| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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On the GOP tax cut and spending bill. | |
| And Spectrum News national political reporter Taylor Popolars talks about White House News of the Day and the week ahead. | ||
| Also, American COMPAS founder Oren Cass will talk about his new book, The New Conservatives, Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry, and President Trump's Tariffs Agenda. | ||
| Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| This is the Washington Journal for June the 2nd. | ||
| As the Senate starts work on the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill, several Republican senators are concerned about what the bill's current form would do to the national debt. | ||
| Several analysis within and outside of government foresee an increase in debt and deficits, though the White House and House Republicans argue the bill as it stands would motivate the economy enough to alleviate those concerned. | ||
| To start the show today, are you concerned about the One Big Beautiful bill and if it will raise the national debt? | ||
| Different phone lines this morning. | ||
| If you're very concerned about that very thing happening, 202748-8000 is the number to call. | ||
| If you're somewhat concerned, 202-748-8001. | ||
| If you're not concerned, you want to tell us why? | ||
| 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can make your comments on text as well if you want, 202-748-8003. | ||
| And as always, Facebook.com/slash C-SPAN is available to you as well as X at C-SPAN WJ. | ||
| The Congressional Budget Office last month putting out its own analysis, a request by several Democratic legislators about what the One Big Beautiful bill would do to national debt. | ||
| Their first line in their analysis shows this, that the total effects reporting for this analysis from 2026 to 2034, the period there, that first line, it says that the One Big Beautiful bill, if passed as is, it would show an increase in the federal deficit of $3.8 trillion attributable to tax changes, including extending provisions of the 2017 Tax Act, which includes revenues and outlays for refundable credits. | ||
| Again, that's from the Congressional Budget Office. | ||
| The Committee for Responsible Federal Budget also took its own look. | ||
| It's an outside of government group, but took a look at One Big Beautiful Bill when it comes to debt and deficits and came up with this conclusion, saying the House of Representatives' fiscal year 2025 reconciliation bill titled that One Big Beautiful Bill Act would add $2.5 trillion to primary deficits over the coming decade, adding $3.1 trillion to the debt, including interest. | ||
| And if its temporary provisions are extended without offsets, we estimate it would add 5.1 to the debt, including interest. | ||
| And then it says the table below is a conference of tally of each provision included in the committee bills that make up the act, along with the deficit impact. | ||
| And if you go to their website, you can see the listing of the various proposals within the bill, what it would do to debt and deficits. | ||
| Again, if you want to give your own thoughts on what this bill might do now that the Senate considers it starting this week and what it would do for the national debt and deficits as some of these analyses show, 202748-8000 if you're very concerned about the One Big Beautiful bill raising the national debt. | ||
| If you're somewhat concerned, 202748-8001. | ||
| And if you're not concerned, 202-748-8002 is how you can let us know. | ||
| This story comes to the fact that if you go to the Treasury website, fiscaldata.gov, treasury.gov, here's what the national debt currently stands, 36 trillion plus. | ||
| And it also shows impacts of deficits and spending and things like that as well. | ||
| Those are things to consider as you call in and give us your thoughts on the One Big Beautiful bill, what it might do. | ||
| Vincent is on our not concerned line. | ||
| He's calling us from Maryland. | ||
| Vincent, you're starting us off. | ||
| Why are you not concerned? | ||
| Tell us why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Concerned about what? | ||
| The Democrats, who destroyed, almost destroyed our country for the last four years, was not concerned about the $36, $37 trillion debt. | ||
| Now, all of a sudden, they're concerned. | ||
| The Democrats are using that as an excuse to slap this bill down. | ||
| And the Democrats, they would destroy the country by slapping this bill down because they hate Trump so much and they want power. | ||
| All the Democrats talk about is regaining their power, not what they're going to do for the country, see? | ||
| So this is faremongering. | ||
| And this shouldn't even be a question on C-SPAN, but all of you are part of it. | ||
| Well, let me ask you, since you called, why do you think that the bill, as it currently stands, why are you not concerned about its impact on debt and deficits, specifically towards the bill itself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because it will get passed. | |
| And everything about the debt going up, that's a lie. | ||
| That is a lie. | ||
| As MassPAC is going to come back down $1.7 trillion, the deficit will be reduced by $1.7 trillion. | ||
| And don't answer where I got it from. | ||
| I got it from the same place you folks have it, but you cover it up. | ||
| Well, you tell for those on the benefit, where did you get that information from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Same place you got it from, Pedro. | |
| The same place you have it, but you're sitting on it. | ||
| Anyway, have a good day, Pedro, and everybody out there. | ||
| Vincent in Maryland, one of the people making the defense for the bill and what it would do as far as overall impacts on the economy and trying to tamp down concerns about debt was Speaker Mike Johnson. | ||
| On the Sunday shows yesterday, he made these comments on NBC. | ||
| Well, I convinced my friends and colleagues by use of the facts. | ||
| I sent a long text message to my good friend Elon Musk after he made those comments the other day to explain this is not a spending bill. | ||
| This is a reconciliation package. | ||
| It is reconciling a budget. | ||
| So there is some additional spending, as you noted earlier at the opening, for national security, for historic investments in border security, the largest in generations, because those are necessary expenditures. | ||
| But what my friends are missing is the tremendous and historic level of spending cuts that are also in the same package. | ||
| So a lot of the analysis that people are pointing to is from groups, for example, like the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO. | ||
| They have projected anemic economic growth. | ||
| They're assuming a growth level of 1.8% over the next 10 years. | ||
| Kristen, never in U.S. history has the U.S. economy sustained less than 2% economic growth over a 10-year period. | ||
| What's going to happen here is exactly the opposite. | ||
| We're going to have historic growth because we're basing this on the history of the recent past. | ||
| Remember, in the first Trump administration, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the CBO was off in its estimates of that one by $1.5 trillion, okay, because they underestimated the incredible growth that would be brought about. | ||
| This is going to be jet fuel. | ||
| The reason we call it the Big Beautiful Bill is because it is a tremendous pro-growth package entwined in this legislation that is going to make everybody's incomes go up. | ||
| There's going to be more job opportunity, more opportunity to climb up that economic ladder in America because job creators, entrepreneurs, and risk takers will have the government off their backs. | ||
| They will have lower taxes and they will be expanding their businesses. | ||
| We're incentivizing U.S. manufacturing again. | ||
| We're bringing jobs back to the U.S. That's going to help everybody, all boats rise like we did in 2017, except this time it's on steroids. | ||
| So that's the defense from House Speaker Mike Johnson when it comes to the One Big Beautiful bill, what it would do for the economy. | ||
| He making the case that it would stimulate the economy, not expressing concerns about debt. | ||
| You may share his concerns as our first caller has, or may agree with him as our first caller did. | ||
| Maybe you have somewhat different thoughts on that. | ||
| 202-748-8000, if you're very concerned about the bill raising the debt, 202-748-8001, if you are somewhat concerned, if you are not concerned, 202748-8002. | ||
| The Associated Press in writing about the White House is making the case for the bill, especially now as it goes to the Senate saying that the White House viciously lashing out against anyone who has voiced concern about debt snowballing under President Trump, even though it did exactly that in his first term after the 2017 tax cuts. | ||
| White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt opened her briefing Thursday of last week saying that they wanted to debunk some false claims about it, saying that the blatantly wrong claim that the One Big Beautiful bill increases the deficit space on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers. | ||
| She adding that they use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democratic and Republican administrations alike. | ||
| One of those senators to watch when it comes to the debate as it goes to the Senate, Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson, who gave an interview with a Wisconsin television station, was asked about the current state of the House bill as it goes to the Senate, concerning about those debts issues and deficits. | ||
| Here's Ron Johnson from yesterday. | ||
| Well, first of all, all of us want to see President Trump succeed, but we also are very concerned about the fact that we're mortgaging our children's future. | ||
| So what I want to do is I want to make sure we engage in a full debate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've been pretty open in terms of what I've been looking for. | |
| I want to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending and a commitment to a process that will achieve and maintain it. | ||
| My complaint with the House is they really didn't talk about the numbers, about the only number you heard was $1.5 trillion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's some serious numbers we need to talk about. | |
| $22 trillion of projected deficits over the next 10 years. | ||
| That would mean an average annual deficit of $2.2 trillion. | ||
| Completely unsustainable. | ||
| Debt going from $37 trillion to probably over $60 trillion. | ||
| Again, completely unsustainable. | ||
| We never talked about that during the House debate. | ||
| We have to have that discussion now as the bills moved into the Senate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seems like there were some in the House who said, yeah, I oppose the spending in this. | |
| They then went to the White House and they came back and voted yes. | ||
| Is that something that's going to happen to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I doubt it. | |
| Again, I'm happy to engage in the conversation. | ||
| But again, I just can't support something that actually increases the deficit. | ||
| And that is what's going to happen right now as the bill is currently written. | ||
| Again, Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson, he from yesterday. | ||
| This is Garrett R.R. Garrick on our not concerned line, calling us from Augusta, Georgia. | ||
| Hello, Garrick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Fine, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, just waking up this morning, I'm actually located in Millersville, Georgia right now, out of town for work. | ||
| But I did just wake up, turn seats fan on. | ||
| And this is my first time even hearing about the bill, to be honest. | ||
| But from what I'm hearing, it sounds good. | ||
| I'm not sure if you can tell just by my voice, but I'm an African-American male. | ||
| I'm a single father as well and 35 years old. | ||
| And I've had a hard time in the job field in this country, being in the restaurant industry mostly. | ||
| However, this big, beautiful bill sounds like something that could possibly help me to expand my future as far as stability for myself and my children, if they're able to actually go through with this. | ||
| I'm not concerned. | ||
| So far, although I didn't vote for Trump, he has shown me a lot as far as his capabilities of moving this country in a good direction. | ||
| So I trust it. | ||
| I feel like he has some good backup behind him, good people in his ear. | ||
| And I just, you know, I trust it. | ||
| So, Garrett, you said you expressed why you support the bill, but in the overall terms of debt and deficit, you called in being not concerned about that. | ||
| Can you explain that a little? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, as far as the debt and deficit, I just feel like, again, who Trump has, you know, behind him right now as far as the Doge and Elon going in and taking the proper, | |
| you know, the proper, the proper, what can I say, marks to ensure that, you know, the deficit isn't affected by doing something like this. | ||
| I believe that they've, you know, gone in and figured out where we needed to cut spending to be able to do, you know, something like this that wouldn't affect the deficit in the first place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I just trust that, you know, I'm not concerned because of the experts that are behind, you know, the movement in itself in the bill. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Garrett there in Augusta, Georgia, giving us his thoughts. | ||
| Some of you posting on Facebook as well. | ||
| Raymond Nickerson, when it comes to the idea of debt and deficit, what the bill might do, says this, saying not if the bill is passed, adding that the economy will be going gangbusters and tax revenues will be pouring into the government coffers. | ||
| They just have to get spending back down to pre-COVID levels. | ||
| Dwayne Robinson, adding his thoughts on X, saying that the problem, as always, is spending. | ||
| It isn't how much or who is getting taxed. | ||
| Elect Democrats and they raise the national debt. | ||
| Elect Republicans and they raise the national debt. | ||
| Voters demand fiscal responsibility in every election, but D.C. consistently spends more than it takes in. | ||
| And then the Bill Lane saying the numbers floated around are 20 trillion over 10 years. | ||
| Congress needs to put a tariff on that big, ugly bill, he calls it. | ||
| And then Jim Hartlett says this off of Facebook saying, yes, neither side seems to be concerned or competent enough to address the debt. | ||
| Then again, neither are the constituents whom seem to only care as long as the cuts don't affect them personally. | ||
| Some of you posting on Facebook, you can do that at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN. | ||
| If you're very concerned about the impact of the bill on national debt issues, 202748-8000. | ||
| If you say you're somewhat concerned, 202748-8001, if you're not concerned, 202748-8002. | ||
| On our very concerned line from Kansas, this is Crystal. | ||
| Crystal, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I'm very concerned. | ||
| The debt, and it just doesn't seem to resolve anything. | ||
| We definitely don't have the spending capacity to do anything. | ||
| And I'm very, the previous callers, I'm not sure if those are Autobots or AI because I never heard a person say that I'm African American. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But yeah, it is very concerned. | ||
| And then the program, just the overall money. | ||
| And if you look at the cost of everything as shopping, as a family, it's very expensive. | ||
| So I do not see the benefits of this bill for the American public, which is very sad. | ||
| Were you concerned about debt and deficit issues even before the introduction of this bill? | ||
| Is this something that you watched a lot before? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, I'm very concerned. | |
| I was, I'm always a very conservative person. | ||
| I'm a Republican. | ||
| But I always look at how funding and how money is spent. | ||
| So way before this, I was always looking at the national debt. | ||
| I think since it's been in existence that we have access as Americans. | ||
| So I am always physically conservative and looking at how money is spent because it's ultimately our children, our grandchildren, and generations to come that, you know, suffer from this. | ||
| What would be your message to Republican senators now that they have to consider what the House has done, especially as you express about debt and deficit issues? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that as Republican, we need to review the bill. | |
| We need to look at what are the ultimate costs and really go line by line. | ||
| Do what I expected my congressperson to do is to be physically conservative. | ||
| That's why I am a Republican. | ||
| So, yes. | ||
| What is the national deficit, by the way, that when it comes to the treasury.gov information? | ||
| That was Crystal. | ||
| Thank you, Crystal. | ||
| This explainer from the treasury.gov saying a deficit occurs when the federal government's spending exceeds its revenues. | ||
| The federal government has spent $1.5 trillion more than it's collected in the current fiscal year of 2025, resulting in that national debt. | ||
| This all goes into the larger conversation about estimates when it comes to the One Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| Will it raise the national debt? | ||
| And your concerns about it. | ||
| Again, very concerned, somewhat concerned, not concerned of the lines for you to consider if you want to call in and give us your thoughts. | ||
| If some of you have called this morning, some of you also, including the one caller referencing Elon Musk in an interview that he did on CBS News yesterday, some of it that was released earlier on, and he did speak about the bill itself, especially as a contrast to efforts he made as the head of Doge. | ||
| Here's Elon Musk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, you know, I was like disappointed to see the massive spending bow, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, if not just decrease it. | |
| And undermines the work that the Doge team is doing. | ||
| I actually thought that when this big, beautiful bill came along. | ||
| I mean, like, everything he's done on Doge gets wiped out in the first year. | ||
| I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. | ||
| Again, that's Elon Musk there. | ||
| Let's hear from Guillermo from Philadelphia on our line for those who are very concerned. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pedro, Pedro, Pedro. | |
| Peace be with you. | ||
| Pedro, I am very concerned that the House of Representatives is raising their salary as much as I was making when I was working every year. | ||
| Yes, I am very concerned. | ||
| They are raising the national debt, yet they're giving themselves a raise in their pay. | ||
| Pedro. | ||
| When it comes to the debt specifically, what concerns you specifically about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That, yes, the debt. | |
| The debt is more because you're going to pay, not you personally, you, Pedro. | ||
| You don't pay nobody. | ||
| I am very concerned that the House is going to get a raise in pay. | ||
| That's going to make the deficit grow more. | ||
| So I am very concerned. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Guillermo's in Philadelphia, another Pennsylvanian on our not-concerned line. | ||
| That's John. | ||
| John, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Pedro, how you doing? | |
| Fine, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what? | |
| This is what kind of gets to me. | ||
| Like for the last one Joe Biden was in there for the four years he was in there. | ||
| Nobody was concerned that inflation reached what was a 40, 50 year high. | ||
| He had that infrastructure bill where it was billions of dollars for these charging stations. | ||
| Well, he spent billions of dollars for charging stations. | ||
| And what do we have? | ||
| Seven or eight charging stations, which had come out to over a billion dollars per charging station. | ||
| But I know what people were saying. | ||
| It's $37 trillion. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| And there's one thing in this bill that I don't really agree with. | ||
| I don't think people, like rich people, should be getting a tax break. | ||
| I think it should be a cutoff to $400,000, anybody below $400,000. | ||
| I think the rich have done really good under Joe Biden. | ||
| I mean, I remember 2022 or 23, Heinz Ketchup came out. | ||
| They made 450% profit in, I forget what year it was, 22 or 23. | ||
| I mean, if you're making catch-up and you're making 450% profit, and we know why, because we all go shopping. | ||
| So, you know, I kind of understand why some people are concerned about it because it's 37 and growing or 36 and growing. | ||
| But I don't see why everybody wasn't setting off the alarms for the last four years when the economy was going. | ||
| And you brought that up because you were concerned then, but not concerned now. | ||
| You've kind of laid that out, but isn't rise in national debt a concern regardless of who's in power as far as in the White House? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| I agree with you 100%. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I think the national debt is what's going to kill this country. | ||
| This 36 throwing the 37 is going to kill us. | ||
| Yes, I agree. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree 100% with you. | |
| All right. | ||
| So would you advise Republicans to pass it, change it, not pass it? | ||
| What would you advise? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wouldn't mind it if they tweaked it a little. | |
| They could. | ||
| They're going to the Senate, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So maybe they can tweak it, you know, but I agree. | ||
| I don't think people that, you know, I think the rich are doing really good, honest to God. | ||
| I think that who needs to help are the middle class and the working poor. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| They need it more than anybody, especially, like I said, with this debt that keeps growing. | ||
| John there in Pennsylvania giving us his thoughts of national debt when it's connected to the one big beautiful bill as it's known as. | ||
| You can add to yours as well to the lines there, divided differently today if you want to pick the one that best represents you and give us a call on that. | ||
| This is Brian Wilson from Facebook saying, and some of you posting, several of you posting before the start of the show saying that regardless of the party, there's no stopping the debt and there's absolutely no way to pay it off. | ||
