| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Until then, enjoy your Saturday. | ||
|
unidentified
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C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington to across the country. | |
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| comcast supports c-span as a public service along with these other television providers giving you a front row seat to democracy this is washington journal first saturday august 2nd | ||
| It was a busy week for economic news, including the release of the July Jobs Report, President Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve Board Governor announcing her plans to resign from the post, and new tariff rates and deadlines announced. | ||
| Also this week, U.S. officials visited an aid distribution site in Gaza in an effort to better understand the humanitarian situation in the region. | ||
| And Texas House Republicans unveiled a new proposed map as they look to redraw federal congressional districts in the state. | ||
| Those are just a few of the stories C-SPAN has been following. | ||
| And for the first hour of today's program, we're asking you, what's your top news story of the week? | ||
| Here are the lines. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can text your comments to 202-748-8003. | ||
| Be sure to include your name and city. | ||
| You can also post a question or comment on Facebook at facebook.com slash C-SPAN or on X at C-SPANWJ. | ||
| Good morning, and thank you for being with us as we start today's Washington Journal. | ||
| We'll get to your calls and comments in just a few moments, but wanted to start with some of that economic news. | ||
| I just mentioned this is the headline in this morning's Wall Street Journal, hiring slows sharply. | ||
| In summer, the article says that after months of uncertainty, July's jobs report is clear. | ||
| The U.S. economy is beginning to show signs of slowing. | ||
| The U.S. added a seasonally adjusted 73,000 jobs in July. | ||
| The Labor Department reported Friday below the 100,000 that economics economists polled by the Wall Street Journal had expected. | ||
| Revisions cut down the jobs growth originally reported from May and June by a combined 258,000. | ||
| That left May is having added just 19,000 jobs and June just 14,000. | ||
| A storm of changes is keeping business leaders cautious. | ||
| Tariffs are weighing on manufacturing. | ||
| Workplace raids are hurting immigrant-dependent sectors like landscaping and meatpacking. | ||
| And cutbacks to the federal workforce are squeezing government hiring. | ||
| Also on that topic, this from CNBC, the article, Trump Fires Commissioner of Labor Statistics After Weaker Than Expected Jobs Report, says that President Donald Trump on Friday fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioners hours after the agency reported that job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near halt. | ||
| In a Truth Social post that also directed even more fire at Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump accused BLS Commissioner Erica McIntarfur of being a political appointee who was manipulating jobs data. | ||
| President Trump was asked about the firing yesterday at the White House. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's his response with the numbers for a long time, but today's we're doing so well. | |
| I believe the numbers were phony just like they were before the election and there were other times. | ||
|
unidentified
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So you know what I did? | |
| I fired her and you know what? | ||
| I did the right thing. | ||
| Any government official? | ||
| If any government official going forward is presenting data for information you don't like, should they fear for their job? | ||
| I've always had a problem with these numbers. | ||
| You know, I was thinking about it this morning. | ||
| Before the numbers that came out, I said, who is the person that does these numbers? | ||
| And then they gave me stats about before the election. | ||
|
unidentified
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I had a similar problem. | |
| I mean, she gave out numbers that were so good for the Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was like unbelievable. | |
| And then right after the election, she corrected those numbers with, I think, almost 900,000 corrections. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think nobody had ever seen anything like it. | |
| Well, today she did the same thing with the 253,000, whatever the number was. | ||
| No, no, we need people that we can trust. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, your question is a very good one. | |
| need people we can trust I've got about three very good I have a lot of good candidates. | ||
| I will say everybody wants it. | ||
| I have had more phone calls, but I have three people that are. | ||
