tax policy moving forward, especially with Republicans getting ready to release this tax legislation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think it's very, very interesting that General Eisenhower went on television and he was offered to be the nominee for the Democrats and had a sit-down with President Truman. | |
| And he said, I am afraid that if I become a Democrat and no, he never voted as long as he was in the military. | ||
| No one ever. | ||
| I want to keep it on the tax policy question this morning. | ||
| Let's hear from David in North Carolina on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm a retired CPA out of practice up north, and I continue to hear the left blaming the billionaires and need to tax more and more revenues. | ||
| We don't have a revenue issue. | ||
| We have an expense issue. | ||
| If you take the 801 billionaires, I just Google these facts, their wealth is $6.22 trillion. | ||
| So if you took every penny the 801 billionaires in this country have, you couldn't pay one-fifth of our national debt. | ||
| According to the Tax Foundation, the top 1% of earners pay 45.8% of income tax. | ||
| The one thing I never heard from the Democrats is how much tax do they want them to pay. | ||
| It's always they need to pay more, pay more. | ||
| In my practice, I saw from the Trump tax cuts across the board tax benefit to taxpayers. | ||
| The small businesses I had who did well money-wise, and businesses that had 5 to 50 employees provided good working conditions, good pay, good benefits, pension insurance. | ||
| And these are the people that those tax cuts helped, who helped this country in giving good jobs to people. | ||
| So I think it's about time that we realize that we have an expense problem in this country and not a revenue problem. | ||
| Thank you, and have a nice Mother's Day. | ||
| Some of those points that David raised are echoed in an opinion piece by Chris Talgo of the Heartland Institute this op-ed saying, guess what? | ||
| Trump tax cuts are helping the poor more than the rich. | ||
| And then just going on to say, since the Republican Congress began debating the bill that eventually became the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, leftists have accused the legislation of being a huge tax cut for the wealthy, funded by middle and lower income Americans. | ||
| In reality, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed into law in 2017 has particularly benefited working and middle-class Americans while increasing the total tax burden paid by millionaires and billionaires. | ||
| Just going to scroll down a little bit on this. | ||
| In terms of percentage saved per filer, the IRS data shows that filers on the lower end of the income spectrum received far larger reductions compared to those at the higher end. | ||
| For example, if you earned $45,000 in 2022 under the TCJA, you received a 19% reduction in taxes compared to 2017. | ||
| If you earned $5 million, you saved 2.3%. | ||
| Laura is in Dale, Texas, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Laura. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I am truly distressed over the amount of malinformation that is being allowed to be spewed on C-SPAN. | ||
| The oligarchy own the debt. | ||
| They are not paying the taxes they should be paying. | ||
| They are taking rather than giving for the opportunity of making money in the United States and in the world. | ||
| It's a betrayal. | ||
| I'm speechless. | ||
| I truly am. | ||
| If they extend these tax cuts, this country will not just go into a recession. | ||
| We will have another depression. | ||
| And the oligarchy own it all. | ||
| Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, all of them. | ||
| They have screwed our country up. | ||
| They have screwed the tax code up. | ||
| They think they'll be able to survive it, and they won't, because China and Russia won't let them. | ||
| They're softening up this country just like Rome was softened up by its oligarchy, and it failed, and we're going to fail. | ||
| It is not just expenditures, it's revenue. | ||
| And it was the starve the beast doctrine that got us here, starting with President Reagan. | ||
| The Republicans have been busy betraying this country, betraying their constituency, and there will be a reckoning, and it's not going to be very polite. | ||
| Trump is insane. | ||
| He doesn't know what he's doing. | ||
| Unfortunately, the Democrat Party doesn't know what they're doing either. | ||
| So, some of those points that Laura raised are also in an op-ed by Dean Baker that's here on Tucson.com. | ||
| The share, which says here that wealthy Americans must pay their fair share, the share of before-tax income going to the richest 1% of taxpayers more than doubled since the 1980s, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. | ||
| The massive upward redistribution of income was primarily a result of the ability of the rich to structure the economy in ways that benefited them. | ||
| Trade agreements, longer and stronger patent monopolies, and a hugely bloated financial industry. | ||
| This was not enough for the nation's rich. | ||
| The wealthiest also demanded that politicians give them lower tax rates. | ||
| And the politicians have responded to this demand from their wealthy campaign contributors. | ||
| The top tax rate for very high-income people fell from 70% in the 1970s to 35% today. | ||
| The tax rate on capital gains, which accounts for most of the income of the rich and the super-rich, is now 20%. | ||
| The tax rate on corporate profits fell from 50% in the 1970s to 21% today. | ||
| Sherry is in St. Agatha, Maine, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Sherry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I totally agree that the rich need to pay more. | |
| I'm a retired school teacher, and this year I am paying $1,800 in taxes. | ||
| I remember Trump one year paid $726 in taxes. | ||
| I think Trump's tax plan is all about helping the wealthy and definitely not the middle and lower classes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Bob is in Old Fort, Tennessee on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Bob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| But I was glad that you read that piece about two or three about three or four calls ago. | ||
| You read exactly what a Republican do was. | ||
| And, you know, we used to say, let's throw the bombs out. | ||
| You know, people need to quit depending on the government and start for the self because the line of work I got, I need rich people because they're the ones that give me my work. | ||
| And I sure don't want to hurt them. | ||
| If you don't mind sharing, Bob, what kind of work is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in construction. | |
| So, in other words, I paint. | ||
| I'll tell you that right now. | ||
| But what I'm saying is, well, I might not need my house paint. | ||
| I was going to, but they hit me with Sahara in taxes. | ||
| And I think Trump's a smart guy, too. | ||
| And I wish somehow he could be our king till he died. | ||
| And I know that might upset a lot of people, but this man bent through everything. | ||
| I mean, there's no person. | ||
| And then just like these judges going after him, that's crazy. | ||
| So there's a group called Securing American Greatness, which is a pro-Trump nonprofit group that's not required to disclose its donors. | ||
| And it's going to be running this ad touting Trump's tax plans nationally on cable stations and online starting tomorrow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They've ruined our economy. | |
| President Trump is fixing it. | ||
| Trump's plan, middle-class tax cuts, job-creating tax cuts, tariffs that bring home American jobs, slashing waste, fraud and abuse, increasing American energy production, bringing down prices. | ||
| We're already seeing results. | ||
| The cost of living's coming down. | ||
| Inflation and gas prices at four-year lows. | ||
| Wages are up, and we're creating American jobs. | ||
| Tell Congress this is a good deal for America. | ||
| Support President Trump's plan to get our economy back on track. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| David is in Akron, Ohio, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning, and thanks for taking my call. | |
| Yes, you have to, you can play around with the numbers, you know, the percentages of the rich and all this. | ||
| But as far as I'm concerned, the rich are getting richer, and there's no economic benefit to giving them a tax cut that really is lasting. | ||
| I go back to the trickle-down economics theory in 1980 under Reagan that was debated. | ||
| John Kenneth Gallbrace, the economist, called it the horse and the sparrow theory. | ||
| And that is, if you give the horse enough votes, enough will pass through the horse to feed the sparrows. | ||
| That's basically, if you get the analogy there, that's basically what's happening. | ||
| And we keep getting richer. | ||
| Also, if you talk about an expense problem, well, look at all the military bases we have overseas. | ||
| And somebody referenced the great President Eisenhower. | ||
| Well, Eisenhower warned the American people in 1960 of the military-industrial complex and how it had too much power. | ||
| Why would a Republican general of impeccable, impeccable patriotism feel like he needed to warn the American people of this? | ||
| Well, it's still going on. | ||
| C. Kennedy tried to stop it, and unfortunately, he came to a bad end. | ||
| So the new guy did not stop the military-industrial complex. | ||
| That's just one of the problems. | ||
| We have too much power in the oligarchy. | ||
| What makes America great is our Bill of Rights and our Constitution, where the power was split. | ||
| And they said, no kings. | ||
| They did not want a king. | ||
| We gained our independence fighting against kings. | ||
| The king of England then imposed absolute authority on the colonies. | ||
| And that's what makes America great, our sense of freedom and our sense of justice. | ||
| And that's what we need now. | ||
| We don't need tax cuts for the rich, that's for damn sure. | ||
| There's more from that Gallup poll that I mentioned earlier in terms of how Americans view our tax system, particularly broken down by party. | ||
| Democrats say just 62% of them say that the amount they pay in federal income taxes is fair compared to 45% of independents and 35% of Republicans who think the amount that they individually pay in income taxes is fair. | ||
| Let's hear from John in New Jersey on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, my name's John. | |
| I want to say happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. | ||
| The problem with the rich today is they're not being taxed the same as every individual. | ||
| They are being compensated through their companies in ways we can't even think of. | ||
| Free place to live, free cars, free credit cards to spend what they want. | ||
| This is not earned income. | ||
| This is money that they spend, and this is what's going on. | ||
| You could tax the rich all you want. | ||
| I mean, and what people are saying about World War II, if they were patriots like in World War II, the rich got together and paid down our debt. | ||
| So why don't they do it now? | ||
| The only reason that they're rich is because they have their businesses in America and the American people buy their products. | ||
| I mean, it's ridiculous. | ||
| Some of these COOs or COAs or whatever, they make more than 20 people will make in their whole lifetime in one year. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Next up is Glenn in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Glenn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I called in on account of the retired school teacher that paid $1,800. | ||
| She didn't tell you how much pension she gets from taxpayers' money. | ||
| And Elon Musk, one year, paid $10 billion. | ||
| Glenn, can I ask you to turn down the volume on your TV and then you're welcome to continue? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I'm calling in about the retired school. | ||
| We heard the beginning point. | ||
| You said that Elon Musk paid $10 billion. | ||
| What was the rest of your point? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, in one year. | |
| How much does she want him to pay? | ||
| $10 billion in one year isn't enough. | ||
| And independents are Democrats. | ||
| So you shouldn't have three lines. | ||
| You should have Democrat and Independents together and Republicans. | ||
| You got to stop leaning to the left. | ||
| C-SPAN got to stop leaning to the left. | ||
| Thanks for your time. | ||
| Next up is Tom in St. Augustine, Florida on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and thank you for the show. | |
| I would like you, if you could, to pull up the studies on trickle-down economics. | ||
| I'm going to give you three of them. | ||
| One is by the London School of Economics. | ||
| One is by the RAND Corporation, a 40-year study. | ||
| And one is by Harvard that just came out showing that trickle-down economics is pretty much a farce. | ||
| And I would also like you to do a show where you ask your callers, what would they do with the money that will supposedly the rich invest and trickles down. | ||
| As an example, if you had $200,000 and you handed it to a rich person and they went out and built a new investment, maybe a Burger King hired people, or you could hire a cop with a gun to be in your son's school where he's protecting your children, creating a good job, buying a car that's made in America, buying a gun that's made in America. | ||
| Which one of those two things would you rather have? | ||
| Those are really your choices is what you really get. | ||
| So would you rather have the cop protecting your children or a tax break for the rich? | ||
| That's really the question. | ||
| Please pull those studies up, and I appreciate your show very much. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| Those studies do exist, but I'll instead point to a summary of one of those studies in CBS News. | ||
| So here it is. | ||
| This is a story from back in 2020. | ||
| 50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down. | ||
| Economic study says, tax cuts for the wealthy have long drawn support from conservative lawmakers and economists who argue such measures will trickle down and eventually boost jobs and incomes for everyone else. | ||
| But a new study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group, the rich. | ||
| The new paper by David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Lindbergh of King's College London examines 18 developed countries from Australia to the United States over a 50-year period from 1965 to 2015. | ||
| The study compared countries that passed tax cuts in a specific year, such as the U.S. in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan slashed taxes on the wealthy with those that didn't, and then examined their economic outcomes. | ||
| Per capita gross domestic product and unemployment rates were nearly identical after five years in countries that slashed taxes on the rich and in those that didn't, the study found. | ||
| But the analysis discovered one major change. | ||
| The incomes of the rich grew much faster in countries where tax rates were lowered. | ||
| Instead of trickling down to the middle class, tax cuts for the rich may not accomplish much more than help the rich keep more of their riches and exacerbate income inequality, the research indicates. | ||
| Next up is Josephine in Livingston, New Jersey on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Josephine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| In the 1950s, the rich paid 98% of taxes. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Of course, we had to pay off for World War II. | ||
| Okay, come along, Ronald Reagan. | ||
| And he decided that wasn't necessary to pay anymore. | ||
| But on the other hand, he went to the other extreme. | ||
| His philosophy was trickle-down economy. | ||
| That was a phrase that never worked out. | ||
| Bottom line is: people who really get screwed in plain English are those of us who are single. | ||
| We've always paid for other people's education. | ||
| We've always paid for everything. | ||
| I never forgot when I had to do paperwork on people who had changed their status because they became a widow. | ||
| I never forgot the woman who came to me, was employed, started screaming, Change it back, change it back, put it on Mary. | ||
| I can't pay you myself. | ||
| I said, Well, now you know what I pay all the time, and I can't say anything. | ||
| And the other thing is, the average billionaire to all those so-called knowledgeable people pay 8%, average. | ||
| You know what I paid last year? | ||
| And I'm proud to do my bit, 39%. | ||
| And I'm single. | ||
| I didn't have anybody handed home. | ||
| I didn't stay home. | ||
| I had to go work for 51 years. | ||
| So, you know, it's only due. | ||
| Are you going to take it from those who don't have it? | ||
| Literally taking the food out of their mouth, just like they were showing yesterday in Sudan. | ||
| People are starving because the nation, what nation was missing? | ||
| The United States. | ||
| We're literally killing people with this philosophy. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next up is Sandy in Jackson, New Jersey on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Sandy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Good. | ||
| Do you want to make sure your volume on your TV is turned down and then please go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sure. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| Like, people talk about how rich shouldn't pay more, but when it seems like when they talk about, they're talking about corporations. | ||
| Corporations shouldn't pay more. | ||
| Can't the taxes for corporations maybe stay where they are? | ||
| But the people that are making a lot of money, that are drawing the high salaries, the CEOs, peop like entertainment, anything, or politicians that make a lot of money. | ||
| Can't they be taxed the higher rate? | ||
| Or at least the fair rate that everybody else is taxed without the loopholes? | ||
| So so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think corporations and private people should be held differently. | |
| So, when the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed, the corporate tax cuts were made permanent, but the individual tax cuts were set to expire. | ||
| And so, what's being debated is what to do about the individual tax cuts. | ||
| And so, the decisions about the corporate tax rates were kind of locked in. | ||
| And the debate happening in Congress coming up is about what to do about those individual rates. | ||
| So, how do you think they should handle that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think they should be charged, they should pay their fair share. | |