| That's Brian Wilson there. | ||
| The Associated Press adding that the tax and spending cuts that passed the House last month would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade if all of them are allowed to continue. | ||
| That was from the Committee of Responsible Federal Budget. | ||
| To make the pill's price tag appear lower, various parts of the legislation are set to expire. | ||
| The same tactic was used with President Trump's 2017 tax cuts. | ||
| And it set up this year's dilemma in which many of the tax cuts that the earlier package will sunset will next year unless Congress renews them. | ||
| But the debt is a much bigger problem now than it was eight years ago. | ||
| Investors are demanding that the government pay a higher premium to keep borrowing as the total debt has crossed $36.1 trillion. | ||
| The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury note is around 4.5%, up dramatically from the roughly 2.5% rate charged when the 2017 tax cuts became law. | ||
| That's just some of the analysis there from the Associated Press when it comes to the bill itself and its potential impact. | ||
| This is Annie. | ||
| Annie is in Illinois on our line for those very concerned. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| You're on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Well, I'm very concerned because the things in this bill that kind of neutered the judicial system, which means that any large company can pretty much have their way. | ||
| And if that's true, then that's giving a blank check to international corporations to do whatever they want. | ||
| Like it's a garage sale. | ||
| So I think it will only raise the national debt. | ||
| And it has other implications that are serious to any small business owner that, or any national business owner, because if the courts have no teeth, if they can be disregarded, as we're seeing currently, then we're losing an entire branch of government. | ||
| But that's only going to raise the debt because that means that the most powerful international companies can have an effective blank check. | ||
| Lauren from New York, also on our line for those very concerned. | ||
| Lauren, you're up next. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| You're on. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm very concerned that they're cutting Medicaid, Medicare, the SNAP program, and giving a break to the billionaires again when they tell us about the trickle-down defect that never works. | |
| It has never come through ever for the rest of the world and the rest of us. | ||
| It's disgusting the way they're cutting off for poor people and old people just so they can have so a Trump can have a $92 million parade. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| So as far as the list you gave, you didn't include the national debt on that. | ||
| Where's the national debt fit on that list? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the national debt is going up as usual. | |
| And they have the nerve to complain about how Biden made it go up for infrastructure by the last person who was talking. | ||
| Infrastructure at least has been fixing the roads and stuff because they're way behind schedule in those things. | ||
| So I'm sorry, but I think that he did a good job. | ||
| That's Lauren there in New York. | ||
| This is Donald, also on our very concern line in Michigan. | ||
| Donald, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, C-Span. | |
| Good morning, American people. | ||
| Yes, I'm very concerned. | ||
| We just had over 900 job cores closed down due to the cuts that this administration has created. | ||
| This is Donald. | ||
| I also want our American concern line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this is crazy. | |
| We have a rich guy in office that is enriching himself and his friends while he's taking services from the middle class and working poor. | ||
| And Republican voters think this is a good idea. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| But Trump's policies are going to really start to affect this country. | ||
| And then we'll see how good Biden actually was. | ||
| Take care, Minister. | ||
| The website Investopedia takes a look at presidents across the history of the presidency and what they've done to changes to U.S. debt, ranking on several of them. | ||
| But in the modern day, accounting for the list, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, high on that list, followed by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. | ||
| In the modern era, when it considers Barack Obama over his two terms, $7.6 trillion. | ||
| Adding to that, Donald Trump in his first term, $7.8 trillion. | ||
| Joe Biden in his singular term, $8.4 billion. | ||
| And it goes on from there as far as the number of debt, including even more in the modern day, 1.2 by comparison under Bill Clinton at the time going back. | ||
| So that's just some comparison on what various presidents have done for debt, concerns about what this president and the bill, if it passes, what it would do to the debt if it does indeed pass the Senate without significant changes. | ||
| Jeff in Maryland, somewhat concerned is how he identifies himself. | ||
| Jeff, hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Pedro. | |
| How are you? | ||
| I'm well, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yes, I'm somewhat concerned because there's variables at the moment I can't account for, the new trade deals, what the economy is going to, how it's going to respond, the low estimates that CBO has given. | ||
| But I am concerned because it was reported on the halls of Congress that the debt adds $6.9 million a minute, $10 billion a day, and $1 trillion every 100 days. | ||
| In 10 years, 3,650 days, that's another 36.5 trillion. | ||
| So that means in 10 years, the debt's $73 trillion. | ||
| Now, I am hopeful that steps have been taken by Doge and some politicians to try to get the country to right the ship and fix the problem. | ||
| But until they pass bills where they have to pay on the principle of the budget or the debt, $500 billion a year, so on and so forth, they're just grasping at straws. | ||
| But they are starting to do things. | ||
| They are making it aware. | ||
| And let's take illegal immigration. | ||
| It was reported at the end of Trump's first term. | ||
| It was $220 billion on the legal, medical, and educational system. | ||
| Now they kind of hide it in the, well, it's $120 billion from when Biden took office. | ||
| So, I mean, every effort that's made, you have people argue, fight, and squander, and they're not taking common sense approaches to basically put things in order. | ||
| And both parties seem guilty of it. | ||
| I'm not picking one or the other. | ||
| But you have one party that wants to promise everything but a 200-year lifespan, and you have another one that can't come to an agreement and agree on the way forward without bickering over the little things. | ||
| So until that changes, I'm going to be concerned. | ||
| But I am hopeful at the moment that Doge is kind of shining the light on what could be done and what is possible. | ||
| So that's my thought. | ||
| I hope everybody has a great day. | ||
| Do you think now that Republican senators have the bill, that they have that appetite to make those changes that you would advocate for? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think they have a limited window to come together and kind of show the American people that they can be financially responsible. | |
| I know some voters are going to point out Trump's first term, but half of his debt accumulated in the $8 trillion was because of COVID in 2020. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So his bill that he passed the tax went and say it was for billionaires, but it did raise the family median house come by like $6,000 for the first time in decades. | |
| And if the bill expired, all the debt or all the taxes were going to go up for people. | ||
| So it did benefit people. | ||
| People that keep saying it was only for billionaires are misleading the American people. | ||
| But it's simple math. | ||
| If you invest $10 million, you're going to make $20,000. | ||
| If you invest $10,000, you're going to make $20,000. | ||
| The rich are going to get richer. | ||
| It's simple math, and numbers don't lie. | ||
| But again, that was my thought. | ||
| Jeff and Marilyn there, on a somewhat concerned line, Robert has that same line, too, calling us from Florida. | ||
| Robert, you're next. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning, everyone. | |
| Good morning, C-SPAN. | ||
| Good morning, America. | ||
| I'm not too concerned about the debt. | ||
| I mean, the most important thing is trying to pass the bill. | ||
| And my thing is, we can't go into default because it'll make it even worse. | ||
| So I'm good. | ||
| If they raise it a little bit in order to relieve a little bit, the economy's gone down. | ||
| Prices have gone down. | ||
| Now, the thing with me is we have a president that is doing what no other president has ever done, Democratic or Republican, about what he's doing with Doge, about the cuts. | ||
| They've talked about it, but nobody had the gall, you know, to go up, to go and do it like Trump did. | ||
| Now he's here doing what he has to do, making America great, and they went complaining about it. | ||
| You know, um, so my thing is, uh, I support him, you know, and I'm going to take a little bit more grief, you know, and to make America great again, you know, and my just a bunch of hypocrisy on, you know, on the other side and stuff like that. | ||
| So, I'm just hoping that we could just all just come together. | ||
| You know, it's two wings on the same bird, you know. | ||
| We sure should come together and make America great and just can I ask when you say hypocrisy, when you say hypocrisy on the other side, when you do you mean when it comes to matters of debt and deficit, yeah, because okay, Biden was in power with GOP for four years, okay? | ||
| Inflation went up the border, um, on the all the DEI, all the walk stuff, and now the habeas corpus stuff, the vetting, you know, and the due process. | ||
| But why didn't they do that when they was there? | ||
| You know, and then now, you know, when Trump gets in, you know what I'm saying, and he's doing he's doing the things he's supposed to do, you know, and he wants to get, you know, now they want to worry about the border. | ||
| Now they want to worry about immigration. | ||
| Now they want to worry about, you know, the economy. | ||
| Now they want to worry about the bills. | ||
| Now they worry about everything else. | ||
| How come they didn't worry about that when they were in power? | ||
| Maybe they'll still be in power, you know? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, it's just, it's just, you know, just my opinion. | ||
| No, that's what we're all about. | ||
| Thanks for calling and expressing that. | ||
| And the rest of you during this half hour, you can still do that if you want when it comes to the big beautiful bill. | ||
| Talk about its debt concerns. | ||
| If you have concerns about debt, talk about the other aspects of the bill now that the Senate has it. | ||
| And you can do all that in something we call open forum as we go into the second half hour. | ||
| 202748-8001 for Republicans. | ||
| 202-748-8,000 for Democrats. | ||
| 202748-8002 for independents. | ||
| And again, if you want to keep on the Big Beautiful bill, you can certainly do that. | ||
| Or other aspects of politics, you can make those comments to pick the line that best represents you there. | ||
| And if you've called in the last 30 days, we ask you from holding off to do from doing that today. | ||
| One of the things, as of yesterday, when it comes to events regarding the FBI, they're looking into this event that took place in Colorado. | ||
| The Washington Post reporting that a man threw that incendiary device at an event organized by a Jewish group at a Colorado pedestrian mall, Mohamed Sabri Solomon, 45 of El Paso County, Colorado, through Molotov cocktails and yelled Free Palestine before he was taken into custody, according to police citing witness accounts of the attack. | ||
| Two victims airlifted for treatment at a burn unit. | ||
| Officials, quote, it's clear, it is clear that this is a targeted act of violence, close quote, said Mark Mikiak, a special agent in charge of the FBI's office in Denver. | ||
| The president or the FBI taking a look at that issue. | ||
| Bring that up in open form if you wish as well. | ||
| Lewis is in New Jersey. | ||
| Lewis in New Jersey, you're next up on this open forum. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing? | |
| Good morning, all. | ||
| I got a different angle about this. | ||
| The fine Italian businessman, Leia Croca, did the same thing that President Trump is doing, but in a smaller scale. | ||
| 1976, when I bought my Lincoln, it cost $9,528 without tax. | ||
| At that time, Toyota was selling for $3,000. | ||
| Now, I know people who were making over $100,000 a year buying the Toyota. | ||
| Now, the people are the ones who save the country. | ||
| In other words, I know people who bought a Chrysler K car to support Iacoca, and that company got out of harm. | ||
| Now, what happened after that? | ||
| I don't know, but it's the people who help the country, not the politicians. | ||
| So, how does that relate to maybe you called initially because of the One Big Beautiful Bill in debt, but how does that relate to today and what's going on, especially when it comes to activities on this bill? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the way it relates is we have to support our country. | |
| Buy American. | ||
| The quality has to get better. | ||
| We have to support our country. | ||
| If we don't support ourselves, what are we going to do? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Aykoka is a perfect example. | ||
| You know, when the people supported him, the country got out of a hole. | ||
| Okay, Lewis in New Jersey there from Connecticut. | ||
| We'll hear from Philip. | ||
| Democrats line high. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I'm an economics professor, and I'm very concerned about this big, beautiful bill. | ||
| President Trump wants lower interest rates. | ||
| I want lower interest rates. | ||
| He's absolutely right. | ||
| Interest rates need to be lower. | ||
| The problem is we're going to be borrowing more money, a lot more money, and $2 trillion a year more. | ||
| It was way too much under President Biden. | ||
| It's too much now. | ||
| If you increase borrowing, what's going to happen is that interest rates are going to raise. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| So it's too much borrowing, higher interest rates, millions getting thrown off Medicaid. | ||
| The budget deficit should be 3% of the economy, or that's $1 trillion, not $2 trillion. | ||
| So when you hear Republicans say that the gross domestic product will increase because of efforts they're currently making under this bill, that will compensate for what the bill calls for as far as tax cuts and other things. | ||
| As an economics person, how do you respond to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I do believe that the Congressional Budget Office scoring is too conservative. | |
| I would like to see scoring done at 2% growth, not 1.8% growth, and that will help a little bit. | ||
| They've been saying the same thing since the 1980s and Ronald Reagan's tax cuts. | ||
| It never works out that way. | ||
| Yes, it does increase the economy, but it never increases the economy enough to offset the decrease in revenue. | ||
| Philip there in Connecticut, by the way, was one of those critics of the Congressional Budget Office yesterday on the Sunday shows, Rust Vote. | ||
| He is the White House budget director, talked about why he wasn't necessarily trusting of their analysis of the fiscal impact of One Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| Here he is from yesterday. | ||
| What some of the watchdogs have done is they have used CBO's artificial baseline, which doesn't allow and assume that current tax law will be extended because of sunsets that are in the law. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They don't do that with suspending. | |
| It is totally something that would be foreign to any common sense person who comes and looks at how we budget in this country. | ||
| And so when you assume the extension of the president's tax relief in 2017, this budget or this bill, and it's really a reconciliation bill, it's not really a budget bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is using a budget process. | |
| This is a $1.4 trillion over 10 years deficit reduction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings. | |
| Obviously, we have a little bit of spending in there as well for border and defense. | ||
| But that is the biggest mandatory savings package that we have seen since the 1970s, 1997. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very historic. | |
| So you have your work cut out for you to explain that to not just Elon Musk, but to people who actually have a vote in the Senate in your own party. | ||
| Again, that was yesterday. | ||
| Again, you can add that to the mix as well on this open forum, 202748-8000. | ||
| One for Republicans, Democrats 202748, 8,000, and Independents 202748-8,0002. | ||
| One of the things to watch out for today is being reported on by CNBC saying it was China Monday refuting Washington's claims that it had broken the Geneva trade agreement instead of accusing the U.S. for breaching deal terms, signaling talks between the world's top two economies have taken a turn for the worse. | ||
| Trade frictions between Washington and Beijing have flared up after a hiatus following a meeting between the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and his Chinese counterpart in Switzerland that let them suspend most of those tariffs for 90 days. | ||
| The Trump administration ratcheting up export restrictions on semiconductor design, software, chemicals to China while announcing it would revoke visas for Chinese students. | ||
| Those steps, quote, seriously undermine the deal that was reached in Geneva, according to a Chinese Commerce Department spokesperson, while vowing that Beijing would take measures to safeguard its rights and benefits, even if the U.S. presses ahead with actions that, quote, damage China's interests. | ||
| Sandy joins us from Ohio, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thank you, Pedro, for taking my call. | |
| The United States of America, and we are thinking we can't even feed our people. | ||
| We want to do all these cuts to the Medicaid and SNAP. | ||
| It will hurt the hospitals. | ||
| I've already heard other people that have said hospitals will be closing. | ||
| And the merging homes, they run on Medicaid just about. | ||
| So what will happen to them? | ||
| And they're already in trouble. | ||
| And it's just, I'll give you an example. | ||
| My brother-in-law in Florida helps out at a church that has a food bank in it. | ||
| 300 people used to come. | ||
| Now there are 700 people. | ||
| I mean, so people are in really bad shape. | ||
| Some are coming in on a bicycle. | ||
| There are homeless people. | ||
| I mean, wow, this is just going to be a disaster. | ||
| And thank you, Pedro. | ||
| Richard is in New Jersey. | ||
| Democrats line. | ||
| You're next up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| We're talking about taxes. | ||
| So, you know, the Republicans keep saying that they're not raising taxes. | ||
| This is their big issue thing, not to raise taxes. | ||
| And that is the biggest giant bunch of BS ever. | ||
| And I'll explain. | ||
| I do not, right now, I pay no taxes. | ||
| I'm a retired person on Social Security, and most people like me are probably paying no tax, no federal tax. | ||
| But now, do you remember the Boston Pea Party? | ||
| That was about taxation without representation. | ||
| And what it was, was a tariff on PAs. | ||
| Tax and Tamps did exact same thing. | ||
| The money goes into the Treasury. | ||
| And when the money goes into the Treasury from those tariff taxes, then they can reduce the income tax on rich people because my taxes, I buy a lot of stuff from Walmart. | ||
| And it's going to go up. | ||
| Everything's going to go up at least 10%. | ||
| And that's going into the federal treasury. | ||
| So I'm going to be paying like $1,000 to $2,000 a year in federal taxes, where right now I'm not paying any federal taxes. | ||
| That's an infinite increase. | ||
| And people, all you people voted for Trump, think about it. | ||
| You're going to now be paying taxes, federal taxes, which you didn't have to pay before because he's doing these plus tariff stuff. | ||
| And, you know, the result is going to be very bad. | ||
| So gotcha. | ||
| Gotcha, Richard. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Beth in Massachusetts, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi, this is Beth, and I wanted to wish you a good morning. | ||
| I am very concerned about what they're taking away from the poor people. | ||
| And also, they keep bringing up Biden. | ||
| I don't care who the previous president was. | ||
| We are concerned now with what's going on today. | ||
| They seem to overlook things about Biden. | ||
| And I just feel our president is not doing a good job for us. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Tom in Ohio, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hey, how you doing? | ||
| This is the watcher of the money. | ||
| Elon Musk uncovered tens of millions of Social Security money and checks that were sent and cashed by dead people. | ||
| That is because our Social Security is a sludge fund to help elect Democratic politicians with my money, our money. | ||
| Liberal judges blocked him from uncovering the truth, but it is now on appeal. | ||
| This is proof the Democrats are a criminal political party who stop at nothing to gain and get power. | ||
| If you're a Democrat, get the hell out of the party. | ||
| That's Tom there in Ohio to give you at least the viewpoint of another Democratic senator who will be at least part of the debate when it comes to One Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| That's Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut on the Sunday shows yesterday, pushing back against the analysis of the One Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| Well, this Republican budget bill is an absolute disaster for the country, in particular for middle-class and poor people, because it kicks 15 million people, working Americans mainly, off of their health care and for what, in order to finance a tax cut, the majority of which is going to corporations and billionaires. | ||
| A trillion dollars of that tax cut goes to the richest 1%. | ||
| It also adds enormously to the deficit. | ||
| And I heard him try to claim that that's not true. | ||