| If you have a background in labor, I can do a long-term thing, or I could do a temporary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a 14-year term. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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But do you put someone in who actually has labor statistics experience? | |
| I put somebody in who's going to be honest. | ||
| That's all we want. | ||
| I have a choice. | ||
| I can have four months. | ||
| I can do a short-term or I could do a 14-year deal. | ||
| So we'll see. | ||
| We have a lot of people. | ||
| We've got a lot of good people around. | ||
| Also, yesterday it was Senator Chuck Schumer on the Senate floor yesterday responding to President Trump's firing of the BLS commissioner. | ||
| Here are his remarks. | ||
| Today we got some of the worst labor numbers that we've gotten in a long time. | ||
| We not only, the economy added only a paltry 70, 3,000 jobs last month, but that wasn't the worst of it. | ||
| We learned the economy actually added less than 20,000 jobs each in May and June following two months of Donald Trump's Liberation Day. | ||
| That's 250,000 fewer jobs more than we thought. | ||
| So of course, that's very bad news for the economy. | ||
| But what does Donald Trump do? | ||
| Instead of trying to fix the economy, he shoots the messenger. | ||
| The woman he fired, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, passed this Senate 88 to 8. | ||
| Vice President Vance voted for her. | ||
| And now fire her. | ||
| Well, Donald Trump, firing her isn't going to relieve the chaos that you've created with your ramshackle tariff regime. | ||
| Shooting the messenger isn't going to make the jobs that we're losing in health care and clean energy because of your so-called big beautiful bill come back. | ||
| None of this will change. | ||
| The American people will still suffer in exactly the same way that they did an hour ago before you fired the head of the BLS. | ||
| You know, Donald Trump sometimes admires dictators. | ||
| He admires them. | ||
| Well, he sometimes acts just like them. | ||
| It's classic Donald Trump. | ||
| When he gets the news he doesn't like, he shoots the messenger. | ||
| Economic news, just some of the stories C-SPAN has been following this week. | ||
| And for the first hour, we're asking, what's your top news story this week? | ||
| The lines there are on your screens. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| We'll start with Alan in Michigan, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Alan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| You know, I was a lifelong Republican, but, you know, you can't pee on my head and tell me it's raining. | ||
| You know, I mean, I look at where we were when Biden left office, and I compare that to now. | ||
| We're much better off. | ||
| Now, what we see here for four years, Republicans complained about Biden said he spent too much money and it caused inflation. | ||
| Well, look where we are now. | ||
| Inflation is going up. | ||
| We just spent, what, four, five trillion dollars on this bill we signed into law? | ||
| And on top of that, now we got the largest tariffs in history. | ||
| So Republicans can take their pick out there. | ||
| Was that tariffs that caused the inflation under Biden? | ||
| Or was it the spending? | ||
| Because we have both now. | ||
| Okay, so wake up, people. | ||
| This man, for four years, we called Biden old, incompetent, corrupt criminal. | ||
| And people went right out and voted for what they hated the most. | ||
| An old, corrupt, criminal, incompetent man. | ||
| That was Alan in Michigan. | ||
| Paul in Houston, Texas, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, I'd like to come in on Trump firing that lady that he just fired and bragged about how bad she was when she didn't report the numbers that he wanted. | ||
| I mean, this is just pathetic. | ||
| And these Republicans, I don't get it. | ||
| I mean, I see why they like Trump because he's a bigot and that's what they want. | ||
| You know, this whole country is going to crash within, you know, because the Hispanics and the blacks, we're not going anywhere. | ||
| I mean, you might as well have to learn to live with us. | ||
| And that's my comment for this morning. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Paul in Texas. | ||
| Michael in Pennsylvania, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for ceaseby. | ||
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| And my comment is about the top story is definitely the information that's coming out of the intelligence agencies about from Tulsa Gabbard and everything about the Iran-Contra, | ||
| The Russiagate and the implications that it has were the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular had trumped up charges against on the getting. | ||
| the elections. | ||
| And this is huge, and it should have been covered like Watergate was covered. | ||
| Watergate was a tremendous issue. | ||
| It was not that big, was not that big of a problem. | ||