| I don't think individual tax rates are going to affect people's jobs as much as the corporate tax rate was. | ||
| They should be charged their fair share without the loopholes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's hear next from Rich in Marion, Ohio on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Rich. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Said that has some really good points there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seems like we have the problem of we tax the drug companies too much, and suddenly they move to Ireland because their taxes are lower. | |
| So, we say, well, let's charge them even more taxes. | ||
| Maybe we can lose another company from the United States. | ||
| We need to get our tax money and try to do it right. | ||
| But we do have the golden goose problem: that, boy, if you eat that golden goose, it'll be a great meal, but suddenly every month they don't produce more earnings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like the rich are producing earnings and good things first. | |
| They're not perfect, no doubt about it. | ||
| Every group is. | ||
| The people are taking money versus the capitalists. | ||
| And trying to get the right answer here is so, so important because China is trying to figure which way to screw us up. | ||
| I'll hang up, listen to your answer. | ||
| Don't really have an answer to that, but interesting points. | ||
| Let's hear from Alan in Blountville, Tennessee, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you this morning? | ||
| Fine, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think the problem in a word is money. | |
| I don't believe in, I believe the politicians have used divide and conquer. | ||
| Half the Americans are Democrats, half are Republicans. | ||
| And while they're fighting each other, the politicians are just getting richer and richer. | ||
| I'm 76 years old. | ||
| When I started voting, what politicians today do would have put them back, would have put them in jail for taking all this money from the rich and corporations. | ||
| We need to stop that. | ||
| No one is going to give a politician, no person or corporation is going to give them millions of dollars without expecting something in return. | ||
| And we have a Congress that hasn't done anything of any substance in probably 30 years because each side is afraid to get their donors, their wealthy donors and corporations, upset where they won't give them money anymore. | ||
| So the average person is not considered by Congress anymore. | ||
| Until we take the money out of it, nothing's going to get better on either side, by either side. | ||
| Well, on one side of this issue on the floor of the Senate, Bernie Sanders was speaking out against the GOP tax cuts and their plans, as well as wealth inequality in general. | ||
| Madam President, as you may know, we have more income and wealth inequality in our country today than we have ever had in the history of America. | ||
| Three people on top own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, top 1%, owns more wealth than the bottom 90%. | ||
| CEOs now make about 300 times more than their workers. | ||
| In other words, the very rich, becoming much richer, and working families are struggling. | ||
| So what does this budget resolution do to address this very serious crisis? | ||
| Does it help working people? | ||
| Does it help low-income people? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| It actually makes income and wealth inequality much worse by providing massive tax breaks to the billionaires and the richest people in this country, driving up the national debt, and making those on top very, very happy. | ||
| Madam President, in America today, the richest country in the history of the world, we have 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck, struggling every week to put food on the table, to pay the rent, to deal with child care, to take care with health care. | ||
| Madam President, real wages, real inflation accounted for wages for the average American worker have been stagnant for the last 50 years, despite a huge increase in worker productivity. | ||
| And today, all across this country, you have workers working for $11, $12, $13 an hour working for starvation wages. | ||
| Some of them are actually sleeping in their cars. | ||
| Let's now turn to some of the comments we've been receiving from you on social media and via text. | ||
| Linda Smith, referring to President Trump and his changing position on whether to raise taxes on the rich, he keeps pivoting on everything because he believes in nothing. | ||
| Then Nick Kirby says on Facebook, I believe they are taxed more than anyone. | ||
| It's proven taxing more, it's proven taxing more won't fix the problem. | ||
| Scott Villandry says there shouldn't be an income tax to begin with. | ||
| There should just be a national sales tax. | ||
| Jim Dahmer says raising taxes is not a good thing. | ||
| We need to lower the individual and corporate tax rates so the economy is open to all, not just the ones that the politicians choose. | ||
| Matthew Crawley says taxes shouldn't be raised on anyone. | ||
| Massive spending cuts are needed. | ||
| Raymond Nickerson says, of course not. | ||
| This is related to should the wealthy pay more taxes. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| They already pay 45 plus percent of all federal income taxes. | ||
| Just leave the rates on the rich where they are and cut the middle class like tips, overtime, and social security. | ||
| Carolyn Cook says, the art of the deal, Trump knows exactly what he is doing just to get out of his way. | ||
| I support everything President Trump has done and will do the next three and a half years. | ||
| Trump Vance 2028. | ||
| Now then, back to your calls. | ||
| And you can also send us a text message or social media post. | ||
| A text line is 202748-8003. | ||
| We're on social media at facebook.com slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Now back to your calls. | ||
| Donna is in Maine on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Donna. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I hope the gentleman from Pennsylvania is still listening. | ||
| He commented on a teacher's retirement benefit that, quote, all the taxpayer money went into. | ||
| And maybe in Pennsylvania, taxpayer money goes into teachers' retirement benefits, but not in Massachusetts. | ||
| I'm almost 78, and I just finally qualified for Social Security because I worked. | ||
| I'm still working. | ||
| But prior to that, our retirement benefits come only from our paychecks. | ||
| They go into an annuity, which grows over time, and that is invested, of course, in the stock market, and that supplies our benefits. | ||
| But he was quite, he begrudged the taxpayer, quote, money that went into that woman's retirement benefits. | ||
| And at least in Massachusetts, that is not the case. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Keith is in Pennsylvania on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Keith. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| I would like to say that spending is the real problem in our government, and I don't believe that Republicans or the Democrats have helped at all. | ||
| I am against TIPS getting tax free because they are earning income and they should pay for it the same as everyone else that is earning income. | ||
| Also, Trump wanted the Social Security to be tax-free. | ||
| Well, that would help me, but I am against it because our federal government is so far in debt. | ||
| One of the other things being debated in terms of what should end up in this final tax bill is changes to the state and local tax deduction. | ||
| Here's a story about this in Fox News. | ||
| Blue State Republicans threaten mutiny over state and local taxes in Trump's big, beautiful bill, going on to say that sparks are flying over taxes that primarily affect Republicans representing districts in Democrat-controlled states, sending tensions skyrocketing as GOP lawmakers negotiate President Trump's big beautiful bill. | ||
| The fight more specifically is about state and local tax deductions, colloquially known as SALT. | ||
| Republican lawmakers representing high cost of living areas outside big cities had been pushing leaders to raise the current cap on salt deductions, $10,000 for both single-filers and married couples, in Trump's bill. | ||
| However, on Thursday night, leaders of the House SALT caucus emphatically rejected what they said was an offer from GOP leaders to raise that deduction to $30,000. | ||
| We've negotiated in good faith on SALT from the start, fighting for the taxpayers we represent in New York, yet with no notice or agreement. | ||
| The Speaker and the House Ways and Means Committee unilaterally proposed a flat $30,000 SALT cap, an amount they already knew would fall short of earning our support, the statement said. | ||
| Now, President Trump on Friday also weighed in on this debate within the GOP over the state and local tax deduction. | ||
| Here's that exchange. | ||
| There are some Republicans who say, why is it that these 45 other states should be paying taxes to alleviate the tax burden of New York? | ||
| It's only because those states are behind, very badly behind, and those people were affected very badly. | ||
| And, you know, the sad part is oftentimes they were affected badly because you had bad management in those states, like in California with Newsom. | ||
| And, you know, people. | ||
| So you had some bad management. | ||
| But that's being worked on now. | ||
| They may do a piece one way or the other. | ||
| It's a very complex issue, but I think it's being worked out. | ||
| I think it's going to be settled yet, but they'll settle it up pretty quickly. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| Clyde is in Queens, New York on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Clyde. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm a real estate investor, and I had to learn the hard way of what money was about. | ||
| And unfortunately, or should I say fortunately, Bernie Sanders is actually telling the truth. | ||
| If you want to save Social Security, Medicaid, and so forth, you can just tax the wealthy, take off the cap off of the Social Security income for the wealthy. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| That would clear it up within a matter of 10 years. | ||
| We never have to worry about Social Security and Medicaid ever again. | ||
| And I voted for Reagan, which I now know it was a horrible mistake, even though I'm in a certain tax bracket. | ||
| The truth is the wealthy have gotten filthy rich. | ||
| President Reagan, the rich have gotten like a 400% wealth increase. | ||
| Everybody else is staying stagnant. | ||
| And most Americans are not financially savvy. | ||
| And all you have to do is just look at how much the wealthy have increased in their pay and benefits and so forth and so on, and look at the average man. | ||
| And from the time of Reagan, the wage stagnantness of the middle class has stopped. | ||
| And matter of fact, that was the end of the middle class when Reagan got in and did that trickle-down economics. | ||
| That's all I got to say. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Frank is in Aberdeen, Maryland on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Frank. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, happy Mother's Day. | |
| I remember in 1963, real fiscally conservative Republicans saying that the JFK tax cuts were going to lead to growing deficits. | ||
| Then in 1980, I remember Reagan saying the reason for his tax cuts initially was to starve the beast. | ||
| And the idea was if the deficit got so big, all of these wasteful entitlement programs would have to be, Congress would be forced to cut them. | ||
| He's jumping up and down right now. | ||
| And that's how we got to where we are at. | ||
| Tax cuts do not pay for themselves because that's, he then told the lie. | ||
| Tax cuts pay for themselves. | ||
| Research shows it pays about 30 to 33 cents back for every dollar you cut. | ||
| The Republican agenda is to cut every progressive program, says Roosevelt, and I mean Teddy Roosevelt, not just Franklin Roosevelt. | ||
| They want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, and everything else. | ||
| I have a niece that I believe is now alive because Maryland's Medicaid program saved her when she was having a difficult pregnancy that I guess if she was in Mississippi, she would probably be dead, as well as her baby. | ||
| We need to understand why our government, our federal government, is here. | ||
| We need to support each other as a nation. | ||
| We need to also not tear down FEMA. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| We're going to have national disasters. | ||
| And he's going to expect poor states to go over and pay for everything if Category 5 hit Alabama. | ||
| I do want to get to a couple more folks before we have to end this segment. | ||
| Let's hear from David in Pennsylvania on our line for independence. | ||
| Hi, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm just good morning, ma'am. | |
| I think people were a little confused this morning. | ||
| It's we the people. | ||
| Yes, it's our nation that have to take care of one another. | ||
| We have some called Social Security. | ||
| Second of all, if we get rid of these illegal immigrants that are in this country here illegally, I'm all for everybody coming here the right way, legally. | ||
| You know, but here's the point. | ||
| We get rid of the illegal immigrants like in Massachusetts. | ||
| They're spending billions and billions of dollars on these illegal immigrant programs. | ||
| That'll be saving money right there if we get rid of these illegal immigrants. | ||
| I'm not a racist. | ||
| I'm not against anybody just coming here the right way like my grandparents did and our founding fathers did. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Michael is in Reno, Nevada on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I just wanted to bring up a couple of things. | ||
| The comment that was made last week about how Donald Trump claims that Ross Perot cost George Bush the election in 1992, which is, I think, is false because George Bush's time was up. | ||
| Perot voters, if they had a choice, they wouldn't vote for Bush. | ||
| They would have voted for Clinton. | ||
| Another thing is, in 1982, precedent has already been decided by the United States Supreme Court. | ||
| Taxes are taxable income. | ||
| They've already decided. | ||
| This is going to end up in the courts with the United States Supreme Court. | ||
| People that tip, they have to pay taxes on their money. | ||
| And if they tip people, they're going to say to themselves, why should I tip them when they don't have to pay taxes on the money they earn? | ||
| It's not fair. | ||
| So that'll ruin it for everything. | ||
| I've been in the gaming industry since 1987. | ||
| All my life I've done it. | ||
| It's going to ruin everything for the poor people in the state of Nevada if they decide to do that. | ||
| Besides that, we need to take care of this deficit, and everybody needs to pay their fair share. | ||
| Taxes are taxable income. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, thank you to everybody who called in this hour. | ||
| Coming up next, we're going to have a couple more interesting segments. | ||
| Later on, we're going to hear for Mother's Day. | ||
| We're going to talk with Kristen Raufinkbeiner of the group's Mom Rising on public policy challenges facing mothers. | ||
| But up next, we'll have a discussion on the state of the media, the Trump administration, and political news of the day with Matthew Boyle, the Washington Bureau Chief for Breitbart News Network. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Weekends bring you Book TV, featuring leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | |
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| Dr. Robert Smith shares his book, Has Medicine Lost Its Mind, in which he argues that the medical establishment has failed to consider the importance of mental health in favor of focusing on physical health. | ||
| Kimberly Heckler talks about her biography of her mother-in-law, Margaret Heckler, in A Woman of First. | ||
| Margaret Heckler was a Republican member of Congress from Massachusetts, who later served as HHS Secretary and Ambassador to Ireland under President Reagan. | ||
| Then on afterwards, Atlantic magazine staff writer Sophie Gilbert looks at the pop culture of the 90s and early 2000s and its impact on women and the feminist movement in her book, Girl Long Girl, How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. | ||
| She's interviewed by Jennifer Posner, author and founder of Women in Media and News. | ||
| Watch BookTV every weekend on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Get C-SPAN wherever you are with C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app that puts you at the center of democracy, live and on demand. | ||
| Keep up with the day's biggest events with live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the U.S. Congress, White House events, the courts, campaigns, and more from the world of politics. | ||
| All at your fingertips. | ||
| Catch the latest episodes of Washington Journal. | ||
| Find scheduling information for C-SPAN's TV and radio networks, plus a variety of compelling podcasts. | ||
| The C-SPAN Now app is available at the Apple Store and Google Play. | ||
| Download it for free today. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Matthew Boyle, who's the Washington Bureau Chief of Breitbart News Network. | ||
| Welcome to the show. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Even though it's been a while since you've been with us, welcome back. | ||
| Tell us about the Breitbart News Service, about how you're funded, where you exist online and on TV. | ||
| Yeah, so, well, first off, since it's Mother's Day, I got to give a huge shout out to my mom. | ||
| So I know she's watching at home and she is very excited. | ||
| And I wouldn't, and neither would my brother be where we are today without her. | ||
| So what's your mom's name? | ||
| Her name is Patty. | ||
| So she is very excited. | ||
| So happy Mother's Day to my mom and to all the moms out there across the country. | ||
| So a little bit about Breitbart. | ||
| So we are right-a-center conservative media outlet. | ||
| We're very open about it. | ||
| We are, our main product is our website. | ||
| So we have Breitbart.com. | ||
| But we also do seven days a week of radio on SiriusXM. | ||
| I host our Saturday show. | ||
| Mike Slater hosts our weekday morning shows and Joel Pollock hosts our Sunday evening show. | ||
| We also do lots of video. | ||
| We have a big social platform. | ||
| But we go out there, we cover the news. | ||