| It's just unreal the amount of gaslighting this administration is doing. | ||
| I mean, it is a fact. | ||
| The difference between passing this bill and not passing this bill is the addition of $3 trillion to the national debt. | ||
| And that's not me saying that. | ||
| That's the credit rating agencies that impact our entire economy. | ||
| Moody's just downgraded the United States credit. | ||
| They didn't do that under Joe Biden. | ||
| They did that under Donald Trump because they look at this bill. | ||
| They look at the attack on the middle class and the diminution in spending power that will come with it for the middle class and the deficits. | ||
| And they say that if implemented, this bill is going to make the American economy much weaker. | ||
| By the way, the senator references Moody's ratings that downgraded the credit rating last month. | ||
| And this is part of their reasoning why in a statement in part saying this one-notch downgrade of our 21-notch rating scale reflects the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns. | ||
| Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs. | ||
| We do not believe the material multi-year reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from current fiscal proposals under consideration. | ||
| Let's hear from Vicki. | ||
| Vicki in Nebraska, Democrats line, hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| You are, this is my very favorite show, Tied with the View, and I watch you guys every day. | ||
| I just want to say I think we need, if they're finding so much fraud, just show us the proof. | ||
| We would love to see the proof. | ||
| And I also feel like having a parade and all this spending isn't going to add to the deficit. | ||
| I don't see that happening. | ||
| Plus, I just think we should all work together for the people, the people that voted, and let's just all, you know, use some common sense. | ||
| That's all we need is common sense. | ||
| You know, taking away from the poor and giving to the rich that already have enough money to live on forever, you're not going to get to heaven. | ||
| Remember what God said about the people that will get into heaven. | ||
| You must help the poor. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| Have a wonderful day. | ||
| You do a great job, Pedro. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We'll go next to James in New Jersey, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yes, hi. | ||
| Thank you for taking my phone call again. | ||
| Kind of very simple. | ||
| Me and Trump had some things in common. | ||
| Can't discuss how and why, but we negotiate. | ||
| I'll talk how to negotiate with Nixon. | ||
| Back in the days, my answer says: stop the waste of military equipment, military pills, old debts, not being used. | ||
| Not them. | ||
| And have old steel. | ||
| Good old steel. | ||
| Same thing with tanks. | ||
| Same thing with everything else. | ||
| Military waste is in the billions. | ||
| Easy. | ||
| Not to all. | ||
| And most people would need. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| Okay, James in New Jersey. | ||
| This is Javier in Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| So I'm a college student, and I more, I don't, this is my first time calling in, not really sure exactly how this works, but I just have a question. | ||
| I was wondering what happens when we default on U.S. debt. | ||
| Like, everyone's worried about raising the debt ceiling. | ||
| And I'm just, it sounds like we're in a lot of debt, from my understanding, but I don't seem to really understand, like, well, it seems like we've been in a lot of debt for a while. | ||
| What's the big issue with this? | ||
| What happens when we default? | ||
| That's all I have. | ||
| Javier, as far as your question, what led you to it? | ||
| What prompted you to even kind of think about these things? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess it was kind of like I was saying, like, people were very concerned with raising the debt ceiling. | |
| And I guess my question comes from the fact that debt sounds very bad. | ||
| No one wants to be in debt. | ||
| But when it comes to U.S. debt, it seems that we have been in debt for an extended period of time and nothing, I don't know what the effects of that debt have been. | ||
| I don't feel like my life is that much worse because the U.S. is getting in more debt. | ||
| But I haven't been on this earth as long as some others have. | ||
| As a college student, do you have any college debt? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do. | |
| I do have college debt. | ||
| When you take a look at the college debt you have and the debt that the national debt of a national concern, are there? | ||
| Do you have concerns about your own debt? | ||
| And does that carry over maybe to the larger issue of the national debt? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess, yes, I have concerns over my own debt. | |
| I feel confident that I will be able to pay it back in the future. | ||
| But when I look at national debt, I guess it doesn't, like, it's such an absurd number that it doesn't, that keeps getting pushed off. | ||
| If I default on my debt, it's a problem because people will come after me for my money. | ||
| If the U.S. defaults on their debt, like, who is held accountable? | ||
| Like, what happens? | ||
| It doesn't, I mean, I don't think it's ever happened. | ||
| And to the thing you just said, what's your level of confidence in Washington to resolve these issues? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My level of confidence is low, not because of the current administration, but rather that I don't feel like people these days are willing to work together. | |
| I feel like people are just trying to undo what the people before them are trying to do. | ||
| Javier there in Ellicott City, Maryland, joining us. | ||
| Javier, thanks for watching. | ||
| Thanks for calling. | ||
| And again, you can carry on on this open forum. | ||
| The lines will be available to you. | ||
| Pick the one that best represents you. | ||
| The Washington Times takes a look at money issues, fiscal issues, with the departure of Elon Musk, Susan Ferricio, writing under the banner of the Times saying that it's his department departure from the Trump administration, satirized on the humor website, Babylon B, which reported that the tech billionaire and SpaceX CEO, quote, will now spend his time tackling the much easier job of sending human beings to Mars. | ||
| Funny, but as Mr. Musk learned, not too far from the truth, the head of the president's Department of Government Efficiency dedicated thousands of hours to reducing federal spending by ridding the government of waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| He left the job, having made just a fraction of the cuts he had anticipated when he wielded a chainsaw in February on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. | ||
| It was on Friday that the president himself saying, quote, Elon not really leaving. | ||
| He's going to be back and forth, adding it's his baby. | ||
| I think he's going to be doing a lot of things. | ||
| Adding that Mr. Trump calling Mr. Musk, 134 days as head of Doge, quote, without comparison in modern history. | ||
| But the results showed how the growth in federal spending is entrenched and nearly impossible to curb. | ||
| If you want to read more there, Susan Ferricio for the Washington Times. | ||
| Let's hear from Moses on our Republican line. | ||
| He's in Idaho. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| You're on. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, somebody else. | |
| Are you talking to Moses? | ||
| Moses, yeah, you're on. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| As far as the bills, I think that they're heading toward the right direction. | ||
| The problem is too many people in the kitchen trying to make decisions. | ||
| They need to lower the amount of people in Congress or get rid of all that dead weight. | ||
| As far as theft, they need to hold people accountable and start putting them in prison. | ||
| Also, the fact that there are people in Congress that are committing treason and nothing is being done about it until they get rid of all these crazy people in office and cut down the amount of people they have that are making the wrong decisions. | ||
| They don't need to be there because their family members are opening positions in Congress. | ||
| They need to lower the amount of people in Congress and get rid of some of the weight up on top. | ||
| And these people that are career people, they shouldn't be allowed to be career people because they've been there too long. | ||
| They're just ruining the country. | ||
| Trump and Elon Musk need to continue what they're doing. | ||
| They're doing a great job. | ||
| Find a fraud. | ||
| And we'll find the money. | ||
| So our country will be better if we find money that they're still in. | ||
| They've been stealing for 60 years. | ||
| Do you think that Doge effort will be offset or at least if the Republicans pass the bill in the Senate and more spending takes place, do you think that that will counteract what Doge has done or at least, I guess, make mute what Doge has done? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that it's going to help a lot with the budget that we have that we hold people accountable for theft and start putting them in prison. | |
| It will stop. | ||
| Alan in Maryland, independent line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hello, sorry. | ||
| I missed the name. | ||
| You're Alan, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, you're on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wanted to address Javier's question earlier. | |
| So there are a bunch of historical examples of when countries tend to default on debt. | ||
| A big example of them are like Argentina, Weimer Germany, Zimbabwe, etc. | ||
| And a lot of those, a lot of the results tend to be end up the same, which is either the company, the country results in hyperinflation and the government effecti collapses, or it ends in civil war. | ||
| And so when I see a lot of people on here who are like on welfare, for example, arguing that there has to be more welfare and that we shouldn't be cutting spending and that we should be increasing the national debt, it gets worrying because there's only one end result to that. | ||
| And the end result is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Either civil war or the government collapses. | |
| And it won't happen for a while, but it'll be within our lifetimes if it keeps going on this track. | ||
| When you say it'll happen, as far as you need to see a change in the current course when it comes to the federal government, how it handles these issues, and if you don't see that, those things to the countries that you talked about similar, that's going to happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, most likely, it seems to me that for the most part, Democrats are incapable of cutting spending and Republicans are incapable of cutting taxes. | |
| And so no matter who you end up electing, you're always going to be increasing the national debt. | ||
| Do you think it's a party thing, or do you think that both parties have these issues when it comes to debt and deficit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's both a party thing and a general voter thing because no one wants to spend more money and not get anything back. | |
| And no matter what social issues you vote on, you're always going to be, there's always going to be someone in the office who's going to be spending money on those issues, but also cutting back on other areas and like wasting money in order to get more voters and to increase their reelection costs. | ||
| That's Alan there in Columbia, Maryland, giving us his thoughts when it comes to the Open Forum. | ||
| And thank you for all of you who participated. | ||
| Again, if you want to keep a track on what's going on with the Senate, you can stay close to C-SPAN 2 as the legislative body starts its work taking a look at the House pass bill. | ||
| We'll reference and talk about that effort throughout the course of the morning with a variety of the guests joining us. | ||
| Later on in the program, we'll hear from American Compasses Orrin Cass, not only head of that organization, with a look at financial and fiscal matters, but also talking about his new book Over Concerns and Aspects of the Free Market System. | ||
| We'll talk with him later. | ||
| But first up, as the Senate now has to tackle the One Big Beautiful bill, to join us about what they face, Ursula Perano of the news organization Notice, covers the Senate and joins us next to take your questions when Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Rick Atkinson has just published the second volume of his American Revolution trilogy. | ||
| The book is called The Fate of the Day and covers years 1777 through 1780 of the American Revolution. | ||
| His initial 800-page volume focused on years 1775 to 1777. | ||
| First volume was titled The British Are Coming. | ||
| The first book in the trilogy was published in 2019. | ||
| Mr. Atkinson won the George Washington Prize for this beginning look at the revolution. | ||
| His second book in the trilogy covers the middle years. | ||
| Stationed in Paris, Benjamin Franklin was wooing the French. | ||
| In Pennsylvania, George Washington was pleading with Congress to deliver the money, men, and material he needed to continue the fight. | ||
| This volume is time to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author Rick Atkinson with his book, The Fate of the Day, The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777 to 1780. | |
| On this episode of BookNotes 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. | ||
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| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| The Senate takes up one big beautiful bill and here to walk us through what faces senators as they do that. | ||
| Ursula Perano, who covers the Senate for Notice. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thanks for having me. | |
| A little bit about NOTICE for those who may not be familiar with it. | ||
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom started here in D.C. | |
| We cover a lot of politics issues around town. | ||
| We cover Congress. | ||
| We also have a very large fellowship class where we are mentoring the next generation of journalists. | ||
| So folks should be sure to give it a read. | ||
| With your coverage of the Senate, especially this week, will include what they do with the bill that was just passed in the House. | ||
| What's been the first reaction overall to it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think the first reaction from senators has been, we are going to change this thing. | |
| We've heard a number of conservatives come out outright saying they're against the bill as it is currently written. | ||
| There's a mix of concerns. | ||
| We have some folks concerned about the spending levels. | ||
| Rand Paul says he's concerned about the debt limit. | ||
| Josh Hawley says he's concerned about Medicaid provisions. | ||
| A number of sort of more moderate senators, the Susan Collins, the Lisa Murkowski's, also have their own concerns. | ||
| And even the senators who seem like they maybe could tolerate the bill as written are saying, yeah, we're going to have to change it to get the votes over here. | ||
| So it will have to go back to the House. | ||
| There are a lot of questions about what that process is going to look like, whether there are going to be formal markups, whether it's going to be just sort of rewritten and new bill put on the floor. | ||
| We're going to see that play out this week. | ||
| But Republicans in the Senate are saying, yeah, this isn't going to work for us here and we're going to need to make some tweaks. | ||
| I was going to say, with that much opposition right off the bat, the likelihood that even gets a vote at all, what's the possibility? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do not think this current version of the bill would go to the Senate floor. | |
| I don't think leadership wants to take a loss on the floor. | ||
| And right now, the votes just aren't there. | ||
| They can only lose three Senate Republicans before Vice President JD Vance would have to come break a tie. | ||
| And if they lose four Senate Republicans, the bill goes down altogether. | ||
| And right now, there are at least four people who have said they are not in support of this bill, for conservatives at least. | ||
| And then, of course, of course, there are those other concerns that folks need to work through. | ||
| There's something, apologies. | ||
| You wrote something recently. | ||
| If people go to the website, by the way, you can find it. | ||
| You talked about the BIRD amendment, or at least what that does to the overall process. | ||
| Can you explain that for our viewers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so this is such a wonky issue, but it matters so much to reconciliation. | |
| The Byrd rule. | ||
| The Byrd rule requires that anything that is going to be in this bill be strictly tied to the federal budget, have a significant budgetary impact. | ||
| The Senate parliamentarian is going to be in charge of deeming whether provisions in this bill are closely tied enough to the budget to get through. | ||
| She is not a legal authority. | ||
| Her name is Elizabeth McDonough. | ||
| The parliamentarian is not a legal authority. | ||
| She can be overruled, but generally leadership defers to her. | ||
| And Thun has said he does not want to overrule her regarding the Byrd rule. | ||
| So what's happening behind the scenes right now is staff for both sides of the aisle in the Senate are preparing their arguments for what they think should or should not be included in the bill based on the Byrd rule. | ||
| Democrats are trying to find things they could strip out based on Byrd Rule objections that the parliamentarian might agree with them on. | ||
| And Republicans are trying to find ways to defend certain provisions staying in. | ||
| So it does have a genuine impact on this bill and also could cause some delays. | ||
| I talked to some folks who have been through this process before and said it takes a few weeks to get through this degree of arguments and provisions and sort of detailed granular review of the bill with of course Senate Republican leadership hoping to get this bill done by July 4th. | ||
| We saw the former deadline of Memorial Day as far as the passage. | ||
| That has passed us by. | ||
| What's the likelihood July 4th is realistic at this point? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Senate Republicans want July 4th because that's around when we're expecting the debt limit to hit and they are hoping to include a debt limit increase as part of this bill. | |
| So there is a motivation there. | ||
| They don't want to do a separate debt limit bill because then they would have to work with Senate Democrats to get around to filibuster on the matter. | ||
| I think it's tricky. | ||
| You know, they have, I think it's four, maybe five weeks of legislative session left. | ||
| There's a couple days of recess in there for the Juneteenth holiday. | ||
| It's a tight timeline and we did see the House manage to meet that Memorial Day time deadline after, I believe, blowing past an Easter deadline. | ||
| It's tough and I think that we're going to see folks trying to go pedal to the metal when they come back today. | ||
| Ursula Perano joining us and if you have questions about the Senate as this takes up the tax and immigration and other related bill from the President and the House Republicans and want to ask her questions on it, 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8002 for Independents. | ||
| If you want to text your questions, it's 202-748-8003. | ||
| Senator Hawley was one of those early on talking about concerns for Medicaid. | ||
| What's motivating that on his side? | ||
|
unidentified
|
His state has a very high Medicaid enrollment, and so we do see that from a number of senators. | |
| Some of the West Virginia senators, for example, both Republicans Jim Justice and Shelley Moorcapito, have also said, you know, they need to look closely at those provisions. | ||
| And there are a number of Republican states with Republican senators that are going to have those questions as well. | ||
| Hawley has been pressing and very open that he will not support this bill if he does not feel the Medicaid provisions are up to par or what he's willing to work around. | ||
| He is concerned about qualified beneficiaries losing coverage. | ||
| And he's not the only one. | ||
| So that's going to be a primary issue where folks need to work through what that language actually turns out to be. | ||
| Senator Collins of Maine expressing that, Senator Murkowski expressing that, and another publication calling them the Medicaid moderates are the ones to watch, especially as this plays out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely. | |
| It's a very strong contingent. | ||
| And there are other provisions in this bill, too, that the Senate just doesn't have the same approach as the House does. | ||
| House members are much more a pulse of their district. | ||
| They're working with a smaller group of people. | ||
| Senators are representing an entire state. | ||
| So sometimes they have different considerations. | ||
| The salt tax is another issue in the bill that we had a number of senators say. | ||
| I don't think we're going to have the same concerns about the salt tax here amongst Republicans in the Senate as Republicans in the House might have. | ||
| Most of the folks in the House who had concerns about salt were from New York. | ||
| And both of the senators from New York and the Senate are Democrats. | ||
| So you don't have that same sort of lobbying and representation for that issue here. | ||
| You hinted at it, but as the bill gets consideration, what faces the Senate leaders he's trying to manage all this, Jon Thune? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's got to get through the parliamentarian. | |
| He's probably going to be dealing with pressure from House members to ignore the parliamentarian on anything she deems not kosher to go in the bill. | ||
| And he's going to be having to work with a lot of different factions of his conference. | ||
| You know, I think so far we've seen Senate Republicans, in many ways, to a surprising degree, stick together through a very unusual cabinet confirmation process. | ||
| So far, they haven't had any particularly surprising bills go down or anything on the matter. | ||
| But this will be a big test for Jon Thune, whether he can corral these extremely different wings of the conference when you're talking about a Rand Paul and a Susan Collins, right? | ||
| They have very different concerns and priorities for this bill, what they're comfortable with going through. | ||
| And trying to get all of those folks on the same page is going to be a test. | ||
