| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Up this morning on Washington Journal. | |
| We'll take your calls and comments live. | ||
| Then, Andrew Aurond, Senior Vice President for Research at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, discusses his organization's annual report on the state of rental housing costs in the U.S. | ||
| And we'll talk about Trump administration higher education policies with Beth Ackers, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next. | ||
| Join the conversation. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| It's Friday, August 1st, 2025. | ||
| The Senate is in at 10 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| The House also in attendance for a brief pro forma session. | ||
| And we're with you for the next three hours on the Washington Journal. | ||
| We begin with former President Joe Biden's address to the National Bar Association in Chicago on Thursday night. | ||
| It was a step back into the spotlight for the former president, who's only given a handful of interviews since leaving office. | ||
| It also gives us the opportunity to get your view. | ||
| Six months after the end of his presidency, what do you think will be Joe Biden's legacy? | ||
| Phone lines split as usual by political party. | ||
| Republicans, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can also send us a text, that number 202-748-8003. | ||
| If you do, please include your name and where you're from. | ||
| Otherwise, catch up with us on social media on XIT's at C-SPANWJ on Facebook. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN. | |
| And a very good Friday morning to you. | ||
| You can go ahead and start calling in now. | ||
| The National Bar Association is the oldest and largest network of African-American lawyers and law students and judges and professors. | ||
| And that was where Joe Biden was speaking last night. | ||
| In his comments to that group, he said that civil rights is very much a part of his legacy as president. | ||
| This is what he had to say. | ||
| As president, I made the cause of civil rights and equality the foundation of everything I did. | ||
| For example, I promised to have an administration that looked like America and appoint a bench that looked like America. | ||
| And I kept my promise. | ||
| I appointed the most demographically diverse slate of judges ever in the history of the United States of America. | ||
| Top of that list one of the brightest lawyers I've ever met, Katanji Brown Jackson, the first black woman on the United States Supreme Court. | ||
| Justice Jackson, as you witnessed earlier this week, has proven herself to have the wisdom and the character that I saw her on her when I nominated her. | ||
| I appointed 13 black women to the Courts of Appeals of the United States Federal Court. | ||
| More than every other president in American history combined. | ||
| There are other story first as well for historic, for Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Muslim Americans. | ||
| By the way, I didn't just appoint Ivy League judges. | ||
| I appointed many HBCU graduates. | ||
| How many of you in this room went to the greatest HBCU in America? | ||
| Delaware State, right? | ||
| They got me started, man. | ||
| Cedric keeps giving me the honor of being called a Morehouse man. | ||
| I'm a Delaware State man. | ||
| Look, my administration understood the importance of HBCUs. | ||
| That's why, as president, I invested more money in HBCUs than all other presidents in American history combined. | ||
| That was former President Joe Biden last night in Chicago. | ||
| It wasn't long after that appearance that former Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night for an interview. | ||
| She's launching a new book in September about her presidential bid, but she was also asked about Joe Biden's legacy. | ||
| This is what the former vice president had to say. | ||
| Let me say something about Joe Biden. | ||
| I have an incredible amount of respect for him. | ||
| And I think that the way that we should be thinking about where we are right now is to remember that we had a president of the United States who believed in the rule of law. | ||
| Who believed in the importance of aspiring to have integrity and to do the work on behalf of the people. | ||
| And that's where I'll leave that. | ||
| I think that's a fine sentiment and all true. | ||
| I'm just curious: did people say to you, you should be prepared for this? | ||
| There were some who did, but I listen, it was Joe's decision, and he made that decision. | ||
| So then you go to run for president yourself, and people are asking you to separate yourself from Joe Biden. | ||
| People are asking over and over again, I was one of them. | ||
| What's different between you and Joe Biden? | ||
| That must have been difficult because you have to differentiate yourself as a candidate, and yet you respect this man who you're still working for at the same time. | ||
| What was that like to navigate? | ||
| I talk about that extensively in the book. | ||
| No, it's because, and I and I say that because you're raising something that you and I both know requires a lot of, a lot more time than we probably have right now to talk about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are we in a hurry? | |
| Are we in a hurry, guys? | ||
| I feel very strongly that, I mean, it's an instinct of mine to be someone who does not participate in piling on. | ||
| And I was not going to pile on. | ||
| And I just wasn't going to do that. | ||
| And there was a lot of piling on at that time, and I wasn't going to participate in that. | ||
| Former Vice President Kamala Harris, that was last night on late night with Stephen Colbert, asking you this morning, this early morning, about Joe Biden's legacy. | ||
| Give us your thoughts on what you think it will be six months after he left the White House. | ||
| It's 202-748-8001 for Republicans to call in. | ||
| 202-748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002, having this conversation in this first hour of the Washington Journal. | ||
| A front page story in the Washington Post on this topic today. | ||
| The headline is: Democrats look forward, the ghosts of 2024 still shadow them. | ||
| The story noting that Democrats are eager to turn the page on their 2024 losses, but their central figures from the last election keep stepping back into the spotlight, and it's complicating their efforts to forge a new identity. | ||
| We can go through more of that story as we have this discussion with you this morning. | ||
| Again, on phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents as usual. | ||
| We'll also look for your social media posts and your texts, but we will start with Greg out of Ohio, line for Democrats. | ||
| What will be Joe Biden's legacy, Greg? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll tell you what would be Joe Biden's legacy for me personally through a policy. | |
| During COVID, I received a tax credit for my children that was passed through Congress and Joe Biden signed. | ||
| That money was used personally to pay off my house. | ||
| I wasn't expecting it, but we benefited from that policy that became a law. | ||
| And every American benefited from that. | ||
| Take two. | ||
| Before Joe Biden left office, I am an educator and I also worked since I was 15. | ||
| I could not receive Social Security and my pension. | ||
| Thanks to Joe Biden. | ||
| I am now going to receive my pension and Social Security. | ||
| A policy that became a law. | ||
| So you can bash Joe Biden all day and scream on the rooftops about inflation, okay? | ||
| Which is not his fault. | ||
| So, Greg, for you, it's financial security is what you'll think about when you think of Joe Biden. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| A policy that benefited me, teachers, public employees, and families in America. | ||
| A policy, not some pseudo policy that you blame Joe Biden for inflation. | ||
| A policy. | ||
| A policy. | ||
| That became a law. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Greg in Ohio. | ||
| This is Nibbity out of Florida, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| I am actually calling from the higher agency in Chicago. | ||
| I'm actually a black attorney, and I was there last night. | ||
| I was very pleased that President Biden attended the 100th anniversary of the National Bar Association. | ||
| I think for the most of it. | ||
| And tell us a little bit about that association. | ||
| You're calling on the Republican line. | ||
| It's Democrats, Republicans, and Independents that are part of this group. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it is. | |
| I am an older black attorney, and I have known the pride and the great contribution of the Republican Party historically. | ||
| And I refuse to allow the 21st century Nandy Wells, the comment here of the party that has done so much historically, not currently, but of course, I digress. | ||
| I believe that President Biden had provided much of the promises that he followed through with some of the lowest black unemployment rates, the highest FBA loans for black-owned businesses. | ||
| Everything is not perfect, but I think that he will go down in the tones of history and time as a great president along the lines of the LCS grant during the Reconstruction era. | ||
| And I think in the 50 years, we will truly understand what has been done to aid American society. | ||
| So I just wanted to say he did a wonderful job. | ||
| I was proud to be there. | ||
| I was proud to be a part of the National Bar Association. | ||
| The fact that it was one of his early appearances was not lost on me. | ||
| And I think what was the sense of the room, Nibity, when he came out and when he left? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was energetic. | |
| We have to find joy where we can find it. | ||
| And I believe that everyone was inspired. | ||
| I know he had done luncheon beforehand, I think somewhere in the afternoon. | ||
| From what I've heard, until he continued some of his promises and some of the discussion points he's going to have, everyone was well received. | ||
| He interacted a lot with the crowd, and he actually lingered longer than I would have kind of anticipated the few times I've ever had the pleasure of seeing him. | ||
| It was not long for public appearance, so I was a bit shocked by that. | ||
| But I think he did a wonderful job, and I think that it was the proper platform and to showcase his legacy six months out. | ||
| So I was very, very much so pleased. | ||
| And I believe that all of my fellow attorneys at the association were pleased. | ||
| And I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of protracted responses in this, though. | ||
| But I am pleased with the legacy that he has left for my people and my children in the future. | ||
| So thank you so much for giving me the time. | ||
| I look forward to speaking to you, Steve, in 30 days. | ||
| Thanks for calling from Chicago, where Joe Biden was speaking at the National Bar Association, the annual gathering taking place. | ||
| Taking your phone calls this morning, asking you about Joe Biden's legacy. | ||
| This is Richard in Savannah, Georgia, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| It's been a long time since I talked to you. | ||
| I'll be honest, I got to where I couldn't watch it because of all the Trump bashing every single day, but this is different. | ||
| So I'm glad I turned you on because I've always admired you. | ||
| So, what do you think about Joe Biden's legacy, Richard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It has to be for me from Georgia: the spirit of Lake and Riley, Jocelyn Nungry, a 12-year-old girl from Houston, Rachel Moran, all the innocent women and children who were brutally murdered, et cetera, from the four years of invasion, if you will, from 15, 10, 20 million people, whatever you want to call it. | |
| The poor policeman that was shot in the face up in New York City, the ice from the two people from South America. | ||
| I just see the horror that happened with the invasion with all the people who are just allowed to come in from every country, practically in the world, and the innocent people who are not here anymore due to that invasion of not only Joe Biden, but the vice president and Maorcus, et cetera. | ||
| So I kind of look at it like that and what it's caused with how many people we're taken care of in hotels at $500 a night and the cost to the American public of the millions of people that came in, whether it be through the cost to each city, what it's done. | ||
| And it's really just a sad situation. | ||
| And the people who voted for a party such as that really need to look inside and say, wow, look what I've done because I voted for that party. | ||
| So I kind of look at it like that. | ||
| And I'm thankful that God protected Trump. | ||
| He's in. | ||
| We're doing well. | ||
| And I just want to say that I've always admired you. | ||
| I thank you for taking my call. | ||
| But I kind of look at it at that point. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Richard in Georgia this morning. | ||
| Looking for your texts, your social media posts as well. | ||
| Here's a few of them. | ||
| This is Bob from Michigan. | ||
| Biden's legacy is a war in Ukraine and a genocide against Palestinians. | ||
| Stephen in Michigan, I'm 62. | ||
| Joe Biden will be remembered as the greatest legislative president of my lifetime. | ||
| And this is in Elmira, New York. | ||
| Dave, for me, Biden's legacy is open borders, but how we tried is, will be open borders, how we tried to ruin America with the invasion of the southern open border. | ||
| Taking your phone calls on phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. | ||
| This is Gina, just across the Potomac River, Alexandria, Virginia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Gina, you with us? | ||
| Stick by your phone, Gina. | ||
| This is Alan in Woodridge, New York, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My memory of Joe Biden goes a ways back. | ||
| I'm 79, going on 80. | ||
| He has done a great job. | ||
| He was one of those people in Delaware who was concerned about those who were undercared for, whether it be the elderly or the ill or racial minorities, whatever it was, he was ahead of the line. | ||
| He has worked very hard to help people, no matter what political thought they may have. | ||
| I think as president, he is blamed for inflation. | ||
| The corporations have been in control of raising prices to the extent that the American public have a terrible time paying their bills. | ||
| I think his legacy will stand up in time. | ||
| They will forget about the fact that everyone is fragile and time takes a toll. | ||
| And when people, as Pamela Harris said, pile things on you, the assassinations take place. | ||
| It doesn't have to be being shot in the head, but being stabbed in the back. | ||
| And when you're trying to keep everything together, sometimes things go south. | ||
| And Alan, when you talk about character assassinations, I'm assuming that's what you're saying. | ||
| Who do you think has done that? | ||
| Who's rhetorically stabbed Joe Biden in the back? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it came from all sides, from ambitious people who wanted to be there, and he was there, but ill health was taking a toll because people were pushing him in so many directions, and he tries to do the right thing. | |
| And I think the problem was that the ambition, whether it be Democrat, Independent, Republican, was very much in the view of what I saw happening. | ||
| And it broke my heart to see a man who has spent so many valuable years of his life doing the right thing through his family tragedies and giving his hand to everyone. | ||
| And he really did. | ||
| A good man. | ||
| And in time, people will just have to drop this Joe Biden mantra using it because it hurts to have this done. | ||
| I'm sure he has to deal with this daily from people making fun of him and lowering his abilities that he has shown the American people or the people of the United States and the American people, North, South, Central. | ||
| Alan, got your point, Alan. | ||
| That's Alan. | ||
| In New York, we're talking about Joe Biden's legacy in the wake of his appearance last night at the National Bar Association. | ||
| Joe Biden's legacy, also the subject of a column in the Dallas Morning News this past weekend by Talmadge Boston, historian and author, presidential scholar. | ||
| The headline of that piece, Biden's legacy is all but ruined. | ||
| We talked to Talmadge Boston on this program back on Monday of this week about that column. | ||
| This is a little bit of what Talmudge Boston had to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's done it to himself. | |
| If he had, toward the end of his one and only term, said, you know what, I was elected as a transition president for one term. | ||
| I've done the best I could. | ||
| We've done some good things. | ||
| We've restored some improved relations with our international allies. | ||
| We've gotten some legislation passed helping the infrastructure. | ||
| I did the best I could. | ||
| He'd be in the Jimmy Carter, maybe better than Jimmy Carter class. | ||
| But of course, at the same time, when we're talking about improving our relationship with our allies, he also, because of his Afghanistan withdrawal, inspired Putin to invade Ukraine. | ||
| He also has a mixed record on Israel. | ||
| So his foreign policy is up in the air. | ||
| On his economic policy, obviously we had the highest inflation that we had in over 30 years. | ||
| We had a substantial increase in the federal deficit. | ||
| So his economic policies are not exactly A-plus by any means. | ||
| They're, you know, just a mixed bag. | ||
| And then, of course, we have the extended period during which we had an open border and all that came with that. | ||
| And then states like Texas, where I live, and others, saying, we don't know what to do with these people. | ||
| And if they're cities that call themselves sanctuary cities, we're going to let you have it. | ||
| You want to be a sanctuary here? | ||
| Have all these illegal immigrants who are just running across the border under President Biden's watch? | ||
| So I think he has a mixed record, but I do think that people would say that he gave it his best shot. | ||
| He wasn't wildly successful, but he had some successes. | ||
| And he saved the Democratic Party from in 19, excuse me, in 2020 from Bernie Sanders and presented a moderate candidate who could be elected and defeated from the Democratic standpoint, Donald Trump, who they didn't like at all. | ||
| But now, because of what's happened in his going for a second term, he's brought Trump back. | ||
| And then we have everything we've been talking about on the cover-up and who was making the decisions and so forth. | ||
| And so that's the point of my column. | ||
| That's the point of what I'm saying this morning: the free fall damage to his legacy is self-inflicted by him, his family, and his insiders. | ||
| Author Talmadge Boston, he was on this program earlier this week. | ||
| If you want to watch that segment in its entirety, Talmadge Boston, the author of this 2024 book, How the Best Did It: Leadership Lessons from Our Top Presidents. | ||
| That's the book that was published last year. | ||
| Taking your phone calls this morning, asking you what will be Joe Biden's legacy. | ||
| This is Steve, Glendale, Maryland, Republican line. | ||
| What do you think, Steve? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No legacy there. | |
| I just thank God it's over. | ||
| I mean, look at it. | ||
| Look at the state of our country today. | ||
| We're divided. | ||
| He helped divide us even more than we always have been. | ||
| Our economics are bad. | ||
| Inflation ran the prices of everything up. | ||
| Our foreign policy stuck. | ||
| There's no reason for any kind of legacy with Joe Biden. | ||
| He was the worst president ever. | ||
| Jimmy Carter, may he rest in peace, was a good man. | ||
| I think Joe Biden was a good man, but they were both way over their head in the deep water, not knowing how to swim. | ||
| They did nothing for America. | ||
| And to look at all the 20 million people that are here with our taxpayers' dollars that's going to run out one day. | ||
| I just thank God for Donald J. Trump. | ||
| That's Steve in Maryland, Alvin, Denver, Colorado, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| Let me start with the first thing Biden did, which we elected a man to help us deal with COVID. | ||
| I just can't forget all the irrational nonsense we had with Donald Trump. | ||
| Joe Biden stabilized the country, encouraged the administration of the vaccines, and under that, the states slowly winded down their restrictions. | ||
| Secondly, he expanded by leaps and bounds who could be on the federal judiciary. | ||
| Third, Katanji Brown Jackson. | ||
| I balance that with ignoring, or I shouldn't say ignoring, but he believed immigration should be dealt with by Congress. | ||