| And I think we do a better job of it than a lot of our competitors out there. | ||
| And there's a serious crisis right now in the media industry. | ||
| And people are turning to new media outlets like us to get the facts. | ||
| And while the rest of the establishment, legacy media is hurting, they're turning to places like Breitbart. | ||
| Now, this site and your news network is named after Andrew Breitbart. | ||
| Let's look at a clip from Andrew Breitbart, who passed away since this has aired, obviously. | ||
| But this is an interview that we had with him on Washington Journal in May of 2011, 14 years ago. | ||
| Let's play that clip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I used to be what I refer to in the book as a default liberal. | |
| I grew up liberal in the west side of Los Angeles. | ||
| And what I learned in my prep school, what I learned through my American Studies degree at Tulane University, what I learned from my MTV, what I learned from ABC, CBS, and NBC is that liberalism is righteous and that anybody that disagrees with it is somehow against the children, against the environment, against, you know, all things good. | ||
| And I happened upon conservative, I tripped upon conservatism, you know, during a time when I was driving, you know, scripts around Hollywood. | ||
| And when I discovered AM radio Rush Limbaugh Dennis Prager, I started to hear a perspective that I had never heard before. | ||
| And it made a lot more sense to me than what I had been growing up, that I had grown up with. | ||
| And so I'm indignant about the fact that the mainstream media pretends to be objective when in fact it's a cudgel that the left uses against the American people. | ||
| And I'm a Tea Party guy, and I'm righteous about what their cause is, limited government. | ||
| I'm righteous about the cause of fiscal restraint. | ||
| And the idea that the mainstream media, the Democrat media complex, would frame the Tea Party from the get-go as a potentially violent threat and a racist threat shows how frightened the Democrat media complex is of its own citizenry, of the American people. | ||
| Now, Andrew Breitbart passed away about a year later in March of 2012. | ||
| Can you tell us a bit about him and how his work informs your site and your news organization now? | ||
| Sure, and you just heard him talking there about what he believed about the objectivity lie about the establishment media. | ||
| What we see from establishment media outlets here in the United States, and this is unique to the United States. | ||
| British press don't do this. | ||
| Other places around the world don't do this. | ||
| They're pretty open about what they believe. | ||
| Establishment media outlets, regularly, people that work there, they claim that they are objective. | ||
| And because it's humanly impossible to be objective. | ||
| Every decision we make as journalists, from who we interview to who we don't, to what quotes we use to what we put in the headline, to what the focus is, has the opportunity for the insertion of bias. | ||
| We're human beings. | ||
| We're not robots, right? | ||
| We make decisions. | ||
| And our belief is that it's better to be open about what it is that we believe with our audience and honest with them rather than try to claim to them that we're some like robotic people. | ||
| And we're not. | ||
| We make decisions. | ||
| And so I think it's better to be open and honest with folks about that. | ||
| And I think that Andrew Breitbart believed that. | ||
| So we've built the entire team here at Breitbart around the entire ethos of our news organization is built around we're open and honest about it. | ||
| At the same time, everything we do, accuracy is king, right? | ||
| So every story we do, I challenge anybody out there, any critic of ours, to find anything that we've printed that's inaccurate. | ||
| If you do, reach out to us. | ||
| We will consider a correction. | ||
| But the fact is, is that accuracy is king. | ||
| So starting from the belief that if we can be open and honest with our audiences, and I think that, you know, let's be honest here for a minute. | ||
| The vast majority of people in the establishment media, the people that work at the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, et cetera, they probably all voted for Kamala Harris. | ||
| They all voted for Joe Biden. | ||
| They voted for Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Be open about it, right? | ||
| I voted for Trump. | ||
| I'm open about that. | ||
| I'm a conservative. | ||
| I wanted him to win. | ||
| But at the same time, that doesn't mean I can't tell the truth. | ||
| I'm a journalist at heart. | ||
| I want the truth to succeed. | ||
| I want to hold people in power accountable. | ||
| And one of the biggest things that we're doing right now is really holding President Trump to the campaign promises that he made to the American people. | ||
| So what we're doing is we're doing stories designed to focus on that. | ||
| And I think it's working, right? | ||
| Like, so I think people continue to turn more and more to us. | ||
| And I think if you look at the actions of the President and you look at the work that we've done over the course of this year, we're doing a real, I think that that is the cir too many people in the establishment media got lost during Trump's first term. were focused on cosplaying as Woodward and Bernstein thinking they were going to go take the president down. | ||
| That was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. | ||
| That was a once-in-a-history of a nation type thing, the Watergate story. | ||
| And I think that they thought that that's what they were going to do. | ||
| And they cooked up all these things against Trump to try to take him down. | ||
| And most of that stuff didn't pan out. | ||
| And most of it was inaccurate, right? | ||
| The Russia hoax, et cetera. | ||
| And then what do they do? | ||
| They turn around, they award themselves Pulitzer Prizes, right? | ||
| Like, you know, and other awards and whatever to celebrate themselves. | ||
| The fact is, is that I think that there are serious problems with this media industry, and they all stem from what Andrew Breitbart identified there, which is the objectivity lie. | ||
| Now, you mentioned that this idea of objectivity, which you believe doesn't exist, filters how people select stories. | ||
| Can you talk about some of the stories that Breitbart covers that you think aren't being covered or aren't being covered fairly by other outlets? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| A really good example of this is what we just saw with the whole Liberation Day thing with President Trump, where he announced the tariffs, and then a week later he did the 90-day pause. | ||
| Anybody that's been paying attention to President Trump knows that the whole focus here was on China. | ||
| So when the president rolled out the 90-day pause, I was in Greece and I was interviewing the Prime Minister. | ||
| I'd interviewed the Prime Minister of Greece a day or so before. | ||
| And the thing that we saw from, again, from across the establishment media was they were out there saying, oh, the whole rest of the world is upset with President Trump. | ||
| I didn't find that. | ||
| Now, look, I can only speak for, like, I was in Greece. | ||
| I was talking to the Prime Minister of Greece. | ||
| He's saying that the European Union and the United States can easily reach a mutually beneficial trade deal. | ||
| And our interview got major attention there. | ||
| It got a lot of attention here. | ||
| President Trump responded to it at the White House and spoke highly of the Prime Minister. | ||
| But the fact is, is that I think that there are a lot of people worldwide that support what President Trump is doing here and trying to turn the tide around when it comes to trade. | ||
| We've seen once vibrant communities across America's heartland that are a fraction, that produce a fraction of what they used to do. | ||
| And a big part of that is that the reason why this happened is leaders of both political parties, by the way, so Republicans and Democrats, were doing things over the course of the last 30 years since the end of the Cold War that enabled the Chinese Communist Party's rise. | ||
| And so I think that it's abundantly clear that President Trump was focused on China. | ||
| He just didn't want to tip his hand right away. | ||
| And then lo and behold, when he does the 90-day pause, he does it for everybody but China. | ||
| So it's like you don't need a Rosetta Stone to understand what President Trump is doing. | ||
| You just have to listen to what he's saying and his speeches over the course of his career. | ||
| And so I think if you look at our coverage of the trade, the trade battle, I think that it's a lot better than a lot of the rest of the establishment media. | ||
| Can you talk about your access as a news organization to the Trump administration and how that compares with access you've had to previous administrations? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This administration is the most transparent. | ||
| And this is even more so than President Trump's first term. | ||
| I think that President Trump's first term was, until the second term, now, the most transparent. | ||
| But we have a lot of access. | ||
| We've interviewed most of the cabinet already. | ||
| Somebody here at Breitbart. | ||
| I've personally done a bunch of these interviews. | ||
| Just this past week, I was with Steve Wickoff at the White House. | ||
| Steve Wickoff is obviously the president's special envoy to the Middle East and leading the negotiations To get to a lasting peace in Gaza, to get to an end to the Russia-Ukraine war and to expand the Abraham Accords. | ||
| And he's also meeting with the Iranians, I believe, today. | ||
| So we've published several pieces from that already, and we've got a lot more coming. | ||
| But we've interviewed several members of the president's cabinet. | ||
| I interviewed the president alongside a couple of my colleagues in mid-March, the vice president. | ||
| They're extremely accessible. | ||
| So more so than any modern administration. | ||
| The Biden administration was very closed off. | ||
| The Obama administration, I can't really speak back further than that, but that's when I got my start, the Obama administration was pretty closed off as well. | ||
| So I would say that Trump in the White House has been one of the most open, honest, transparent presidents across his administration, both in his first term and now in his second term. | ||
| And I'd argue the second term is even better than the first. | ||
| Do you all have a seat in the White House briefing room? | ||
| Technically, no, because that's decided by the White House Correspondents Association, not by the White House. | ||
| The White House Correspondents Association and us have had a variety of conflict dating back a long time. | ||
| Now, we did, this White House did add two new seats at the front of the room that they call the new media seat. | ||
| So on their first day, their first press briefing, I was there in the press briefing room in a seat, new media seat at the beginning of this second term with Caroline Levitt there. | ||
| I think that was a good move. | ||
| I do think that the White House Correspondents Association has serious problems as an institution. | ||
| They have regularly stripped voting rights from news organizations. | ||
| They have kicked organizations out. | ||
| They serve to protect the establishment legacy media outlets, the ones that are already there and in the front couple of rows, right? | ||
| So they're more interested in protecting the associated press and CNN in those places than they are in providing more voices, not less. | ||
| That was Andrew Breitbart's belief, right? | ||
| Is a more voices, not less is a good thing. | ||
| I think we should open up the briefing room and have far more outlets that are there already. | ||
| So this White House has taken a number of steps. | ||
| Now, at the same time, while this White House is taking a number of steps, as a journalist, I would prefer that these steps come from the journalists, right? | ||
| So the White House Correspondents Association should be leading these efforts, not the White House. | ||
| I think the White House has suggested that maybe they should be making the seating chart. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's the thing is that the White House Correspondents Association should be the ones to change it up, right? | ||
| Like, I mean, the seating chart hasn't changed in what, 20 years, something like that, right? | ||
| Like, maybe they should take the steps to do it and not let the White House be the ones setting the tone here, right? | ||
| If you believe in the First Amendment, you believe in journalism, right? | ||
| You believe in media access, then as an institution, maybe they should be the ones taking the steps to do this stuff, not the White House. | ||
| And so while I applaud the White House for these steps, they should be coming from the White House Correspondents Association. | ||
| We've already got lots of callers with questions for you, but folks who want to call in, Democratic line is 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We're going to start with Bradley in Marietta, Georgia on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Bradley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I just want to tell America this guy is completely gaslighting you. | ||
| He's ridiculous. | ||
| And when you brought up the Russian hoax, it was not a hoax. | ||
| Him, Paul Manafort. | ||
| I mean, there's like ample evidence. | ||
| And then, I mean, look at it. | ||
| He doesn't say anything negative about Vladimir Putin ever. | ||
| He's completely in cahoots or whatever. | ||
| Like here, like there was a Russian conspiracy, and that's all I want to say. | ||
| This guy's terrible. | ||
| We'd prefer it if you do not insult our guests, but I will let you respond. | ||
| It's typical Democrats, right? | ||
| Like, I mean, that's what we're facing on a regular basis. | ||
| I mean, at a certain point, and by the way, there are a lot of reasonable Democrats out there. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| Believe me, I have many friends who are Democrats, and they agree on a lot of these issues, particularly protecting the working class. | ||
| I was watching in the green room in the last hour when you were talking about the tax rates and stuff. | ||
| I mean, the fact that you see President Trump even considering going out there and raising taxes on the upper income folks out there. | ||
| I mean, the fact is that President Trump has pulled off the greatest political realignment in probably American history. | ||
| It's definitely up there with FDRs. | ||
| But the working-class voters make up his coalition, black voters, Hispanic voters. | ||
| He hit historic numbers with both of them, both demographics in this last election. | ||
| He remembers that. | ||
| The core part of his pledge is to raise, to eliminate taxes on tips, to eliminate taxes on Social Security income and on overtime wages. | ||
| And so hopefully those are all part of this reconciliation plan. | ||
| And I think that all of that stuff is going to help working class people. | ||
| But I do think that the radical left that we see out there is there's still a radical left. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| We have a question from X. What, if any, left-of-center news organizations do you believe are credible? | ||
| And specifically, what are your thoughts on Glenn Greenwald and breaking points with Crystal Ball and Sager Ingenti? | ||
| Okay, so Glenn Greenwald is fantastic. | ||
| So I'm a huge fan of Glenn's work. | ||
| I follow his stuff very closely. | ||
| I also follow Ryan Grimm at Dropsite News. | ||
| I think that he is a pretty solid guy. | ||
| And in fact, while I criticize these establishment media outlets, I regularly read them. | ||
| So I subscribe personally to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I read those outlets on the regular. | ||
| I read Politico. | ||
| I read The Hill. | ||
| I read all of these places to gather information. | ||
| But I also would say that the exciting folks on the left are in many ways the Glenn Greenwalds of the world and the Ryan Grimms of the world. | ||
| Tom is in Spring Hill, Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good morning, sir. | |
| How are you? | ||
| I have two questions. | ||
| First is about AI. | ||
| Is it a game changer now, since we're more progressing into AI, that it could help us with the tariffs and offset the slave labor that China uses, the cheap slave labor, and it gives America an advantage if we focus on AI, we'll be able to defeat them with the tariffs and having more businesses and more factories with AI in the United States. | ||
| Another question I had is that this new Pope, Louis XIV, with his globalist ideas, he wants to push for illegal immigration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why don't he tear down the walls of the Vatican, get rid of security, and with all those expensive paintings and sculptures, he could house these illegals over there. | |
| As a Catholic, I've been to the Vatican. | ||
| I've seen how much money is in there. | ||
| He should put his money where his mouth is. | ||
| Yeah, so two points there. | ||
| So on the AI front, the one thing I will say from talking to senior administration officials and cabinet officials across the Trump administration, I've interviewed Administrator Zeldon of the EPA, Secretary Bergham at Interior, so many others. | ||
| They all, to a person, talk about the importance of artificial intelligence for the future. | ||
| As for what that exactly looks like and what those policies look like, I mean, that story is yet to be written. | ||
| So I mean, we'll see as it plays out. | ||
| As for the Pope, you know, I think the, again, still unclear as to where he's going to come down politically, culturally, et cetera. | ||
| So it's a story we're watching very closely. | ||
| There are some signs that he, you know, I think he was a registered Republican. | ||
| So I think there are some signs that, you know, he may not be as left of center as or as far left progressive as Pope Francis was. | ||
| But there are also signs that he's pretty critical on immigration. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| It's a story we're watching very closely. | ||
| A question we received via text from Denise in Redwood Falls, Minnesota. | ||
| Have you covered the possibility of a recession or are we already in one? | ||
| So I would, I'm not an economist, so I don't want to like, I'm a journalist, but as for that question, our economic editor, John Carney, who joined us from the Wall Street Journal several years ago, has been tracking this very closely. | ||
| I don't think we are in a recession. | ||
| I do think that there's a lot of strong economic signs out there from the Trump administration so far. | ||