| Again, the numbers 202748-8,0001 for Republicans, Democrats 202-748-8,000, and Independents 202748-8,0002. | ||
| You mentioned Senator Rand Paul on the Sunday shows yesterday. | ||
| Talk a little bit about his concerns. | ||
| He expressed those. | ||
| We'll show you a little bit of that. | ||
| Get your comments on it. | ||
| Well, the math doesn't really add up. | ||
| One of the things this big and beautiful bill is, is it's a vehicle for increasing spending for the military and for the border. | ||
| It's about $320 billion in new spending. | ||
| To put that in perspective, that's more than all the Doge cuts that we've found so far. | ||
| So the increase in spending put into this bill exceeds the Doge cuts. | ||
| When you look just at the border wall, they have $46.5 billion for the border wall. | ||
| Well, the current estimate from the CBP is $6.5 million per mile. | ||
| So if you did 1,000 miles, that's $6.5 billion. | ||
| But they have $46 billion. | ||
| So they've inflated the cost of the wall eightfold. | ||
| So there's a lot of new spending that has to be counteracted. | ||
| But essentially, this is a bill by the military-industrial complex advocates who are padding the military budget. | ||
| There's going to be a lot of extra money. | ||
| Look, the president has essentially stopped the border flow without new money and without any new legislation. | ||
| So I think they're asking for too much money. | ||
| And in the end, the way you add it up to see if it actually is going to save money or add money is how much debt are they going to borrow? | ||
| $5 trillion over two years. | ||
| It's an enormous amount. | ||
| So Ursula Perrano, let's start with that last bit, the eventually idea of what it does to the debt. | ||
| How many senators like Senator Paul at this point expressing those concerns? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So Paul seems to be among a group of four senators that have these concerns. | |
| It is himself, it is Senator Rick Scott, Senator Mike Lee, and Senator Ron Johnson are all, it seems, speaking as part of a group. | ||
| Ron Johnson and the Senate, before they left town, after this bill passed, was openly naming. | ||
| These are the guys I've got that are also sharing these concerns about spending levels. | ||
| We've heard members of this group, including Paul, say they just think it is too high. | ||
| They're concerned about what it's doing to the national debt. | ||
| He seems to have a very specific concern about also including the debt limit increase in the bill. | ||
| He said that if that was not part of it, he might be a little more amenable. | ||
| But this is a big bill, and there are concerns about what it'll do to the budget. | ||
| And these folks could have the power to stall it if they genuinely are not comfortable with the numbers that are being shown as a result. | ||
| He threw immigration into the mix as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, and there are a lot of questions about immigration regarding the bird rule, what can get through, because that has been an issue that historically, when senators on both sides are trying to do reconciliation bills, the parliamentarian has questions about how closely are these immigration provisions tied to the federal budget. | |
| So it'll be interesting to see whether Senate Republicans can maintain their arguments on these elements of the bill as well. | ||
| Let's hear from John. | ||
| John is in Florida. | ||
| Republican line for our guest, Ursula Perano, of notice. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is basically for the U.S. Senate. | |
| You know, the perfect is the enemy of the good. | ||
| This bill is absolutely necessary to remediate a lot of the problems that due to corruption have ruined the economy for the middle class and the safety over the last 35 years, really starting with Daddy Bush. | ||
| Because remember, he drafted and negotiated NAFTA, and then it was signed by Bill Clinton in November of 93. | ||
| So if this bill does not pass, the economy of the U.S. is going to be in shambles. | ||
| President Trump passed many things within this bill or has many things that will remediate all that pathology over the last 30-something years. | ||
| So again, if these senators, Murkowski, Collins, Johnson, and Ray and Paul, do not sign off on this bill ultimately, ultimately, then they need to. | ||
| Honest news stations need to research who's paid them off to betray America. | ||
| Now, we know the Democrats are not going to help America. | ||
| They're in the pocket of guys like Soros that are always for ruining America. | ||
| But you got Republican, Trump agenda Republicans, you know, who are actually not in the pocket of bad actors. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, got your thought, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and I think that when you're talking about the perfect being the enemy of the good, that is very true in Congress generally. | |
| One thing that is helpful context for reconciliation is that it is a limited use procedure. | ||
| The benefit of reconciliation and why lawmakers do enjoy this process is that in the Senate, it is a way around the filibuster. | ||
| Usually legislation in the Senate is subject to a 60-vote threshold. | ||
| Reconciliation requires only a 50-vote threshold. | ||
| But you can only use reconciliation once a fiscal year. | ||
| There have been exceptions for federal emergencies where there is a significant need to pass a bill related to the budget. | ||
| But the reason that many Republican senators, and we saw this last time, Democrats did reconciliation as well, are very firm on making sure they try and get everything they want in is because they don't get a lot of opportunities like this to not need to try and get to that 60-vote threshold where they do need Democratic support. | ||
| This is their best chance to get conservative policy through this term. | ||
| From Georgia, Republican line, Roy is next. | ||
| Hello, Roy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I hope you can answer a question for me that's been going through my mind for a little while. | ||
| I'm on Social Security. | ||
| I have Medicare. | ||
| When I go to the doctor, the doctor will bill Medicare a Social Security to pay my bill. | ||
| My question is this. | ||
| A person on Medicare Advantage, they well, my thing is this, is that the government is taking the same Social Security money and paying the insurance company $1,200 a year for Medicare Advantage. | ||
| To my understanding, even if a person does not go to the doctor, bring money to the private insurance company. | ||
| If we just stop future enrollment into Medicare supplement, I mean, Medicare Advantage, go back to traditional Medicare where you had Medicare supplement, would we save the money? | ||
| I mean, are we just paying money to private insurance company, even when there's no services provided? | ||
| Roy, in Georgia, thanks for the call. | ||
| Let me take his question and ask you this. | ||
| We heard President Trump saying, don't touch Medicaid. | ||
| He said that to the House members all the time. | ||
| Is he going to make that same type of message to the Senate and how's that going to be received? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, when he made that message to House Republicans in a conference meeting a few weeks ago, it really did embolden some of the opponents of this bill in the Senate for these Medicaid provisions who are concerned about kicking qualified beneficiaries off. | |
| I think that it is a question of how much Trump weighs into the Senate. | ||
| In the House, it seems like he had to go. | ||
| He had to go and get people on board. | ||
| The House is difficult to control. | ||
| Speaker Mike Johnson and him were able to come together to get folks on board. | ||
| It was a big question of if this bill would even pass there at all or whether it would have to be rewritten. | ||
| I don't know whether we're going to see as much of a presence of him in the Senate. | ||
| Some of the people who are opponents of this bill or question marks on this bill aren't even the closest allies or necessarily aligned with Trump themselves when we're talking perhaps about some of those moderate senators who have openly rebuked him on a number of issues. | ||
| So whether he steps back in and tries to handle these Medicaid concerns in the Senate will be a big question over the next few weeks. | ||
| What's the likelihood that JD Vance, being in the Senate before himself, is the one to maybe make the calls and twist the arms, so to speak? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I could see that. | |
| You know, he's come around a couple times this year. | ||
| He does have relationships in the Senate and he has sort of worked as a liaison on some of these issues. | ||
| We have seen some folks coming to Senate Republican lunch to explain their side of the bill. | ||
| For example, the last lunch or full conference lunch that Senate Republicans had, Speaker Mike Johnson himself came and he walked senators through why the bill looks this way, why it was so carefully negotiated. | ||
| I heard he used a line that passing this bill in the House was like crossing the Grand Canyon on dental floss. | ||
| You know, he was trying to relay, this is a very delicate process and we are trying to not change it up too much and risk it being complicated when it does inevitably kick back to the House with changes. | ||
| You talked about the Senate parliamentary and the role she has. | ||
| What history does she have in taking a look at reconciliation type bills and being, you know, a very, you know, by the book, so to speak, when it comes to what can be done in it and what can't? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, folks who I spoke to who have worked with her through this process on previous reconciliation bills say she has a very tight, narrow view of what budget or being closely aligned to the budget looks like. | |
| It can go very parliamentarian to parliamentarian over the historical history of reconciliation bills. | ||
| What people will allow in, it's very much an art, not a science. | ||
| She seems to be on the stricter side of wanting to make sure that things are not overly sweepy of what comes in the bill. | ||
| It does seem from folks I've talked to that when she goes through the process, she likes to, you know, give one win to Republicans, give one win to Democrats. | ||
| She tries to be fair when she's going through of not being overly favorable to one side or the other. | ||
| But it will be a question too of how staff who are preparing these arguments present them. | ||
| A lot of folks said that this is a carefully, it's like a courtroom style, carefully constructed process where they are trying to be prepared for every objection that the other side can have. | ||
| The Senate's back this week. | ||
| You talked about the July 4th deadline. | ||
| Walk us through the first steps. | ||
| What happens this week and ongoing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, when they come back today, reporters swarm and we will have a lot of questions. | |
| I think first we're looking to hear from leadership on what they think this process is going to look like. | ||
| When they last left town, the House had just passed the bill a matter of hours before. | ||
| So as I mentioned at the top, the questions on markups, whether they're going to do that formally, whether they're going to try and conference the bill. | ||
| I had spoken to Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham right before he left town, and he said he still needed to talk to leadership about it and figure out what that looks like. | ||
| So I think right now there's a big question about is this going to be a very formalized process? | ||
| Is this going to be a matter of lunches where they sit down and try and work through their disagreements on the bill? | ||
| My guess is that I feel like if they did have markups, it would be very public what their disagreements are and very time consuming. | ||
| So I would say based on how the Senate generally has handled these sort of sweeping policy issues that it would be a family matter and a conversation not to be had in public, but we'll have to see. | ||
| Does that family also include House Republican, the majority or the House Speaker, Mike Johnson? | ||
| Is he still in communication in this process with Senator Thune? | ||
|
unidentified
|
From what we know, Senator Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson have remained in pretty constant contact throughout this process. | |
| And yet, in many ways, they still have seemed unaligned on some of the key provisions or approach to this bill. | ||
| I mean, for months, we were debating one bill versus two, and it seemed there wasn't necessarily a family agreement on that matter. | ||
| But I do think it's very likely that we do continue to see House Republicans be a voice in this matter. | ||
| Because inevitably, if the Senate makes changes and they send it back to the House, they do have to consider what can we get through there. | ||
| They know if we change too much, it could complicate passage over there, and they don't want to blow past the July 4th deadline. | ||
| Ursula Perano of Notice joining us for this conversation. | ||
| Let's hear from Felix. | ||
| Felix in North Carolina. | ||
| Felix is on our line for Democrats. | ||
| You're on with our guests. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN America. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| How are y'all on this beautiful day? | ||
| Fine, sir. | ||
| You're on with our guest. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, my question here is basically on the waste-fraud and abuse cause. | |
| I haven't seen any yet because I watch a lot of the hearings and stuff. | ||
| I hear a lot of propaganda coming from all sides, but I'd like to see somebody either indicted or actually produce some under oath. | ||
| My second issue here deals with the waste, fraud, and abuse also. | ||
| And we have a senator up there, or there's one from Florida called Rick Scott. | ||
| He was president of HCA Columbia. | ||
| And if I'm not mistaken, he was the largest Medicare fraud person that has ever been in history. | ||
|
unidentified
|
About $1.7 billion fraud. | |
| His company, HCA Columbia, paid something like $200 million. | ||
| He walked away with $300 million. | ||
| And that means about $1.2 billion were just left to the shareholders. | ||
| Wouldn't that be considered the waste-fraw and abuse? | ||
| Y'all have a great day, and God bless America. | ||
| Felix in North Carolina. | ||
| Does the specter of Elon Musk still weigh over whatever is being considered on the Senate side? | ||
| Especially on his efforts to cut government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think the efforts to cut government broadly weigh over the bill. | |
| You know, Elon Musk is a question. | ||
| He did recently visit the Senate not too long ago, so he is still a presence. | ||
| But I think there are questions around how rescissions or Doge cuts could play into arguments on spending on this bill, whether cuts to government waste could perhaps offset concerns from some conservatives over how much this would add to the debt. | ||
| So it's a question of whether they can seesaw that and make it tolerable to folks. | ||
| But it remains to be seen. | ||
| There is a rescissions package that lawmakers are going to be handling, and that itself is going to be a battle. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that rescissions package a little bit, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So rescissions is also one of those policies that is subject to a 50-vote threshold. | ||
| So there's a lot of opportunity for the Senate and the House to get through something on this. | ||
| But actually putting those levels of cuts, basically rescissions is codifying the cuts that the government has proposed through Doge and other efforts to government spending. | ||
| Codifying those cuts and getting people to agree in writing what they're taking money away from is going to be complicated for a lot of reasons. | ||
| People have different priorities. | ||
| It is also a huge political liability for a lot of these lawmakers. | ||
| If you're a vulnerable House Republican back home and there are cuts to a program in your district, you don't want it in writing that you voted for those. | ||
| That's an ad waiting to be written, you know? | ||
| And so I think we're going to see that for a lot of lawmakers who are looking to fine-tune what is in that package. | ||
| This is John. | ||
| John is in South Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| My question is that there's a $9 trillion interest payment due for the debt. | ||
| And according to Bloomberg, there doesn't seem to be an appetite to buy 30-year treasuries. | ||
| So I'm curious how are we going to finance the interest already due and still increase the debt with this big, beautiful bill. | ||
| Yeah, there are a lot of questions about how that is going to be handled. | ||
| There are revenue generating measures in this bill that folks are hoping will help offset. | ||
| I mean, taxes are inherently revenue generating. | ||
| That's some of the argument that's being made. | ||
| But I know earlier on the show there was a question about the debt limit in general and what the price would be for not increasing the debt limit as part of this bill. | ||
| And at the end of the day, that is that the Treasury would not be able to continue its obligations for payments and interest to folks that we as a country owe money to. | ||
| And there would be catastrophic economic results of that if that doesn't actually happen. | ||
| Ursula Perrano and the House bill, there are several provisions in that reconciliation bill. | ||
| Just to kind of give you the highlight, one would ban states from self-regulating AI. | ||
| One would bar judges from enforcing contempt citations. | ||
| One would require federal agency rules to be approved by Congress. | ||
| And then it would eliminate the federal registration requirement for firearm suppression. | ||
| What happens to those amendments once the Senate takes a look at it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and I mean, those are the sort of things that there are a lot of questions about whether they make it through the parliamentarian bird rule process. | |
| The AI provision, for example, is one that I've heard multiple people say they have doubts about that getting through. | ||
| I've heard some people call them sort of industry sweeteners to where you can tell folks from certain industries that you tried and then the parliamentarians struck it out. | ||
| So I think some lawmakers even have a sense that those things might not survive. | ||
| Because these are provisions, when you're talking about them, you have to be able to argue that they are so strictly tied to the federal budget. | ||
| And the question is, how does a state regulating AI tie to the federal budget? | ||
| Or how do these different provisions actually strictly tie to spending and debt and all these matters? | ||
| So these are some of the holdups that could cause delays in the bill if Republicans or Democrats do get caught up in a prolonged fight with the parliamentarian over them. | ||
| This is Carl. | ||
| Carl is from Maine, Democrats line. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm here. | |
| Yeah, I had a question about on this new bill. | ||
| I watched the news report. | ||
| I forgot what station it was yesterday, but it showed exactly how about a mile of that new wall that Trump was billing on the defense end of the bill. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it says actually in the bill, he's asking like five to six times more than the wall will cost. | |
| And also, they touched on it on the last thing, that other provision in the bill where they try to weaken the judicial branch. | ||
| So I wondered if you knew anything about why they were asking so much money for defense, because the news station yesterday said the wall was like so much dollars per mile, but they're asking six times that amount for the wall. | ||
| So I was just wondering if you'd heard of the thing about that. | ||
| And Carl, while I got you, let me ask you about your senator, one of your senators, at least, Susan Collins, opposing this bill as it currently stands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I hope she does oppose it because I live a lot long with my dog in Maine, and I'm a veteran disabled. | |
| Well, I don't have a disability check, but I get regular Social Security. | ||
| And with my pension last year, I made about $16,000, $59,000. | ||
| And this bill does nothing for me. | ||
| And where they say for poor people that most people do standard deductions, they don't do itemize when they make that amount of money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this bill is basically for the rich, and those jobs were never produced in 2017. | |
| Carl, I'll finish there, get our guests respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Carl, I think what you're talking about there with the concerns over border spending and the questions over where that money is going. | |
| Again, the parliamentarian has always been kind of a question mark on border money. | ||
| There are questions of whether she is going to see these as closely aligned enough to the budget, whether this will get through. | ||
| But there are arguments on the Republican side that when you're talking about cribbing undocumented immigrants and illegal immigration, whether that does have an impact on the budget through the cost of mitigating that inflow. | ||
| So it's going to be a very wonky argument that I think we will have to see whether that level of spending actually makes it through. | ||
| And also thank you for your service. | ||
| What's the Democratic strategy going forward, particularly on work on this bill? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So just yesterday, minority leader Chuck Schumer put out a dear colleague saying that he is working in close conjunction with Hakeem Jeffries in the House to try and prepare their arguments and their resistance to this bill. | ||
| What that's actually going to look like is likely a number of fights with the parliamentarian, points of order on the floor, doing everything they can to delay passage. | ||
| That's a pretty common tactic we're seeing among Senate Democrats this term is finding ways to eat up time. | ||
| They are finding ways to delay votes on the floor through making things that are usually done through UC or unanimous consent, like going in and out of session or in and out of legislative business. | ||
| The most basic procedural things that the Senate does, making people take full votes on the matter, which can eat up, for the Senate, 15 minutes to an hour. | ||
| It's not the speediest voting chamber on earth. | ||
| So I think that we're going to see Senate Democrats try and oppose things that way. | ||
| But at the end of the day, their votes aren't needed for this bill. | ||