| Therefore, he didn't take executive action to stem the flow at the border. | ||
| The Republicans are never going to let us live that down. | ||
| And lastly, and I do have one more thing I want to say after this, John, but lastly, he never should have ran for a second term. | ||
| And the last thing I want to say, I listened very closely to the Talmadge Boston interview. | ||
| I didn't even try to call in because I wanted to listen and hear what he's saying. | ||
| Really, all I heard was a repeat of the talking points from the Jake Tapper book. | ||
| That's what I have, John. | ||
| That's Alvin out in Denver. | ||
| This is Robert. | ||
| Speaking of Talmadge in Talmadge, Ohio, Independent, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, how are you doing today? | |
| Doing well, Robert. | ||
| What do you think Joe Biden's legacy will be? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think his legacy is the most horrible for black Americans. | |
| He lied to black America. | ||
| He didn't do nothing for black Americans. | ||
| He's been against black Americans his whole career. | ||
| Robert, did you listen to that first clip that we played from last night speaking to a group of African-American lawyers and talking about his civil rights record? | ||
| What did you think of what he said was his legacy in that clip? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think that they're sellouts and they're not for black Americans. | |
| Never. | ||
| The only black American man that was for black Americans was Johnny Cochrane. | ||
| Nobody else. | ||
| That's Robert in Ohio. | ||
| Here's more from President Joe Biden last night at the National Bar Association gala in Chicago. | ||
| Again, it's the oldest and largest network of African American lawyers and judges. | ||
| Joe Biden discussing the Trump administration and criticizing their policies and efforts to roll back some of the work that Joe Biden says is part of his legacy. | ||
| Joe Biden from last night. | ||
| In our lives, in the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before from everything that followed. | ||
| Moments that force us to confront hard truths about ourselves, our institutions, and democracy itself. | ||
| We are, in my view, at such a moment in American history. | ||
| Reflected in every cruel executive outreach, every rollback of basic freedoms, every erosion of long-standing established precedent. | ||
| We've seen the laws, the law firms, bowing to pressure, bending to bullies, instead of staying rooted in justice of the law, including some of the largest newspapers in America. | ||
| We've seen the apparent glee some of our politicians express. | ||
| That's why watching immigrants who are in this country legally torn from the arms of their family, dragged away and handcuffed from the only home they've ever known. | ||
| My friends, we need to face the hard truths of this administration. | ||
| And it has been to ease all the gains we've made in my administration. | ||
| To erase history rather than make it. | ||
| To erase fairness, equality, to erase justice itself. | ||
| And that's not hyperbole. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| Look, folks, we can't sugarcoat this. | ||
| These are dark days. | ||
| But you're all here for the same reason. | ||
| I left that prestigious law firm in the Public Defender's Office to go to the defender's office years ago. | ||
| It's because our future is literally on the line. | ||
| Former President Joe Biden, last night in Chicago, it's coming up on 7.30 this morning on the Washington Journal. | ||
| We're asking you what will be Joe Biden's legacy. | ||
| It's a little more than six months since he left office. | ||
| And in light of that appearance, a good time to take your view on this topic. | ||
| Continue to call in on phone lines for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents as you're calling in. | ||
| Plenty of news this Friday morning and yesterday it began with a series of announcements when it came to tariffs and trade deals. | ||
| Former President Joe Biden certainly talking about trade deals and Donald Trump has made it the centerpiece of his economic push, announcing an extension on trade talks when it comes to Mexico, deals reached when it comes to Thailand and Cambodia. | ||
| Those were announced yesterday. | ||
| And then this from Politico, his order imposing new global tariff rates effective on August 7th. | ||
| In one week, those tariffs go into effect, including steep new tariffs when it comes to America's neighbor to the north in Canada. | ||
| Lots of news on that front yesterday. | ||
| This morning, there will be more news on the economic front. | ||
| At 8.30 this morning, we will get the July Jobs Report, and we'll let you know what those numbers are when the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts that out. | ||
| Also today at 9 a.m. Eastern here in Washington, we should have more news on that hearing on the January 29th mid-air collision over Washington, D.C. | ||
| The military helicopter colliding with a commuter plane, killing all on board. | ||
| It's the National Transportation Safety Board's hearing on that that we'll be airing live coverage of, again, 9 a.m. Eastern. | ||
| That's going to be on C-SPAN 3 this morning. | ||
| Also on C-SPAN.org and the free C-SPANNOW video app. | ||
| At 10 a.m. this morning, the Senate is in and the House has a brief pro forma session. | ||
| At 11 a.m. this morning, the select committee from the Texas House of Representatives holds its first hearing since the recent release of a newly proposed redistricting map for the Lone Star State. | ||
| Democrats have been pushing back on that effort, claiming it would disproportionately favor Republicans in future congressional elections. | ||
| A public hearing on that from Austin, Texas will be airing live on C-SPAN, 11 a.m. Eastern, also on C-SPAN.org and the free C-SPAN now video app. | ||
| So plenty going on today. | ||
| We hope you stay with the C-SPAN networks throughout this Friday here in Washington, D.C. and around the country. | ||
| And we'll continue to take your calls in this first hour on Joe Biden's legacy. | ||
| What do you think it will be six months since he left office? | ||
| He made that appearance last night. | ||
| Dave in Auburn, New York, Republican line. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| I'll be brief as possible. | ||
| This is my take here. | ||
| Joe Biden was manipulated by the far left wing of his party. | ||
| He was not in charge. | ||
| He was a wall, sleepy Joe. | ||
| The country was leaderless, rudderless. | ||
| What a difference today with Trump as president. | ||
| He and his cohorts threw a monkey wrench into the economy. | ||
| He was a Luddite. | ||
| He will be remembered as the worst president to date. | ||
| That's what I have to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Jerry, Livingston, Tennessee, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking the call. | ||
| Joe Biden will be, his legacy will be he was a decent man. | ||
| He is the man that took over a mess from COVID, which the president we have now denied for the longest. | ||
| Joe Biden stood for women's rights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He stood for equal rights for all. | |
| He stood for everybody having health care. | ||
| Joe Biden will be remembered for the man that raised Social Security, not cut Social Security. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Joe Biden will be remembered for, you know, almost missing his presidency on account of an insurrection that the former president caused. | |
| You know, Joe Biden will be remembered as a good man. | ||
| He, you know, he made his mistakes, but he was a good man. | ||
| And I believe he was a good Christian man. | ||
| You know, I believe he's his Christian beliefs. | ||
| And I think people will remember Jimmy Carter. | ||
| He went out as the worst thing ever. | ||
| Well, look at who Jimmy Carter's remembered today. | ||
| Jimmy Carter was a good man. | ||
| There's no replacement for being a good man. | ||
| That's just a big part of his legacy. | ||
| And the job he done with COVID, anybody got to admit, you know, he really took over a mess. | ||
| And another thing, too, when they look back, Joe Biden had 48 months of job growth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He took us from the, I mean, he took us from ruins with COVID. | |
| And if Donald Trump and them would have skipped his policy over Ukraine, Putin would have been put back in his cage by now. | ||
| And I just thank you people for taking the call. | ||
| But look at the things that Joe Biden accomplished for, you know, his first unemployment. | ||
| 48 months. | ||
| I don't know if any president ever done that before. | ||
| That's Jerry in Tennessee. | ||
| John Troy, New York, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Doing well. | ||
| Yeah, Joe Biden, he was definitely the worst president in my lifetime, and I'm in my early 60s. | ||
| But I mean, whereas Jimmy Carter, you know, I thought Jimmy Carter was a bad president, but Jimmy Carter was overwhelmed by events. | ||
| The things that went on under Biden were caused by Biden. | ||
| He caused inflation by pumping $2 trillion into the economy and we didn't need it. | ||
| He opened the borders to the point where 10,000 people a day were coming across. | ||
| He was just, he was horrible. | ||
| He caused inflation. | ||
| He caused the border. | ||
| And to prove it, I mean, just how quickly Trump fixed the border as soon as he came in, it was a very, very easy fix. | ||
| And you have to wonder how bad things would have been had Biden or Kamala Harris been elected and how things would be four years from now. | ||
| They would be even worse. | ||
| It's just What would you say to that caller before you who was talking about 48 months of jobs growth of recovery coming out of the coronavirus pandemic? | ||
| What would you say to that caller if he was still on the line? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that was basically hiring back the jobs that were lost. | |
| That wasn't real recovery. | ||
| And then not only that, but his energy policies were horrible. | ||
| Forcing people to, you know, trying to ban the gasoline engine and forcing everybody off of oil. | ||
| This country, you know, 80-something, close to 90% of our energy comes from fossil fuels. | ||
| You're not going to do that without destroying the economy. | ||
| And then there was the appeasement that went on under Obama and Iran. | ||
| I think you think the world would be up in arms when Trump bombed Iran and took care of the nuclear program. | ||
| The world is breathing a lot easier now because the world's most evil regime will not have nuclear weapons. | ||
| Biden, Obama, Harris, that would have just slipped. | ||
| They would have left Iran alone until they developed a nuclear weapon. | ||
| So, I mean, the country was much better off with Biden gone. | ||
| And that's to say nothing of his mental decline, which was blatantly obvious to anybody with eyes. | ||
| So his legacy was just, in my opinion, he replaces Jimmy Carter as the worst president in my lifetime, hands down, because he caused the problems we're facing, whereas Jimmy Carter was just overwhelmed by them. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's John in New York. | ||
| This is Phil on Facebook, who writes in that Joe Biden failed in some areas of foreign policy, but had modest wins when it came to domestic policy, including CHIPS and the Science Act, bipartisan infrastructure bill, investment in renewable energy, was able to pass over $2 trillion in fiscal stimulus, which effectively ended the COVID-19 recession, expanding the child tax credit, creating three times the number of manufacturing jobs that existed in 2019, nearly three years into Trump's presidency. | ||
| And Biden was deeply flawed, Phil writes, but was a hell of a lot better than Trump. | ||
| Looking for your comments on social media, on text message, and of course, your phone calls as well. | ||
| This is Joe Quincy Mas, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing, John? | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I believe that Joe Biden was a man of character and morality. | ||
| And I believe that Trump was not. | ||
| Clearly, he seems to be a clever businessman, but he basically puts profit before people. | ||
| And we saw that with the response to COVID. | ||
| But Joe is, as far as Joe is concerned, I know his legacy ended on a sour note. | ||
| He probably should not have run for a second term, especially after the debate. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that he didn't accomplish a great deal in his presidency. | ||
| He brought America out of a recession twice, once with Obama and once with what Trump left him after COVID. | ||
| Not that Trump caused COVID, but Joe brought us out of it. | ||
| And as far as his foreign policy, I realize I do remember 13 people died tragically in a terrorist bombing getting out of Afghanistan. | ||
| But I'm a person of facts. | ||
| And while that's true, 2,500-plus soldiers died in the 20 years prior to us getting out of Afghanistan. | ||
| Donald Trump promised to get us out of Afghanistan. | ||
| He made a deal with Taliban to stop killing Americans and would stop killing them, but he never came through on the deal. | ||
| He never got out of Afghanistan, so that deal was only going to end. | ||
| So he did not solve the problem in Afghanistan. | ||
| Joe Biden did. | ||
| Getting out of wars is a messy business. | ||
| I lived through Vietnam. | ||
| We lost 58,000 Americans in Vietnam and also 3 million Chinese, most of them after we pulled out. | ||
| So ending wars is ugly. | ||
| Joe did a great job. | ||
| I think Joe did a great job on economics, too. | ||
| Inflation, we were at nine points after COVID, caused by COVID, not by Joe. | ||
| It was COVID, it was supply and demand. | ||
| The world was inflation. | ||
| He brought us down to 2.6 before we left, which is pretty much where we are. | ||
| So Trump has not improved the economy, which he said he would do. | ||
| I'm paying the same for gas, the same for groceries, and who knows where Traff is going to lead. | ||
| So I think Joe Biden, minus his last few months, is going to have a great legacy. | ||
| History will see him as a great president. | ||
| That's Joe in the base state to the Pine Tree State. | ||
| This is Keith and Bangor, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, America. | ||
| I want to call your about Joe Biden's legacy. | ||
| I'd like to say the word legacy just on its own. | ||
| I don't really like to talk about people's legacies until they're actually dead. | ||
| Like the legacy of Hulk Hogan, great hero of mine, who I believe one of his legacies is putting on a pile driver. | ||
| Well, Keith, we'll hold off on the Hulk for a little bit just because we're focusing on Joe Biden after that appearance last night. | ||
| Do you want to say anything about Joe Biden? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sir. | |
| But I wanted to get to my point and my view on his legacy, if I could describe it. | ||
| And I'll just refer to one more person. | ||
| That was Ozzy Osborne. | ||
| At his wake, they piled on a bunch of flowers till there was an immense pile of flowers there, roses, to tell you what, Keith, we're sticking to Joe Biden for now just because we're trying to keep the conversation on track here. | ||
| This is James in Waynesboro, Georgia, Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning, America. | ||
| I think Joe Biden's legacy to be one of honesty, decency, respect for other people for all Americans. | ||
| He's a good man, but I really called and waited all this time to say something about the guy that called, saying Johnny Cochran was the most influential, did the most for black people. | ||
| That guy sounds like he is the most dumbest person to ever call in the history of CPAN. | ||
| Thank you, John. | ||
| That's James in Georgia having this conversation a little over six months since Joe Biden has left the White House. | ||
| He's done a handful of interviews in that time. | ||
| The BBC, The View come to mind. | ||
| He's, of course, writing his memoirs, Hachette paying some $10 million for the Joe Biden memoirs, those currently being worked on by the former president. | ||
| And here's a story about what life is like these days for Joe Biden. | ||
| Joe Biden is staffed by only one or two aides, political rights. | ||
| He holds up for hours at a time in his Delaware home working on his memoir with his new ghostwriter while undergoing treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer. | ||
| Welcome to life after the White House. | ||
| The shockingly shrunken footprint of a former president is Adam Wren's column in Politico. | ||
| It came out just yesterday, just this week, if you want to read it. | ||
| This is Heather out of Massachusetts Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just want to say President Biden was a president for all people. | ||
| Also, he gave a speech, right? | ||
| Where is the dementia? | ||
| That does not go away. | ||
| And I think people are saying the wrong things. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| Woodstock, Georgia, Roy, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You know, Bill Hillary Clinton said it best is that Joe Biden pushing the crime bill is responsible for the decimation of the black community with the number of people that went to jail, the number of families that were broken up. | ||
| Bill Hillary Clinton said that. | ||
| The thing that I think he'd be known for is that he got us to see just how corrupt the deep state really is. | ||
| I mean, he used the federal government to go after his rivals. | ||
| When he lifted the sanction against Iran and the sanction against Russia, he opened the bloodgates of money to Iran that allowed them to attack Israel on October the 7th. | ||
| They're destroyed. | ||
| Look at Gaza being destroyed because he lifted sanctions against Iran and allowed them to fund that war. | ||
| Same thing with Russia. | ||
| He opened a pipeline of Russia. | ||
| Russia's funding there were right now two wars that we're planning to defend against, but we gave them the money to fight with us. | ||
| And that's the thing that we need to remember. | ||
| And also the White House. | ||
| I mean, a bare transgender, bare-chested transgender at the White House, opening women's sports up to men. | ||
| I mean, morally, he literally tried to destroy our country. | ||
| And then when you're talking about the, I heard Hillary Clinton saying about to let all these illegal immigrants to come in to replace the 20 million black babies that was killed in abortions, what kind of legacy can that be if he was, Hillary had said that she had wanted to open the border, no borders, Joe Biden came president and did exactly what she said she wanted to do. | ||
| That's Roy in Georgia. | ||
| This is Melissa, Lake Charles, Louisiana, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mr. McCartle. | |
| Joe Biden's legacy will be one of being part of a crime family. | ||
| Whether he led the crime family or not, you know, we haven't yet to determine that, but the millions of dollars taken from our foreign adversaries as he sold out this country with his family. | ||
| Shame on all of them. | ||
| He's not a nice man. | ||
| He's never been a nice man. | ||
| You can see that throughout his time in office. | ||
| He's a mean person. | ||
| Now he's a mentally decrepit, although he was never bright. | ||
| He's a mentally decrepit old man who will have zero, he won't have a library. | ||
| He really won't have a legacy other than his crime family and a child for me. | ||
| Why don't you think he'll have a library? | ||
| You don't think he has enough supporters to have enough donations to have a library in Delaware? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, and I'm so glad because he doesn't deserve a library. | |
| I don't think he has enough supporters. | ||
| He doesn't have enough donors. | ||
| The donors, you know, he shines the spotlight for a deep state. | ||
| Look at each, almost every day, there are his aides being paraded in front of the oversight committee, being asked questions about his, they call it cognitive decline, but I think we all know what it was, and his corruption. | ||
| So how can you have a library under those circumstances? | ||
| They've still, we won't even be finished interviewing those people until sometime in September. | ||
| It's glorious, and no one deserves it more than the Biden crime family. | ||
| So no library for them. | ||
| They won't be able to raise the money. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Melissa in Louisiana. | ||
| Just about 15 minutes left in this opening segment of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Taking your phone calls after Joe Biden made that appearance at the National Bar Association's annual gala in Chicago last night. | ||
| It wasn't long after that appearance that we noted that Kamala Harris made her own appearance on the late show with Stephen Colbert. | ||