| Jobs numbers are looking good. | ||
| There's a lot of signs that the Federal Reserve is maybe moving a little bit too slowly with some of the forthcoming rate cuts. | ||
| I know the president has been very aggressive in trying to push them to cut rates a little bit faster. | ||
| And there's a lot of investment coming into the United States from a lot of different companies. | ||
| In fact, I've talked to several executives of companies that were working at different other places around the world and in places like Asia and whatnot. | ||
| They're excited to invest in America. | ||
| So I think you're seeing already some of the early signs of the Trump economy doing very strongly. | ||
| But the idea that we're in a recession, I don't think so. | ||
| Morgan is in Reading, Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Morgan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for C-SPAN. | ||
| Your comment about the radical left. | ||
| I mean, really, you people are allies to Nazis and the Klan. | ||
| Nazis. | ||
| Did you have a specific question from Matthew Boyle? | ||
| How come we don't hear you pushing back on the Nazis that are marching through our American cities like you want to push back on a boy who wants to be a girl? | ||
| I don't want to hear that. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Okay, so again, our friends on the radical left here continue to throw around names like this. | ||
| Of course, it's nonsense. | ||
| The idea that we would be Nazis or anything like that. | ||
| Literally, Breitbart has its roots in Israel. | ||
| Our founding, Andrew Breitbart, Larry Solov, our CEO, went to Israel, met with Benjamin Netanyahu before they founded Breitbart.com. | ||
| The idea that we're somehow aligned with Nazis or something is just nonsense. | ||
| It's crazy, right? | ||
| And so I think what you see out there is... | ||
| I think the question, though, was whether you spend more time covering things like transgender athletes versus any rise of anti-Semitism or racism. | ||
| Well, I mean, I would argue that both are major issues. | ||
| But the fact is, is that how is it normal to have biological boys competing against biological girls in sports? | ||
| It's not, right? | ||
| Like, they have an inherent biological advantage. | ||
| The story is, I'd argue both stories are legit and worth pursuing. | ||
| Next up is Ed in Columbia Station, Ohio on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Ed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Matthew, great. | |
| Good to see you on the show. | ||
| Your topic, news meeting, the Trump administration. | ||
| I'm 65, never missed a vote in my life. | ||
| I'm 18 to now, from local to presidential. | ||
| This is the most transparent president we have ever had. | ||
| The fake news doesn't show 99%. | ||
| Whenever he's live or anything, they don't show it, but they put their spit on it because they cut him out. | ||
| Like, we've already had trillions dedicated in this country coming here from overseas just on his jobs on his policies. | ||
| He's not even in 120 days yet, give or take. | ||
| I mean, just like the correspondence from Washington, the big thing they just had a week or two ago, didn't they just give like a person of the year? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was the person of the year, Kamala Harris. | |
| And then Biden comes out finally out of his basement, goes on the view last week, and he comes out there, again, the Democrats right away says she lost because of sexism and racism. | ||
| That is all that the media does, the fake news. | ||
| And the Democrats, I call them it. | ||
| They're low information voters. | ||
| I watched rates. | ||
| I mean, they even got the Pulitzers for the conclusion story, which is 100% paid done by the Democrat Party, the Clinton administration, the fake crisis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we all know, it's proven. | |
| They got a Pulitzer for that. | ||
| Now, Trump's ratings are still high that the Republicans and the Denver Rats. | ||
| I mean, even Bernie Sanders running around in that part. | ||
| And Ed, did you have a question for Matthew? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, he's, and what I want to ask, I'm going to let go. | ||
| America is, you have to combat his view on, now we're already seeing it, but the media's ratings are like 17%, almost as bad as Washington. | ||
| How can people still be that party? | ||
| Like, I already heard a Nazi caller from them. | ||
| They were so deranged from this election, hateful, most hateful party I've ever seen. | ||
| What's good for this country, they still against. | ||
| And grow this country. | ||
| You've raised a bunch of points there. | ||
| I'm going to let Matthew respond. | ||
| Yeah, look, I think that there's a few things. | ||
| Well, I remember he mentioned the Pulitzers that the two major newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times got over their Russia collusion hoax stuff. | ||
| I think if they were honorable, journalistic, you know, believed in journalistic integrity, those two newspapers would return those Pulitzer prizes and they would give them back because the stories were totally fake. | ||
| Like, I mean, the fact is, is that there wasn't a Russia collusion hoax. | ||
| We know that now. | ||
| And so, or there wasn't Russia collusion. | ||
| It was a hoax. | ||
| So that's one thing. | ||
| I think that the trust in the media is a major crisis in this country. | ||
| And again, we're built to answer this. | ||
| This is what Breitbart does. | ||
| I mean, we go in and we cover stories that other media outlets don't. | ||
| And we're a team of about 80 people that work here. | ||
| And we regularly put up numbers that are stronger than in terms of social media interaction, in terms of traffic, et cetera, that are stronger than the New York Times, that are stronger than the Washington Post. | ||
| We had our guys pull the numbers just the other day. | ||
| Our numbers in the last 30 days against we had more than a million interactions more than the New York Times. | ||
| And we beat almost every single media outlet in the country. | ||
| And why is that happening? | ||
| Why are people coming to us? | ||
| It's because I think that they are hungry for News organization that has their trust. | ||
| And we're honest with people. | ||
| You know what you're getting when you come to Breitbart. | ||
| You know that these are guys that like Trump. | ||
| They want him to succeed. | ||
| They like conservative ideas. | ||
| But also that we are going to tell you the truth. | ||
| And I think that these establishment media outlets have to really change their ways. | ||
| And there are some promising things that are happening in some places across the media. | ||
| I would say that some of the changes that we're seeing at the Washington Post, for instance, under their new leadership are kind of fascinating. | ||
| And I'm watching that closely. | ||
| And we'll see if that stuff continues and how long that goes for. | ||
| But there are some serious problems in this industry. | ||
| And if you believe in telling the truth and journalistic integrity and holding people in power accountable, then we need help as an industry. | ||
| And we're the answer, I'd argue. | ||
| There's some interesting data recently from Pew Research about trust in media, finding that Republicans have become more likely since 2024 to trust information from news organizations and social media sites. | ||
| Around half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 53%, now say they have at least some trust in the information they get from national news organizations, a 13-percentage point increase from September of 2024, when 40% of Republicans said the same. | ||
| Between 2016 and 2024, trust among Republicans in the information they get from the national news media had declined overall, and Republicans' trust in other information sources has increased as well. | ||
| They are now more likely than last year to say they have at least some trust in the information that comes from local news outlets, 75% now versus 66%, and social media sites, 45% versus 37%. | ||
| Republicans' trust in social media has been increasing steadily since 2021 when 19% said they trust the information that comes from social media, at least some. | ||
| What do you think is behind some of those numbers? | ||
| I think part of it is the election. | ||
| So what we saw in November, obviously President Trump won in such a decisive way that I think Republicans are a little confident. | ||
| So I think part of the shift there of Republicans having a little bit more trust out there, you know, it's a similar type of thing to Republicans trust elections can be run fairly or not. | ||
| After they lost in 2020, different, you know, I would say that the Republican trust in elections was record low after they win in 2024. | ||
| They're probably back on the upswing. | ||
| Similar type of a thing here. | ||
| But I do think that also you're seeing what Republicans would define as a news organization is probably a little bit different than what maybe Democrats would define as a news organization. | ||
| So Republicans would consider us at Breitbart to be the news, and probably they would not consider CNN to be a news organization. | ||
| We have another question from X. Mr. Boyle, what is your opinion on fact-checking media reports? | ||
| Why was there a push from the administration to stop fact-checking efforts? | ||
| Does that concern you? | ||
| Specifically, those fact-checking, I mean, I don't know exactly what you mean about a push from the administration. | ||
| I think that fact-checks are great. | ||
| Like, we do them all the time at Breitbart. | ||
| So we fact-check President Trump, we fact-check Republican leaders in Congress, we fact-check Democrats, we fact-check the media. | ||
| I think fact-checks are fun in terms of stories. | ||
| Sometimes they're true, right? | ||
| Like sometimes when you check if somebody says something that you think isn't the most credible thing in the world, then you dig into it a little bit and it turns out to be true. | ||
| And Trump does this quite a bit, actually. | ||
| So, where he'll say something that's a little bit edgy, and then you think there's no way that can be true. | ||
| And then you go and do a little bit of research and you find out that it is. | ||
| But we do regularly do a lot of fact checks, especially on big news nights. | ||
| So, like when we're covering State of the Union or a debate night or something like that, we'll regularly have a team of people that's sitting there writing up fact checks of these things. | ||
| So, I don't think that the I don't know what you mean about a push from the administration to get rid of fact checks. | ||
| The only thing I was able to find quickly related to that was from the campaign, not from the administration. | ||
| But there were several incidents where the Trump campaign pushed back against live fact-checking during debates. | ||
| Perhaps that's what they're meant. | ||
| Oh, maybe if they're putting it on screen on TV, something like that. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that. | ||
| So, I don't think that's the right play. | ||
| But if you want to do an article fact-checking things, I think that's great. | ||
| Rush is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Rush. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, Kimberly. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| And Matthew, I watched a I used to be a Breitbart follower. | ||
| I guess I still am, but I'm more of a Tucker Carlson fan. | ||
| I followed Tucker for 20. | ||
| I'm 73 years old. | ||
| Followed Tucker for 27 years. | ||
| And when Fox fired him, I haven't watched, I don't even watch the local news. | ||
| I haven't watched anything since I watched these podcasts. | ||
| I happened to see Steve Bannon last night. | ||
| He was giving a speech from Hillsdale College, or what a Hillsdale, I think it's a college. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I wanted to know: did you ever work with him? | |
| Because I know he was at Breitbart for a while. | ||
| Yeah, so I actually worked with both Tucker and Steve. | ||
| So I got my start as a reporter at Daily Caller. | ||
| I worked there for about three years when Tucker Carlson was the editor-in-chief. | ||
| And then when Steve Bannon was running Breitbart, so I've been at Breitbart for a little over 12 years now. | ||
| So I started here in December 2012 when I started at Breitbart and for the several years leading up to the 2016 election when he would later go run the Trump campaign in 2016. | ||
| Steve Bannon was our executive chairman. | ||
| He later came back to Breitbart for about four or five months after he left the White House and then has since gone on to launch his own thing. | ||
| I know Steve very well. | ||
| I go on War Room quite a bit. | ||
| I'm on there pretty frequently over the last year or so. | ||
| I think the world is Steve. | ||
| I owe a lot to him. | ||
| He gave me a lot of shots over the course of my life. | ||
| And I think he's doing some amazing stuff out there. | ||
| Next up is Tina in Sonoma, California on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Tina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm calling to find out if Mr. Boyle believes that the 2020 election was fairly won. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, so, okay, so this is a more complicated answer than a yes or no. | ||
| So in the way I would answer this question is that there were a lot of things that were done via executive action from Democrat governors in a lot of different states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, et cetera, in terms of new stuff that we had never done before, in terms of mail voting, in terms of ballot drop boxes. | ||
| There was also hundreds of billions of dollars spent by people like Mark Zuckerberg on things like these drop boxes and mail programs, et cetera. | ||
| So would I argue that it was Dominion machines or something like that? | ||
| No, like, but the do I think that there were some serious abnormalities in the way that we conducted that election? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think that that is part of the reason why you saw a lot of the energy on one side or the other against this. | ||
| You saw big protest movements in 2020 and in early 2021. | ||
| In 2020, a lot of angry people out there. | ||
| And in fact, this is one of the things we do at Breitbart. | ||
| We regularly cover protest movements and understanding what motivates people, what gets them focused on things. | ||
| A big part of the reason why I think you had both the BLM riots throughout the course of 2020 and then later the January 6th stuff in early 2021 is because of the fact that people felt like they weren't getting listened to. | ||
| And that's a big part of the problem of our political class and our establishment media. | ||
| And frankly, across the board, I think that that's a big mistake. | ||
| I would encourage people to go back and look at the stories that we did in the post-2020 election timeframe. | ||
| In fact, we were very critical of people like Lynn Wood, who was going out there and making some outlandish claims. | ||
| And we did some deep dive stories on him. | ||
| We did articles about the January 6th stuff in the lead up to that. | ||
| I can't help but notice that you referred to the BLM riots, but the January 6th stuff. | ||
| Do you think that the January 6th? | ||
| It was a riot. | ||
| It was a riot at the Capitol. | ||
| So I'm not trying to not say that. | ||
| But the fact is that I do think that people, in fact, in the lead up to that, we were actually very critical in the lead up to it. | ||
| If you go back and look, I personally even wrote some stories on Breitbart that laid out like they didn't have the votes. | ||
| So even if they were going to do what they wanted to do, they didn't have the votes in Congress anyway. | ||
| The Democrats did. | ||
| So it's just, I think that, but that at the same time, there are, in both cases, there's a lot of people out there that feel like they're not being listened to. | ||
| In fact, this is why I think part of the reason why I agreed to do this show, because of the live callers, I think that that's a really good thing. | ||
| I do our radio shows at Breitbart. | ||
| We take live callers regularly. | ||
| Some of them are people we agree with, some of them are not. | ||
| But I think that making sure that people are listened to and heard, I mean, that's a big part of the responsibility of American journalists. | ||
| It's a big part of the responsibility of our government. | ||
| And I think it's been a big failure of the establishment in both cases over the last several years across the board. | ||
| And it's part of the reason why we have the messes that we have as a society. | ||
| I do want to get a couple more callers in, but I wanted to ask you about a New York Times story about how last week the Justice Department unveiled a revised regulation for leak investigations, which restores the ability of federal investigators to use court orders, warrants, and subpoenas to go after reporters' phone records, notes, or testimony under certain circumstances. | ||
| What do you think of this policy? | ||
| It's complicated. | ||
| So I think that there's a lot of leakers throughout the federal government that are not well motivated. | ||
| At the same time, I don't like the government going after journalists. | ||
| I don't like that seeing that happen. | ||
| So I don't like leakers, right? | ||
| Like I don't like in the sense of people that are inside the government leaking for political reasons or something like that. | ||
| I don't think that's good. | ||
| But at the same time, I don't like the government doing that type of a thing either. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I'm not sold on it either way. | ||
| Earl is in Indiana on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Earl. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, ma'am. | |
| I've honored this man here. | ||
| He's coming out with the truth, which Trump does. | ||
| But people say he's a liar. | ||
| He's a crook. | ||
| He's a – if people – I'm 88 years old. | ||
| If these people could go back during the 30s and 40s and 50s, they'd realize what this country is. | ||
| Today, it's nothing but greed. | ||
| Everybody wants money. | ||
| Money does not get you into heaven. | ||
| God says, the love of money is evil. | ||
| And that's what we've got right here in this country. | ||
| Everybody wants to seal us blind. | ||
| That's what it's all about. | ||
| These people that give the jobs, they make their money to people that work for them. | ||
| And they pay for them and they pay their taxes. | ||
| If they didn't pay their taxes, they'd be in prison right now. | ||
| So you people, if you think the Democrats can run this country, good luck to you. | ||