| So it's kind of delaying the inevitable so long as Senate Republicans can come together behind it. | ||
| Let's hear from Ted. | ||
| Ted's in Pennsylvania, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| My question is, you know, I'm a disabled Vietnam combat veteran, and what I've seen is like with the senators, congressmen, anybody is in office, that's all they do is talk. | ||
| They shoot their mouth off, but they don't do any good. | ||
| I mean, 90% of the people my age, mid-70s up to 100, we're almost dead. | ||
| We'll never get nothing out of any of this. | ||
| Then on top of it, with the VA, I have to fight for my benefits because everything that's said on TV is a lie. | ||
| They have to vote to see if they're going to give you your benefits. | ||
| It's a fact. | ||
| I got the letters. | ||
| I got the proof. | ||
| But everybody on TV, all these senators, all these congressmen, all these news people, that's all they do is say words, but they don't work. | ||
| What do they do? | ||
| I would love to get paid to shoot my mouth off and lie to people. | ||
| It's all a lie. | ||
| It's about money. | ||
| Gotcha, Ted. | ||
| Gotcha, Ted. | ||
| And let's hear from Dave. | ||
| Last call from New York, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi. | ||
| You've been talking about the Senate parliamentarian and the role that she will play. | ||
| Has a debt ceiling increase ever been done through reconciliation? | ||
| I don't recall that been done. | ||
| And is it something that should be allowed to be done through reconciliation? | ||
| It's not really part of the budget. | ||
| It's a separate financial act. | ||
| I appreciate if you have any insight on that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You know, I will say in recent history, I can't recall any instance where the debt ceiling has been raised through reconciliation. | ||
| I would have to go back through time and the history of the debt ceiling to be totally sure. | ||
| But I will say it is an unusual approach, and it is specifically designed to avoid needing Democratic support. | ||
| Right now, Senate Democrats have not necessarily been eager to work with Senate Republicans on issues and even with government funding. | ||
| We saw Senate Democrats who did vote to keep the government open face huge backlash from progressives and even some moderate Democrats who thought that the bill should have gone down. | ||
| So if the debt ceiling were peeled out, it would be an entirely different situation for Senate Republicans where they would need to be looking to potentially make some concessions with their minority counterparts. | ||
| We talked a lot about this bill, but what other activities will the Senate be involving itself this week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so we're going to have that rescissions package. | |
| I think coming back, we have a number of senators looking to get back to work on some of their own policy issues. | ||
| We've seen a lot of talks about crypto lately. | ||
| I think we're going to see the Senate continue trying to find a way to get that genius act through. | ||
| And otherwise, you know, folks are just really eating up a lot of time in this reconciliation situation. | ||
| And I think that that's going to keep them pretty busy. | ||
| The website for NOTICE, by the way, is notice.org. | ||
| If you're interested in seeing the work of our guest, Ursula Pirano, who covers the Senate, particularly as we watch what happens to the reconciliation bill. | ||
| Thanks for your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Coming up about a half hour from now, we're going to hear 45 minutes from now, we're going to hear from Oren Cass. | ||
| He's the head of an organization known as American Compass, wrote a new book taking a look at fiscal policy. | ||
| But first, open forum. | ||
| And if you want to comment, 202748-8001 for Republicans, Democrats 202-748-8000, and Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| We'll take those calls from Washington Journal continues. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In a nation divided, a rare moment of unity. | |
| This fall, C-SPAN presents Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| In a town where partisan fighting prevails. | ||
| One table, two leaders, one goal, to find common ground. | ||
| This fall, ceasefire on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
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| 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. | ||
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| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| This is part of the program we call Open Forum, a chance for you to comment on things of politics and related stories, things you're interested in commenting on. | ||
| 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats, and Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| You can always make your comments on our social media sites. | ||
| That's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPAN WJ. | ||
| In the Wall Street Journal this morning, taking a look at Iran's country's program when it comes to nuclear enrichment, saying that it was the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a confidential report circulating to a number of states that Iran had grown its stockpile of 60% enriched uranium to 408.6 kilograms from 274.8 kilograms in early February. | ||
| That's an increase around 50%, according to the Wall Street Journal viewing the report. | ||
| That means Iran has enough highly enriched uranium for roughly 10 nuclear weapons based on IAEA measures of the minimum fissile material required from at least six at the time of the previous report. | ||
| U.S. officials also saying it could take Iran less than two weeks to convert this highly enriched uranium into enough weapons-grade, 90% fissile material for a nuclear weapon. | ||
| That's on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| If you go to other international news, when it looks at Ukraine, the Washington Post, its head story, lead story, saying that's on the eve of that bilateral peace talks in Istanbul, that Ukraine security services launched that massive drone attack against five air bases inside Russia. | ||
| Officials in both countries said Sunday, in one of the most penetrating assaults of Russian territory by Ukrainian forces since the war began. | ||
| The security service of Ukraine claimed responsibility for the attack, which saw Ukrainian drones smokeled into Russia before they struck strategic airfields in remote areas, that including to Siberia for the first time. | ||
| President Volvir Zelensky hailing the assault as brilliant and perfectly prepared. | ||
| So if you want to comment on those international stories as well, you can do so on this open forum. | ||
| Let's start with Dan in Michigan, Democrats line. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I'd just like to comment on this big, beautiful bill. | |
| Some of the things that I haven't really heard reported on was that a president would be able to delay or cancel elections legally, ignore Supreme Court rulings for a year or more, fire government employees for political disloyalty. | ||
| Judges wouldn't be able to enforce their own orders. | ||
| Protests can be tracked and criminalized. | ||
| I think those things are almost as important as the whole package, considering that that's what our whole democracy is based on. | ||
| And where did you hear about this being part of the package? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I read it in an article in the newspaper. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Dan in Michigan, Democrats line. | ||
| Again, you can add your thoughts to the mix as well as we continue on. | ||
| Later on, the program, like we talked about, Oren Cass, the head of American Compass, joining us to talk about his new book called The New Conservatives. | ||
| It takes a look at matters of fiscal policy, particularly as new conservatives as they deem it might look at it in these days. | ||
| You can join us for that in about 40 minutes from now. | ||
| But again, open forum: 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8000 for Democrats, and Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Let's go to Robert. | ||
| Robert in Delaware. | ||
| Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi. | ||
| You're on. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'd like to know about this monopolize. | |
| You know, the companies like Amazon, they're taking over everything, even the jug stores, selling cars and all now. | ||
| Isn't that monopoly? | ||
| I thought that Teddy Roosevelt stopped that. | ||
| I just wanted to hear something about that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Robert, there in Della, where we talked with our previous guest about taking a look at what happens on the Senate side, particularly as the work on the One Big Beautiful bill takes place. | ||
| As always, if you want to follow along in real time on what's being said on the Senate floor and the lead up of work, you can always follow along on our channel that's dedicated to the Senate, C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Speaking of the Senate, a very special day here at C-SPAN. | ||
| We celebrate the 39th anniversary today of coverage of the U.S. Senate on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| It started back in 1986 on this day. | ||
| And here's some of what legislators had to say about television coverage in the Senate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are going public. | |
| We'll be watched by our friends and by people across the country. | ||
| And I would hope, as I've said before, that the Senate may change, not as an institution, but may become a more efficient body because of televised proceedings. | ||
| Today, as the U.S. Senate comes out of the communications dark ages, we create another historic moment in the relationship between Congress and technological advancements in communications through radio and television. | ||
| The senator will be recognized for one minute the senator from Tennessee, Mr. Gordon. | ||
| Today marks the first time when our legislative branch in its entirety will appear on that medium of communication through which most Americans get their information about what our government and our country does. | ||
| The televising and Senate chamber proceedings also represents a wise and warranted policy. | ||
| Broadcast media coverage recognizes the basic right and need of the citizens of our nation to know the business of their government. | ||
| Extremely important occasion about bringing the Senate of the United States into the 20th century and to what I consider to be a very important day for the Senate and for the American people. | ||
| And by our action today, we haven't really fundamentally altered that situation. | ||
| We've simply enlarged the galleries. | ||
| We have pushed out the walls to include all the American people who wish to watch. | ||
| As Thomas Jefferson so often reminded us, an educated citizenry was crucial to the preservation of representative government. | ||
| It was inevitable in our democracy that floor proceedings in the United States Senate would one day be televised. | ||
| This has rightly been termed an historic day. | ||
| Not, Mr. President, that I delude myself that the primitive art form that we practice here on the Senate floor is likely to constitute any great threat to the ratings of Dynasty or Dallas or Falcon Crest. | ||
| Now, Mr. President, I will not say that TV in the Senate is going to change anything, but I wish to note that we've had advice on how to do this and how to make certain that we cut that shine on the head and if necessary, how to do the eyeshadow and the whole thing so that those of us unfortunate enough to have bags under the eyes may look a little bit better. | ||
| That's just a snapshot of that first day of coverage that started today 39 years ago. | ||
| Happy birthday to us. | ||
| Happy anniversary to us, so to speak. | ||
| But the gift is to you really, and you can follow along and continue to follow along on the work of the Senate and what it does in this modern day. | ||
| By the way, if you're interested in seeing more of that history of televised coverage in the Senate, go to our website at c-span.org. | ||
| You'll see Senate leaders like you did with Bob Dole and Robert Byrd, other video highlights there as well. | ||
| And the way that you can see that on the website is at cspan.org backslash senate-tv if you want to see more there as we continue on with our coverage of the Senate and the House and of this program where you get to call in 202748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8000 for Democrats, Independents, 202748-8002 on this open forum if you want to participate. | ||
| To let you know what's going on on our other networks, including the Senate 1, C2, as we call it, you can see a conversation on innovation and national security. | ||
| This will be on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Like I mentioned, it will feature Navy Secretary John Phelan, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, Air Force Chief of Staff David Allen, and others. | ||
| Speaking about the role of national security and innovation within that space, it's hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project. | ||
| That will be live in just about a half hour from now, 9:15. | ||
| You can see that on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| Our app is at C-SPAN now. | ||
| And then you can always follow along on our website at c-span.org if you're interested in seeing more there. | ||
| Again, this is open forum as we take your calls. | ||
| One more aspect when it comes to the big beautiful bill, so to speak, how Wall Street is looking at it. | ||
| That's where the Washington Post picks that up. | ||
| This is the story that you'll find in the papers on website and the website. | ||
| In private Wall Street Sound's alarm on the president's tax bill, here's some of that alarm being highlighted: saying the federal government borrows money issued as treasury bonds to fund the gap between what it spends and what it brings in through taxes and other revenue. | ||
| The almost 30 trillion market for U.S. debt influences the interest rates for other lending, including mortgages and auto loans, as well as for debt issued by private companies. | ||
| Experts warn that too much government borrowing could send already elevated interest rates soaring as investors demand higher yields to cover the increased risk that the United States might eventually default. | ||
| Even before it becomes law, the tax bill has helped to fuel a spike in treasury yields with the 30-year bond recently surging past 5%, an important psychological threshold before receding. | ||
| Again, that's the Washington Post. | ||
| If you want to read more on what Wall Street thinks, let's hear from Long Island. | ||
| This is Jim, Republican Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yeah, hi. | ||
| The last time I called about this subject, you didn't give me a chance to finish. | ||
| I noticed today that you're getting worse with the pop-ups on the screen there. | ||
| I hope you allow me to finish. | ||
| You're on, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I was watching the screen and I saw you talk. | ||
| So the last news that was left on television was McDeal Layer News Hour, which I lost from its inception. | ||
| And then along came 9-11 and all the stations got crazy with all these doodads over the screen. | ||
| And you were the last one 10 years ago when I tuned in that was pretty conservative. | ||
| You lost that conservatism. | ||
| As soon as you mentioned that the CNN guy, I think, took over the station as the manager, I knew this was going to happen. | ||
| I don't know what people are supposed to glean from all this. | ||
| Think of all the channels I just got rid of. | ||
| The History Channel, Discovery, and so forth, probably 10 or 20 channels. | ||
| They constantly do this. | ||
| The only time they don't have all these doodads on the screen is when they have commercials. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| I'm a newspaper reader, The Times, Wall Street Journal, and a local newspaper, and a French newspaper, which I get, Le Canada Soné. | ||
| A paper is probably going to be my last place to get the news. | ||
| I'm going to have to give up on this channel. | ||
| I don't know what I'm supposed to glean from some of these doodles. | ||
| Well, let me explain only because probably as of today as well, you'll notice that we're using some new graphics. | ||
| And part of the design of the graphics is to help you, the viewer like you and others, not only what's happening on this network, but it happens on other two networks as well, C-SPAN 2 and C-SPAN 3. | ||
| Sometimes it will direct you if the president is speaking or the member of Congress or if something else is happening that we're going to cover. | ||
| It helps you, the viewer, get a sense of what we're doing in our coverage of Washington, whether it be the White House, whether it be Congress, or other things. | ||
| As always, we've branched out as well beyond what you see on screens these days, as far as television is concerned, or Maine television is probably the way to think of it, but also our app as well, C-SPAN Now. | ||
| That's a place you can go if you're on the go, if you want to see things online, things that take place here, follow along. | ||
| You can always follow along on the app as well at C-SPAN Now. | ||
| Cutler in New Hampshire, Republican line. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I'm on the Democrat. | |
| I should be the Democratic line. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But I don't want to talk party. | ||
| I want to talk the news clip that you just showed about the previous senators and congressmen. | ||
| Those days are gone. | ||
| They were willing to compromise. | ||
| We have a non-functioning Congress. | ||
| We have a Republican Party that are just puppets. | ||
| They're not doing their job. | ||
| And personally, I get sick of Democrats attacking Republicans, Republicans attacking Democrats. | ||
| We've got to think about the country. | ||
| And there's so much going on now that's wrong. | ||
| And we need courage and we need conviction from our elected officials. | ||
| Cutler, let me ask you: Cutler, before you go, you saw the legislators from back in 1986. | ||
| What do you think has happened as far as that willingness to work together? | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't. | |
| Well, the current person in charge is not helping the matter. | ||
| I don't really know why we can't talk to each other rationally. | ||
| I mean, I try to look at the other person's point of view and understand where they're coming from. | ||
| But the reality is that the Congress is not functioning as it should. | ||
| It's relinquished its responsibilities. | ||
| And hence, Obama and Biden and everybody else writes executive orders when it should be legislation that's passed and it's not happening. | ||
| And, you know, we always talk about Ronald Reagan, how good he was. | ||
| Well, he drove up to national debt, and we found out that he had mental problems at the end. | ||
| So stop attacking Joe Biden. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, that's Cutler there. | ||
| Let's hear from Randy in Louisiana, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yes, I'm in favor of a sound that lately do it, but a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. | ||
| Randy, Randy, I apologize. | ||
| You're coming in real, you are very faint. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you get closer to the device you're speaking on? | |
| Yes. | ||
| I'm in favor of a balanced budget amendment for the Constitution. | ||
| It would be a wonderful thing. | ||
| Why do you think that? | ||
| Why do you think that would be a wonderful thing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we force things to be done. | |
| I mean, a balanced budget. | ||
| That would be a wonderful thing to have a balanced budget. | ||
| And it would be responsibility. | ||
| And they should have done this many, many years ago, but it's kind of late to do it. | ||
| But it would be a wonderful thing to do it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Randy there in Louisiana. | ||
| By the way, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning, another story about Iran. | ||
| This is by David Cloud saying that Iraq was a minor market for Visa and MasterCard a couple of years ago, generating just $50 million a month or less in cross-border transactions at the start of 2023. | ||
| Then it exploded to around $1.5 billion in April that year, a 2,900% increase almost overnight. | ||
| What changed? | ||
| Iraqi militia groups figured out how to squeeze dollars on the industrial scale from Visa and MasterCards payment networks for themselves and for their allies in Iran, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| The shift into cards came after the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in late 2022 shut down a gaping loophole being used for fraud, international wire transactions by Iraqi banks that lacked money laundering safeguards, flaws in that system created by the U.S. during the occupation of Iraq, allowed Iran and other militia groups it supports to access billions of dollars over more than a decade. | ||
| Ricky is up next. | ||
| Ricky in South Carolina, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I was just wanting to comment about it's sort of funny that the Democrats won't bipartisanship, but they kept not one Democrat vote for the better bill. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| That's Ricky there in South Carolina, the neighboring state of North Carolina. | ||
| This is Kenny, Independent Line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Yes, the gentleman that called and said those sentences you put on, he was right on the money. | ||
| Those are the days of old, and we're options from that now. | ||
| But the reason I called in, I wanted to bring back because we're never going to settle these problems unless we look at how we got here. | ||
| Now, Pedro, I would like for you, if you will, please, please look up and find out. | ||
| Am I still there? | ||
| I don't hear anything. | ||
| You're on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I want you to look up and find out how much the Gulf War with Iraq, because we had no deficit before then. | ||
| We had a surplus with Clinton, the Democrat, last Democrat. | ||
| Well, not the last Democrat, the Democrat. | ||
| He balanced the budget. | ||
| Now, all of a sudden, come to Republicans. | ||
| They started a war in Iraq, Afghanistan. | ||
| Now, I did some studying and with the interest on that debt, because we borrowed that money to fight those wars. | ||
| And that was $20 over $20 trillion right there. | ||
| Now, you look up the development of the banks out of the banks and everything. | ||