| She talked about the book that she's writing about her time running as president. | ||
| She talked about Joe Biden. | ||
| She also talked about her decision not to run for governor of California. | ||
| Here's a little bit more from that Kamala Harris interview. | ||
| You said you're going to sit this one out. | ||
| Why are you sitting this out? | ||
| Are you saving yourself for a different office that might be obviously people project onto the standard? | ||
| And honestly, it's more perhaps basic than that. | ||
| Listen, I am a devout public servant. | ||
| I have spent my entire career in service of the people. | ||
| And I thought a lot about running for governor. | ||
| I love my state. | ||
| I love California. | ||
| I've served as just elected district attorney, attorney general, and senator. | ||
| But to be very candid with you, I, you know, when I was young in my career, I had to defend my decision to become a prosecutor with my family. | ||
| And one of the points that I made is why is it then when we think we want to improve the system or change it, that we're always on the outside on bended knee or trying to break down the door? | ||
| Shouldn't we also be inside the system? | ||
| And that has been my career. | ||
| And recently, I made the decision that I just, for now, I don't want to go back in the system. | ||
| I think it's broken. | ||
| I think it's, there's so much, I mean, there are so many good people who are public servants, who do such good work, teachers and firefighters and police officers and nurses and scientists, scientists. | ||
| And so it's not about them, but, you know, I believe and I always believed that as fragile as our democracy is. | ||
| our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles. | ||
| And I think right now that they're not as strong as they need to be. | ||
| And I just don't want to, for now, I don't want to go back in the system. | ||
| I want to travel the country. | ||
| I want to listen to people. | ||
| I want to talk with people. | ||
| And I don't want it to be transactional where I'm asking for their vote. | ||
| Kamala Harris, last night, Susan Page this morning in the pages of USA Today focuses on Kamala Harris, that decision not to run for governor of California and what her future may hold. | ||
| Susan Page, the Washington Bureau chief of USA Today, writing this about the history of those who have lost a presidential bid in the Democratic Party. | ||
| She lost Susan Page rights, and Democrats in the past have demonstrated little loyalty to losers. | ||
| The last Democratic nominee who lost one presidential race and was nominated for another was Adlai Stevenson in 1956 who lost to Dwight Eisenhower again. | ||
| And that was eight years before Kamala Harris was born. | ||
| For the record, she writes, Republicans seem to be more forgiving. | ||
| Donald Trump, for one, was nominated in 2024 and won after losing to Joe Biden in 2020. | ||
| Richard Nixon was nominated in 1968 and won after losing to JFK in 1960. | ||
| A little bit of history from Susan Page this morning. | ||
| This is David Bemidji, Minnesota. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Regarding President Biden's legacy, I think time will tell, but I look at it in a rather harsh manner. | ||
| He did some very good things, especially for the gay community and women's rights. | ||
| But all in all, he was a corporate Democrat, and he was a cold warrior. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He put us at risk for World War III on several occasions. | |
| He sent cluster bombs to Ukraine, which I considered to be a war crime. | ||
| He kept sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel while they were dropping them on civilians and women and children. | ||
| So he was a moderate, corporate, wishy-washy, unimaginative person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He put huge tariffs on electric vehicles because he didn't want foreign electric vehicles competing with our car manufacturing. | |
| He spoke out of both sides of his mouth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was duplicitous. | |
| He was terrible to that law professor. | ||
| What was her name? | ||
| Anita Hill. | ||
| Anita Hill. | ||
| He was horrible to her during the Thomas hearings. | ||
| So, David, who's more your cup of tea as a Democrat? | ||
| Who's the best Democrat right now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I couldn't tell you. | |
| I really like Mr. White House. | ||
| I like Sheldon White House. | ||
| Yeah, he's brilliant. | ||
| He's intelligent. | ||
| He's thoughtful. | ||
| He's erudite. | ||
| He's perceptive. | ||
| He actually understands things in depth. | ||
| There's Jamie Raskin, who's a marvelous human being. | ||
| There are some good people out there. | ||
| I think unless the Democrats really go progressive with somebody like White House or OAC, they're going to fall on their face again. | ||
| And the last thing we need is another moderate president. | ||
| We need high-speed no-carbon trains. | ||
| We need a real response to climate change. | ||
| We need to have a real response to the health of our children, their mental and physical health. | ||
| Without those things, we're going to fail as a country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to collapse as an empire. | |
| We need to stop this insane, militaristic approach we have to the world. | ||
| We need to stop this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| And I'm running short on time, so I want to get to a couple of other callers. | ||
| But I did want to let you know, you mentioned Jamie Raskin. | ||
| An interesting interview that Jamie Raskin did with an author took place. | ||
| It was just a couple weeks ago. | ||
| It is community organizer Michael Ansara was interviewed by Jamie Raskin about his book, The Hard Work of Hope. | ||
| It's a discussion of activism in the 60s and 70s and a history of it. | ||
| But there were several folks who showed up at that event. | ||
| It was here in Washington, D.C., at a bookstore called Bus Boys and Poets that challenged Jamie Raskin about the war in Gaza and what Congress is doing. | ||
| He repeatedly stopped throughout that book interview to take those questions and interact with folks. | ||
| Anyway, it's available on our website at c-span.org. | ||
| If you just search Jamie Raskin, you'll find it. | ||
| You might be interested in watching it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll do that. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| That's David in Minnesota. | ||
| This is Jay, Louisville, Kentucky, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Joe Biden's greatest legacy will be you can become very rich with influence. | |
| Joe Biden had been a politician all his life. | ||
| The best job he's ever had was his president. | ||
| And I think they make around $300,000. | ||
| Joe Biden never had a business. | ||
| He never sold a product. | ||
| He wasn't a hedge fund operator or real estate or anything. | ||
| But he has so much wealth, people just wonder, how can you do that when you don't make that kind of money to have what he has right now? | ||
| Jay, what do you think about a $10 million book deal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, you get that through influence. | |
| He got that through influence. | ||
| He became a politician. | ||
| I don't think he went into being a politician for that. | ||
| What he got into it, he said, wait a minute, we got something special here. | ||
| We got something which he has sold, everybody knows he's sold influence all of his life. | ||
| Him and his family, they're all rich and they've never had a business. | ||
| How can you acquire that much and never have a business when you're a politician? | ||
| Jay, what does it say? | ||
| Let me just come back to that book deal for another minute. | ||
| That it was a $10 million book deal. | ||
| That's reportedly what it was for Joe Biden. | ||
| Barack and Michelle Obama set a record for their book deal, and this was eight years ago in 2017 with Penguin Random House. | ||
| $60 million is what Penguin Random House paid for Barack and Michelle Obama. | ||
| And then here, eight years later, it's only $10 million for Joe Biden. | ||
| What does that say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, what I'm saying, these book people who publish books, they know that the president like Biden, he'll sell a certain amount of books. | |
| They'll give him that money. | ||
| But this all comes back to starting out with the influence and being the president of the United States and taking his son everywhere with him on the plane. | ||
| And he's making deals while he's being the president overseas. | ||
| I mean, it's very, I mean, people, and plus letting all the people across the border, I mean, that is one thing you can't forgive him over. | ||
| You have to get rid of all these people now. | ||
| And it just, his legacy is really not good. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| And I'm not going to say anything about his, you know, his decline in his health because that's not fair to do that because the man has a problem as a lot of people do. | ||
| But he has sold influence since the day he realized he could. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Jay in the bluegrass state. | ||
| Back to the Heintree State. | ||
| This is Elijah in New Gloucester, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Oh, good morning. | ||
| What I would like to preface this by saying is that I'm 23, right? | ||
| And what I personally will, you know, remember Biden for will be like, I remember 2021, like at that point in my life, we had been in Afghanistan for literally all of my life, right? | ||
| I see on the news, you know, pictures of like soldiers, you know, dying over there in the Middle East. | ||
| And I remember, you know, even though it was, you know, messy, Joe Biden was actually the one to actually get us out of the Middle East. | ||
| So for that, I'll always remember that. | ||
| And to that point, I would also like to say that like, you know, particularly I focus on like foreign policy. | ||
| And I just personally think that Biden's, sorry, I'm a little bit nervous. | ||
| I've never done this before. | ||
| I would say that Biden's foreign policy is a little bit stronger because, you know, Trump kind of pulled us, I feel like, further away from our alliances in the Pacific, you know, like Japan, South Korea, and all that type of stuff. | ||
| So, and just in terms of foreign policy, I think I kind of see Biden as a little bit stronger. | ||
| I feel like people remember that, his foreign policy, Ukraine, our alliances in the Pacific, that type of stuff. | ||
| So that's pretty much it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Elijah, before you go, as a young person, who do you see as the best president in the modern era? | ||
| You don't have to go all the way back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, if in a modern era, like are we talking about like all of U.S. history or just like recently, the 20th century? | |
| World War II forward, after World War II forward. | ||
| I think for people my age, I feel like we would say either or I would say maybe Obama or maybe even, but definitely not George W. Bush. | ||
| I would say Obama or maybe Clinton, maybe. | ||
| It's kind of difficult. | ||
| I would say probably, I see a lot of people talking about Obama nowadays. | ||
| So I feel like they would say Obama was a really strong president. | ||
| Elijah, thanks for the call from Maine. | ||
| You said you haven't done this before. | ||
| You can call him once a month. | ||
| So we'll check in with you at the beginning of September. | ||
| This is Ted in Santa Maria, California, Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Doing well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Yeah, I think Biden will probably go down as one of the, if not the worst, one of the worst presidents we've ever had. | ||
| And I think the way he left office, for one, by pardoning the son Hunter Biden, was just the ultimate slap in the face to every one of us who get up and go to work, pay taxes, and follow the laws. | ||
| And, you know, we get a traffic ticket. | ||
| We don't pay our, we don't pay it. | ||
| We get thrown in jail. | ||
| There's nobody pardoning us. | ||
| And that was just the, and not only that, but look at how many Democrats he pardoned on the way out and gave retroactive all the way for future and behind. | ||
| And that right there is just, it tells you right there that he pardoned his whole family. | ||
| That tells you right there, they're a crime family. | ||
| They'll be known for their crimes. | ||
| They'll never be held accountable for them because they're part of the elite and they can do that. | ||
| And, you know, it was the ultimate slopping place. | ||
| But I think you said the worst or one of the worst. | ||
| You're putting him there with, and among surveys, it's always James Buchanan at the bottom, Andrew Johnson at the bottom, Franklin Pierce at the bottom. | ||
| You're putting him in that category? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I would say in modern history, in modern times, I would say President Polk was probably one of the worst too, but I would say that, and I love JFK. | |
| I thought he was a good Democrat. | ||
| I thought Clinton was a, you know, that was the last time any Democrats and Republicans reached across the aisle and balanced the budget and worked together and got things done. | ||
| And that's why I would say Clinton was probably was a good president. | ||
| I'd say George W. Bush was horrible. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Obama, now what Biden is, is in my opinion, is just a continuation. | ||
| It's basically Obama's third term is what it was. | ||
| And we all know Biden wasn't mentally there. | ||
| He auto-penned everything. | ||
| He didn't even know half the stuff he was signing. | ||
| He had no idea what he was even signing. | ||
| And so, I mean, if you look at what he did, getting us in Afghanistan and then turning around and leaving three, I think it was three or four billion dollars worth of military equipment behind. | ||
| Yeah, that, again, is ridiculous. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Ted in California, our last caller in this first segment of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Stick around, though. | ||
| Plenty more to talk about this morning. | ||
| A little later, we'll be joined by Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| We'll talk about the Trump administration's higher education policies. | ||
| But first, we'll focus on the housing affordability crisis. | ||
| Andrew Oren joins us of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. | ||
| Stick around for that discussion. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This show and C-SPAN is one of the few places left in America where you actually have left and right coming together to talk and argue. | |
| And you guys do a great service in that. | ||
| I love C-SPAN too. | ||
| That's why I'm here today. | ||
| Answer questions all day, every day. | ||
| Sometimes I get to do fun things like go on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN is, I think, one of the very few places that Americans can still go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN has such a distinguished and honorable and important mandate and mission in this country. | |
| I love this show. | ||
| This is my favorite show to do of all shows because I actually get to hear what the American people care about. | ||
| American people have access to their government in ways that they did not before the cable industry provided C-SPAN access. | ||
| That's why I like to come on C-SPAN is because this is one of the last places where people are actually having conversations, even people who disagree. | ||
| Shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective. | ||
| Thank C-SPAN for all you do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable, because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard, where hard questions are asked, and where people have to answer to them. | |
| Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest non-fiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 4:30 p.m. Eastern, Emory University professor Corita Brown documents the history of educational freedom and justice among African Americans, from segregated schools to historically black colleges and universities, in her book, The Battle for the Black Mind. | ||
| And at 8 p.m., former Texas Republican Senator Phil Graham and economist Donald Bordeaux share their book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom, where they talk about the history of government involvement in the U.S. economy and argue that it has had an overall negative effect. | ||
| Then at 9 p.m. Eastern, national political reporters Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf offer a behind-the-scenes account of the 2024 presidential election that sent Donald Trump back to the White House for a second non-consecutive term after a litany of criminal and civil investigations and two assassination attempts in their book, 2024. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| A discussion now on housing affordability. | ||
| Our guest is Andrew Arend of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, a group founded back in 1974 to do what, Mr. Arendt? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, we do research policy and advocacy to ensure socially and racially equitable public policy to provide affordable housing for the lowest income renters, housing that is affordable and accessible. | |
| An organization that focuses on low-income people, how is the group funded? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The National Low-Income Housing Coalition is funded by private funding, so foundations, mostly foundations, and we're also a membership organization as well. | |
| And so we have more than a thousand members from across the country, many of whom are other organizations working at the state and local level. | ||
| Recently, a report coming out late last month on the state of rental housing in the United States and the costs of rental housing. | ||
| What did you find in terms of how affordable it is to rent a home in the United States? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, yeah, so unfortunately for many renters, it's not affordable. | |
| Out of Reach is a report that we publish every year. | ||
| And the primary question we try to answer is how much does a full-time worker have to earn in order to afford just a modest rental home in their community. | ||
| And we found this year that nationally across the country, on average, someone would have to earn more than $28 an hour to afford just even a modest one-bedroom apartment and more than $33 an hour for a two-bedroom apartment. | ||
| And, you know, we know that there's a lot of low-wage occupations that don't pay wages that are adequate for people to afford their housing. | ||
| How you come up with those numbers and when you do it, when you say afford a modest home, what does that mean? | ||
| How much of their income are they spending under your metrics on housing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, the federal standard that's used in many of our housing programs across the country is that renters should not be paying more than 30% of their income towards housing. | |
| And so we look at what's called the fair market rent for every county in the country, which is a HUD estimate. | ||
| HUD produces, the Department of Housing and Urban Development produces, does these rent estimates and it's what a family moving today could expect to pay for just a modest apartment sort of in the bottom part of the rental market. | ||
| So this is typically modest older housing. | ||
| And then we calculate how much someone has to earn so they don't have to spend more than 30% of their income on that housing. | ||
| And you can find a map of what the coalition found in running those numbers on their website. | ||
| It's nlihc.org. | ||
| We'll show it for you to our viewers, but what did you find geographically? | ||
| What were some of the trends that you found as people take a look at the map? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so I think, you know, if you look along the West Coast, you know, and people probably aren't going to be surprised by this, you'll see that, you know, rental costs are much higher in California. | |
| California and Hawaii have the largest affordability problem, or that's the most expensive rental housing, followed by Massachusetts and District of Columbia as well. | ||
| And in those states, on average, someone has to earn around $50 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment. | ||
| And you'll notice, of course, that there's a lot states that are less expensive than that. | ||
| And so, you know, at the most affordable states, you have Arkansas, North Dakota, that's more like $19 an hour. | ||