| They are the worst thing I've seen in my lifetime. | ||
| I never argued over money. | ||
| The most I ever made an hour was $10. | ||
| Three and a half. | ||
| I'm just wondering if you had a question from Matthew as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you think Mr. Trump is trying to do what's right for this country? | ||
| That's what I want to know. | ||
| Yeah, so I would say I do think so. | ||
| I think that President Trump is definitely trying to, I've gotten to know him very well over the last decade plus. | ||
| I've interviewed him probably as much or as almost as much as anybody else in the media. | ||
| And I've talked to him when the cameras are off and the microphones are off and I've gotten to know him pretty well. | ||
| I think that his heart is in the right place. | ||
| He really wants to do right by the country. | ||
| He wants to leave the country a better place. | ||
| He doesn't need any of this. | ||
| He's a billionaire. | ||
| He's got great properties around the world. | ||
| He didn't need all of the attacks that have come after him and all the weaponization that he's faced and everything that he's gone through. | ||
| But I do think that he's identified a major problem and he sees the same problems that we're talking about here and he wants to try to fix it. | ||
| And I think that President Trump is very focused on that and he wants to leave behind a better country than he was elected to lead. | ||
| Jeff is in Hoboken, New Jersey on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thanks, Kimberly, for taking my call. | |
| I appreciate it. | ||
| I would like to ask if there's, I've been seeing on Independent, you were talking about independent outlets, about this, there's a riff between Netanyahu and Trump that Trump doesn't want to be, he feels like he's being manipulated. | ||
| And so now there's some kind of riff going on that Vance canceled his trip to Israel. | ||
| So, you know, I'd like to know what the speaker thinks about that. | ||
| And also, what do you think about the fact that there's a lot of Jewish people that think that this right-wing Jewish party that's in now with Netanyahu, Danielle Weiss, people like that, are doing more harm to Israel than doing good? | ||
| Those are my questions. | ||
| That question is probably the best and newsiest question of the day because I'm actually going to be publishing a piece later today about this. | ||
| So as I mentioned, I interviewed Steve Wickoff at the White House on Thursday. | ||
| We've published a couple of pieces from that. | ||
| One piece that I haven't published yet that will come out later today is going to be, I asked about exactly this, right? | ||
| Like, and because I'd seen those reports in Israeli media before I'd done this interview, and I asked him about these reports of a souring relationship. | ||
| Now, I've spoken to both Prime Minister Nanyahu. | ||
| Interviewed him when he was here earlier in the year and to President Trump. | ||
| I don't believe those reports to be accurate. | ||
| I asked Steve that, and he said that the relationship between the two countries, the United States and Israel, has never been stronger. | ||
| As for the questions about the Israeli government, I think that Prime Minister Nanyahu, first off, he's led Israel for a very long time, right? | ||
| Like, so in multiple different stints, and I think he's faced some major challenges here. | ||
| And I think he's done a really remarkable job of steering the country through these major moments, like especially after what happened on October the 7th. | ||
| But yeah, I'm not as dialed in on internal Israeli politics, but I do think that he's a major leader, and I think that he has really done some amazing things for Israel. | ||
| Miriam is in Farr, Texas, on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Miriam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I wanted to ask you if you're one of those syncopats that praises the king when they're like in, what do you call it, like in a meeting? | |
| Like one of those meetings. | ||
| And also, are you a person that is going to like to do that when there's like a White House, what do you call it, when they're getting out the news? | ||
| And do you praise the king all the time, as in Trump? | ||
| And also, do you believe in due process? | ||
| Because do you believe in due process? | ||
| And do you think that immigration, that immigrants bring something positive to the country? | ||
| Okay, so there's a bunch of questions there. | ||
| So I'll do my best to unpack them all. | ||
| So I believe number one was if you're a sycophant. | ||
| If I'm a sycophant, no. | ||
| I like to ask interesting, important questions. | ||
| As I mentioned, I just explained one that I asked of Steve Wickoff last week at the White House. | ||
| These are questions that a lot of other people and other media outlets are not asking of these folks, right? | ||
| Like, and so I'm trying to get interesting answers. | ||
| I'm trying to use the access I've got to get answers to important questions. | ||
| As for, there was another question. | ||
| There was a question about whether or not you're in the White House briefing room, but you've kind of already addressed that in terms of your chair. | ||
| But then the third one was about due process and the value of immigrants, which I think is particularly relevant given comments from Stephen Miller last week that the administration is looking into whether or not they could suspend habeas corpus for some immigrants. | ||
| So as for, I don't know what they're going to do with regard to habeas corpus or not, right? | ||
| Like obviously I've seen the same stuff that everybody else has out there. | ||
| Now, as for due process, every American citizen and legal immigrant should be afforded due process. | ||
| But people that broke our laws, legal immigrants, they don't have constitutional rights, right? | ||
| Like constitutional rights go to American citizens. | ||
| And so they don't go to illegal aliens. | ||
| Illegal aliens do not get constitutional rights. | ||
| They don't get due process. | ||
| Like that's not, that's not how this system works, right? | ||
| Like our Constitution and our Bill of Rights protects American citizens. | ||
| And so for American citizens and those who follow our laws and came in legally and are legal immigrants, they should be afforded due process. | ||
| But illegal aliens, no. | ||
| Now, as for the contribution of immigrants to American society, I think that immigrants are a huge part of our history and our culture. | ||
| They add a lot. | ||
| Legal immigrants that came here legally add enormous amounts to our society, to our economy, to our culture. | ||
| We applaud that. | ||
| But at the same time, we should be having a conversation about, First off, we're the most generous country on planet Earth. | ||
| We allow in more than a million people legally every single year. | ||
| But shouldn't we not have a conversation about who we should allow in and why? | ||
| Like, I think that's a fair question to have. | ||
| And also, in terms of illegal immigration, illegal immigration should be zero. | ||
| There should be zero illegal immigrants in America. | ||
| We shouldn't tolerate that. | ||
| We shouldn't tolerate illegal immigration. | ||
| Most countries don't. | ||
| So how we ever got to a place where we did and we allowed in millions of them, it makes no sense, but we should enforce our immigration laws very aggressively and we should be able to decide as a society who adds value to our country. | ||
| And we should be able to make those decisions proactively. | ||
| Very quickly before we have to let you go, another question from X. Can you please explain why every independent media rating outlet describes your news organization as biased and uncredible? | ||
| I've posted several different independent sources that rate news sources for both bias and honesty. | ||
| You've been found lacking in independence and truth. | ||
| Well, I would imagine those are they're referring to ones that are like NewsGuard or other places out there. | ||
| Those are places, many of them are funded by institutional left, by big tech companies in some cases. | ||
| These are places that don't want us to succeed. | ||
| Again, I would challenge you to find something about any individual story, right? | ||
| Like go read our site, right? | ||
| Like read our site, read our content, listen to our interviews, and let me know if you come to the same conclusion. | ||
| Maybe you do, maybe you don't. | ||
| But I think that our product speaks for itself and I'm very proud of it. | ||
| And there's a reason why we continue to grow when these other places like the Washington Post and the New York Times are suffering. | ||
| Well, thank you so much for your time this morning. | ||
| Matthew Boyle is the Washington Bureau Chief for Bright Bart News Network. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Yep, you bet. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Now, coming up in a fit, we are going to, in about half an hour or so, we're going to have a discussion on policy decisions that directly impact mothers with Kristen Rau-Finkbeiner of the group Moms Rising. | ||
| But first, we're going to have an open forum. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Our line for Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| For Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And for Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Carthyism, Whitaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Paul Robeson, House Un-American Activities Committee, the Smith Act, the Hollywood 10, the Joint Anti-Facist Committee, the Truman Loyalty Program, the Blacklist. | ||
| Book Burning, and Communism. | ||
| All subjects of controversy during the 30s, 40s, and 50s here in the United States. | ||
| Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at the New York Times, has a fresh look at all this in his book, Red Scare. | ||
| Mr. Risen writes in his preface that his grandfather was a career FBI agent who joined the Bureau during World War II, and he recounted stories of implementing loyalty tests for the federal government in the late 1940s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Clay Risen with his book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America on this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| There are many ways to listen to C-SPAN radio anytime, anywhere. | ||
| In the Washington, D.C. area, listen on 90.1 FM. | ||
| Use our free C-SPAN Now app or go online to c-span.org/slash radio on SiriusXM Radio on channel 455, the Tune-In app, and on your smart speaker by simply saying play C-SPAN radio. | ||
| Hear our live call-in program, Washington Journal, daily at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Listen to House and Senate proceedings, committee hearings, news conferences, and other public affairs events live throughout the day. | ||
| And for the best way to hear what's happening in Washington with fast-paced reports, live interviews, and analysis of the day. | ||
| Catch Washington today, weekdays of 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Listen to C-SPAN programs on C-SPAN Radio anytime, anywhere. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're in open forum. | ||
| But before we get to your calls, I want to follow up on a point raised in the last segment about the White House considering the ideas around suspending habeas corpus. | ||
| Let's read a bit of a USA Today article about that. | ||
| A writ of habeas corpus is used in federal courts under civil law to challenge a person's detention. | ||
| Stephen Miller, a senior advisor to the president, who was answering a question about illegal immigration, told reporters on May 9th that the Trump administration is actively looking at suspending the constitutional right that allows people to challenge in court their detention. | ||
| Now, habeas corpus, Latin for you have the body, is used to determine if the government's detention of someone imprisoned is legal, according to the Cornell Law Schools Legal Information Institute. | ||
| A writ of habeas corpus is used in federal courts under civil law to challenge a person's detention, commonly used by people imprisoned who are challenging the conviction that led to their prison sentence. | ||
| And so Stephen Miller made those comments on Friday, and let's listen to a bit of what he said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have just two quick questions. | |
| First, you know, President Trump has talked about potentially suspending habeas corpus to take care of the illegal immigration problem. | ||
| When could we see that happen, do you think? | ||
| Well, the Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. | ||
| So, to say that's an option we're actively looking at. | ||
| Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not. | ||
| At the end of the day, Congress passed a body of law known as the Immigration Nationality Act, which stripped Article III courts. | ||
| That's the judicial branch of jurisdiction over immigration cases. | ||
| So, Congress actually passed it's called jurisdiction-stripping legislation. | ||
| It passed a number of laws that say that the Article III courts aren't even allowed to be involved in immigration cases. | ||
| Many of you probably don't know this. | ||
| I'll give you a good example. | ||
| Are you familiar with the term temporary protective status or TPS, right? | ||
| So, by statute, the courts are stripped of jurisdiction from overruling a presidential determination or a secretarial determination on TPS when the Secretary of Homeland Security makes that determination. | ||
| So, when Secretary Noam terminated TPS for the illegals that Biden flew into the country, when courts stepped in, they were violating explicit language that Congress had enacted, saying they have no jurisdiction. | ||
| So, it's not just the courts aren't just at war with the executive branch, the courts are at war, these radical rogue judges, with the legislative branch as well, too. | ||
| So, all of that will inform the choices the president ultimately makes, yes. | ||
| Now, a bit of history here, as recapped by the New York Times. | ||
| Habeas corpus has been suspended four times in the history of the United States, most recently in Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. | ||
| Each time, authorities cited specific congressional statutes to justify the move, with the exception of one president, Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War while Congress was not in session. | ||
| His move was challenged, and in 1863, Congress passed a law giving him the explicit right to suspend habeas corpus for the duration of the hostilities. | ||
| Now, let's get to your calls in open forum. | ||
| Dan is in Simpsonville, South Carolina on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Kimberly. | |
| I'm waiting to call in because I recognize you as the best host on Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And I'm calling in as a Republican. | ||
| I support Donald Trump, but I'm concerned about the statements that he made on Thursday that they have a deal with the United Kingdom. | ||
| And in fact, they have no signatures. | ||
| They've got to use some time to dot the I's and cross the T's, as I believe they described. | ||
| And so I think everyone should recognize that in that process, something may fall through. | ||
| And so I don't think we have a deal. | ||
| I believe he made the statement so that he could calm down the stock market to reduce the volatility, which I believe the volatility has calmed down some. | ||
| But I also think that he did it because he wanted to give some ammunition to some of the other negotiations, negotiations with other countries, and also to help out the Secretary of Treasurer, Scott Bessett, and negotiator, a trade negotiator, this past weekend. | ||
| And so I just wanted to clarify that I just don't think we have an agreement yet. | ||
| You're accurate that the White House did say that the U.S. and the United Kingdom did reach a historic trade deal, but then later issued more details that the deal is still being hammered out in the final ways. | ||
| But some of the outlines that the White House released around it said that the deal includes billions of dollars for increased market access for American exports, especially in agriculture, that the U.K. would eliminate, reduce or eliminate numerous non-tariff barriers that unfairly discriminated against American products, and that the trade deal would significantly expand U.S. market access in the United Kingdom, | ||
| creating a $5 billion opportunity for new exports for U.S. farmers, ranchers, and producers. | ||
| This was the White House fact sheet about it, but it was later clarified that the deal has not been formally signed. | ||
| So let's hear from Joe in Bowling Green, Ohio on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm calling in on the independents, but I'm actually a Green member. | ||
| And I think there's an important lesson for the U.S. in the Australian elections. | ||
| They just threw out the coalition, which was the Trump Light Conservatives that were trying to get into power. | ||
| And the Conservatives ran their entire campaign around nuclear energy. | ||
| They said that's going to be the future of energy. | ||
| And Australia is leading the world in wind and solar. | ||
| And they've got 4 million solar roofs on houses and buildings. | ||
| And the Conservatives who were pushing nuclear power were completely wiped out. | ||
| It was a historic loss. | ||
| The prime minister got re-elected from the Labor Party, who was a po and the reason is that the Labor Party just stood up against all the lies about nuclear power that the coalition were telling. | ||
| One after another, they proved it was too expensive, it was too dangerous, it was too dirty. | ||
| And once the big lie that the Conservatives were relying on fell apart, all the other lies that the Conservative parties were telling also fell apart, and their whole coalition got thrown out of office in Australia. | ||
| And I think that's an important lesson for Americans: that when we're faced with the big lies that the Conservatives here are telling, if the opposition parties stand up and just stick to the truth and disprove the lies, then the whole House of Cards built on those lies will fall apart. | ||
| And unfortunately, I don't see that happening with our current crop of politicians in anywhere near enough of a level. | ||
| Next up is Larry in Cleveland, Ohio on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is Jackson Larry, 1st Battalion, 6th Marine, 2nd Marine Division. | |
| What's going on now is the presidency is not, we do not worship and we will not celebrate a parade for the president. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Amy is in Leesburg, Florida on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Amy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to bring up a couple points. | ||