| You add that up in there. | ||
| You add in the tax cuts that we had. | ||
| Tax cuts during the war, trillions of dollars. | ||
| You add that up. | ||
| And the interest, not just that money, but the interest is what been killing us over these 20-something years. | ||
| And you will see how we got here. | ||
| It wasn't here. | ||
| We didn't get here by spending money on the people. | ||
| When we spend money on the people, say on programs and stuff like that, food stamps, this money goes right back into the economy. | ||
| This money that we're fighting these wars on, it never comes back, Pedro. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It goes overseas. | ||
| Now, let me say that. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| That's Kenny there in North Carolina. | ||
| We'll hear from Jerry. | ||
| Jerry in New York, Republican line. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What I would like to know, it's a couple of bipartisan things. | |
| And one, I think it was when the Secretary of State, when he was a senator, Senator Rubio, he proposed something that would stop us from having to change our clocks every year. | ||
| And it's bipartisan. | ||
| It isn't Republican or Democrat. | ||
| And so I don't know why that couldn't be passed. | ||
| The other thing is, I get tired of people blaming one party or the other for things. | ||
| You know, let's work together. | ||
| That's the way that's the American way, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| You can't, you know, if something's wrong, you can't just blame the other party. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| Very van. | ||
| In Schenectady, New York, giving us a call in this open forum. | ||
| You can continue on. | ||
| We'll go on to 9-15-202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| And Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| The New York Times reporting this morning that federal officers entered Representative Gerald Nadler's office in lower Manhattan Wednesday, handcuffed and briefly detained one of his aides. | ||
| Confirmation happened shortly after the aide observed federal agents detaining migrants in a public hallway outside an immigration courtroom in the same building as the congressman's office. | ||
| The episode was recorded by someone who was sitting in the office in the video. | ||
| An officer with the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security, is shown demanding access to the private area inside the office. | ||
| The video obtained by the Gothamist, which was early reported the confrontation, quote, you're harboring rioters in the office, the federal agent, whose name tag and officer number are not visible in the video, says to a member of Mr. Nadler's staff, there were no riots reported Wednesday at the federal building, though protesters and immigrant right advocates gathered inside and outside the building earlier. | ||
| The immigration court is on the fifth floor. | ||
| Mr. Nadler's office is on the sixth. | ||
| Shamarke in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I am calling about the pause of the federal job core program. | ||
| Operators have been notified that they need to pause all operations for about 80 or so job core centers that support over 20,000 students around the country in getting their credentials for the hard trades. | ||
| I'm not calling about specifically that reason. | ||
| I'm just confused as to if Congress authorizes spending for a specific program, I would assume the executive's role would be to procure services or products for the country. | ||
| And, you know, as opposed to deciding we're not even going to spend any specific funds for that. | ||
| And I think some of the reasons that were cited for the pause of the program are unfounded and bogus statistics that were influenced by the pandemic was used. | ||
| So I'm just like curious as to how that whole process works. | ||
| If I tell you, hey, you know, here's money, procure me this product or service. | ||
| I would expect the understanding of that product or service is procured as opposed to just saying, you know, we don't think it's the best thing for us to do as executives because it's a congressional law. | ||
| So I just thought I'd share that. | ||
| Shamarke in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, joining us on this open forum. | ||
| You can continue to do so as we go throughout the morning. | ||
| Joining us now from the White House, Taylor Populars of Spectrum News. | ||
| He serves as their national political reporter on the White House News of the Day of the White House week ahead. | ||
| Mr. Populars, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great to be with you, Pedro. | |
| Has there been any follow-up, Mr. Popolars, on the terror attack in Colorado? | ||
| Of what the White House is hearing about it and what the Trump administration plans to do about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, it's been interesting. | |
| As of this point, we've not heard from the president himself responding to this attack, but we've heard very loud and clear from many members of his administration, from the FBI director to the Attorney General and others, calling this point-blank a terror attack and saying they're using every lever of the federal government to both respond and investigate. | ||
| We're also seeing the Department of Homeland Security, which of course oversees immigration, scrutinizing the suspect. | ||
| He was apparently here illegally, and that's something that the Trump administration is wanting to highlight as they continue to push their deportation efforts. | ||
| But we're waiting to hear from the president himself. | ||
| He's not even posted on his truth social account about it yet. | ||
| When it comes to other matters facing the White House, what does it plan to do when it comes now that the Senate starts work on the reconciliation bill? | ||
| What's the White House strategy? | ||
| We saw what they did for the House side, but what's the approach of the White House now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, with the senators, it's going to be a bit more of an intimate effort. | |
| There are 53 Republican senators and they need 51 votes to pass this big beautiful bill, as the White House and congressional Republicans are calling it. | ||
| And this is going to be kind of a one-to-one lobbying effort from the president and his team for these senators, especially those who are on the fence right now. | ||
| We know over the weekend, Senate Democrats released a letter saying that they're going to coordinate with House Democrats and fully oppose this big beautiful bill. | ||
| So this will be up to Republicans to unite, much as we saw House Republicans do just several days ago. | ||
| But it will be a bit tricky for the Senate. | ||
| Senators like to put their own fingerprints on legislation, especially a thousand-page plus multi-trillion dollar bill. | ||
| And we've heard from some Republicans, like Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who's been very critical of it, saying he thinks it's going to raise the deficit, which nonpartisan budget estimates have forecast, and that he wants to see changes made. | ||
| So the president will likely be involved. | ||
| I was on Capitol Hill when he visited with House Republicans. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if he went to the Capitol again at some point, but this is going to be a busy couple weeks for Senate Republicans as they try to figure out how to unite and how to push forward on this bill that really matters to the president. | ||
| What role could the vice president possibly play, JD Vance, considering he served in the Senate himself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he has been a very key hill Sherpa, if you will, for the Trump administration. | |
| He only served in the Senate for a couple of years, but he left an impression there, and he's not been afraid of going back to his old stomping grounds and very directly talking with senators. | ||
| Especially we saw that early on in the administration as some confirmation hearings were underway for some key and controversial cabinet picks like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. | ||
| Vance proved very effective in that realm, so I wouldn't be surprised if we saw him kind of replicate that role for this legislation. | ||
| Tyler Populars, it was yesterday that the Treasury Secretary talked about the current back and forth going on between the United States and China when it comes to tariff policy and an agreement. | ||
| I want to play a little bit of what he had to say, get your response to it. | ||
| I am confident that when President Trump and Party Chairman Xi have a call, that this will be ironed out. | ||
| So, but the fact that they are withholding some of the products that they agreed to release during our agreement, maybe it's a glitch in the Chinese system. | ||
| Maybe it's intentional. | ||
| We'll see after the president speaks with the party chairman. | ||
| That's critical minerals, rare earths. | ||
| Is that what you're talking about? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the president has said a few times that he was going to speak to President Xi, but he hasn't since before the inauguration. | ||
| Beijing keeps denying that there was any contact. | ||
| Do you have anything scheduled? | ||
| I believe we'll see something very soon, Margaret. | ||
| So, Tyler Popolars, that was Sunday. | ||
| Any word today on an advancement of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We haven't gotten any advancement, but I will point out, as Margaret Brennan, the host, was mentioning, President Trump has almost teased with us over the last few months about whether or not he's actually spoken with the Chinese leader. | |
| It does not seem that he has, but when they both speak, that will be a big moment. | ||
| Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant was sent overseas, I believe it was in Geneva several weeks ago, to reach an initial deal with China that was celebrated by the Trump administration, even though it really was more so of a broader pause on the extreme tariffs so they could continue talking. | ||
| This back and forth has continued. | ||
| The president posted on Truth Social a couple of days ago that he felt that China was basically stepping away from that initial agreement they made. | ||
| So if and when that phone call takes place, it will be substantial. | ||
| A lot of Americans pay attention to how much things cost, but we don't. | ||
| always realize how much we rely on China for those goods. | ||
| So as these tariff back and forths continue, both in the courts and in public opinion, whether or not actual progress is made with China will determine a lot for this administration. | ||
| As far as the future of the trade and tariff agenda, what faces the White House now? | ||
| We saw a lot of legal action against it. | ||
| We've seen still continued work with individual countries. | ||
| Where is the Trump administration on finalizing some of these aspects? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's interesting. | |
| It's a very fluid process. | ||
| I remember last Thursday I was here at the White House and I had a whole story written about how two courts had paused a lot of tariffs and then in the next hour an appeals court came in and put them back into place. | ||
| This is very, very fluid. | ||
| But the Trump team keeps hinting at future deals being made. | ||
| Economic advisors like Kevin Hassett, who leads the National Economic Council, has said, I expect one any day now. | ||
| But that deadline seems to be pushed back every day as progress seems to stall in certain ways. | ||
| The Trump administration has no issue criticizing the judges who are making these rulings, arguing that one individual judge should not be able to derail or pause or take off the track the president's whole trade agenda. | ||
| But critics of the tariffs say this is what the courts should be doing because the president has been trying to make such sweeping steps economically. | ||
| So the White House continues kind of with a cautious optimism, indicating that they're going to make a lot of deals. | ||
| But I'll point out that it was back in early April when they paused those sweeping reciprocal tariffs for 90 days. | ||
| And White House Trade Councilor Peter Navarro, at one point after that, promised 90 trade deals in 90 days. | ||
| And right now, we've seen maybe one and a half to two deals made, and some of them are not even long-term deals. | ||
| So a lot of road ahead that they have to kind of complete. | ||
| One of the things we saw in the last week and in the last couple of days, a string of pardons coming from the president. | ||
| What's driving this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, it seems from what White House advisors have said, these are cases that the president has become aware of, whether it's through media reports or conservative allies reaching out to him. | |
| But it's been an interesting string of them. | ||
| You know, reality TV stars whose daughter played a big role in getting the president's attention on this. | ||
| A former Democratic Cincinnati councilman in Ohio who had tried to make his case known and was fighting it up to the Supreme Court, and a string of others. | ||
| The common thread seems to be a lot of these folks were charged or found guilty of and convicted of financial crimes related to corruption and bribery. | ||
| I think the president sometimes draws on his own personal experience going through the courts over the last few years and kind of wanting to give people a second chance. | ||
| But the White House is defending these pardons even as certain allies question why they're happening now and kind of what influenced the president to act on this moment. | ||
| We, of course, see presidents issue a ton of pardons toward the end of their administrations. | ||
| We're only a few months into Trump's second term. | ||
| So it's a fascinating Storyline. | ||
| One of the things being reported today in the papers is that the president is set to meet with the German Chancellor this week. | ||
| What's the point? | ||
| What's the purpose of the meeting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, we've seen a ton of leaders from Europe and that whole swath of the country come here to the White House over the last couple of months. | |
| Of course, the war between Russia and Ukraine remains a key sticking point. | ||
| Trump has been pressuring European leaders to up their defense spending. | ||
| He's been engaging with these leaders when it comes to trade and tariffs. | ||
| So I wouldn't be surprised if both of those are kind of top agenda items. | ||
| And these leaders have had to play a delicate dance because as we saw with the president here with the leader of South Africa a couple weeks ago and Ukrainian President Zelensky a couple of months ago, he uses these visits and these Oval Office meetings to confront people he's frustrated with or to really compliment and kind of show a good visit for allies. | ||
| So it'll be interesting to see how the chancellor's visit is received. | ||
| But usually foreign policy as it relates to the war in Ukraine and then tariffs are the top two agenda items, especially for leaders coming from that part of the country. | ||
| That visit is set for Thursday. | ||
| What else are we expecting from the White House this week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's funny, we've been waiting for kind of a week ahead schedule. | |
| We know the president is here. | ||
| We spent the weekend and he spent the weekend in Washington. | ||
| He was actually golfing at his course in Virginia over the weekend, but it's been unusually quiet. | ||
| We expect, though, some types of developments on trade because that's something a lot of the president's advisors have been talking a lot about. | ||
| And I wouldn't be surprised if he weighed in on this big attack we saw over the weekend from Ukraine on some of Russia's military equipment. | ||
| This was a really elaborate attack having to do with drones. | ||
| And the president has been really kind of watching closely whether or not Russia and Ukraine can have direct talks without his involvement. | ||
| He's also been teasing that at some point he might have to go meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to find an end to this war, something that the president last year campaigned on ending in day one. | ||
| And we're now in June, several months into his second term. | ||
| So there are talks that are supposed to take place in Istanbul, Turkey, this week, but it comes right after Ukraine launched this big attack on Russia's infrastructure. | ||
| So we'll have to see if those talks even happen, whether or not the president feels he has to get more directly involved. | ||
| Taylor Popolars is with Spectrum News. | ||
| He's their national political reporter joining us to talk about the White House week ahead. | ||
| Mr. Popolars, thanks for your time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Pedro. | |
| We'll continue on with Open Forum. | ||
| Again, if you want to participate, it's 2027 for eight eight thousand one for Republicans. | ||
| For Democrats, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| And for Independents, it's 202-748-8002. | ||
| Wanda in California, Republican line. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I would like to recommend a YouTube channel. | |
| It's by an African immigrant from Uganda, and he puts a new, shines a new light on racism in America. | ||
| And it's called the ZANU Project Rethinked. | ||
| And it's spelled Z-A-N-U, Project Rethink. | ||
| And if you want to hear a really informative version of racism in America, that's what you need to watch. | ||
| And also, I would like to recommend another YouTube channel. | ||
| It's called S-E-R-P-E-N-T-Z-A. | ||
| This guy talks about South Africa, and he's from there. | ||
| It's a white guy from South Africa. | ||
| Those are two very informative YouTube channels. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And also, oh, wait a minute. | |
| I got one more thing to say. | ||
| I wish you wouldn't interfere with the one hour or so that you have open forum with all these news people because that cuts it down to about half. | ||
| And it's already hard enough to get through with all those without all those Guests that you have taken up our time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Wanda there in California joining us. | ||
| Let's hear from James. | ||
| James is on our line for independence. | ||
| He's from Ohio. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You're on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Calling in. | ||
| I'd like to see whatever happened to that situation with Doge where he was supposed to be collecting all of this money from the government. | ||
| He had mentioned him and President Trump about sending some of the money back out to the people. | ||
| And Yents has never talked about it or nothing's ever been said since. | ||
| And Doge said it's all up to the president. | ||
| But the president has never mentioned anything about it. | ||
| But they've mentioned everything else on everything that Doge has cut from the government. | ||
| And that's all I have to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| In Tennessee, Karen joins us. | ||
| Karen on our line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes, I just want to let you know that as a resident of Memphis, Tennessee, we are not pleased about the Elon Musk Super Center that's being built here. | ||
| And I don't know how many people are familiar with that, but it just doesn't seem like a good idea for our city. | ||
| And that's all I had to say. | ||
| When you say super center, do you mean a Tesla outlet? | ||
| What exactly are you talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes. | |
| The Tesla building that's being built here in a part of the city that will not benefit from that facility. | ||
| I mean, all the waste and everything and all our resources are being consumed by this super center or whatever. | ||
| It is not good. | ||
| The pollution, I mean, it's not good for the city and for the residents. | ||
| Is that because you don't think it would generate jobs or other things related to the building of the center? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, that's possible that it will generate jobs, but, you know, I just don't, I still don't think it's a good idea. | |
| Anyway, by the way, producer Leslie Collins has pulled up this CNN story taking a look at that effort in Memphis when it comes to Mr. Musk, the world's biggest supercomputer to Memphis. | ||
| This story adding that residents say they're choking on its pollution. | ||
| So if you're interested in reading more there, you can find it at that website. | ||
| Let's hear from Godfrey, Godfrey in North Carolina, Democrats line. | ||
| Hi there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Yeah, I would just like to bring a little attention to one thing that seems like everybody's blind about, and they never speak about it all. | ||
| But the president has made it clear that he plans to take us to higher places with the usage of clean coal. | ||
| Clean coal, he stretched it many times. | ||
| And, you know, he stretched it a lot. | ||
| And I'm looking to see this clean coal. | ||
| What I envision more than likely is our clean coal will tend to be the death knoll for our grandchildren. | ||
| That's my take on it. | ||
| That's all I got. | ||
| One more call. | ||
| This is from Fawn. | ||
| Fawn joining us from California, Republican line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Good morning, Pedro. | ||
| I would like for you all to have a guest on Colonel Douglas McGregor if you could ever have him on as a guest. | ||
| That would be very interesting. | ||
| Who is he and why should we have him on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he gives a different perspective about a lot about the war, the Ukraine war, and it takes as far as a lot of the funds and money that's been going there. | |
| But he gives a good perspective about the wars that are going on, not just the Ukraine war. | ||
| When you say perspective, is he someone would advocate for what the U.S. does in Ukraine and other places? | ||
| Would he oppose that? | ||
| How would you define that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not that it's advocated or opposed. | |
| I guess when you have the experience of colonels in the wars like General Wesley Clark, he had a very good perspective on it as well. | ||
| And that would be very interesting to have General Wesley Clark on there as well. | ||
| And maybe have both of them at the same time. | ||
| And just give the perspective of what's going on as far as the wars, the funding, all the military, the money that's going into the war. | ||
| And then it also, how that affects the country too, as far as a lot of the funds are going over into Europe and fighting elsewhere as opposed to the funds just being circulated. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That's Fawn there. | ||