| But one thing we try to sort of emphasize is that, regardless of that housing wage, when you compare states, there's an affordability problem that's national because even the states that look more affordable, the jobs there typically pay lower wages. | ||
| So the lowest wage workers in Arkansas face the same challenges as the lowest wage workers in California in some aspects. | ||
| Is there a red state-blue state divide when it comes to this map? | ||
| It does seem kind of familiar to recent electoral maps. | ||
| Are there state law reasons why it's more affordable in some states than others? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, in some of the states, like on the West Coast and on the East Coast, there's a greater demand for rental housing. | |
| And over, it started to, it's gotten better over the last couple of years, but for quite a while, just the supply of rental housing was not keeping up to demand. | ||
| And that was because of both growing demand as well as land use, local land use, and zoning restrictions that make it difficult to develop rental housing. | ||
| And so, you know, those factors have combined to create high housing costs. | ||
| I would say, though, that there's similar issues even in the red states where on the map they look more affordable. | ||
| But again, when you look at what people's wages are in those states, there still is an affordability problem. | ||
| We're focusing on housing affordability. | ||
| And our guest this morning is Andrew Arrend of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. | ||
| If you want to call on phone lines, but a bit differently. | ||
| If you are a homeowner, 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you're a renter, 202-748-8001. | ||
| All others, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll also look for your texts, 202-748-8003. | ||
| It's a report on the costs, the affordability of a modest rental apartment, but it's also a report that each year gives recommendations. | ||
| What are you recommending this year in terms of alleviating this housing affordability crisis? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so it's a very complex problem. | |
| I mean, when there's a significant shortage of affordable rental housing, particularly for low-wage workers and extremely low-income families, and it's a complex problem because there's so many housing markets and different housing markets differ from one another. | ||
| But generally speaking, we need more federal investment in our affordable housing programs. | ||
| And so that includes Housing Choice Vouchers, which is a large program that provides eligible low-income renters with a voucher to try to afford housing in the private market. | ||
| But we also need capital investments in what we call project-based rental assistance, which goes to specific properties to keep them affordable for low-income renters. | ||
| We have a capital backlog in public housing, which is a very important source of affordable housing for the lowest-income renters. | ||
| But there's been years of disinvestment and we need to reinvest in that housing as well. | ||
| So that's all, those are federal resources we need. | ||
| And then at the state and local level, there's a rule for local governments and state governments in that at the local level, there's a lot of land use and zoning laws and other restrictions that make it hard for developers to produce affordable rental housing. | ||
| Well, any rental housing. | ||
| What's an example of that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a lot of single-family zoning that just that just prohibits multi-family, so apartment developments or even small apartment buildings, which a lot of the affordable housing stock for the lowest income renters is in those types of properties. | |
| And they're very difficult to produce these days. | ||
| If I'm a home builder and there's no specific zoning law that says what I have to do, why would I build a low income project versus a million dollar single family home project? | ||
| What would be the financial reason for me to do that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, and that's the issue. | |
| There is no reason unless there are other incentives and subsidies involved. | ||
| And so you cannot, if you're a developer, you cannot go out and produce rental housing or even maintain existing rental housing in some cases and charge a rent that's affordable to very low income and extremely low income renters because you also have bills to pay, right? | ||
| You have financing costs, you have maintenance costs. | ||
| If it's new housing, you have construction costs, of course. | ||
| And what extremely low-income renters can afford to pay in rent is not, it's just not enough. | ||
| And so as a private developer, you would not develop that housing unless you have some type of public subsidies involved. | ||
| You talk about vouchers for eligible renters. | ||
| Generally, what are the eligibility levels for someone to be able to access this federal program that you're talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so the Housing Choice Voucher Program is the largest subsidized housing program that HUD manages and operates. | |
| And to be eligible, your income has to be below 80% of your area's median income. | ||
| It gives priority, though, to extremely low-income renters. | ||
| And HUD has a definition of extremely low-income, which are renters whose household income is below either the poverty line or 30% of the area's median income. | ||
| And so generally speaking, those are renters whose income is below the poverty line. | ||
| And there's no housing market that adequately serves them. | ||
| What do we know about waste, fraud, and abuse in these kind of programs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so there has not been a lot of evidence of fraud or abuse. | |
| Programs have been very concerned about that. | ||
| And it does. | ||
| I mean, it does happen, but it seems as though it happens on a very small scale relative to the number of vouchers that are out there. | ||
| And you see it less with the voucher program, I would say, because there's a lot of documentation requirements. | ||
| And in order to apply and be eligible, you have to produce a lot of documentation. | ||
| And I think they do a good job at weeding out fraud. | ||
| And it has not really risen to a level that is a concern. | ||
| And it probably is very, very minimal, if at all. | ||
| For the program like the voucher program. | ||
| program, how much do we spend on that a year in terms of tax dollars? | ||
| And is that something that as the Trump administration has looked around the federal government to trim costs spending? | ||
| Is that a program that has gained attention? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It has. | |
| So the voucher program itself is about $35 to $36 billion a year is usually what's appropriated. | ||
| That's what was appropriated last year, $35 billion. | ||
| The Trump administration this year in their budget proposed eliminating that program and eliminating four other major HUD assisted housing programs, so project-based rental assistance, public housing, and a couple of other smaller programs and lump them all together to be a block grant to the states for the states to decide how to spend that money. | ||
| Is that a good idea? | ||
| No, for two reasons. | ||
| One is not only did they propose merging those five programs and just giving all the money to the states, but they cut the amount of money significantly. | ||
| And so last year the voucher program was about, I said, $35 billion was appropriated. | ||
| This year in Trump's proposal, he proposed $35 billion in block grant money to replace all five programs. | ||
| So less money or about equal money that just the voucher program takes, letting out public housing, project-based rental assistance, and the other programs that are very important. | ||
| In terms of giving this to the states, I imagine, though, regardless of the arguments over how much and what it should be, is that states are closer to the people who would be living in these houses, that they may be better able to target this money than a federal bureaucracy here in DC trying to manage this in communities around the country. | ||
| What do you say to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I would say, you know, it depends on the program. | |
| In terms of the Housing Choice Voucher Program, it targets the lowest income, extremely low-income renters. | ||
| And we need to ensure that that money is actually targeted to extremely low-income renters. | ||
| And one way to do that is to have it be a federal program. | ||
| And it's expensive, admittedly, to provide these subsidies for extremely low-income renters, but it's a lot cheaper to do that than to have these renters to have them not be able to afford their housing, lose their housing, and there's a lot of costs associated with that. | ||
| So there are other programs that are more like block grant programs to the states that provide more flexibility. | ||
| And some states decide they split it between rental housing and home ownership housing and they serve different income groups. | ||
| But there's lots of times there's pushback on serving extremely low-income renters. | ||
| And so I think it's important that we keep that program intact and operate at a federal level because every community, like I said, and what we point out in our reports is there's no community that has an adequate supply for renters with those lowest incomes. | ||
| Andrew Arrend is our guest of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a senior vice president there for research, taking your phone calls. | ||
| And as we said, we split the lines by homeowners, renters, and all others. | ||
| We'll start on the line for renters. | ||
| This is Randall, Chevy Chase, Maryland. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you for doing this show. | ||
| I live in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which most listeners in DMG at least would know is a very expensive area to live in. | ||
| I have a Section 8 housing voucher, which is the only way I could afford to live in this area or possibly anywhere in the country. | ||
| I just wanted to make a couple of quick points. | ||
| One is that the federal government is tightening up rules for the Section 8 program. | ||
| For example, there's a new asset test, which did not, there wasn't before. | ||
| I'm not sure if it's taken effect yet. | ||
| I think it hasn't, but it's coming soon. | ||
| And another point I'd like to make is that there's a lot of talk, at least in this local area, about creating more housing. | ||
| But unfortunately, and this is mostly on the state level and the local county level, the housing market is controlled by developers. | ||
| And the housing that's being built is mostly, from what I can see, luxury housing, luxury condos that are, for example, in Chevy Chase that are going for $1 to $2 million each. | ||
| Housing along the new transportation route, the Purple Line, there would be stops there along the metro line, luxury high-end rental housing. | ||
| So I don't really see much emphasis on low-income housing. | ||
| They usually have to set aside, I think it's 15% of these new housing complexes for what they call moderately priced housing, which is something that people like myself who are living on a fixed income could not possibly afford. | ||
| And one last point I'd like to make is that if you look at the inflation rate, we always talk about the CPI. | ||
| I think it's pretty obvious to most people that the measures of inflation are grossly inaccurate. | ||
| They're widely underestimate the actual cost of living. | ||
| And one of the ways that happens is the cost of housing is not properly factored into housing. | ||
| I mean, the overall inflation rate is like, I think it's 2.7%, but there's no way that housing or most expenses people actually have only has gone up 2.7%. | ||
| If you're interested in your talk, you're going to have to. | ||
| You bring up a lot of topics. | ||
| Let me give Andrew Arind a chance to respond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, Randall, that's a lot of important issues that he points out and a lot of important topics. | ||
| And I'm going to address some of them. | ||
| And, you know, I will say, so the Section 8 voucher program is now called the Housing Choice Voucher Program. | ||
| So that's the program we were just talking about. | ||
| And, you know, for renters who receive that voucher, if they were to lose that voucher, there really are no housing options. | ||
| You know, in a place like, definitely in a place like Chevy Chase, Maryland, and in most other communities across the country, without that voucher, it's very hard to find rental housing. | ||
| And just explain how that works. | ||
| Is the money given directly to the renter and then they pay the landlord or does the federal government pay the landlord? | ||
| How does it work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the way the voucher program work is the tenant will typically pay about 30% of their income towards rent. | |
| So that's their contribution to the rent to the landlord. | ||
| And then the voucher will cover the rest of the rent up to a certain standard, which is called a fair market rent. | ||
| So it's a fairly modest rent that's allowed. | ||
| And that's how that works. | ||
| And so it's a mix between what the tenant can afford and then the subsidy pays the rest. | ||
| And, you know, the thing about the voucher program is, you know, Randall is one of the, unfortunately, well, fortunately for him, he's one of the lucky few. | ||
| I mean, the voucher program kind of works like a lottery. | ||
| We don't invest in these programs enough. | ||
| And so only about 25% of people who qualify for assistance actually receive it. | ||
| And so in most places, there's a waiting list. | ||
| You can apply, but you're put on a waiting list. | ||
| And in some places, you can't even apply. | ||
| So it's great that he has one. | ||
| You know, and every year, you know, many years there's threats to that program and funding cuts. | ||
| But it's such an important program. | ||
| Randall's in Chevy Chase, I'm coming to your map and you can zoom into Maryland and specifically Chevy Chase. | ||
| You have this broken down by zip code. | ||
| Explain what $52.50 means on your map, the area where Randall lives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so what that means is that for a two-bedroom apartment, a full-time worker needs to earn about $52 an hour an hour so they don't spend more than 30% of their income on their rent. | |
| And that is high. | ||
| I mean, that is definitely on the higher end of the housing wages or on the rental costs that we see. | ||
| And then the other thing that Randall points out that we were talking, that you and I were talking about, and he's making the important point too, which is, you know, developers are producing the higher cost, more luxury housing because it's expensive to develop housing, and that's where they can recoup their investment. | ||
| You know, you don't recoup it by developing housing and then having it be low rent for $900 or $1,000 a month. | ||
| And so without some form of public subsidy, developers are not going to produce it. | ||
| George is a renter in Douglas, Georgia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I have a question of if you're in low-income housing and it's based on the amount of your income, then could you talk something about that? | ||
| Yeah, so the way these programs work, I mean, we have a variety of programs. | ||
| One's the voucher program, public housing, project-based rental assistance. | ||
| We also have through Treasury the low-income housing tax credit program, and that is a subsidy to developers. | ||
| So they will develop housing, rental housing that's more affordable. | ||
| And the way these programs work is you have to be income qualified. | ||
| And for some of the programs, the income qualification is 80% of your area's median income. | ||
| For the tax credit program, not always, but in many cases, it's either 50% of your area median income or 60% of your area median income. | ||
| And so you have to be income eligible to be considered for those, for that housing. | ||
| And then the way the voucher program work, public housing and project-based rental assistance work, is that if you do receive the assistance, you typically contribute 30% of your income towards the rent, and then the subsidy covers the rest. | ||
| The tax credit program works a little bit differently, and that rents are not tied to your income, they're tied to the area's income. | ||
| And so there's a maximum rent that developers can charge. | ||
| Are there incentives to try to move people up and off these programs? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think incentives from the programs themselves are insurance. | |
| I mean, so in public housing and with vouchers, there are some family sufficiency programs where money can go into part of their payment can go into an escrow account so they can over time build up some resources to become financially sufficient self-sufficient. | ||
| And so there are incentives in that way. | ||
| Richard is a homeowner in Augusta, Georgia. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You are next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My concern is whether or not investment groups and also developers are going to drive people out of being able to rent apartment complexes because I've seen the prices here in Augusta, Georgia go up high to where people's income can't afford to rent the apartment complexes. | ||
| And also When I got to buy my house in 1999, I got it at a low interest rate. | ||
| Do you think if the feds would specify low interest rate for home buying would help? | ||
| And then the labor that the developers depend on are mostly Latino workers, which if the government keeps going after them, that's going to drive the price of the building up even more so. | ||
| Housing in this country is very tight. | ||
| And like the gentleman from Virginia, you talk about the wages earning. | ||
| Back then, I was making $25 an hour, $19.99. | ||
| And he's talking about up there in the Northeast Virginia, $57 an hour. | ||
| Companies don't want to pay that because they want to, investment groups, they want to make sure they keep their profits higher along with the developers. | ||
| They're building complexes here in Augusta now. | ||
| Houses are going to be $250,000, $300,000. | ||
| Who can afford that? | ||
| That's Richard in Augusta, where you'd have to make $22.69 an hour to be able to afford a moderate two-bedroom rental and not pay more than 30% of your salary for that rental. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Yeah, so Richard makes some good points that I just want to highlight a bit. | ||
| And one is that, you know, there have been labor shortages in the construction industry for quite some time in some areas of the country. | ||
| And that has impacted the cost of the development of rental housing. | ||
| And so that labor shortage has definitely been an issue and could grow. | ||
| The other thing is he mentioned about low interest rates for home buyers. | ||
| You know, there has been also over time, it has become harder for moderate income renters to become homeowners because of the cost of homes in general have gone up significantly relative to incomes. | ||
| And especially recently, we've seen the increase in interest rates. | ||
| And so it's become harder to buy homes. | ||
| And so that has kept the demand for rental housing higher. | ||
| And there's more competition than for rental housing. | ||
| And so, of course, that increases rental housing prices, squeezing out even further the lowest income renters. | ||
| And so that has also been a problem that has existed for quite a while. | ||
| And then the other thing I'll mention is about investors, there has been concern about, you know, institutions investing in multifamily housing, which is not necessarily itself a bad thing. | ||
| But a lot of the housing that extremely low-income renters rely on is older housing. | ||
| It's very old housing. | ||
| And we see it flipped out of the affordable housing stock. | ||
| It's purchased, it's rehabbed, it's developed into more expensive housing, and it is no longer affordable. | ||
| And so we have, you know, it's been well documented that over the last few decades, we have consistently lost just low-cost rental housing in the private market. | ||
| You know, so subsidies haven't kept up with the need. | ||
| But even the private market, we've seen a loss of low-cost units over time. | ||
| It's head to Durham, North Carolina, where you'd have to make $31.54 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom rental. | ||
| Brian's in Durham. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much for taking my call. | |
| I am a mortgage loan officer with a bank here in North Carolina. | ||
| I deal with CRA, which is Community Redevelopment Act. | ||
| The biggest challenge that we have, because we do work with a ton of Section 8 borrowers, is the down payment. | ||