| One point is that the reason why Biden chose Harris as his vice president was for the demographics. | ||
| I'm from Florida and I'm a Republican, but Val Deming would have been a much better choice. | ||
| But the reason he didn't choose her was because she had a law enforcement background. | ||
| Also, no one ever brings up the fact that Biden had five deferments, college deferments. | ||
| They're always talking about Trump and his bone spurs or whatever it was, but how come no one ever says anything about Biden and his deferments? | ||
| And with the CIA and FBI conspiring to say that the Biden computer, hunter, Biden computer, wasn't true, 15 to 18 percent of people would have voted differently if they knew that that was true. | ||
| So really, Biden did not win that election legally. | ||
| So, and then he said he wouldn't pardon his son, and he did. | ||
| So, I just would like to bring all these things out that Biden is not the man that you portray him to be. | ||
| You know, plus they said Elon Musk bought Trump the presidency. | ||
| Zuckerberg bought Biden the presidency, and he had to cheat to win. | ||
| So, that's all I have to say. | ||
| Just backing up some points that Amy raised, USA Today has a fact check on this story about Biden and his Vietnam deferments. | ||
| Biden, like Trump, received multiple draft deferments from Vietnam. | ||
| The claim that former Vice President, this was a 2020 story, former Vice President Joe Biden received five draft deferments from the Vietnam War, referring to some Facebook posts. | ||
| Biden received five student draft deferments and a medical exemption, first as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware and later as a law student at Syracuse University. | ||
| And after a medical exam in April 1968, he received the 1Y classification, which meant he could only be drafted in a national emergency. | ||
| Next up is Art in Streamwood, Illinois on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Art. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'm so happy to be talking to you one more time. | ||
| I just want to say that what amazes me, why I listen to this show, watch it, is because the people of Columbia are very, very, very well educated in things they want to talk about. | ||
| My issue is that at the present time we are involved. | ||
| Some people think this is the beginning game to destroy the republic. | ||
| No, this is the end game to destroy this republic. | ||
| But people that are involved in the alienation of our country from every other ally is pursuing on its own, it's picking up impetus. | ||
| It's starting to become more and more apparent to me that what they're trying to do is make this the richest banana republic in history. | ||
| And I'm really afraid that we're going to lose more and more of our freedoms as this goes on. | ||
| They are pushing the envelope as far as they can as far as our ability to be free. | ||
| They're already attacking the First Amendment any way they can, little ways that turn the big issues. | ||
| And the thing is, I see it happening every day in what I see. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next up is David in Tucson, Arizona on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. | ||
| And I have a two-part question, which to me is a yes or no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It just seems like Mr. Boyle is kind of prejudiced. | |
| I would like to know: do you believe that the January 6th rioters so David, I'm going to pause you there because Mr. Boyle is no longer on set with us, but if you wanted to make some comments about what you heard of what he said, please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it just seems by us more Trump. | |
| He's buddies with Trump. | ||
| You know, and I don't think any of the January 6th rioters, violent people, should have been released. | ||
| And it was the Republicans in Texas that sent all of the illegal immigrants into the middle of our country and up to the north. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they want to put it on the Democrats. | |
| Well, they're the ones that put them up there so they could look good by getting them out and giving them money. | ||
| So that's my statement. | ||
| Happy Mother's Day. | ||
| Ruben is in Austin, Texas, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Ruben. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I love this program that you have. | ||
| It's so informative. | ||
| And oh, I was calling in regards to January the 6th. | ||
| Why doesn't anybody bring it up that Nancy Pelosi, she refused the 10,000 National Guards? | ||
| And why doesn't anybody bring it up that when they tracked down all the people that were there, they immediately picked up all their cell phones to erase or to have control of any footage that was recorded of those Biden insurgents. | ||
| were encouraging all the people to get him in a rioting state of mind and encourage him to do all that instruction and everything? | ||
| Why haven't anybody looked into that and brought it out? | ||
| That's my question. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The fact checks related to January 6th, including this one from the Associated Press, contradict this idea that Nancy Pelosi refused National Guard support. | ||
| Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he offered National Guard troops to the Capitol and that his offer was rejected. | ||
| He had previously said that he signed an order for 20,000 troops to go to the Capitol. | ||
| While Trump was involved in discussions in the days prior to January 6th about whether the National Guard would be called ahead of the joint session, he issued no such order or formal request before or during the rioting, and the guard's arrival was delayed for hours as Pentagon officials deliberated over how to proceed. | ||
| Max is in Valdosta, Georgia on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Max. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| And I just want to say a happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. | ||
| Mothers have a full-time job to raise children. | ||
| I want to say my wife has been a great mother to my kids. | ||
| And whether you are a stay-at-home mom or you have a job outside the home, if you're a mother, thank you for the contributions. | ||
| What's your wife's name, Max? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's that? | |
| What's your wife's name? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hopkins. | |
| Happy Mother's Day to her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| In the Bible, when Paul talks to Timothy, Timothy's mother and grandmother had a huge impact in his life, raising him up as a believer in Christ. | ||
| So I just want to say as mothers, Happy Mother's Day. | ||
| Keep doing the good work. | ||
| And you guys are appreciated. | ||
| You women are appreciated. | ||
| As far as that, that's all I have to say today. | ||
| So thank you for taking my call, and everyone have a blessed day. | ||
| Joe is in Adrian, Minnesota on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'd like to speak on the tariffs. | |
| These tariffs are nothing more than a tax that they want to leave in permanently so they can tax us people and give the money to the rich on their $4.5 trillion tax break. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| And he can't even get that right. | ||
| That's all the more I got to say. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Jerry is in Broadway, Virginia, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jerry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Democrats keep yapping about due process. | ||
| Well, yes, over 20 million illegal immigrants were denied their due process. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They were denied that by the Biden administration. | |
| The law clearly states that when you cross their border, you shall be detained until you have your due process. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Next up is Mike in Rockford, Illinois on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Kimberly. | |
| Five things the media totally whiffed on. | ||
| The first one, Elon the Fenam bought Twitter for $48 billion, sold it to himself, which is XAI, for $30 billion. | ||
| $18 billion difference. | ||
| What does that mean to the taxpayer and his write-off? | ||
| Are we looking at paying him $18 billion for his loss? | ||
| First one. | ||
| Second one, the hand on the Bible. | ||
| There's more there than there. | ||
| If you don't get sworn in, you're not the president. | ||
| Ask Obama. | ||
| He had to get sworn in again in the Oval Office after a hiccup in his sworn. | ||
| Here's the president that didn't put his hand on the Bible, and I feel he's going to use it as a loophole saying, you guys never saw me in, so I'm going to run for another term. | ||
| I think he needs to be sworn in, and Obama should pick up the card for it and push it. | ||
| The next one is Melania, or Jill and Biden, Bedpan Joe, and Melania. | ||
| Could Melania be working with the Kremlin as a glorified dog walker for Putin's lapdog, the orange poodle? | ||
| And the final point is the big one. | ||
| They've totally missed out on the biggest one of all. | ||
| These trade deals are, these tariffs are treaties. | ||
| In our Constitution, trees are specifically mentioned. | ||
| You need two-thirds of the Senate and all treaties. | ||
| Now he's rolling in his trees and he's signing as an executive orders into this big, beautiful bill, which I call the Arnold Palmer bill. | ||
| And we're the blow-up dollar. | ||
| U.S. is a lawyer. | ||
| Let's hear from Ernestina in North Carolina on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Ernestina. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Happy Mother's Day to everyone. | ||
| What I want to say, they need to impeach Trump. | ||
| He has Alzhammer, and they know he's not running anything. | ||
| Somebody else is running it. | ||
| And when trouble comes down, he never gets blamed. | ||
| But the people that he has doing these things, they don't want to get blamed. | ||
| And what else I want to say? | ||
| They keep talking about President Biden. | ||
| I let his son. | ||
| As long as President Biden was president, he said he would not release his son. | ||
| But as soon as he didn't be president, of course he was going to release his son. | ||
| What do they think Trump was going to do to that man's son if he had stayed locked up? | ||
| That wouldn't have been right. | ||
| And another thing, Putin, I wish y'all would pull up 1994 and Google. | ||
| They then made an agreement that he was never supposed to miss Ukraine. | ||
| Never. | ||
| It was an agreement back then. | ||
| And Trump needs to apologize to Ukraine's president. | ||
| He was rude and a bully. | ||
| That's one thing that children don't need to look at. | ||
| They don't need to learn how to bully people and disrespect people like he and his vice did. | ||
| That was wrong. | ||
| Edward is in New York on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Edward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Happy Mother's Day to everyone, especially my wife, Grace. | ||
| But I'm glad to follow that young lady there. | ||
| I got a whole bunch of things to say, but I'm going to cut it short. | ||
| I want people to have a chance. | ||
| All we have to do is look back to 2017. | ||
| Look back to the last Trump era. | ||
| I could make a living then. | ||
| I could make a living. | ||
| I was proud of my country. | ||
| They were having oil, that they could help other lesser countries. | ||
| Trump is the best president we've ever had. | ||
| All the others try. | ||
| They try very hard, but he's stuck his neck out there, even to get shot at twice. | ||
| There's people out there that love him very much. | ||
| I'm one of them. | ||
| And I think he's great for our country. | ||
| And if people just remind themselves that he is trying to make up for President Biden did, he's trying to make up for what President Biden did and put his terrible $35 trillion deficit. | ||
| So big Trump. | ||
| He's really great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks to everybody who called in for Open Forum. | ||
| Coming up next, we're going to hear from Kristen Rau Finkbeiner of the group Moms Rising, who's going to be here to discuss public policy challenges facing mothers and families. | ||
| We will be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, former Ohio Governor John Kasich, author of Heaven Help Us, talks about the work done by religious institutions and people of faith in the United States, including combating homelessness, hunger. | |
| human trafficking, and other issues. | ||
| I do think it's not critical to count the number of times you go to church, but at the same time, I think we need to realize that those institutions, they're sort of like when you think about running for office, you need a clubhouse, a political clubhouse to gather. | ||
| I look at the churches as an opportunity for people to go in there with their ideas of change in the world and to be able to find support, some material support, some psychological support. | ||
| I also believe you can get more things done working with others than just working alone. | ||
| John Kasich with his book, Heaven Help Us, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on the C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| Looking to contact your members of Congress? | ||
| Well, C-SPAN is making it easy for you with our 2025 Congressional Directory. | ||
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| This compact, spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every House and Senate member of the 119th Congress. | ||
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| The Congressional Directory costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling, and every purchase helps support C-SPAN's non-profit operations. | ||
| Scan the code on the right, or go to c-spanshop.org to order your copy today. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Welcome back here to talk about Mother's Day and also the policies affecting mothers. | ||
| We're joined by Kristen Raufinkbeiner, who's the executive director and CEO of Moms Rising. | ||
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me and good morning. | |
| Good morning and happy Mother's Day. | ||
| You are co-founder of Moms Rising. | ||
| Can you talk a bit about your group, when and how it started? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Moms is for moms and anybody who's ever had a mom. | |
| So we like to affectionately say it's for anybody with a belly button. | ||
| And we started back in May of 2006 to help increase economic security and build a nation where every family can thrive. | ||
| And so who are your members? | ||
| You mentioned that you're for everybody, but who makes up most of your membership and how many people? | ||
| How are you funded? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love all of these questions. | |
| So it's a beautiful story, actually. | ||
| Moms Rising started with one mom talking to another mom, talking to another mom. | ||
| And all over time, through moms talking to moms, we're now actively 1.2 million members. | ||
| We have members in every state in the nation. | ||
| And in fact, recently we figured out that one in every 300 people are an active member of Moms Rising in America. | ||
| So we are strong and rising and growing. | ||
| And it's really about looking around and saying it shouldn't be this hard to be a mom in America. | ||
| And what are the steps we need to make so that we can increase both economic security, make sure that moms can go to work, contribute to our communities, and raise our kids, and make sure that our economy is strong at the same time. | ||
| So, what do you see as some of the biggest public policy challenges facing mothers in the United States today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is the best question. | |
| What we hear from our members and what we see in the research is actually quite similar. | ||
| In fact, it's the same. | ||
| Moms and people who are raising kids need access to affordable, high-quality child care. | ||
| Childcare right now, in most states in the nation, actually costs more than college. | ||
| And we are in a bind because parents can't afford to pay any more to have child care for their kids. | ||
| And childcare workers are some of the lowest paid workers in the United States of America. | ||
| And we can't afford to pay child care workers any less. | ||
| So we need to solve the child care crisis. | ||
| That is number one on the list. | ||
| Next up, we have an issue that everybody knows about, which is health care. | ||
| Everybody gets sick, and everybody should have a chance to get better. | ||
| So we have moms, dads, parents, people across the nation really rising to make sure people have access to health care. | ||
| And with moms in particular, there is an incredibly bad maternal health crisis in America right now that a lot of people don't know about. | ||
| The United States of America is the only industrialized nation where maternal morbidity or people dying in childbirth is going up, not down. | ||
| And black women are three times as likely to die in childbirth as white women. | ||
| So we have a maternal health crisis happening as part of our health care crisis. | ||
| And we also have a reproductive health care crisis. | ||
| Access to reproductive health care has gone down significantly in recent years as well, which is also a crisis for moms. | ||
| So healthcare overall is a big umbrella that moms care about. | ||
| We also, I have a list, you all, I have a list. | ||
| We also, in the United States of America, lack paid family and medical leave after a new baby or child arrives, or if a serious health crisis strikes ourselves or a close loved one. | ||
| Now, what is that about? | ||
| Well, all other countries on the planet Earth, you all, except six, and the United States of America is one of them, have access to paid family medical leave so that we can recover after a new baby arrives. | ||
| And most people are being pushed back into the labor force within weeks of having a baby, which is far too soon, both to have that bonding as well as to have that recovery, which is part of the reason why we have a maternal health crisis. | ||
| And we know we can do better. | ||
| Many states have passed the policy here, and it's actually boosting businesses, boosting families, and boosting our economy alike. | ||
| I have a longer list. | ||
| My list is actually 12 policies, but I will stop there for a moment so people don't get bored with me going on with the list. | ||
| The key thing is that the policy solutions that we have at the ready to move forward have been tried and tested in many states and across the world. | ||
| And we know we can pass those policies here. | ||