| Thank you for the suggestion. | ||
| Fawn in California joining us on our Live for Republicans. | ||
| That's it for this open forum. | ||
| Thanks to all of you who participated. | ||
| Also, a special thanks for those who behind the scenes here at C-SPAN are responsible for the new graphics package, what you see on the screen there that we have unveiled today. | ||
| A lot of hours behind that work, evolving that on-air look between this network and our other networks, all with the purpose to better inform you, the viewer, about what's going on on various networks, things you may be interested in watching and following. | ||
| We hope that the design will help you point to the various efforts that a lot of us behind the scenes of this program and all across the network do to bring you coverage of Washington, the White House, and Congress. | ||
| Coming up, a conversation with Oren Cass. | ||
| He is the head of an organization known as American Compass, and he's also the editor of a book called The New Conservatives. | ||
| We'll talk about the themes in that book when Washington Journal continues. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As Mike said before, I happened to listen to him. | |
| He was on C-SPAN 1. | ||
| That's a big upgrade, right? | ||
| But I've read about it in the history books. | ||
| I've seen the C-SPAN footage. | ||
| If it's a really good idea, present it in public view on C-SPAN. | ||
| Every single time I tuned in on TikTok or C-SPAN or YouTube or anything, there were tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people watching. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I went home after the speech and I turned on C-SPAN. | |
| I was on C-SPAN just this week. | ||
| To the American people, now is the time to tune in to C-SPAN. | ||
| They had something $2.50 a gallon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I saw on television a little while ago in between my watching my great friends on C-SPAN. | |
| C-SPAN is televising this right now live. | ||
| So we are not just speaking to Los Angeles. | ||
| We are speaking to the country. | ||
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| Shop now or anytime at c-spanshop.org. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| This is Oren Cass joining us. | ||
| He is the founder and chief economist of an organization known as the American Compass, also the editor of a book called The New Conservatives. | ||
| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
| Great to see you again. | ||
| To remind people about American Compass, what is it? | ||
| It's a think tank we founded in 2020, so actually our fifth anniversary this week. | ||
| And it's focused on economic policy and really trying to move all of American politics and especially conservatives forward toward facing the challenges we have now. | ||
| I think we were sort of stuck in Ronald Reagan mode for a very long time. | ||
| And I think a lot of what you're starting to see now with new Trump administration on trade or immigration or labor or Wall Street or antitrust and breaking up big companies, all of these themes are coming together in a very different way of thinking about our economy and what people need. | ||
| When you say Ronald Reagan mode, a lot of people look Ronald Reagan as like the chief economist or at least economic policy and other things. | ||
| What has to change or why do you think changes are needed from that mode? | ||
| Well, look, I think Ronald Reagan was an incredibly important leader and incredibly successful for the problems the United States had in the 1980s. | ||
| But the 2020s are very different. | ||
| I mean, if you even think about, you know, just the presence of the role of China and what it means to be competing with China, or you think about the kinds of problems we've had with immigration, you think about the challenges we've seen for the working class, for workers who have less education, and what's been a very long period of stagnating wages for them. | ||
| You see the struggles that folks have if they don't have college degrees in a lot of cases. | ||
| The idea that we had coming out of the 1980s was pretty much, well, whatever is good for corporations, whatever boosts corporate profits, whatever makes the stock market go up, somehow that sort of magically will take care of everybody else too. | ||
| And we've seen that that's just not true. | ||
| And so I think especially people on the right-of-center who used to be very committed to that idea are doing the right thing, which is taking account of facts and trying to understand what has to change. | ||
| Is that driving the book that you have out called The New Conservatives? | ||
| Yeah, so The New Conservatives is intended to sort of explain that story, I think, to a lot of folks who are still very confused by it, right? | ||
| Like why is there a labor union president speaking at the Republican National Convention? | ||
| Why is there a Republican senator out protesting outside of a factory that a private equity firm is trying to close? | ||
| And so what we've done, and this is what American Compass has been working on for the last five years, and we've been very fortunate to get to play a very prominent role in these debates, is we've tried to take all the kind of key pieces, whether it's something that we wrote ourselves, whether it's something we published from somebody else, and organize them in a way that helps explain what's going on in American politics. | ||
| So starting with principles. | ||
| How are people actually thinking about the market and the role of government and policy? | ||
| And then thinking about the economy, and then ultimately thinking about what it means for people. | ||
| And I think it helps a lot of people to understand, wait a minute, obviously politics does need to change. | ||
| It's not going to be 1980 forever, but why is it changing? | ||
| Why are we hearing these different things? | ||
| And where are we going to go from here? | ||
| You write in the book, What Began as an Entirely Justified Advocacy for the Benefits of Markets has mutated into a fundamentalism that throws bad policy after good, unable to distinguish between what markets can and cannot do, and unwilling to acknowledge the harm that they can cause. | ||
| Fortunately, it comes with an expiration date. | ||
| Can you elaborate from there? | ||
| Yeah, I think the way that people think about markets has obviously changed a lot over time. | ||
| We were in this period until recently, and some people still think about this way, that has what I would call a kind of blind faith in markets, that markets, there was actually a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal just last week where the columnist was saying the market just is, right? | ||
| It's sort of, it is this thing, you know, any two people who run into each other and trade something, that's a market, and that's kind of all you have to know about it. | ||
| And look, one thing I emphasize, I love markets. | ||
| I think markets are exactly the way we should be organizing our economy. | ||
| But what we've found when we just trust them and don't think we should even ask any questions, we don't think there's a role for public policy, is that they can also do a lot of things that are not productive. | ||
| You know, if the way to make money, if the most profitable opportunity is shutting down your business and moving it to China, that's what the market will tell you to do. | ||
| If the most, you know, the highest paying opportunity isn't inventing something great, it's going to a hedge fund and trading Bitcoin, that's what the market will tell you to do. | ||
| And for a long time, conservatives thought, well, we can't say anything about that because we're supposed to support the market. | ||
| And what we're arguing is, and what I think you're seeing increasingly a lot of people say is, no, that's exactly wrong. | ||
| If you just don't say anything, that's a very bad situation for markets. | ||
| If we want to have strong, healthy markets in this country, we have to be willing to recognize their limits. | ||
| We have to recognize the ways they cause challenges for families. | ||
| And we have to be willing to say, you know, ultimately the market is a tool. | ||
| The market is there in service to human flourishing, in service to a strong nation. | ||
| And it takes a government. | ||
| It takes a role for policy in making sure that it delivers on that. | ||
| You talked about the ultimate impact on people and challenges. | ||
| What are the challenges? | ||
| What are some examples that you can see as far as how markets currently work and how that could be impacting people in a negative way? | ||
| Well, I think the biggest problem that we've seen broadly is that markets, and particularly in the United States, the market has not been spreading prosperity broadly enough. | ||
| That in its pursuit of efficiency and its pursuit of profit, a lot of things that are most efficient and most profitable concentrate activity in certain places. | ||
| So economists call this agglomeration. | ||
| Let's get all the most productive people in the same cities working together. | ||
| Let's specialize in the particular industries where the biggest opportunities are. | ||
| Let's focus on the productivity of maybe the people who are already the most productive. | ||
| And what we've seen as a result is for some people, this has worked out great, right? | ||
| They're obviously people who are thriving and are doing better than ever. | ||
| If all you care about is total GDP, that looks okay too. | ||
| It's been growing. | ||
| Everybody has more stuff than they've ever had before. | ||
| But if you look at what's happened to the wage of the typical worker, it hasn't grown nearly as quickly. | ||
| If you look at productivity in something like our manufacturing sector, productivity is actually declining. | ||
| We're literally getting worse at making things, which should be impossible in a well-functioning economy. | ||
| And so I think what we have to look at is, obviously, we want growth. | ||
| I like stuff. | ||
| I'm not saying we should go live in log cabins. | ||
| But we have to realize that for growth to be good for people, it has to do certain things. | ||
| It has to provide for the typical person. | ||
| And it has to actually create an opportunity for that typical person to be a productive contributor, to support their family, not just deliver for somebody else and then ask that person to send the other person a check. | ||
| And so I think what we're seeing is a lot more focused on the question of, okay, what does it take for the economy to actually deliver good jobs? | ||
| Because again, that's something that markets can do. | ||
| Certainly markets can do it better than government, but markets don't do it automatically. | ||
| Artin Cass is our guest, and if you want to ask him questions about his book and the themes there, it's 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats, and 202-748-8002 for independents. | ||
| You can also text us your questions or comments at 202-748-8003. | ||
| When did this become an aha moment for you? | ||
| When did you see the themes in this book in your own personal life? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| For me, it goes all the way back to 2012. | ||
| I worked for Mitt Romney on his presidential campaign, and one of the issues I was working on was trade policy. | ||
| And this was back in the days whenever just free trade was good, more free trade was better. | ||
| We should embrace China. | ||
| And I remember we gave him the standard presentation on here's why free trade is good. | ||
| And he said, you know, most of this is fine, but what are we going to do about China? | ||
| And all of the senior economists were kind of puzzled. | ||
| They're like, what kind of question is that? | ||
| We know that free trade is good, so obviously we don't have to do anything. | ||
| And he, coming from more of a business background, said, no, that's not right. | ||
| That's not what's actually going on in the economy at all. | ||
| And I was the staffer who was kind of sent off to try and learn more about that for him. | ||
| And partly it was just incredible to have the opportunity to study it and learn about it. | ||
| But the other thing I discovered in trying to find the experts who could speak to it was that there just wasn't anybody thinking about it. | ||
| I mean, there were a couple of very interesting people who were thinking very seriously about it. | ||
| One of them was Bob Lighthizer, who at the time was a lawyer, then went on to become the U.S. trade representative for Donald Trump. | ||
| But by and large, people just, they sort of had their prayer book of the things they were supposed to say, and that was as much as they thought about it. | ||
| And so for me, the aha moment was partly, wow, free trade isn't working very well, but it was also more broadly, wow, especially those of us on the right of center, conservatives have not done the work we need to do to understand what's going on and to address the real problems that people have. | ||
| And I think we really saw that break out into the open with Donald Trump's rise within the party. | ||
| And now we're, you know, we're a decade into Donald Trump's leadership in the Republican Party. | ||
| And I think we're finally at the point where I would say most people in the Republican Party on the right of center are changing how they think about this stuff. | ||
| And that gives me a lot of hope because that, I think, sends us in a much better direction. | ||
| I'm simplifying, but the Trump administration is currently making the cases that their current effort on trade and tariffs ultimately will help people overall. | ||
| I'm simplifying greatly, but what do you think of the argument that's being posed? | ||
| I think that's exactly right. | ||
| And I think the way that they have focused on what has gone wrong with globalization, the way that they have focused on it's not just about the cheap stuff. | ||
| You know, I think Secretary of the Treasury Scott Beston has made this point. | ||
| He said, the American dream isn't cheap stuff. | ||
| And again, that's not to say we don't like stuff, but that when that's all we've focused on, we've lost a lot of things we frankly care about a lot more. | ||
| And so I think, you know, one thing you've heard them say is very true, is that this isn't a free lunch, right? | ||
| There are absolutely costs associated with correcting these problems. | ||
| But I think it's important to see those costs as investments that will have a return, that will have a payoff, and that in the long run, it's the better choice to make. | ||
| We made one choice when we embraced China and said, let's just do free trade. | ||
| And I think most people look at what we got and what we lost and they say that was not a good deal for most Americans, for the nation as a whole. | ||
| And so we're ready to make a different deal. | ||
| And you hear the argument of by some, the Commerce Secretary and others saying short-term gain, long-term, or short-term pain, long-term gain. | ||
| Ultimately, what does that do for the people that you ultimately are concerned about in this book? | ||
| Well, I think it helps them tremendously. | ||
| I think one of the, you know, one of the things that's very funny, we've heard for a long time, oh, American politics is broken. | ||
| Leaders won't take the difficult decisions. | ||
| They won't level with people about the things, you know, and we finally actually have someone doing that, right? | ||
| We're actually being quite honest and upfront about the fact that, look, there is short-term pain here, but it's worth it for the long-term gain. | ||
| And I think, frankly, that most people understand that. | ||
| I think most people look at the direction the country has been headed until recently and say, this isn't good. | ||
| And we're already paying the costs. | ||
| I mean, there was a time when it did just seem like the fun of the cheap stuff. | ||
| But over the last 10 or 15 years, you know, outcomes for a lot of people, a lot of communities, young people trying to get their start in life, they have been on the decline. | ||
| And so I guess you could just say, well, let's just sort of stick with the managed decline. | ||
| Or you can say, no, let's do what we need to do to turn the ship around. | ||
| And I think it's very important to have leaders that are willing to try to make that turn. | ||
| 202-748-8,001 for Republicans, Democrats 202-7488,000, and Independents 202-748-8,0002. | ||
| How well are they doing in communicating the message as far as the good ultimately it does for people? | ||
| I think some of the communication has been very good. | ||
| I think when they've talked about, you know, look, here is the sort of cost that we expect. | ||
| Here is the vision of a country that actually does make things again, that has better jobs and opportunities, that is stronger and more resilient. | ||
| I think that's exactly the right case. | ||
| I think with the sort of rollout of the tariffs in particular, we've obviously seen, in some cases, a certain amount of chaos and a lot of changing back and forth. | ||
| And some of that's expected when you're pursuing an entirely new policy course. | ||
| But I also think it's a very fair criticism, and it's one we've made, that the administration can and should do a better job of making clear here's where we're going. | ||
| Here's what we want the actual stable new situation to look like. | ||
| Because at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is you're trying to get people to invest, whether you're talking about businesses investing in building things here, whether you're talking about people investing in developing skills, going down certain career paths. | ||
| And for that to work, for people to do that, there has to be certainty and clarity about not just what's it going to be next week, but what's it going to be in three years, five years? | ||
| And that's where I think we can certainly need more clarity for people to hold on to. | ||
| Let's hear from Tony. | ||
| Tony joins us from Pennsylvania, Independent Line. | ||
| You're on with our guest, Oren Cass. | ||
| He's the head of American Compass, also the editor of a book called The New Conservatives. | ||
| Tony, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I am really glad that we have an economist on and that we're talking about these tariffs and ways to bring jobs back to the U.S. | ||
| I think it's important to recall Ross Perot back in the 1990s said that NAFTA would be a giant sucking sound and U.S. jobs would go oversea. | ||
| I think time has proven that Ross Perot was correct. | ||
| The other thing that I think is really important is to this idea somehow that U.S. companies are going to come back. | ||
| I have some concerns about that, especially the way Trump is going about these tariffs, where he slaps them on, then he takes them off, then he slaps them on, and there's no predictability. | ||
| I would like the economist's thoughts on that. | ||
| And then I also had another thought, which is that it's really strange that the billionaires in this country sold us out. | ||
| They basically gave our jobs to China. | ||
| They built our new enemy in a way. | ||
| And so our billionaires that backed Trump, like Elon Musk or other billionaires, are they our friends today? | ||
| Do they care about the American worker? | ||
| I find it laughable that we are suggesting that they do. | ||
| Yes, I think that there might be a way to bring back U.S. manufacturing, but with AI robotics, I don't think we bring back U.S. jobs. | ||
| And so I'm very worried about the future of the country, and I think we need to be honest. | ||
| Billionaires don't care about U.S. workers. | ||
| They never have. | ||
| Tony, there in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Well, I think that's a very good critique that he made. | ||
| And I think it connects in my mind exactly to the central theme that we're trying to talk about in the book, which is that billionaires don't care about American workers. | ||
| It's not that they dislike American workers, right? | ||
| It's not that they're trying to hurt them. | ||
| It's that the way that we've set up our market system, what we ask businesses to do, what we ask investors and entrepreneurs to do, is make as much money as they can. | ||
| And if the way to make as much money as you can is to move all of your production to China, then that's what they're going to do. | ||
| And we can be disappointed by that. | ||
| We can celebrate the occasional person who makes a different choice. | ||
| But we also sort of have to blame ourselves and say, well, but wait a minute, that's the system we set up. | ||
| That's the set of rules we had. | ||
| And the reason we did it, and this goes to that point about the giant sucking sound, we had this theory that it was okay, right? | ||
| If you go back and look at what the economists and what the policymakers were saying when we embraced China, it was, no, no, this is going to create new and better jobs for Americans, right? | ||
| We're going to embrace China, and we're going to have all sorts of new opportunities to sell stuff to them. | ||
| That was the theory. | ||
| It just didn't happen. | ||
| It was wrong. | ||
| And so I think what you're seeing, and this is a, I think for so many conservatives, especially China, is the lesson. | ||
| It's the key sort of jumping off point for a lot of this, is you say, no, no, wait a minute. | ||
| If we want Elon Musk to behave in a way that's good for American workers, then just saying hooray free markets doesn't do that. | ||
| It might maximize Tesla's profit, but it's not supposed to. | ||
| This isn't something markets do. | ||
| If we want Elon Musk's pursuit of profit to also be good for American workers, we have to have rules in place that say, if you want to make a profit, you have to do it with American workers. | ||
| And that's exactly what something like the trade policy that the Trump administration is pursuing starts to do. | ||
| It says, no, no, there's actually an advantage. | ||
| There's going to be an advantage in our market for using American workers. | ||
| And, you know, that's the sort of policy that China had, and that was very good for Chinese workers. | ||
| And we're going to have to start thinking a lot harder about how to make sure that markets work for us. | ||
| In San Francisco, this is Frank, Democrats line. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, hey, good morning. | |
| Capitalism inexorably concentrates wealth, and wealth is power. | ||
| and power corrupts. | ||
| It goes to people's heads. | ||
| People who have a lot of wealth, they naturally think they earned it, even though their wealth is either inherited or supported by a capitalist system and government, which seems intended to concentrate wealth. | ||
| So while I appreciate the author's critique of capitalism, well, when I mention the Marxist theory that I've somewhat alluded to here, when I mention it to conservative friends who are religiously oriented towards justice, they tell me, oh, well, Marxism is wrong. | ||