| Fortunately, we have several partners, municipalities that do have down payment assistance monies. | ||
| So we can work with a first-time homebuyer, first-time homebuyer, which has been amazing because a lot of these homebuyers have never thought that they could purchase a home. | ||
| And by utilizing down payment assistance funds, and also you mentioned vouchers, we also use vouchers to help with that income source. | ||
| This allows them to get into a home. | ||
| We have programs here that can work with individuals up to $145,000 of down payment assistance, $145,000. | ||
| So that does help an individual that has never purchased a home get to the point where they can own their own home and afford the monthly payment because of the down payment assistance. | ||
| I do know that currently one of the things I was hoping to see was the bill, the American drain that Kamala spoke about in her bid for presidency. | ||
| And that was the low-income housing tax credit. | ||
| Over $40 billion was thought to be funneled into a fund to help homebuyers that never purchased before. | ||
| Her goal was to get 3 million new homeowners into homes within her presidency. | ||
| My question is, have you heard anything that the new administration is doing for affordable housing? | ||
| And have they talked about implementing funds or funds available for down payment assistance to help these affordable home buyers? | ||
| Brian, thanks for the questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thanks. | |
| So I'll say, you know, down payment assistance is really important. | ||
| So, you know, if you're a low to moderate income household, I mean, he's absolutely right. | ||
| One of the most difficult things is accumulating resources so you have a down payment. | ||
| And so down payment assistance is absolutely necessary. | ||
| In some cases, housing counseling. | ||
| So how do you develop, you know, how do you save your resources to make a down payment? | ||
| And then how do you get a mortgage and go through that process is important. | ||
| And then even once you're a owner, Brian's right in that for some households, this really works and it's very helpful in terms of building wealth. | ||
| But there's also households who then have an unexpected maintenance issue of their home and they don't have the resources to fix it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so I would argue there also needs to be repair dollars for those households that just don't have the resources. | ||
| If something does go wrong, they don't have the resources to fix it. | ||
| And there are studies that show that for extremely low income renters, even if they go through housing counseling and then purchase a home, oftentimes in the long run, they become renters again because they couldn't afford the maintenance of the home. | ||
| But again, that's just for the lowest income renters. | ||
| For low to moderate income renters, homeownership programs are very important and they should receive more funding. | ||
| I'm not aware of what the proposals from the current administration have been. | ||
| I do know that there's a bipartisan bill called the Road Act, the Renewing Opportunity American Dream Act that's bipartisan. | ||
| Was just introduced last week by Republican Senator Tim Scott and Democrat Elizabeth Warren. | ||
| It's a big, there's a lot of things in that bill to reform some of our programs, but doesn't provide more money for the rental programs, but there are reforms in it. | ||
| I think one of the things it talks about in that bill is how to make it easier for people to get mortgages for moderately priced homes. | ||
| Sometimes people just need a smaller mortgage to afford a smaller home, and it's difficult to get a smaller mortgage. | ||
| And so I think there is a lot of discussion about how to make it easier for low-to-moderate income households to get a mortgage. | ||
| But I don't know what I'm not aware of is how much money has been proposed, any new money to do it. | ||
| And as viewers tune into these discussions, so the caller used Section 8 program, once again, that's the same thing as this rental voucher program that we've been talking about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sounds like it to me, I would assume. | |
| I mean, because terminology has changed a bit over time. | ||
| This is kind of like section vouchers. | ||
| Yeah, yes. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that's often still referred to as Section 8 because a long time it officially was called Section 8. | |
| But then for the voucher program, the name changed a while ago. | ||
| Section 8, we still say Section 8. | ||
| Section 8 of what? | ||
| Why was it called? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of the Housing Act. | |
| I forget the year, but the 19, I'm guessing 68. | ||
| But it was a Housing Act, and Section 8 of the Housing Act created the program. | ||
| To Amarillo, Texas, where it would cost $19.42 an hour in hourly wages to afford a modest two-bedroom rental. | ||
| Robert is a renter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Hello, sir. | ||
| The first thing I'd like to say is you are performing a much needed task that is easily solvable. | ||
| And I will tell you how in a moment. | ||
| First, I would like to refer you to the available articles by Paula Pershaf in the New York Times or Rachel Wolf in the Wall Street Journal on the forever renter, which I am. | ||
| Unfortunately, the amount of intellectual dishonesty in the media and on C-SPAN presents the problem in an inaccurate way. | ||
| So let me refer you back to the most successful, I won't say successful, I should say accurate, accurate political program in history, which was the 2010 Jimmy McMillan founder of the Rent is Too Damn High in New York City. | ||
| At that time, the rent was $602, and 2 million people have rent control in New York City. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And of course, you know, it's $3,600 now. | |
| And although he was the most accurate political platform in history, he had the wrong approach. | ||
| And the approach is to tax massive amounts of luxury housing in the United States. | ||
| And if you read the Friday section of the Wall Street Journal, you'll see why. | ||
| We have to put the luxury real estate market out of business. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Robert and Amarillo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I think that, you know, when we talk about luxury rental housing, you know, many times, you know, people are equating that with new development. | |
| And I will say that adding to the supply of the rental housing stock is important. | ||
| You know, in many markets across the country, there's just not enough housing, right? | ||
| And, you know, one way you can start, obviously, start to get at that is to develop more housing, obviously. | ||
| So, you know, I don't think that, you know, it's necessarily a bad thing. | ||
| I think, though, that where some of that thinking goes a little bit astray is that just the development of more housing is not going to solve the affordable issue for very low-income and extremely low-income renters. | ||
| Because I would say, as I was saying before, like the market just cannot really serve them because what they can afford to pay in rent doesn't allow owners to pay the bills. | ||
| And so I do think there needs to be a mix of housing development. | ||
| And so, you know, develop luxury housing if there's demand for it, develop moderately priced housing. | ||
| And then also we need to develop really low-cost rental housing, affordable rental housing for the lowest income renters. | ||
| And subsidies are needed to do that. | ||
| Robert Amarillo was a Wall Street Journal reader. | ||
| He mentioned Rachel Wolf, one of their main economics reporters. | ||
| She just published about five minutes ago a story about the jobs report that was just released at 8.30 Eastern Time by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. | ||
| U.S. hiring slowed in July with 73,000 new jobs added for the month. | ||
| When it comes to a jobs report, what do you pay attention to in your line of work? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we often pay attention to what those jobs are paying and watching whether, you know, if we see increases in wages, are those increases keeping up in the increases that we see in rent? | |
| And so we'll often watch that. | ||
| And then, of course, the general unemployment, particularly among lower wage workers and what that is looking like. | ||
| 4.2% is the unemployment rate changed little since July. | ||
| I'll look through the survey data to try to find those hourly wage numbers. | ||
| You didn't give me enough time there. | ||
| Brent, though, is waiting in Washington. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thanks for calling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I had more of a comment than a question. | ||
| As far as rent, I see it as a lot of it's just pure greed. | ||
| You know, too many houses, too many rental houses are owned by large conglomerates like investment firms or tech bros or hedge funds managers. | ||
| And all they do is buy up all these large swaths of housing. | ||
| Like back in the 2008 crisis, they bought up a lot of the houses around Las Vegas. | ||
| And all they do is constantly raise the rent every six months, every three months, whatever they can get away with. | ||
| They don't even see people as people anymore. | ||
| They're nothing but an algorithm. | ||
| So then that puts people out in the streets. | ||
| And then people look at the people in the street to say, oh, well, look, they must have a drug problem or they must have this or that. | ||
| It's their fault that they're in the street. | ||
| They never consider that they are in the street because they have been basically pushed into the street because they can no longer afford housing. | ||
| And that includes senior citizens. | ||
| So to me, it's not like we need more nor cheap rentals. | ||
| We need more cheap, affordable housing that people can buy. | ||
| And I'm not talking like 5,000 square feet houses, 1,500, 2,000 square foot houses like in the 50s and 60s. | ||
| People were able to live in the house just like that just fine. | ||
| So like I said, all I can see is the problem is pure greed. | ||
| Yeah, I would say we do need more moderately priced houses for people to enter home ownership and leave the rental market. | ||
| And that would relieve some pressures in the rental market. | ||
| You know, the caller mentioned something that's interesting that I want to highlight, which is he mentioned about algorithms and large companies. | ||
| And there has been growing concern about The use of technology and how property managers are using technology and using algorithms to set rent. | ||
| They will look at the rents of surrounding properties and they'll track this algorithm and figure out what's the maximum they can charge. | ||
| They'll even put up with some vacancies in order to charge the higher rents. | ||
| They've discovered that there's more money to be made that way. | ||
| And there has been a lawsuit against one of those companies that basically manages data for property managers. | ||
| And they produce these estimates about what property managers should charge for rent. | ||
| And in some markets, they serve so many of the large property managers that the argument is that they are rent-setting. | ||
| It's a monopoly and they are setting rents like colluding to set rents across these management companies. | ||
| And there's a lawsuit against them about that. | ||
| So there is a concern about algorithms and how companies are using that to set rents. | ||
| And even screenings, screening people out. | ||
| Is it fair to screen people out based on a variety of things like background checks, credit history, criminal history, and other things? | ||
| And then people can be rejected from not being given an apartment, but then they're not necessarily told why they're being rejected, right? | ||
| And so they pay an application fee, they get rejected. | ||
| They go to another property, they pay an application fee, they get rejected. | ||
| And no one necessarily is informing them why. | ||
| And that's a problem as well. | ||
| On those hourly earnings, got those numbers for you from the jobs report that just came out 13 minutes ago now. | ||
| Average hourly earnings for all employees on private non-farm payrolls rose by 12 cents or 0.3% to $36.44 in July. | ||
| Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased 3.9%. | ||
| Your reaction? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, what was the 3%? | |
| I'm sorry, what was the 3.9%? | ||
| Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.9%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, my reaction to that is: so we, I mean, that's not a bad thing. | |
| Obviously, it's a good thing. | ||
| You know, we would be interested in knowing what has been the increase in rents over that time. | ||
| You know, right now, actually, affordability has not gotten worse. | ||
| In many cases, it hasn't really got in a lot better. | ||
| But, you know, a few years ago, we saw significant increases in rents with the huge rates of inflation that we saw in the housing market. | ||
| That has leveled off. | ||
| And in some markets, we've even seen now a small decline in rents. | ||
| But, you know, when we say small decline, it's not even close to the increases we saw a few years ago. | ||
| So they're still really high. | ||
| So, you know, in some cases, workers are, you know, it is becoming somewhat more affordable for the moderate income or typical worker. | ||
| But we haven't really seen the same for low-wage workers. | ||
| One last call on that line for renters. | ||
| Want to get Dylan, who's been waiting in Austin, Texas, for a while. | ||
| Dylan, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Big fan of C-SPAN. | ||
| And as a young nonprofit professional, I have always been a big fan of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. | ||
| Most of my career has been spent in homeless services with a particular focus on older adults and the growing rate of older adults experiencing homelessness. | ||
| I recently joined a nonprofit affordable housing provider. | ||
| We have nearly 500 apartments. | ||
| Some of those apartments are funded by HUD with project-based vouchers. | ||
| But predominantly our apartments are funded through the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program. | ||
| All of these apartments are for older adults, 55 and older. | ||
| It's just been a real eye-opener to see how precarious this business is, the business of managing affordable housing, providing affordable housing, without there being additional support beyond the affordable rent rates. | ||
| The average income of our tenants, our residents, is basically a social security check. | ||
| And I'm just wondering if Andrew or any of the work at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition speaks to some of the distress that nonprofit affordable housing providers face without additional support. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Dylan, thanks for the call. | ||
| I'll give you the final minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Yeah, that's an important point. | ||
| You know, affordable housing providers, you know, it's not easy. | ||
| It's not easy because they need to keep their rents low. | ||
| At the same time, in some programs, you know, funding is often unpredictable because it's part of the appropriations process. | ||
| You know, the caller referred to LITEC and also projects-based vouchers, which are like housing choice vouchers, but they're tied to a specific property. | ||
| And it gets complicated because the tax credit program is very important. | ||
| You know, it really helps produce a lot, millions over the years of affordable rental housing units. | ||
| But it doesn't serve the lowest income renters. | ||
| It doesn't really serve people who are at immediate risk of homelessness because rents are set here. | ||
| I mean, there's a max rent. | ||
| That's what people charge. | ||
| That's oftentimes what the owners will charge. | ||
| And it's not tied to the person's income. | ||
| So if you're an extremely low-income senior living, you know, just on Social Security, you know, a very low Social Security amount, you probably can't afford to live in a LITEC, a tax credit property, unless you have additional support. | ||
| In this case, it sounds like that support are these project-based vouchers. | ||
| But then you're in a situation where you have to manage the vouchers as well as the tax credit requirements. | ||
| And usually there's other funding streams involved too to cover all the costs of these properties. | ||
| And it gets very, very complicated. | ||
| And then on top of that, some of these programs are appropriated. | ||
| And so, you know, there's usually some type of funding threat of your funding, at least part of your funding being threatened every year. | ||
| Andrew Arendt is the Vice President for Research at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. | ||
| You can find them online at nlihc.org. | ||
| And we appreciate your time this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| I really enjoyed being here. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Coming up, we will be joined by Beth Akers of the American Enterprise Institute for a discussion about the Trump administration's higher education policies. | ||
| Stick around for that discussion. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| The patriarch C.F. Seabrook was hailed as the Henry Ford of agriculture. | ||
| His son, Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Life magazine called the biggest vegetable factory on earth. | ||
| His son, John Seabrook, has written about his grandfather and father in his book called The Spinach King. | ||
| It's subtitled The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. | ||
| Work on the spinach gang started in the early 1980s when John Seabrook was with the New Yorker magazine. | ||
| John Seabrook says, I had a grandfather who was a champion of white supremacy, a true believer in the superiority of the Nordic Christian male. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Author John Seabrook with his book, The Spinach King, The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty 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. | ||
| Sunday night on C-SPAN's Q&A. | ||
| Technology reporter Nicole Kobe, author of The Long History of the Future, talks about how technology evolves and discusses why many predicted technologies, including driverless and flying cars, smart cities, hyperloops, and autonomous robots, haven't become a reality. | ||
| If you've ever tried to build anything, you know, whether it's like an IKEA cabinet or, you know, something a little bit more complicated than that that doesn't come with instructions, it's very difficult to build something. | ||
| So engineers who are working on these kinds of problems, you know, whether it's driverless cars or flying cars or I don't know, even sillier ideas like Hyperloop, they're taking science that we know works and they're applying it to the real world, to a physical object. | ||
| And then they're trying to build that. | ||
| And it's kind of in the details where things start to fall down a bit. | ||
| It's kind of in, you know, how you actually make it happen, the materials you choose, the business model, all of that can just kind of take something that sort of works in the lab or works in an academic paper and just make it completely fall apart, even though people have spent maybe 80 years on an idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Technology reporter Nicole Kobe, Sunday night at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A. You can listen to QA in all of our podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts or in our free C-SPAN Now app. | |
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| A focus now on the Trump administration's higher education policies. | ||
| Beth Akers is our guest. | ||
| She's a senior fellow focusing on higher education research at the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| Good morning to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for having me today. | ||
| So a major goal of the Trump administration is to close the Department of Education. | ||
| They say it will reduce waste, increase efficiency. | ||
| When it comes to higher education, colleges and university students, what exactly does the Department of Education do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, great question. | |
| They actually do quite a lot. | ||
| So we spend a tremendous amount of money on federal student aid programs, and those are all administered through the Department of Education right now. | ||
| So federal student loans are originated, held, and the servicing is managed by the Department of Education. | ||