| They are very highly supported by Democrats, Republicans, Independents, everybody alike across the country. | ||
| And so we need to just keep pushing and make sure they happen, especially on Mother's Day. | ||
| Now, Moms Rising organized a rally at the Capitol with both moms and children from around the country last week. | ||
| What was the message for that rally? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thank you for bringing that up. | |
| It was such a fun rally. | ||
| It's so fun. | ||
| We had kids blowing bubbles. | ||
| We had moms speaking out and sharing their stories. | ||
| And really what we're telling Congress, especially the Republican leadership in Congress, is we don't want more tax breaks for people who are already very wealthy like Elon Musk, paid for by giant cuts to the policies that I was just talking about that are priorities of families. | ||
| So right now on the table, there is a Republican-led push to cut $880 billion, that's with a B, over 10 years out of Medicaid. | ||
| That would be a disaster. | ||
| Medicaid actually is part of 40% of all births in America. | ||
| It's part of 62% of all nursing home stays. | ||
| It's part of one in three people who have disabilities. | ||
| access to health care. | ||
| And importantly, Medicaid is what keeps the doors of rural and hospitals of all sizes opened so that anybody who has a crisis can go to the emergency room. | ||
| Also, Medicaid, and you can tell I'm passionate about this one because I have a long list here too. | ||
| A lot of people don't realize, but Medicaid is what brings us new doctors. | ||
| It's how we get doctors in the pipeline to be in service. | ||
| Medicaid covers the residency program in medical school so that we can have that doctor pipeline opened. | ||
| So when you look at the impact of what $880 billion with a B and cuts to Medicaid would be, it is enormous. | ||
| And a lot of people don't realize that Medicaid at the state level is called lots of different things. | ||
| I'm zooming into you from Washington State, for example. | ||
| It's called Apple Care here. | ||
| And other states, they have similar names that identify with the states that they live in. | ||
| So Medicaid is called many, many, many different things depending on where you live. | ||
| So a lot of people don't realize how much they're relying on it, but it's woven throughout our healthcare system. | ||
| So we don't want Congress to cut Medicaid. | ||
| That is a big no. | ||
| That was our message that we were sending this week in Washington, D.C. from moms across the nation. | ||
| Similarly, we do not want cuts in Head Start. | ||
| Head Start is an essential childcare program for America and is on the chopping block as well. | ||
| It's on the chopping block also in President Trump's proposed budget for next year. | ||
| And here we go into this child care issue, which I think is so important to think about. | ||
| Parents need childcare in order to go to work. | ||
| Kids need child care in order to thrive. | ||
| And childcare workers need a really good child care program enabled to be able to stay in that job, stay in that profession so that we can have consistency in education and people can earn living wages. | ||
| So it's an issue where sometimes people back up and they say, well, maybe, you know, what's going on with moms in the labor force? | ||
| And this is really important backdrop. | ||
| Three quarters of moms are in the labor force. | ||
| Three out of four families need the wages of moms to make ends meet. | ||
| We have rising costs of eggs, food, shoes, all the things are rising in costs right now. | ||
| And even before these rising costs happened, three out of four families absolutely needed those wages of moms to keep a roof over kids' head and food on the table. | ||
| But if we don't have access to policies like child care, which includes Head Start, like healthcare, which includes Medicaid, and like the child tax credit expansion, which we would like to happen again, then we absolutely get pushed out of the labor force. | ||
| You also, your group also highlighted that last week on May the on Tuesday, that, which was May the 6th, Moms Rising highlighted what you call Moms Equal Pay Day. | ||
| And we've got some numbers based on that, that white moms are paid 74 cents for every dollar paid to white dads. | ||
| Black moms are paid 56 cents per every dollar. | ||
| Latina moms are paid 51 cents. | ||
| And Native American moms are paid 50 cents. | ||
| Why is it important to highlight these numbers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That, I'm so glad you raised that. | |
| So those numbers are shocking. | ||
| For people who are watching, for people who are listening, you might be like, wait, what? | ||
| We have that big of a wage gap right now? | ||
| The answer is yes. | ||
| And it's actually getting worse. | ||
| So for the first time in decades, the wage gap just expanded between moms and non-moms and actually between women and men. | ||
| So let's back up. | ||
| I love numbers, you all. | ||
| So, warning, numbers are my favorite thing. | ||
| So, let's back up and look at what's happening with the numbers overall. | ||
| 86% of women in America do become moms by the time they're 44 years old. | ||
| So, we're talking about a huge number of people being impacted both by the mom wage gap, which is also called the maternal wall, as well as by what's happening overall with wage gaps. | ||
| So, when we look at that and we look at those numbers, we see that we have something going on where we have both family status discrimination along with structural racism. | ||
| And you see those two things coming together in those wage gaps. | ||
| And those wage gaps are real. | ||
| There are rooms full of studies. | ||
| And, you know, I've written books about this, like literally rooms full of studies over and over again that show that the wage gaps are real. | ||
| And that's the first question that I usually get. | ||
| Are those wage gaps real? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One of my favorite studies that is the most depressing study, so it's depressing to share with you is Cornell University and Stanford University did a study of two pieces of paper. | ||
| So there's not a person involved. | ||
| And the two pieces of paper had equal resumes and job experiences. | ||
| And on that, if you had the one change was that somebody was a mom, the mom was hired 100% less of the time than the non-mom and was offered for a high-paying job $11,000 lower salaries than a non-mom, while the dad got a dad boost and was paid $6,000 more. | ||
| So right now, we're seeing that maternal discrimination in that particular study. | ||
| Why is that happening and how do we solve it? | ||
| That's usually the next question I get. | ||
| Well, in good news, very good news, solutions are very possible. | ||
| We started out this segment talking about what do the policies that moms and people want the most. | ||
| Well, the policies that moms and people want the most also happen to help close the wage gap in very big ways. | ||
| Study after study here too shows that if we had paid family medical leave after a new baby arrived so that there was job attachment and people didn't get pushed out of their jobs when they had a baby, then that would help close the wage gap. | ||
| Combine that with access to affordable child care, access to health care, and access to earned sick days, as well as with policies like the Paycheck Fairness Act, which has been proposed in Congress. | ||
| And then you get really into closing that wage gap in a very big way. | ||
| It's going to take a couple policies combined to help start really closing that wage gap, but there are over 2,000 bills proposed in Congress each year. | ||
| They pass hundreds of bills a year. | ||
| We can do a couple policies combined to help close the wage gap. | ||
| And here's the really good news: even if you aren't a mom, even if you don't care about moms, closing the wage gap helps you because we live in a country where our GDP, where our economy is based on consumer spending. | ||
| Women and moms make 80% of our consumer spending decisions. | ||
| And last I looked, our GDP was actually 74% based on consumer spending decisions. | ||
| So we're making the majority of consumer spending decisions in an economy based on consumer spending. | ||
| But if we don't have funds to spend, if we don't have money in our wallet to get those groceries, to get the shoes when our kids' feet grow and they change sizes, to put a roof over our head to help stimulate the economy, then we all lose out. | ||
| But if we do have pay parity, studies show that we would increase the GDP by three to five percentage points and that 50% of kids or more would come out of poverty. | ||
| So this is a win-win-win-win. | ||
| Pushing these policies that we were talking about forward actually does boost businesses and boost the economy overall. | ||
| We'll be taking questions for Kristen Raufinkbeiner of Moms Rising for Democrats. | ||
| You can call in at 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans at 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents at 202-748-8002. | ||
| And if you'd like to skip all of those categories and just identify as a mom, we have a special line for our moms this morning: 202-748-8003. | ||
| And let's hear from a mom. | ||
| Joe is in Iowa. | ||
| Good morning, and happy Mother's Day. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
| Can you hear us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm here. | |
| Sorry about that. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Go ahead with your question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just another mother distracted there for a moment. | |
| Sorry. | ||
| Y'all are busy. | ||
| So I just wanted to mention: I am, I was a great-granddaughter, a granddaughter, a daughter, and I experienced the loss of my grandmother in 21, the loss of my dad in 23, and now my mom is ailing as well. | ||
| And so what we are experiencing, all as mothers and women, should be taken into consideration for everything else that we do and how important these programs are to us. | ||
| My children had the privilege of using Head Start. | ||
| If they didn't, I don't think they would have graduated, one of them, summa cum laude, and also my other younger one graduating college as well, if we didn't have that Head Start. | ||
| And I just wanted to say that's a reflection on our population. | ||
| And if people like the ones that are in office now want to condemn that, then they're just making, like the city is saying, making everything worse harder for everybody else, not to have these people who are educated and with under their belt that can participate in society, productive person in society. | ||
| I also wanted to make a note, if I could, on Medicaid in general, also something that has seemed to be, you know, that they're threatening to take away. | ||
| Yes, it is all those things that she said, and I found that out the hard way by caring for and participating in the care of my elders. | ||
| But I will also note that some people do not know this, that most of the time when a person receives Medicaid, they are signing something, whether it's in the younger years up into their 80s and 90s when they're in a care home, that they are giving up their entire estate and their home. | ||
| So when they pass away, the state gets to recoup their home and their estate to pay for the Medicaid. | ||
| So either way, Medicare, Medicaid, we, the people who are working all our lives for this, are paying into this system one way or another. | ||
| It is not the budget in which is being canceled by Doge. | ||
| And where is that money going anyway? | ||
| I'd like to know that. | ||
| But thank you very much for your time. | ||
| Bye-bye. | ||
| I love everything that our caller just raised right now. | ||
| And one of the points I want to double down on and really look into is what was just said about Head Start. | ||
| When we look at studies of Head Start, having access to Head Start definitely helps kids, definitely helps moms, dads, and parents, and it helps taxpayers. | ||
| So we just heard a listener share that because of Head Start, kids got a great start and were able to continue on education and continue to be thriving adults. | ||
| This is exactly what we see in studies too. | ||
| And in fact, studies show that for every $1 that taxpayers put into programs like Head Start and child care, we get back at least $7 later. | ||
| There's many studies that show we get back even more, like $20. | ||
| So, I'm giving you the conservative estimate of for every $1 in, we get back about $7 later. | ||
| And why? | ||
| It's exactly what our listener just said. | ||
| It's because of fewer later grade repetitions, fewer need for future government programs that cost even more money. | ||
| And really, those taxpayer savings go on and on and on. | ||
| So, when we're talking about making short-term cuts, and by we, I mean Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump, to programs like Head Start, we actually are undercutting ourselves and our economy in the long run, and it's costing us significantly more in the future. | ||
| I thought that was so important that your listener raised that. | ||
| The other thing that the listener raised is something that is happening to families across America as well, and we hear about it every day. | ||
| It's people in the sandwich generation in what we call the panini, you know, that sandwich that is being squished between two generations, caring for the younger generation and caring for the older generation. | ||
| So many moms, dads, and parents are in that right now, where we have a crunch where both elder care and child care are too often out of reach and cost. | ||
| And at the same time, we have to be in the labor force to help put that food on the table, the roof over the heads. | ||
| So, I'm really glad that the sandwich of caring for younger and older was raised. | ||
| And then there was the budget. | ||
| What's happening with the budget? | ||
| Love that too. | ||
| I was like, wow, this is a great color. | ||
| The question that was raised and that was brought up that I really loved hearing about, and thank you so much, was this our money. | ||
| These are our taxpayer dollars. | ||
| Our taxpayer dollars that we are paying in should most definitely help us have roads to drive on, help us have clean water coming out of our faucets, and help us have that infrastructure that makes work possible. | ||
| And that infrastructure is the care infrastructure. | ||
| So, as we talked about at the beginning of this segment, moms, dads, parents can't go to work. | ||
| Just like we need to build bridges and roads to drive on, we have to build that care infrastructure so we can go to work. | ||
| And doing that means child care, paid family medical leave, health care, as well as we didn't talk about this yet, but SNAP and nutrition programs and other programs that we've been talking about so that we can all thrive. | ||
| Myron is in Centerville, Virginia, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Myron. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and happy Mother's Day to you, your guests today, and all of the mothers there, out there, rather, and especially to all the mothers on C-SPAN's Washington Journal behind the scenes bringing us this program today. | |
| I just wanted to share an illuminating point. | ||
| In the early 2000s, I was divorced and was awarded primary custodial care of two great kids. | ||
| And it was during that time as a single dad that I had an incredibly newfound appreciation for all that mothers do, especially single mothers. | ||
| When I was a single dad, I remember calling my mom, my former mother-in-law, and many mothers that I knew. | ||
| And I wholeheartedly thank them for everything that they did as moms. | ||
| Sorry for cracking, but thank you. | ||
| And I'll listen to your response offline. | ||
| Oh my gosh, sending you the biggest hugs and thank you for all that you've done and for calling in. | ||
| And I think, you know, happy Mother's Day to everybody out there, including the single dads. | ||
| I'm just going to say it. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| Right now, we have a significant number of families who are raising children as single parents. | ||
| In fact, a Johns Hopkins University study recently said that in the millennial population, 56% of parents are unmarried. | ||
| That doesn't mean that they're unpartnered, but it does mean that when we're working on the public policies that lift families, businesses, and our economy, and we just talked for a little bit about how these policies that we're talking about do lift businesses and the economy. | ||
| We could talk a little bit more about that too, because I think it's an important aspect. | ||
| But we are also making sure that we have policies that reflect and respect who we are as a nation. | ||
| And who we are as a nation includes a lot of single parents. | ||
| And single parents and parents, I just want to say, I'm so glad you called on the Independent Line, are not Democrat, Republican, or Independents. | ||
| You know, everybody is having babies across all political parties. | ||
| And when we look at the polling for the policies that we've been talking about, access to health care, access to Medicaid, access to child care, including Head Start, access to paid family medical leave when a new baby arrives or a serious health crisis strikes. | ||
| Those types of policies are supported across the political spectrum by Democrats, Republicans, Independents alike. | ||
| In fact, 76% of Trump voters actually support those policies. | ||
| But unfortunately, while we have those policies supported so much across the country, and we have stories about how these policies matter so much from every state in the nation, in Washington, D.C., inside that Beltway bubble right now, Republican leadership and Donald Trump are trying to cut and undermine those policies in order to pay for more tax breaks for people who are already wealthy, like Elon Musk. | ||
| So on this Mother's Day, we across the political spectrum are rising to say, hello, Donald Trump, President Trump, hello, Republicans in Congress. | ||
| Please don't cut these policies that allow us to thrive, allow our businesses to prosper, and allow our economy to be strong, especially when we have rising costs. | ||
| And thank you so much for sharing your story and for all you've done. | ||
| Speaking of the Trump administration, last month, the White House sounded the alarm on declining fertility rates in the United States and has suggested a number of different policies to try to encourage more Americans to become parents, including $5,000 baby bonuses and classes to help women track their menstrual cycles. | ||