| What we need to do is have like distributionism or something. | ||
| And I'm afraid this author's rhetoric, it just sounds like another soporific. | ||
| Like, this is not really the real answer. | ||
| We need to have the control of production out of private hands. | ||
| Okay, that's Frank in San Francisco. | ||
| Well, I would certainly disagree with Marxism as the way to go here. | ||
| I think the point that's correct, though, or worth focusing on, is this question of does capitalism concentrate wealth and therefore power? | ||
| Because again, this is a perfect example. | ||
| If you don't care about how the market behaves, if you just say, well, the market just works, then yes, capitalism can concentrate wealth and power in those ways. | ||
| We've also seen periods of time where it did the opposite. | ||
| If you look at the post-war, you know, World War II period in the United States, we went through 30 or 40 years where that's not what capitalism did. | ||
| Capitalism actually did build an incredible middle class. | ||
| It did spread prosperity, wealth, power quite broadly. | ||
| And so the question is, well, what was different? | ||
| Why does it behave one way in one era and a different way in another era? | ||
| And I think there are lots of reasons. | ||
| One of them is the question of, well, how much power do workers have? | ||
| And this is something I think that you're starting to see conservatives focus on a lot because I think a very good point that Frank makes is by default, you just get the sort of distributionism. | ||
| Just like, well, if it's unfair, we're just going to have to tax the winners and provide a benefit to the losers. | ||
| But that's not what conservatives want. | ||
| It's not what most people want. | ||
| What most people want is the opportunity to have a good job themselves. | ||
| And so you're starting to see conservatives really think much more seriously about organized labor, you know, labor unions, ways of actually giving workers more power in what's called essentially countervailing power. | ||
| So if you have one group that has a lot of power, the laws you have are going to determine in a lot of ways, okay, well, how much power does the other group have? | ||
| And if you have a situation where workers have a lot of power too, and unions help with that, this is a place where I think immigration policy is actually really important, right? | ||
| For a long time, the policy was, well, if employers say they need more labor, bring in more labor. | ||
| Of course, this was mostly the progressive left that argued for this somewhat accidentally in kind of cahoots with the Chamber of Commerce. | ||
| But this was this idea that, you know, well, cheap labor, I guess, is a good thing because it makes cheap stuff. | ||
| And you say, no, no, that's wrong. | ||
| If you want our markets to work well, if you want capitalism to work well, you don't want cheap labor. | ||
| You actually want labor to be really expensive in a lot of ways. | ||
| You want to be very productive, but you need to create rules and you need to have systems and institutions that actually support workers in those ways. | ||
| And so whereas in the past, conservatives would have just said, well, just you leave that to the market, now I think increasingly they're saying, oh, wow, no, if we want this to work, if we want markets to work, we actually have to get more involved here. | ||
| Are labor unions an avenue to help people get a seat at the table? | ||
| Are there other means that conservatives can use to do that? | ||
| Yeah, I think labor unions are a sort of specific example of a way to create worker power. | ||
| And it's important to recognize that even labor union can mean a lot of different things, right? | ||
| The U.S. has one sort of very specific labor system that is a lot different from systems elsewhere in the world. | ||
| And even within the U.S. system, you have different kinds of labor organizing. | ||
| So, you know, I think when people say labor union, they picture like, you know, Norma Ray, right? | ||
| Sally Field up on the table with the sign. | ||
| And there are situations where that's worked very well. | ||
| I think it's important to acknowledge there are a lot of situations, and we see it broadly today, where that system doesn't work all that well. | ||
| Actually, a lot of workers don't like that structure. | ||
| Obviously, a lot of employers don't like it. | ||
| And you've seen it steadily decline as a force, especially in the private sector. | ||
| Now, historically, the response of conservatives to that was to say, hooray, right? | ||
| Like, if we get rid of unions entirely, imagine how great things would be. | ||
| And instead, now what you're seeing conservatives do is say, okay, well, wait a minute, we're glad a system that's not working is fading, but we should want to have a system that does work. | ||
| So what are the other ways, in some cases, it can be union organizing like that. | ||
| You can also have, you know, one example is what a lot of people call works councils, which is a much more collaborative relationship between groups of workers and employers. | ||
| Should workers have representation on corporate boards? | ||
| And then also, how do you just make sure you have what's called a tight labor market? | ||
| How do you make sure, in a sense, you always have a labor shortage so that employers are always having to think about how to attract workers, how to treat workers well, how to pay them more, how to make them more productive. | ||
| If those are the ways you run a successful business, those are the things businesses will do. | ||
| But that's not going to happen automatically. | ||
| The full title of the book is The New Conservatives, Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry. | ||
| Secretary of State Marco Rubio has a chapter in the book. | ||
| What did he contribute? | ||
| Yeah, he had given a really great speech for American Compass actually a few years ago, focused particularly on this China issue and reflecting back, I think it was on the 20th anniversary of when China had been welcomed to the WTO, reflecting on sort of what we had gotten wrong and why. | ||
| And I think he's someone who's been a real leader. | ||
| It would be hard to have a book on the new conservatives without featuring his perspective because going all the way back to 2018, 2019, in the Senate, he had started to work on a lot of these issues. | ||
| His team had put out a very important report looking at financial markets and showing how investors pursuing profit had really stopped doing that by actually investing and building things, which is obviously a huge problem. | ||
| He'd done a lot of leading work on China's industrial policy and the way China was very strategically stealing key industries and technologies for us. | ||
| He'd given a wonderful speech on what he described as common good capitalism, which was on this very broad theme that we'd sort of made the mistake of thinking that people and the nation are here to serve the market when in fact it's the other way around, that the market is here to serve the nation and its people. | ||
| And so I think he's someone who has been and will continue to be a very important leader in shaping this thinking. | ||
| This is Tom. | ||
| Tom's in South Carolina. | ||
| Independent line for our guests. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| One of the things your guest mentioned was about markets and businesses. | ||
| The first rule of business is to make a profit. | ||
| Because if you don't make a profit, all your other goals are gone and you don't have a business. | ||
| So first and foremost, it's to make money for the business and the shareholder. | ||
| Secondly, I'd like to have your guest address the issue that for the past 50 plus years, Members of both parties have crafted legislation that actually made outsourcing beneficial to a lot of companies, where you have the apples that used to be made in the United States now being made offshore. | ||
| A lot of other things, including some of the current president's merchandise. | ||
| How do you address the fact that the government has actually encouraged businesses to offshore and created tax laws that made it beneficial for them to do that? | ||
| And you don't turn that around in 10 minutes by a group of tariffs. | ||
| Tom, thanks. | ||
| Yeah, I think this is exactly right, that this is, in a sense, something we did to ourselves. | ||
| And that it's not like there was this sort of irresistible force, right? | ||
| Like an asteroid didn't hit the earth, right? | ||
| You know, aliens didn't show up and tell us we had to do this. | ||
| Policymakers, and it was absolutely bipartisan from both parties, thought it was a good idea to essentially release all of these constraints on the market, whether it was on trade, whether it was on immigration, whether it was on financial regulation, on tech and the kind of power we allowed the big tech companies to accumulate. | ||
| All of these were policy choices that we made. | ||
| And we made them on a theory that that was the direction that was going to work out well. | ||
| You know, I really do think people thought it was going to work out well. | ||
| I don't think it was a conspiracy to oppress everybody. | ||
| But it also turned out to be wrong. | ||
| And on one hand, that's incredibly frustrating and disappointing. | ||
| It actually, I think, is good news, though. | ||
| I would much rather have a problem that we created and can make other choices than have a problem that was out of our control and we can't do anything about. | ||
| And so I think the caller's point is exactly right that you're not going to turn it around in 10 minutes. | ||
| I think this is a 5, 10, 20-year project to reverse what took us 20, 40, 50 years to do. | ||
| But you do have to start somewhere. | ||
| And I think, you know, what you're seeing certainly with the Trump administration is a focus on trade as one example. | ||
| I think something actually that the Biden administration had a lot of leadership on that was very good was what was called industrial policy. | ||
| The idea that if there are certain industries that we think are really important, like semiconductor manufacturing, you can't just trust, well, the market knows semiconductor manufacturing is important, so it's going to invest in semiconductor manufacturing. | ||
| It's only going to do that if that's where the profit is. | ||
| And so what we saw was the U.S. obviously pioneered all of that technology. | ||
| And then other countries said, well, we want to make that stuff here. | ||
| And the U.S. said, we don't care. | ||
| There's a very famous quote from a chief economic advisor to George H.W. Bush. | ||
| He said, computer chips, potato chips, what's the difference? | ||
| Because again, if the market is just going to solve everything, then what is the difference? | ||
| Who cares what gets made where? | ||
| And now you're seeing, and again, this was a very bipartisan effort, what's called the CHIPS Act, which is, no, no, we're actually going to spend money to build chip factories here again. | ||
| And that's already having incredible results, I think. | ||
| It's still very early, but it looks very encouraging. | ||
| And so that's another example of a place where, look, if you actually think making things matters, if you actually care what we can make and do in this country, then you realize that markets are the right way to do it, right? | ||
| We don't want U.S. federal chip company that run by the government, but you realize that the rules and incentives are going to shape what kinds of investments happen. | ||
| And you have to pay attention to that. | ||
| Let's hear from Stacey. | ||
| Stacey joins us from Virginia, Independent Line for Orange Cass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Thanks, Pedro. | ||
| Really appreciate it. | ||
| I have two questions, if you humor me. | ||
| The first is I'm a little bit, I just, I have a little bit of an internal inconsistency challenge. | ||
| So the collar just said that, for you, the example, we don't want a U.S. chimp company. | ||
| But at the same time, we're using tariffs to onshore companies that presumably were less efficient, which is the whole reason why they got offshored. | ||
| So if the whole theory is that we're going to use government intervention in order to bring back industry that were deemed to be inefficient in our current market environment, at what point do you start to roll back the government intervention? | ||
| Because what I'm hearing is that there's always going to need to be government intervention to distort the market, which to me sounds like we're bridging onto sort of a communistic sort of theory of market dynamics. | ||
| And that just strikes me as being very internally inconsistent. | ||
| And then the second thing that the caller said is that we want a market here that serves the people and we don't want cheap labor. | ||
| But I'm from a really small town. | ||
| My dad's a veteran. | ||
| He ran a small business his entire life. | ||
| Like my entire community is run by small businesses. | ||
| And rule number one of running a small business is that you've got a really small margin of error in terms of your costs and your revenue, of which one of your largest is labor. | ||
| So if the whole idea is to increase the cost of labor, how is that supporting small businesses? | ||
| So those are my two questions. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Yeah, those are great questions. | ||
| Let me take a minute on each of them. | ||
| On the first point about inefficiency, I think it's really important to say that the reason that companies left the United States is not because they were inefficient here. | ||
| It's because there were particular advantages typically created by governments elsewhere that attracted them, right? | ||
| So the reason that computer chips, like the most advanced chips, are now made in Taiwan, it's not because there's something special about Taiwan, right? | ||
| They don't have chips on the beaches. | ||
| It's not like growing avocados in the place where it's the right climate. | ||
| It's because the Taiwanese government thought chip making was important and invested massive sums in helping to build those factories and training the workers and so forth. | ||
| And what we're seeing as we now actually say, no, we care about it is the U.S. can absolutely do it just as well. | ||
| In fact, Taiwan Semiconductor, which is now building an enormous set of plants in Arizona, has the first one in its test runs. | ||
| And they're saying actually the yields, the quality in the American planet is already higher than in their Taiwanese plant. | ||
| So we can do these things. | ||
| What we have to recognize is that when you just say, well, whatever happens in the market is what's most efficient, you're trusting that everybody else is taking the same approach. | ||
| If other countries aren't doing it that way, you can't just step back and say, we don't care either. | ||
| And I think that's something to think about for the long term. | ||
| You know, I think there's a long way to go between having interventions in the market and communism, right? | ||
| And in fact, it was always the American tradition to have interventions in the market, and particularly to protect the domestic market. | ||
| I mean, literally the first law passed and signed by George Washington was a tariff. | ||
| Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, was a huge fan of protecting the American market, giving subsidies to companies to invest in the American market. | ||
| And the Republican Party was always the party of tariff. | ||
| Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, all the way through up to and including Ronald Reagan. | ||
| When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, the Cato Institute, which is a large libertarian think tank, called him the worst protectionist since Herbert Hoover, because he loved the free market, but he also recognized that having a strong free market in the United States meant addressing what was going on in the global economy. | ||
| So I think actually this is much more the traditional American way to approach economic policy. | ||
| It's this period after the end of the Cold War when everybody lost their minds a little bit and just said, this is all going to take care of itself. | ||
| We don't have to worry about it. | ||
| On the point about cheap labor, it's a very important point that whether you're a small business or a large business for that matter, labor is a big cost, and you obviously can't just start paying people a lot more for the same thing. | ||
| And so when I say we don't want cheap labor, what I mean is that we want labor that earns a higher wage, but that's also worth the higher wage, that is much more productive, that can do more. | ||
| And so if you have a worker who can do twice as much and you pay him twice as much, that's not a problem for your business. | ||
| What we've done in this country instead is for a long time say, look, you don't have to worry about that question of how do you get more out of the workers, how do you use more technology, how do you improve your processes. | ||
| When you complain that things are getting more expensive, when you complain that you can't find enough workers, we say, oh, here, quick, let us bring you a bunch more workers. | ||
| And so, as I think a number of callers have pointed out very well, what businesses care about is making a profit. | ||
| And it's in fact the biggest proponents of business are the ones who celebrate the incredible power of business and the profit motive to solve virtually any problem, right? | ||
| When you put a challenge in front of businesses and say, solving this is the way you're going to make a lot of money, the power to innovate and solve the problem is incredible. | ||
| And so what we need to do, what any good market needs to do, is say, okay, your challenge is create good jobs for people and make them productive. | ||
| If that's the way you're going to make a lot of money, I have no doubt businesses can do that. | ||
| We just haven't asked them to. | ||
| Well, we've got about five minutes left. | ||
| Anna in Massachusetts, Democrats line. | ||
| Hi there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm going to follow up a bit on the whole small business sector in that it employs 40 to 50 percent of the workforce in the country. | ||
| And that's small businesses, seven to eight employees, and yet pays minimum wage, as perhaps has been addressed a bit by the prior comments. | ||
| And so that has created a working poor class. | ||
| And that's 40 to 50 percent of the workforce. | ||
| And so my question is, is that a conundrum or how do we move that system? | ||
| Thank you, Anna. | ||
| Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. | ||
| And, you know, again, it's not something that you're going to fix overnight. | ||
| We went through a long period in this country. | ||
| It's entirely possible in a capitalist system to have those jobs for those kinds of workers improving over time, to have those workers be more productive, to have them seeing rising wages, and also to seeing, at the same time, those small businesses be very successful. | ||
| What has changed in the more recent past is those wages stopped going up. | ||
| Those jobs stopped improving. | ||
| And there are a lot of reasons for that. | ||
| But step one, in a sense, right, step one is acknowledging you have a problem. | ||
| And one thing, there's still a fight, certainly within the right of center, a little bit across the board, about whether there even is a problem. | ||
| If I were writing a book called The Old Conservatives, it would spend a lot of time on various arguments about, oh, how actually, well, if you measure it differently, you know, workers are actually doing okay and they have more stuff than they used to. | ||
| And so actually the economy is doing very well. | ||
| And if you start from that point, then it's hard to argue you need to do anything. | ||
| You end up thinking, actually, the market's doing great. | ||
| I think the reality, and we're seeing this in people's attitudes and their experience and how they vote, is that that's not how people feel. | ||
| That is not the actual experience of trying to make ends meet in this economy. | ||
| And so I guess there are two things you could do at that point. | ||
| One would be to throw up your hands and say, well, that's just the best we can do. | ||
| But I think the much better approach would be to say, okay, how do we change how our markets are operating? | ||
| How do we actually think about a role for public policy in ways that support people and prepare them better for successful jobs? | ||
| And in ways that shape the way that businesses behave and the incentives that they have to try to get that market actually delivering the outcomes we want. | ||
| What's a new conservative viewpoint of what's going on with the One Big Beautiful Bill? | ||
| Well, it's a great example of where there's a huge amount of debate, where there didn't used to be, right? | ||
| Even in, you know, if you go back to George W. Bush, right? | ||
| He comes into office. | ||
| What's he going to do? | ||
| Big tax cut. | ||
| Everybody agrees. | ||
| Nobody cares how much it costs. | ||
| Deficits don't matter. | ||
| It's going to be great for businesses. | ||
| And off it goes. | ||
| If you look at when Donald Trump came into office the first time, actually quite similar, right? | ||
| Who was Speaker of the House? | ||
| It was Paul Ryan. | ||
| Got a big tax cut, going to be great for businesses, work out well for everyone, off we go. | ||
| This time, obviously, the discussion has been very different. | ||
| I think certainly Republicans still like tax cuts. | ||
| Democrats still like tax cuts. | ||
| Everybody wants to be for tax cuts. | ||
| But the idea that it pays for itself is pretty much gone. | ||
| The idea that it's going to generate so much growth that we don't have to worry about the deficit is pretty much gone. | ||
| And the idea that, you know, on the flip side, we should also just cut spending for things because we don't have to worry about the benefits that people need. | ||
| Increasingly, you see Republicans starting to rethink that. | ||
| And so I think what you're seeing is it's a great illustration of the transition point we're in and the tension that everybody's struggling with where, yes, there are still lots of people committed to that old way of thinking, but it is no longer the default norm shared by everybody. | ||
| And as a result, it's a lot harder. | ||
| The book is called The New Conservatives, Restoring America's Commitment to Family, Community, and Industry. | ||
| Orin Cass serves as the founder and chief economist of American Compass. | ||
| Their website, AmericanCompass.org. | ||
| Mr. Cass, thanks for your time. | ||
| Well, this was great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's it for the program today. |