| The FAFSA process, the process by which college students apply for financial aid, including Pell Grants and student loans, that all takes place at the department. | ||
| Historically, we've had civil rights protections managed by the department. | ||
| That has been moved over to the Justice Department. | ||
| But largely, it's this financial and oversight role that the department plays with higher education. | ||
| So if the Department of Education were to shut down, what happens to those loans, that financial oversight that you're talking about? | ||
| Where does that go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great question. | |
| And that's a question that a lot of us in the field have at the moment. | ||
| I mean, I'll say, you know, we have heard different ideas about where the financial management of these programs could go. | ||
| You know, for a long time, I've even advocated that we should probably move them to an agency that's better suited for the role, something like Treasury or IRS if we want to automate this process. | ||
| We have heard the secretary indicate a preference for moving the management of these loans over to the Small Business Administration, which also handles a consumer loan portfolio, though it looks a little bit different. | ||
| But basically, it seems to me like given the cuts that we've already seen the reduction in force at the department, it's probably unrealistic to think that the financial aid programs can continue to be managed at the department. | ||
| And then, you know, not even mentioning yet that the department oversees the accountability standards for colleges, those accreditation and the new accountability standards that just came from the new reconciliation legislation, the Big Beautiful bill, that put new standards on colleges and new data requirements that the department would need to manage and oversee. | ||
| So it's definitely in a moment where it's not clear to me how all of that will continue to get done given the current staffing levels at the department and the plan for the trajectory of staffing. | ||
| And I want to come back to the accountability standards in just a second, but staying on loans for right now, right now there's $1.7 trillion in outstanding federal student loan balances. | ||
| Some 43 million student borrowers are out there across the United States. | ||
| Is the small business administration able to absorb numbers of that size, a $1.7 trillion loan balance that they have to handle? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, my guess is no, but to be honest, I don't think our current Department of Education or even the Department of Education before these reductions in force had the capacity to manage that. | |
| I mean, this is essentially operating at the scale of like a large consumer bank at this stage. | ||
| And so in my mind, that's really part of the problems that we've seen with the administration of student loans. | ||
| And I think that absent some legislative fix that puts in place some spending and infrastructure to manage this scale of a loan portfolio, I do think that we're going to continue to have problems with mismanagement. | ||
| And so, yeah, that was a long answer, but short answer, you know, I don't have a lot of confidence in the plan to move to SBA, which is kind of the only indication we have at this point of where the administration would like to go with this. | ||
| This might be another long answer, but how did we as a country accumulate $1.7 trillion in student loan debt? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good question. | |
| So people always throw out that number like this is like a horror story. | ||
| We've got $1.7 trillion and like outstanding student debt. | ||
| Think of all the victims, the people. | ||
| But the flip side of that, I feel like I have to point out as an economist is that, you know, for a long time, we've celebrated higher ed in this country because it's tremendous investment that pays dividends for people in terms of improvements in lifestyle, increases in earnings opportunities. | ||
| And so we celebrated a higher education and encouraged more and more people to go. | ||
| We created programs that allowed them to borrow, not by accident, but because we believed that these were investments in human capital that paid dividends, both to individuals and to themselves. | ||
| So there's absolutely problems that we need to solve with student loan affordability, college affordability. | ||
| But I think that we can look at that number and say, you know, we got here in part for good reason, which is that we wanted a country that was more educated. | ||
| You know, then the flip side of that is, okay, is this number really the number that we want? | ||
| And is there an alternative system of financing that would have us in a moment where student loans plays like a less pivotal role in the financial lives of young people? | ||
| And I think that's the debate to be having. | ||
| Beth Akers is our guest in this 45-minute segment of the Washington Journal. | ||
| Go ahead and start calling in. | ||
| We have a special phone line for college students as we talk about the Trump administration's higher education policies. | ||
| 202-748-8003 is that number. | ||
| Otherwise, phone numbers as usual, Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| As folks are calling in Beth Akers, can you come back to what we mean by accountability standards and what happened with the One Big Beautiful bill? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so a really important function for the federal government in higher education is to ensure that higher ed institutions, that is, college and universities, are delivering a quality education. | |
| And I mean, we could debate all day what quality means, but there is a responsibility to make sure in some sense that a quality education is being delivered. | ||
| And that's because the federal government is the primary or the largest consumer of education. | ||
| Tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars are going into the system. | ||
| And so they need to make sure that this is supporting institutions that are doing good things for our country, that are doing good things for young people. | ||
| And also, the fact that so many Americans are spending so much of their livelihoods on making this investment, there's a consumer protection angle to this as well. | ||
| So when I say accountability, basically it just means making sure that colleges and universities are meeting a particular standard. | ||
| Historically, when we've talked about accountability and quality at institutions, I think it was a bit more of a fuzzy idea. | ||
| You know, the idea of what is a good education. | ||
| You know, we've talked a long time about higher education makes people better, you know, better participants in a democracy. | ||
| It improves their standards of living. | ||
| There has been a shift in the past decade, I would say, towards embracing this idea that those things are great, but the baseline is that higher ed needs to deliver financial returns for people who make these investments. | ||
| And so we have seen incremental creeping policy changes moving in that direction, even starting with the Obama administration, which first published data on earnings outcomes by major, by institution for every program that participates in federal student aid. | ||
| So then to come back to your question, the Big Beautiful bill basically makes a big step in that direction and says that in order for programs of study, undergraduate and graduate, to have continued access to student loans for their students, they need to prove that they are essentially doing no economic harm to their students. | ||
| That is, that they end up on the back end better off financially than when they started. | ||
| The way they do that for undergraduate programs is say graduates of your program need to be out earning the median high school graduate in your state, you know, for a period of time in history. | ||
| And if you start to fail that metric, your students can still get Pell Grants. | ||
| The program can go on. | ||
| Maybe you can go find some philanthropic dollars to replace it, but we're not making student loans to your students anymore. | ||
| And so this is a really big shift in the way that we think about what colleges owe students, what colleges owe to our country. | ||
| And so while it's in fact a low bar in a way, if you think about it, that really graduates only need to do better than someone with just a high school diploma in the labor market, it actually marks a huge shift in the way that we think about what colleges and universities owe to us for all of the funding that goes into that sector. | ||
| Is there such thing as an academic blacklist, a list of universities that the federal government has said federal student loan dollars cannot go to this university? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So not quite yet. | |
| I mean, historically, we have had a bar in place that was called the cohort default rate. | ||
| If so many of your students were just not being able to repay their student loans, that the rate of non-repayment was above this threshold, those colleges would get kicked out of the program. | ||
| Sometimes there were appeals and institutions were allowed to stay in the system. | ||
| But historically, we've had programs, or excuse me, institutions, not programs, kicked out of eligibility for federal student aid. | ||
| Now we have yet to see a full implementation of what these standards are going to do for loan eligibility. | ||
| And it will take a bit of time to accumulate the data for these standards to actually go into practice. | ||
| So we don't quite know yet where this bar, this standard, is going to be binding and causing students to lose access to those federal aid dollars. | ||
| I mean, ideally, in theory, this is the lowest reforming programs of study, the places where people are going and ending up, you know, empirically worse off than when they started in terms of what their earnings opportunities are. | ||
| So, you know, I don't think we should be in the business of deciding which programs are great or awarding the highest earnings majors and institutions, but this is really just clearing out the very bottom. | ||
| If your institution has programs that are delivering people into real financial hardship consistently, that's where we're going to see those cuts. | ||
| I think we will see community college programs, some for-profit colleges subject to these constraints. | ||
| And of course, the problematic result of this is that programs like social work, like education, may be the ones where we're likely to see access to loan dollars cut because of those being traditionally low-paying occupations. | ||
| Let me get to some of those calls, and there are plenty for you. | ||
| Brandon is up first out of Huntington Station, New York, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to just have Beth address the during the Obama administration. | |
| The federal government started taking control of these loans, college loans, and basically took the banks out of the picture. | ||
| And since there was really no oversight by the federal government in allowing these students to get bundles and bundles of money over four or five years, it kind of gave the universities the authority to just ask for more money for tuition year after year after year. | ||
| And don't you think it might be a good idea to get the government back out of the loan business and more or less moving it over back to the banks who can determine if that student, you know, they'll put a ceiling on that amount of money. | ||
| And since the colleges know that, you know, the money's not going to be as cheap as it was, it might also have them reduce the cost for these students because at 18 years old, you know, they could say, Mom, mom, dad, you know, I'll get a good job when I come out. | ||
| But I don't want to prolong it. | ||
| But can you just discuss that a little bit? | ||
| Brandon, thanks for the question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, really great question. | |
| So a couple things in that question. | ||
| So first, it's been kind of a policy decision to say that, you know, when we look at consumer credit typically, you know, if you want to buy a car, you want to buy a house, you go to a bank, you go to a consumer lender and say, can I borrow, you know, $500,000 to buy a house? | ||
| Can I borrow $30,000 to buy a car? | ||
| The bank is going to look at you and ask one question: Can you afford this loan? | ||
| We do not do that when it comes to federal student loan programs. | ||
| That's just been a policy decision that has historically been in place. | ||
| The idea is that if we were to do that, the students that are most economically disadvantaged to start would be the ones to lose access to credit. | ||
| And it's just been a decision that, in terms of providing access more broadly, this is something that we're going to do. | ||
| You could debate whether that's the right decision or not, but that has been the case. | ||
| So when it comes back to this shift that the caller is talking about, it is true that during the Obama administration, private sector participation in federal student loans was eliminated. | ||
| And so I should say just before that, I was an economist with the Bush administration where we implemented legislation to try to keep the private lenders participating in the program because I think there was some good to come of that. | ||
| But it's not exactly the good that I think the caller would like to think or has imagined. | ||
| And it's that when private lenders did participate in this program in the past, they were not doing the kind of underwriting that we know private student, private lenders do in other consumer credit spaces. | ||
| So they had to operate by the exact same standards that were in place for the government side of the program. | ||
| So it was not as if Citibank was coming in or Sally Mae was coming in and making loans and, you know, being critical and saying, okay, I'm not going to give you this loan because I don't think you can afford it. | ||
| Instead, they were using the exact same rules as the federal side of the program. | ||
| So it was almost like a private loan program in name, but not in practice. | ||
| None of the benefits of privatization were actually in place because of that. | ||
| I absolutely think it's true that when you give colleges this unlimited access to credit without an underwriting process, you risk them running up the cost because there are not these underwriting practices that put pressure on institutions. | ||
| I think the change that we saw from the reconciliation legislation to eliminate uncapped borrowing for graduate students actually really reflects our newfound understanding of how this has been happening in that space in particular. | ||
| Some new research in the last few years has shown that colleges have almost increased their prices dollar for dollar with the expansion of access to credit for graduate student programs. | ||
| And so I think the shift we will see because of the pretty aggressive caps that were put on place through this new legislation is the private sector will likely step in and pick up some of the slack, but they will only pick up the slack in places where these are programs of study that deliver good outcomes and they're likely to get their dollars repaid because, you know, like the caller said, | ||
| if you're going into a program of study that doesn't look like it's heading towards an occupation that's going to give you a good financial return, a good earnings, be able to repay back those loans, private lenders aren't going to give you the loan. | ||
| And while that has problematic implications for equity, I think that it also is an important consumer protection. | ||
| So I think it's a good direction for graduate student lending. | ||
| I think we could definitely benefit from some of those aspects being introduced for undergraduates as well. | ||
| That line for college students. | ||
| Ethan is in the Steele City of Pittsburgh. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, thank you for taking my call. | |
| I guess the main thing I wanted to ask or just talk about was, you know, I hate how this whole administration and MAGA move in as hitting on professors as if they're the main issue and we need to get rid of all professors. | ||
| They're poisoning our kids when the real issue and part of the reason why loans have ballooned up is these administrators, like these administrative fees have absolutely gone huge. | ||
| Their salaries are ginormous. | ||
| go to a small school in Pittsburgh where, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone to upper administrative where professors have to get up a second job just in order to pay the bills. | ||
| And therefore, you know, we're set to foot and they look at their job too. | ||
| You know, us college students are here to foot the bill for these people, you know, just sucking at their job pretty much. | ||
| And that's why we have tens of tens of thousands of dollars of student debt. | ||
| Beth Akers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, when you look at the data on where colleges are spending money, it's hard to really put the blame on any specific aspect of their business model as really driving the increase in costs that we've seen over time. | |
| You know, I like to say, you know, the reason that prices have increased is because students are willing to pay it. | ||
| And that's not to put the blame on students. | ||
| I think students are willing to pay it because we have had this rhetoric in this country that really the only way to access the American dream is by having that college degree. | ||
| You know, it's the house, the white picket fence, and the bachelor's degree diploma on the wall. | ||
| And I think when you tell someone the only way to be successful in this country or the only way to be adequate is to have that degree, people are willing to pay any price, especially when we've made the credit available and the process of paying for college is really opaque. | ||
| I think students often don't even know how much they're paying, unlike the caller who sounds like he's really well informed on his financial position. | ||
| But I think that, you know, we've pushed too far in that direction. | ||
| And Pete Buddha Judge once said many years ago in a Democratic primary debate that we need to make it affordable for people not to go to college in this country. | ||
| And while I don't often agree with Pete Buddha Judge, I agree with him in that instance and affordable to not go to college, but also socially acceptable and celebrated to not go to college because I think that empowers students, puts more power in the hands of consumers, and takes this power away from institutions to continue to increase prices year after year. | ||
| And I would agree that it's not the faculty for sure. | ||
| There's a lot of hardworking faculty out there not necessarily getting rich doing that job. | ||
| So I think the caller is right in that respect. | ||
| Dubuque, Iowa. | ||
| James, good morning. | ||
| You're next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I think one of the most prescient things that Ronald Regular said was that the most feared 10 words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. | ||
| I think we need to get back to the free market. | ||
| If I'm not mistaken, I think that the largest asset on the federal assets is questionable to be charitable, questionable student loans. | ||
| And I think our system is bankrupt. | ||
| We have $38 trillion in debt and hundreds of trillions of dollars in unfunded obligations. | ||
| And the system is collapsing. | ||
| Some of these colleges have more administrators than they do professors. | ||
| And this system is non-functional as soon as the government got involved, just like in housing. | ||
| It's the same issue in housing. | ||
| When the government gets involved, there's no problem the government can't make worse. | ||
| Let's put it that way. | ||
| Beth Akers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I think I appreciate the comment. | |
| I think that in theory, there is a place for federal intervention in student lending. | ||
| Even Milton Friedman, sort of the father of conservative or classical economic thought, made the case that the feds should be intervening to make sure sufficient liquidity is available so that we have adequate investment in education because without it, we may not. | ||
| And education is so critical to the growth of our country, our international competitiveness, our democracy. | ||
| But at the same time, I think there have been tremendous innovations in finance since the time that Milton Friedman wrote that in the 1950s. | ||
| And I do think the private sector could do more. | ||
| And I'm excited to see that this recent legislation has really clawed back the federal role in graduate student lending. | ||
| I mean, this was a real racket. | ||
| This is a place where we had uncapped borrowing, tremendously generous loan forgiveness programs. | ||