| What's your response to some of these suggested solutions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Honestly, the response to the suggested solutions at the same time as the Trump White House and Republicans in Congress are literally gutting or proposing gutting Medicaid and child care and all the programs that we actually need was that it was insulting. | |
| And here's why it's insulting. | ||
| When we have an actual crisis of motherhood, of businesses, of families, of the economy happening in America, it's insulting to moms to say that, oh, we're going to solve the fertility crisis by telling you about your menstrual cycles. | ||
| We know about our menstrual cycles. | ||
| We also know that child care costs more than college in most states. | ||
| And that is the crisis. | ||
| It's insulting to say that we're going to give you a one-time baby bonus when Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump have undercut the monthly child tax credit extension, which was based on how many kids are in each family and is ongoing on a monthly basis and was proven to boost the economy and our country because we had it for a short period during the pandemic. | ||
| It's insulting to have these policies proposed when we have this actual emergency happening and we know the solutions. | ||
| Other countries, including many places in the United States of America that are not in other countries, have passed these policies and we've shown that it helps businesses, it helps our economy, and it helps our family to have this set of policies. | ||
| Childcare again, health care, paid family medical leave, that the Republicans in Washington, D.C. are undercutting. | ||
| So it is a problem when we have Donald Trump having these tariffs, for example, that are really negatively impacting the cost of baby products. | ||
| We've had an analysis done recently and the cost of baby products that are absolutely necessities, like car seats and baby bottles and everything you need to raise a kid, height chairs, are going up astronomically right now due to the Trump tariffs. | ||
| And so to say we'll give you a baby bonus, it doesn't cover the cuts that we're getting. | ||
| The baby bonus does not cover the cuts in Medicaid. | ||
| It does not cover the cuts in the child tax credit, does not cover the cuts in child care, does not cover the cuts in the costs that we're seeing in our family budgets each month because of the tariffs. | ||
| So that's my response. | ||
| You sound a little passionate, getting a little hot. | ||
| Kay is in Claysburg, Pennsylvania, and called in on our line for moms. | ||
| Happy Mother's Day, Kay. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, you guys. | |
| My question is, I'm all for this. | ||
| I'm not against it. | ||
| But what are you willing to cut? | ||
| Do you want to cut foreign aid? | ||
| What are you willing to cut to get this? | ||
| Or do you want to raise the taxes up to 25 or 50 percent? | ||
| I'm not against you, but we cannot have free everything, free this, free that. | ||
| I'm for it. | ||
| I'm for free stuff, but somebody has to pay. | ||
| So I'd like to know how, what are we eliminating in the budget to pay for this? | ||
| That is such a good question. | ||
| And thank you so much for calling in. | ||
| In the situation that we're in right now, we're dealing with cuts in these programs. | ||
| So these programs that we have right now aren't enough. | ||
| I'll just say it. | ||
| We have insufficient health care, insufficient child care, and we don't even have paid family medical leave yet. | ||
| So we are in an insufficient place. | ||
| And the cuts that are being proposed to our insufficient access to these programs are in order to pay for more tax breaks for people who are already wealthy. | ||
| So my answer to the question is, don't give more tax breaks to people who are already wealthy. | ||
| Make people and corporations that are already wealthy pay their fair share. | ||
| There are many really, really, really wealthy people who are paying far less in taxes than all of us listeners right now as a proportion of their income. | ||
| And so we need to make a fair taxation system and then we can pay for all of this. | ||
| You know, it isn't actually that difficult. | ||
| And we're not asking for the world. | ||
| In fact, I wish right now I was asking for universal health care, but no, instead I'm saying please don't cut $880 billion out of the Medicaid program that we have right now, which actually should be expanded, not cut entirely. | ||
| And so the good news is that it's possible to not make these cuts. | ||
| The bad news is that we actually need to do expansion after this, not steady state. | ||
| Speaking of Medicaid, we had a text message from Judith in Newark, Delaware, who says, thanks to Ms. Rau Finkbeiner for elevating the issue of gender inequity in compensation for equal work. | ||
| Just to clarify, Medicare is the largest source of funding for graduate medical education. | ||
| Medicaid is also a contributor, but not as much as Medicare. | ||
| And I'm guessing she's following up on your point about it being the pipeline for new doctors. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, Medicaid pays a significant portion of the residency program. | |
| Medicare is also a national health care program that usually helps older adults, but also is woven throughout our health care system as well. | ||
| So I'm glad she raised both. | ||
| So there are two, you all, listeners, there's two, Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| She's exactly right. | ||
| Larry is in Gates County, North Carolina on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Larry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Happy Mother's Day to all. | ||
| The scenario that I like to bring up is I was an educator for 35 years. | ||
| I worked at a private school, and both my department chair was a woman, and the principal at the school was a woman, and they made quite a bit more money than I did. | ||
|
unidentified
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And kudos to them. | |
| I really want to say that there are women out there that make a good bit of money, and I'm happy for that. | ||
| What I'd like to bring up, though, is the scenario that you brought up with food prices. | ||
| Food prices skyrocketed about two and a half to three years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A big box store sold peanut butter at $1.87 for a 40-ounce jar. | |
| During the last administration, at the end of the administration, it was at $3.98. | ||
| Where was your pushback then? | ||
| That's what I'd like to know. | ||
| Plus, one other thing, where do you stand with all the transgender scenario with women and sports? | ||
| Thank you very much for your time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I have always been worried about food prices, so I'm glad that you brought that up. | ||
| And the fact of the matter is that skyrocketing costs have long been a problem for families, which is why we absolutely need the care infrastructure so people can go to work, so people can raise their kids, and so people can contribute to their communities. | ||
| And those policies we've been talking about, and we'll talk a little bit more in a moment. | ||
| What's happened, though, is Donald Trump ran his candidacy on lowering those food prices that you rightly named as going up. | ||
| And instead of lowering the food prices when President Trump came into office, the rate of price increase for food, for goods, and all the things that we need to live actually skyrocketed at an increased rate. | ||
| And instead of saying this is a problem, President Trump just last week said, okay, just deal with it. | ||
| So just last week, I was totally shocked when President Trump said, for example, girls, 11-year-old girls, which is a little bit out of touch, have $20 and 250 pencils. | ||
| And so they can deal with less. | ||
| And I was like, wait, first of all, who has $20 and 250 pencils? | ||
| That's out of touch. | ||
| Secondly, no, we cannot deal with rising costs at an increased rate. | ||
| So our request to the President of the United States and to Republicans in Congress is to look at what's happening through their constituents, their Democratic constituents, their Republican constituents, their independent constituents. | ||
| Look at what's happening with rising costs and look at what's happening with the impact of eviscerating or cutting the programs like Medicaid and Head Start and SNAP that actually allow us to put food on the table and a roof over our kids' heads. | ||
| And note that the negative impact of cuts on those programs actually is significantly more in Republican states. | ||
| For example, Medicaid is 30% of many Republican states' overall budget because of the way it works and because it's named after things in the state rather than Medicaid when you're in the state itself. | ||
| And so when we look at the impact, we're seeing a disproportionate negative impact expected actually on Republican areas. | ||
| So one of the things when we think about these programs, sometimes it's easier with the story. | ||
| People say, Kristen, do not talk about so many numbers. | ||
| Numbers are so hard to follow. | ||
| And I'm sorry, they are. | ||
| So, I'm going to share a little bit about me and a personal story to sort of share why these issues are so important in a frame of actual person. | ||
| So, when I had my son, I actually was raised by a mom who was primarily single when I was growing up. | ||
| And she worked really hard to put food on the table. | ||
| And she was there for us. | ||
| And she really taught us all the value of being in the labor force. | ||
| And so, I had always planned to stay in the labor force. | ||
| And so, I had my son, and he had a primary immune deficiency when he was born. | ||
| It was an unplanned health emergency. | ||
| And I didn't know that much about any of these policies. | ||
| And I didn't actually know that I didn't have paid family medical leave. | ||
| So, I had a baby with an unplanned health emergency. | ||
| And you know what happened? | ||
| I immediately was pushed out of the labor force and lost my job because I had to care for a very sick baby. | ||
| Well, now you have a very sick baby, and it's very hard to afford infant child care to get back into the labor force. | ||
| Infant child care, for one, you can't even get because of insurance until the babies are six weeks old in many areas. | ||
| And for two, that's the most expensive part of child care. | ||
| And so, it's very hard to get back into the labor force, especially if you have a high-needs medical needs baby. | ||
| So, you end up pushing people out of the labor force. | ||
| And again, 84% of women have kids by the time they're 44. | ||
| So, this is not a small number of people that this happens to. | ||
| People get pushed out of the labor force because we don't have these policies and have a very, very, very hard time getting back in because then child care costs more than college, and you face that just when you don't have income to pay for it in many instances. | ||
| And that's where we get that domino effect of not having the care infrastructure, and is why we need not one policy but multiple policies as the infrastructure in our nation. | ||
| Let's see if we can get a couple more folks in the last few minutes that we have. | ||
| Fran is in Independence, Missouri, and is also a mom. | ||
| Happy Mother's Day, Fran. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Happy Mother's Day to you and every other mother out there. | |
| I agree with so many things that you have to say. | ||
| I was raised by a single mother. | ||
| I was a single mother for quite a while with my two sons. | ||
| And now I've been through the welfare system. | ||
| I've done all that. | ||
| And now I am disabled, and I'm on Medicaid and Medicare. | ||
| And I am so terrified if I lose my coverage that there's not going to be anything there. | ||
| And I'm worried about what's going to happen to me when I get older, and my boys aren't going to be able to look after me. | ||
| I mean, what's going to happen? | ||
| But the best way we can deal with this is instead of us lowering tariffs on Rolls-Royces, why don't we worry about lowering the tariffs on things that our young babies need, our children? | ||
| You know, we don't, I don't, I have a Rolls-Royce. | ||
| I can't afford one. | ||
| So I really don't care about that. | ||
| I care about food and clothing. | ||
| I have a two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, and I'm afraid what the world's going to be like for her because now I'm here and they want to pass laws to know when we're having our periods. | ||
| That's just wrong. | ||
| That is nobody's business but you and your doctor, not the government. | ||
| I think they're coming in too far into our lives, and they're hurting us more than they're helping. | ||
| But Congress, there's where your fraud, waste, and abuse is at. | ||
| They're not doing anything and they're being paid to do something and they're not doing it. | ||
| So we need to start pulling the rug out from underneath them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Those are excellent points. | |
| The rollback in reproductive health care has been intense and damaging. | ||
| As we talked about earlier, maternal morbidity or people dying in childbirth is actually going up at a very fast pace in the United States of America. | ||
| And we're the only industrialized nation where that's actually happening. | ||
| It doesn't have to be this way. | ||
| And we have both a rollback in access to abortion care. | ||
| And just so listeners will know, seven out of 10 people who need and have abortions are already moms. | ||
| And so that is a very important aspect of reproductive health care that has been rolled back. | ||
| And as that's been rolled back, so too has access to OBGYNs and all kinds of reproductive health care. | ||
| So it is a very, very, very, very, very trying time in our nation's history right now for people in America. | ||
| So thank you for raising that. | ||
| On the issue of abortion, Rich in Kingsport, Tennessee, responding to you saying that President Trump's suggestions to increase birth rates were insulting. | ||
| What is insulting is a person purporting to represent moms even as she supports the execution of millions of unborn humans, thus preventing them from becoming moms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is an oxymoron. | |
| I really think that everybody should be able to decide if, when, and how many children they have on their own with their family and their doctor. | ||
| And it's not just me who thinks that. | ||
| In fact, when you look at the polling of the United States of America, the majority of people think that that is a personal decision with your family, your faith, and your doctor. | ||
| And so to me, taking that choice away from people is outrageous. | ||
| Next up is John in El Paso, Texas on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning. | |
| Like mothers have to go shopping and they have to figure out how to feed the family with their budget. | ||
| The same thing happened with Southwest Airlines after 9-11. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They realized that passengers weren't flying anymore and they didn't want to lose their airline. | |
| So the CEO said that nobody will lose their job if they cut everybody's salary 10%. | ||
| That was from the CEO all the way down to the last baggage handler that got hired. | ||
| And they got through it great. | ||
| I just wanted to suggest that they do that with the government if that's our biggest problem is our deficit and not our poor moms. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You know, one of the things about this moment is that we have this solution of not giving more tax breaks to mega wealthy people like Elon Musk, who are Donald Trump's friends, and big corporations. | ||
| We had a listener just call in and say, hey, stop, you know, giving breaks to Rolls-Royce and putting more costs on the things like baby strollers and car seats. | ||
| And so we don't have to do what's happening right now. | ||
| By we, I mean, the Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump don't have to cut all that they're suggesting be cut right now. | ||
| They could just have a fair taxation system and we could get through this together as a nation in a very solid way that does actually lift our economy. | ||
| And this is really important. | ||
| We haven't talked about this much yet. | ||
| So all of these programs, even SNAP, which is food stamps, have a high return on investment for taxpayers because of what we talked about earlier, which is what runs our economy. | ||
| Our consumer spending runs our economy. | ||
| So for example, when we have SNAP, which is food stamps, one Republican study said that for every $1 of taxpayer money that goes in, we get back $1.79 later. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| And by later, it's pretty immediate. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| It's because if you need to put food on the table for your family, for yourself, then you will immediately go to the grocery store and spend those SNAP money, which then helps the grocery store workers, it helps the farmers, it helps the truckers who drive the food around in the trains and all of the transportation. | ||
| It has a ripple effect that's positive in our economy because those money is immediately spent. | ||
| But on the other hand, when we give tax breaks to people who are already wealthy, like Elon Musk, like Mark Zuckerberg, like all of the people who are Donald Trump's friends who we see standing with him, when we give those people more tax breaks, do you know what they do? | ||
| They lock it up in a bank. | ||
| It does not come out of that bank generally and fuel the economy. | ||
| So those funds, when you give tax breaks to people who are already wealthy and corporations who are already doing really, really well, get locked up and do the opposite of fueling our economy. | ||
| They just kind of suck the economic engine out of our economy. | ||
| So the answer to the idea of, you know, how do we save money is we have a solution. | ||
| We need Republicans in Congress and we need Donald Trump to stop the tax breaks that they're trying to expand for the very wealthy and just go ahead and not undercut American families by, you know, eviscerating programs like Medicaid, Head Start, SNAP, and more. | ||
| Well, that is all of the time that we have for this segment. | ||
| Thank you so much, Kristen Rau Finkbeiner, who is the executive director and CEO of Moms Rising. | ||
| Thank you for your time this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much and happy Mother's Day to everyone. | |
| And thank you to everybody who called in today for our show. | ||
| We're going to be back tomorrow morning with another edition of Washington Journal at 7 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| Once again, a happy Mother's Day to all, especially my mom, Linda Adams. |