| And so, you know, as the caller pointed out, this program's not working, but I would argue that it's not working, not because in theory we shouldn't have any intervention, but because we've made some really lousy policy choices. | ||
| And, you know, I look back on the days when I started doing this work when higher education was not a front page news story most days. | ||
| And the good thing about that was that it wasn't necessarily being used as a political instrument. | ||
| And since that has changed, it seems like we have a lot more bad policy coming about as a result. | ||
| So I think in theory, there's definitely a role. | ||
| I would like to see us streamline and improve the efficiency of that intervention and experiment in the way that we're doing with the graduate student side of things to see where can the private sector improve this process. | ||
| You talk about stories on the front page, two high-profile efforts by the Trump administration when it comes to higher education. | ||
| One involves combating anti-Semitism on college campuses. | ||
| Another one is limiting the enrollment of international students at various colleges and universities. | ||
| What mechanism is the Trump administration using to push for these changes at these colleges and universities? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a great question. | |
| You know, it's my sense that the Trump administration is really going outside of the traditional processes that are in place for oversight of the sorts of civil rights violations that the administration is charging against these institutions. | ||
| And so, you know, while I think there is room for improvement for institutions' handling of free speech on campuses, particularly the issue of anti-Semitism, you know, I think the behavior that we saw on campuses following the Hamas attacks on Israel made clear to me, and I think a lot of Americans, that there are some problematic things happening, but there are standard processes for addressing those violations or perceived violations. | ||
| I wish the administration had taken a more traditional route in addressing them because I think, you know, through this maybe partic maybe extra legal process that they're utilizing today, I think undermines the argument that there are in fact real issues. | ||
| And as I just mentioned, turns it really more into a political commentary more than an effort to really fix and sort out higher education. | ||
| New York City, Michael, Line for Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Guess made a comment earlier on about taking certain professions. | ||
| I think she mentioned social work as an example because folks don't make that much money compared to, let's say, maybe a high school graduate. | ||
| So therefore, why subsidize those loans? | ||
| And I'd like to suggest to her that sort of enter professions where salary is not the most important piece. | ||
| I became a teacher 50 years ago knowing I make much less money than a CEO in a corporation. | ||
| And the same thing with social workers. | ||
| So I'm a little upset about the thought of not helping out folks who go into professions that don't earn that much money. | ||
| I appreciate her comment off the air. | ||
| Beth Akers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, really great point. | |
| So, I think this is an issue that's sort of yet to be resolved because I absolutely agree that our nation needs teachers, we need social workers, and I don't want a regime of oversight for institutions that rewards or pushes institutions or students into making investments only in those highest-paying occupations. | ||
| I think that's the wrong direction for policy. | ||
| I want to be clear that the changes that came from the Big Beautiful bill actually don't really push us very far in that direction. | ||
| So, like I said, it's the first time that we're putting these standards on earnings in place in a really big, you know, universal way. | ||
| But it's not saying that more money is better and taking away from people who are choosing lower earnings occupations. | ||
| It's basically just saying that at a very minimum, these institutions, these programs of study, really need to do no economic harm. | ||
| And I get what the caller is saying, which is that maybe some really important public service occupations get tied up in that. | ||
| The problem I have is that the system that we had in place before recognized, yes, we need people to go into these low-paying occupations, but we're not going to pay for it as a nation. | ||
| We're going to basically get people to take on unaffordable debt, that we know is unaffordable, so that they are the one who pays the price for this. | ||
| So, the system before wasn't helping people to go into these occupations. | ||
| I would much rather see that, as a result of this, if we do get some shortages of people going into lower earnings occupations as a result, that we make policy changes that more directly address that. | ||
| Let's pay teachers more, let's pay social workers in the public sector more, create a tax credit, scholarship programs, let's get institutions to charge less for these programs of study, find philanthropic dollars to offset the costs in those spaces. | ||
| There's lots of solutions that are other than what we had in place previously, which was that the individuals, often economically disadvantaged students themselves to start, are the ones who are going to pay the entire price and often unknowingly. | ||
| If students always knew what they were getting themselves into and yet were choosing to go into unaffordable debt to pursue these careers, I think I'd be more comfortable with that. | ||
| But the data tells us that very often students have really no sense of the trajectory that they're on when it comes to the affordability of student loan repayment. | ||
| And so, to my mind, this is an absolutely critical change from a consumer protection perspective. | ||
| And there may be further changes necessary in order to subsidize what we perceive as really socially valuable occupations, including teaching, which is a wonderful occupation important to society that the caller participated in himself. | ||
| Less than 15 minutes left with Beth Akers of the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| You can see her work, her webpage at AEI.org. | ||
| Taking your phone calls about the Trump administration's higher education policies. | ||
| One topic we haven't touched on yet: how much, about how much a year does the federal government give to colleges and universities when it comes to research grants? | ||
| And what is your view about not just this administration, any administration limiting those research dollars if they disagree with the university's hiring practices or admissions practices or even course offerings? | ||
| Is that something that is okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, a tremendous share of revenue at a lot of research universities is coming from grant support for research. | |
| And so the current administration's strategy of basically stopping those funding streams based on a distaste for the political liens of the research or of just practices happening on those college campuses, I think is an overreach and an inappropriate use of the executive authority. | ||
| I particularly don't like that some of these contracts have been disrupted midstream. | ||
| I mean, it's one thing if we're going to make a pivot in terms of our strategy for making investments in research at universities, you know, and convene a task force and decide that our budget for funding research will be declining in future years. | ||
| But I think it's unnecessarily disruptive to take the tack that the administration has taken, which is to create this financial uncertainty for institutions by disrupting the flow of resources mid-grant in some cases. | ||
| So to me, again, it feels more like a politically motivated commentary on what the institutions are doing rather than a real shift in policy. | ||
| And so again, like when it comes to whether or not political leanings on college campuses are an appropriate reason for the administration to exert authority and withdraw funds, I mean, absolutely not. | ||
| I think we, of course, need to make sure that civil rights are protected on college campuses. | ||
| Free speech is protected on every college campus. | ||
| But beyond that, I'm perfectly happy for there to be places where institutions focus on having particular ideological specializations. | ||
| I mean, it's fine for me that there's an institution with largely progressive faculty. | ||
| If students want to choose to go invest in education there, I think that's fine for them. | ||
| It's fine for federal resources to support that. | ||
| As long as on the flip side, there are institutions allowed to exist that embrace a more conservative philosophy and are staffed according to those principles. | ||
| I think heterogeneity in our higher ed sector is part of what makes it great and helps it to serve our country in the best way that it can. | ||
| And so I worry that we are undermining that heterogeneity or ideological diversity across campuses through the actions of the current administration. | ||
| To the Badger State, this is Alan in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, a couple comments that will inform this conversation. | |
| The New York Times reported very recently that two-thirds of all student loan borrowers are not making payments on their loans. | ||
| Two-thirds. | ||
| So what are we even talking about here, Beth? | ||
| This lending program is finished. | ||
| And by the way, Donald Trump's our education chief, even before the pandemic, he said that 85% of all student loan borrowers were never going to be able to repay their loans. | ||
| Now, right now, interest is now restarted on all student loan borrowers. | ||
| $100 billion a year in interest profit for the Department of Education is being generated and slapped onto our backs. | ||
| You know, Beth, there's no offense, but. | ||
| Alan, I'm going to let Beth Akers jump in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, great question. | |
| So we know that the Department of Education is, in fact, not making huge profits off the backs of students. | ||
| You know, we have a lot of students who are in non-repayment right now, but this is not necessarily reflective of affordability. | ||
| So, if we go back in time during the first Trump administration, at the onset of the COVID pandemic, President Trump put a pause on student loan repayment. | ||
| Basically, this is a moment of unprecedented economic uncertainty. | ||
| And so, the idea was: let's just put a pause on something that we can control entirely and not put that additional burden on Americans while we're potentially entering this really dramatic economic downswing. | ||
| What happened was throughout the Biden administration, as Biden pursued his campaign promise to cancel student loans up against the Supreme Court restricting him from being able to do that, he basically continued that student loan repayment pause, which allowed borrowers to not make any payments without accumulating fees or interest on their loans throughout his administration. | ||
| And so, it was very near the end of the administration when eventually student loan repayment was allowed to resume again. | ||
| And so, it was asked that borrowers start to begin making those payments. | ||
| And so, you know, having a few years of disconnect with a lender on any consumer credit loan you have, and then being asked to kind of, okay, jump back on board, I think is going to be a disruptive, a disruptive experience for consumers, regardless of their ability to repay. | ||
| And I think what we are seeing is we've had so much confusing messaging going out in the media about student loans. | ||
| I don't think borrowers even know necessarily that they should be repaying their loans, or very often, you know, those who do know they should be repaying don't know where to be repaying. | ||
| And so, you know, this highlights a real challenge with the status quo, which is that the system is so complex that we're making the financial burden of loan repayment even more challenging through this excessive administrative burden. | ||
| And some of the changes in the Big Beautiful bill really seek to streamline the program to move away from that. | ||
| But I'm hopeful that in the next several months, we will succeed in getting a lot of those borrowers back into repayment, reconnecting them with their servicers, getting their direct deposit or their auto pays signed up again. | ||
| A lot of those non-repaying borrowers will actually quickly come back into repayment. | ||
| Just recently, the financial consequences like loans going to collections agencies, the effects on credit scores, those sort of went back into effect. | ||
| So, you know, as borrowers go to maybe buy a new home or buy a car and try to get a loan, they may get this unpleasant surprise to learn that, in fact, they should have been paying on their student loan. | ||
| And as those consequences hit, I think we're likely to see people reconnect with their loans and get back into the business of repaying. | ||
| And I'll add one thing here, which wasn't part of the question, but I think it's important to point out for this audience: you know, there has been a lot of criticism of the recent legislation from Democrats who dislike that some of the President Biden's repayment plans will go away as a result of these changes. | ||
| And what's left is in some regards less generous than the repayment protections that were previously put in place. | ||
| But I want to be really clear that anybody who has a student loan today still has access to repayment options that make monthly payment affordable based on how much they're earning. | ||
| So borrowers with the lowest income can pay as little as $10 a month. | ||
| And so, you know, it is not the case that this legislation and Republican leadership in Congress has eliminated the safety nets for borrowers. | ||
| Yeah, they've tweaked the parameters. | ||
| It's slightly less generous for some borrowers in some ways, more generous for other borrowers in certain moments. | ||
| But safety nets absolutely still exist. | ||
| So if you're a borrower out there who has a loan, you know you should be paying, but have concerns about whether or not you can afford to pay back those loans, just know that connecting with your servicer through the Department of Education, there are repayment options available to you that will necessarily be affordable based on how much you're earning. | ||
| Time for one more call this morning with Beth Akers of AEI. | ||
| This is Roy Cameron, Texas. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| One of the things that I haven't heard discussed, I'm currently a student at Southern New Hampshire University. | ||
| I'm a native Texan. | ||
| I started my college when I started college back again, was in Colorado and I had to move back to Texas. | ||
| When I transferred to UT or tried to transfer with the 4.0 GPA, I had to write three essays. | ||
| And one of the essays that I wrote was on the fact that they wanted me to have three classes that did not pertain to my degree. | ||
| So what are we going to do about these universities that are charging students just doodles of money to take classes that they don't need? | ||
| My degree is in cybersecurity with a focus in forensics. | ||
| I don't need chemistry, biology, or calculus. | ||
| So I think that's something that really needs to be addressed and be, I don't know how it's going to be done, but I think that's one of the big problems. | ||
| Thank you so much for taking my call and I'll take my response off the air. | ||
| Beth Akers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's a really good point that the borrower or the callers borrow or the caller is raising. | |
| This idea, but basically the question is, what is education? | ||
| What does it need to be? | ||
| And I think big colleges and universities, especially the long-standing ones, have a vested interest in it looking like it always looked. | ||
| And I think that there is a big push with some of the changes from the current administration, as well as the Republicans in Congress right now to open up what education looks like. | ||
| And I think the direction that Republicans at least are moving is to a more career-oriented pathway. | ||
| And some of the policy changes like around accreditation policy, which basically sets the bar of what does a degree need to look like in order to have access to aid, those things are changing as a result of some of the decisions from the Trump administration. | ||
| And there may be more options available for programs of study institutions as a whole that look more like the career-oriented, focused pathway to employment that the caller is looking for. | ||
| And I think that's a good change. | ||
| Like I said, I think there's plenty of room for the old model, but I would like to see some more streamlined models that maybe take out of some of the unrelated academic experiences that some students just aren't interested. | ||
| And I think that's fine. | ||
| I think we're moving that direction. | ||
| Beth Akers is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. | ||
| For much more on her work and her research, AEI.org is where you can go. | ||
| Beth Akers, thank you so much for your time this morning. | ||
| Really do appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| Coming up in our final 25 minutes or so here on the Washington Journal, it is our open forum. | ||
| Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, phone lines are yours to do so. | ||
| Numbers are on your screen. | ||
| Go ahead and start calling in now, and we will get to your calls right after the break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This show and C-SPAN is one of the few places left in America where you actually have left and right coming together to talk and argue. | |
| And you guys do a great service in that. | ||
| I love C-SPAN too. | ||
| That's why I'm here today. | ||
| Answer questions all day, every day. | ||
| Sometimes I get to do fun things like go on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN is, I think, one of the very few places that Americans can still go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN has such a distinguished and honorable and important mandate and mission in this country. | |
| I love this show. | ||
| This is my favorite show to do of all shows because I actually get to hear what the American people care about. | ||
| American people have access to their government in ways that they did not before the cable industry provided C-SPAN access. | ||
| That's why I like to come on C-SPAN is because this is one of the last places where people are actually having conversations, even people who disagree. | ||
| Shows that you can have a television network that can try to be objective. | ||
| Thank C-SPAN for all you do. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why this program is so valuable, because it does bring people together where dissenting voices are heard, where hard questions are asked, and where people have to answer to them. | ||
| Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| At 4.30 p.m. Eastern, Emory University professor Corita Brown documents the history of educational freedom and justice among African Americans, from segregated schools to historically black colleges and universities in her book, The Battle for the Black Mind. | ||
| And at 8 p.m., former Texas Republican Senator Phil Graham and economist Donald Bordeaux share their book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom, where they talk about the history of government involvement in the U.S. economy and argue that it has had an overall negative effect. | ||
| Then at 9 p.m. Eastern, national political reporters Josh Dawsi, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf offer a behind-the-scenes account of the 2024 presidential election that sent Donald Trump back to the White House for a second non-consecutive term after a litany of criminal and civil investigations and two assassination attempts in their book, 2024. | ||
| Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org. | ||
| And past president nominal. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a kangaroo. | ||
| This fall, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Join Political Playbook Chief Correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns as host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue to find common ground. | ||
| Ceasefire, this fall, on the network that doesn't take sides, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Here's where we are on Capitol Hill. | ||
| The House will be in for a brief pro forma session at 10 a.m. Eastern, and we will, of course, take you live for gavel-to-gavel coverage to the floor of the House. | ||
| The Senate is in for legislative business at 10 a.m. this morning. | ||
| At 11 a.m., we're going to be covering here on C-SPAN a Texas redistricting hearing. | ||
| House of Representatives, the Texas House of Representatives, holding its first hearing since the recent release of a newly proposed redistricting map for the state. | ||
| We're going to be covering it live from Austin, 11 a.m. Eastern here on C-SPAN, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| In terms of the latest news out of Washington, it's the jobs report this morning. | ||
| It came out about an hour ago. | ||
| Here's the USA Today wrap-up. | ||
| U.S. employers added a disappointing, they note, 73,000 jobs in July as payroll growth slowed amid President Donald Trump's sweeping import tariffs, intensifying immigration crackdowns, and massive federal layoffs, they write. | ||
| Even more concerning, though, job gains for May and June were revised down in this report by a whopping 258,000, portraying a much weaker labor market, they say, than believed in the late spring and early summer and raising the odds that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates in September. | ||
| The unemployment rate rose from 4.1% to 4.2%. | ||
| Before the report was released, economists had been estimating that about 105,000 jobs were added in the month of July. | ||
| That's to wrap up from USA Today. | ||
| We can talk about that in our open forum if you'd like, or any public policy that you want to talk about. | ||
| The phone lines are yours to do so. | ||
| It's 202-748-8001 for Republicans to call in. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Bill, Mobile, Alabama's up first Republican line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Well, it looks like Trump was right again, but I did not call in for that. | ||
| What I called in for is that during all the different times that they've allowed pauses in student loan payments when we had the Gulf oil spill, when we've had hurricanes, when we've had COVID, I continue to make all of my payments. | ||
| If the interest was not to be accumulated on people who didn't pay, it would seem that my payments would apply toward the principal. | ||
| But when I have called, A, you can't get anybody that you can talk to about it. | ||
| They don't know anybody you can talk to about it. | ||
| And I can't find anybody who can answer the question of do I get credit? | ||
| But when I check on what I owe, it shows that I've got no additional credit for the payments that I've made. | ||
| I just wish that some way somebody would make it available where we can know that we got credit for that, or if we didn't, why we didn't. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's Bill in the Yellowhammer State. | ||
| This is Angela in the Tarhill State. | ||
| Fayetteville, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I actually had a call for the previous guest. | ||
| However, in regards to the previous caller from Alabama, in terms of the student loan program, those pauses in paying back those student loans, if policy was such that individuals got a lower interest rate, perhaps many would be able to pay during that timeframe. | ||
| But the other thing is the Consumer Protection Agency, which is now not resourced the way it needed to be, and the Department of Education that's responsible for administering student loans has been slashed in terms of funding. | ||
| That speaks to the reason that the caller has not been able to get the information that he's needing in regards to whether his payments throughout his repayment period have been applied. | ||
| And it just adds to the notion that those folks that have aspirations to be professionals should be funneled to community colleges, technical institutes, and things of that nature versus going ahead and going to university because the cost is too high. | ||
| So they need to address The interest rate may be a no-interest rate for those people that want to pursue professional jobs. | ||
| Because as a person that actually went through the Reagan years where they were saying you needed to go to a technical school, I did that. | ||
| And I ended up going part-time to college and then finishing, matriculating through a four-year university in order to get a good paying professional job for which I have now retired after 30 years. | ||
| What was that job, Angela? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was human resources, labor management, employee relations, dealing with unions, managers, employees for the Department of Defense. | |
| So this recommendation that people start looking at jobs that are technically geared is disingenuous because everybody does not have those types of aspirations. | ||
| And we always need professionals like doctors, nurses, and you don't get that type of experience and expertise at technical institutes for the most part. | ||
| That's Angela in North Carolina. | ||
| This is Brittany out of Wilmer, Texas. | ||
| It's open forum. | ||
| Brittany, what's on your mind? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me tell you one of the stories of humanity. | |
| You have two people from two different cities. | ||
| As you know, everywhere you go, the people have a unique nuance that you can see in their thoroughbred population, no matter the race, no matter the masculine, the feminine, from city to city, colony to colony. | ||
| It's a unique accent, culture, and vibration. | ||
| Jesus Christ created us to be the salt of the earth. | ||
| The people see one another and their different types of beauty, and eventually one thing is going to happen. | ||
| Everyone is going to believe that one tribe is more beautiful and one is more average, and one will be looked up to, and then one will be idolized. | ||
| One will be looked up to and idolized, and their population will double the size of the other. | ||
| Okay, that's Brittany, Matt, Florida, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, yeah, I'm a first-time caller, and I'll have to try in many months. | |
| And I try to avoid rhetoric during political intercourse. | ||
| And so, instead of that, I'd like to speak about an essay, John, by the political theorist, Hannah Aaron, in which she gives contrasting images of a certain type of politician who takes facts and lies about and distorts them, and a certain type of historian who takes facts as being the result of some necessary development. | ||
| So, this historian is under the false impression that we're all basically just pawns of nature or world spirit-driven history or et cetera. | ||
| But she goes on to convey that while this historian type denies, implicitly denies freedom of action in the political sphere, this historian, I mean, this politician, | ||
| this politician, they overestimate the possibilities of their actions and implicitly condone Without reservations, lying images, the sourcing of facts. | ||
| So, Matt, what is this applying to today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, this is not a political. | |
| I was just thought maybe something a little different to do with a more general than specific policy. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| If you want people to read it, what's the name of your historian or your writer that you're talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Hannah Aron. | |
| She's a political theorist. | ||
| It's called Truth and Politics. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks for bringing it up. | ||
| That's Matt in Florida Lewis in Colorado, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, John. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Let me start with Washington is the problem. | ||
| It is so corrupt, it makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like Shangri-La. | ||
| And it's not the buildings. | ||
| It's not even the institutions. | ||
| It's the people. | ||
| There's something in the water. | ||
| I don't know what it is, but it's frightening. | ||
| Does it matter what administration is in power, Lewis? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't know. | |
| I don't think it matters. | ||
| I think the system is can't be beat. | ||
| If anybody could do it, Donald Trump could do it. | ||
| But it cannot be. | ||
| When did it get that way, Lewis? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what? | |
| I don't know, John. | ||
| Probably, you know, maybe before the big war, you know, before there's been a couple of big ones. | ||
| World War II? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, before the, maybe even before World War I. | |
| But, you know, when the intelligence community started to realize that they can control using manipulation, you know, using information as a weapon and weaponizing the system. | ||
| So, you know, the Hoover Building, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, that could be the beginning of the real solidification of the true center of power. | ||
| Lewis, on the intelligence community, there's actually an op-ed in the opinion page of the New York Times today that you might be interested in reading. | ||
| It's by John Brennan and James Clapper, both senior intelligence officials during the Obama administration, both very much back in the spotlight since allegations that President Trump has made about their involvement in the 2016 election. | ||
| Here's what they write in their joint column. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbert, the director of the National Intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the Central Intelligence Agency director, have over the past month claimed that senior officials in the Obama administration manufactured politicized intelligence, silenced intelligence professionals, and engaged in a broad treasonous conspiracy to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump. | ||
| That is patently false, they say. | ||
| In making those allegations, they seek to rewrite history, and we want to set the record straight and in so doing, sound a warning. | ||
| They say every serious review has substantiated the intelligence community's fundamental conclusion that Russia conducted an influence campaign intended to help Donald Trump to win in the 2016 election. | ||
| They say the real politicization is the calculated distortion of intelligence by administration officials, notably Mr. Trump's directors of the National Intelligence and CIA, positions that should be apolitical. | ||
| They write, we find it deeply regrettable that the administration continues to perpetuate the fictitious narrative that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election. | ||
| It should instead acknowledge that a foreign nation state, a mortal enemy of the United States, routinely meddles in our national elections and will continue to do so unless we take appropriate bipartisan action to stop it. | ||
| There's much more in that column if you want to read it in today's New York Times. | ||
| This is Jeff in Kansas City, Missouri Democrat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Hello? | ||
| What's on your mind, Jeff? | ||
| Open forum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I want to make three quick points based on the last couple of callers. | |
| Number one, for the student loans, you got to look at the profits. | ||
| Profits take money out of the system, just like health care and all these other big deals that we have, you know, that are causing a lot of lack of funding. | ||
| Number two, it's the people send these people to Washington. | ||
| So if you think corruption is corrupt, well, we're sending them there. | ||
| So that's on the people. | ||
| Number three, Vega really needs to understand that once you make a king, then you just as well sit down at the little kitty table and shut up because you no longer have any power. | ||
| So, I mean, that's on them. | ||
| So, you know, if you speak against him, it's up to him what he wants to do. | ||
| I mean, he can just blow you off or just say off with your head and, you know, go on about your business. | ||
| Jeff, on your second point, what do you make of the old adage that everybody hates politicians except for their politician that, you know, kick out the bums, but not my elected official. | ||
| He or she is just fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| I mean, you know, when it comes to your politician, you know, you basically close your eyes and your ears and don't hear nothing what they're saying, you know, even when they're in bed with the, you know, with the person that's, you know, causing all the strife and grief and, you know, and pain in this country. | ||
| I get things need to change, but you're affecting people's lives when you're throwing them out of jobs just because of some political craziness that you're making up. | ||
| People need to understand that lies will tear a country apart, you know, and that's what it's doing. | ||
| Look at Russia. | ||
| That's how they've got the war to think. | ||
| They got into that war over a lie. | ||
| And look at what it's doing to the Russian people. | ||
| Those are sons and fathers and whatever that are dying in a war that started by a lie. | ||
| That is the same thing that can happen in America. | ||
| If you got a king or whoever, you know, that's starting stuff over lies, I mean, it will rip your country apart and do things that you did not want it to do. | ||
| That's Jeff in Missouri. | ||
| Let me go to the garden state of New Jersey. | ||
| Joan Independent. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hi, good morning. | ||
| So there's just so much. | ||
| I have anxiety because I think we're just so overwhelmed. | ||
| And I feel this administration is overwhelming us to consistently distract us from what's really happening. | ||
| One thing I believe, I don't believe President Trump is running the country. | ||
| I think Stephen Miller and the Heritage Foundation and all those folks who, you know, orchestrated this whole presidency, the presidency to me now looks like a TV show with Donald Trump as the star actor because that's how he behaves. | ||
| He constantly has no idea of what's going on. | ||
| So it's clear he's not running the country. | ||
| Another way you could tell he's not running the country is in his last presidency, his whole family was there. | ||
| Ivanka was there. | ||
| Gerald was there. | ||
| They were all there. | ||
| They're no longer there. | ||
| They're not there because Donald Trump is not in charge. | ||
| And the Trump family cannot be involved in what's going on in any of the decisions. | ||
| Would you prefer more Trump family members in the administration? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no, no. | |
| No, listen, I didn't like them being there, but at least there was transparency. | ||
| And we knew what Jared and Ivanka and what they're advising him. | ||
| Now it's this wall where you don't know who's behind the scene. | ||
| Look at the people that he picked for his cabinet. | ||
| They're all TV actors. | ||
| So the joke is on the American people, okay? | ||
| And the next thing we need to be careful about, and American people should start thinking about. | ||
| We at this point in time need to stop being Democrats and Republicans. | ||
| We need to be Americans because that's the divide that they continuously pit us against each other, flood the media with so much information that we can't keep track of what's going on. | ||
| We don't even know what to concentrate on because every time something happens, they turn the narrative to something else. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And the thing we need to be worried about is they're going to try to stay in control past the four years. | ||
| And the way they're going to do it is they're going to continue to pit us against each other and start water in this country. | ||
| Who's they? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Call in the National Guard, call martial law, lock everything down, and put us all in fear and stay in power past the four years. | |
| Mark my words, because we've been so sanitized now to things that we should be screaming about as Americans. | ||
| Got your point. | ||
| That's Joan in New Jersey to the Sooner State. | ||
| This is Ty Republican. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is Ty in Oklahoma. | |
| Go ahead, Ty. | ||
| Turn your TV down just because it's easier to hear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I've left the room. | |
| Yeah, I want to talk about this Boy Scout settlement thing. | ||
| The Boy Scout settlement. | ||
| Is there a story about that out today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, well, it's a story that needs to be in everybody's thugs. | |
| I got abused when I was a little kid. | ||
| Now these lawyers are pretty much playing a game with the whole thing and giving you way below what you would even expect if they would have given it to you in the beginning. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And that last lady who talked to these Democrats, I can't understand them. | ||
| I can't understand why they think from a place that doesn't have any basic sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They will not just look at what's going on around them. | |
| You cannot let perverts in the schools play with the children. | ||
| You cannot let illegals come over here and take all the good jobs and the knowly jobs for people that are American may not be heavy educated, but they got good sense and they can learn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We can learn. | |
| You got new jobs that are coming into this country a year from now. | ||
| There'll be more jobs than we know what to do with that are paying good money. | ||
| That's what Donald Trump is doing. | ||
| This man is on God's side and he's on America's side. | ||
| So he's on our side. | ||
| It's Ty in Oklahoma to Lawrence Mas, James, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, John. | |
| I tried a couple of times to get in. | ||
| I'd like you to refer to January 20th, 25 ABC News article on Joe Biden and his pardoning everybody. | ||
| And I'd like to read. | ||
| He did two paragraphs. | ||
| Media carried one, you carried one. | ||
| The back half was never read to anybody. | ||
| I'd like to read them both if I could right now. | ||
| James, go ahead. | ||
| I'm running short on time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| My family has been subject to unrelenting attacks and threats motivated solely by a desire to hurt me. | ||
| The worst kind of partisan politics. | ||
| That's what Biden wrote. | ||
| Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe that this will stop. | ||
| In the second paragraph, he said, I believe in the rule of law, and I'm optimistic that the strength of our legal institution will ultimately prevail over politics. | ||
| But baseless and political-motivated investigation wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. | ||
| Even when individuals have done nothing wrong and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreputably harm their damage, their reputation, and finances, Biden said. | ||
| And I believe that is entirely the agenda of Biden. | ||
| He's slicker than an outhouse rat, and he was a liar. | ||
| And that's exactly what I feel. | ||
| He did exactly to Donald Trump when he said he's a victim, and it's going to happen to him. | ||
| And I think that's wrong. | ||
| And the media never put it on, except the only place I could find it was here. | ||
| Thank you for the time. | ||
| That's James in Massachusetts. | ||
| A couple minutes before the House comes in, it's a brief pro forma session, but we will, as always, air our coverage of the House Floor Gavilla Gavel as we wait for the House. | ||
| This is Dennis, also in Massachusetts. | ||
| It's Gardner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| I have a question. | ||
| Dennis, I cannot hear you well. | ||
| Can you try one more time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a question for you. | |
| I keep trying to refresh my memory. | ||
| I'll tell you what, Dennis, try again, although we may not have time. | ||
| Let me try, Sandra in Kentucky. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Hi. | ||
| No, I just wanted to comment on the Ukraine situation. | ||
| If I was the Ukraine President Zelensky, I would think he's done a wonderful job in defending his country. | ||
| But Donald Trump says he has no cards to play. | ||
| Well, yes, he does. | ||
| He has those rare earth minerals. | ||
| And whether I did it or not, I would go and make it aware that I would go and negotiate with Russia because they have the biggest stock. | ||
| He has the less biggest stock. | ||
| I mean, not Russia, but with China. | ||
| And I'll tell you what, Sandra, we'll take your point. | ||
| Let me try to get in Corey in the villages in Florida independent before the House comes in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, John. | |
| Great week on Washington Journal this week. | ||
| I just wanted to say that I had to look on the computer to look at the bona fides for your last guest, Beth Akers, and I find that she had a PhD from Columbia University. | ||
| That's something that should be put on the graphics when your guests are on. | ||
| I'm interested in the bona fides of all the guests that come on, anywhere from her, even down to a politico reporter. |