| But this is huge and its implications for our elections going forward. | ||
| How they use the Justice Department to basically distort our elections and tried to keep Trump out of office and tried to keep, it doesn't matter whether you're Republican, Democrat, or Independent, it's important that we have free and fair elections. | ||
| And we can't use the intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, and the intelligence agencies for these purposes. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| That was Michael in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Mike in Norwalk, Ohio, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning, America. | |
| That man from Texas, I cannot believe him. | ||
| Let's talk about legal citizenship. | ||
| I get along with brown, black, yellow. | ||
| It don't matter. | ||
| We're all Americans. | ||
| We're talking about legal citizenship. | ||
| And the man from Pennsylvania, he's correct. | ||
| The biggest story is the coup, the attempted coup from Obama, Brenner, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, they all conspired to oust a sitting president and then to try to make sure that a president that is going to be voted in to be ousted. | ||
| Means we have enough evidence now, and they're saying that as far as anybody being prosecuted, that the time's lapsed. | ||
| Come on, there is no lapsed time for treason, and this is treasonous. | ||
| If we don't start cleaning up our government, we're never going to get that DC in order, and Trump is the one to do it. | ||
| He's not a politician, he's cleaning up Washington, and he's doing exactly what we elected him to do. | ||
| And the Democrats are screaming, the sky is falling. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Mike in Ohio. | ||
| Paul in Asheville, North Carolina, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Response to the last gentleman. | ||
| I think you elected a dictator. | ||
| If you look at Venezuela and Argentina and what their leaders did to the economy, Trump is doing the same thing to ours. | ||
| He's getting ready to crash it, and he's driving our costs way up. | ||
| His comments yesterday about he needed someone honest to give the job numbers that is very rich. | ||
| Someone honest, he is the biggest con man that has ever lived. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Paul in North Carolina. | ||
| Dave is in Little Neck, New York, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| I'm going to talk about a tough subject because I saw a street brawl somewhere in Cincinnati, Ohio, where a group of people descended on what looked like some young, | ||
| middle-aged people and beat the tar out of them, such that the whole city now there is doing an introspection about what is leading people to act so violently and hateful. | ||
| And I think there's a lot of repressed hatred. | ||
| I don't know what's causing it, but it kind of in light of George Floyd, which just happened, the date of that thing happened in Minnesota just passed. | ||
| I mean, I don't understand why we still, as a country, have this hatred. | ||
| And, you know, it's frightening to see, you know, a mob descend on some people and just beat the tar out of them. | ||
| And nobody called the police and nobody cared. | ||
| What does that say? | ||
| Cars were driving by. | ||
| Onlookers were laughing, taking videos, and nobody called the cops. | ||
| That's what I thought was the story of the week. | ||
| What's wrong with us? | ||
| That's all I have to say. | ||
| Have a great morning. | ||
| That was Dave in New York. | ||
| Barney is in Florida on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Barney. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| The biggest story is the protection of pedophiles. | ||
| We have a president, a known pedophile, a known rapist running the country and protecting other pedophiles. | ||
| It is a disgrace to mankind for us to have, as a president, a pedophile, a child molester. | ||
| And as for January 6th, it was Black Lives Matter, I guess, and Barack Obama who stormed the Capitol. | ||
| All these crazy Bahai Republicans. | ||
| If they got a case against Obama, bring it. | ||
| All this crazy talk that they, the Kool-Aid drinkers, if you got a case against Obama, prosecute him. | ||
| Otherwise, keep your mouth shut. | ||
| You need to worry about that white man in office that raped them kids and now is your president, a rapist, a con artist, a criminal. | ||
| We lost all respect for humanity. | ||
| Y'all voted for a con art. | ||
| You knew the man was a rapist, and you're still voting for him. | ||
| What'd that make you? | ||
| That was Barney in Florida. | ||
| Another story from this week, the ongoing situation in Gaza. | ||
| This is the headline in today's New York Times. | ||
| U.S. Envoy Visits Center for Food Aid Inside Gaza. | ||
| It says that Steve Witkoff, President Trump's envoy for peace missions, went to the Gaza Strip on Friday and visited an aid distribution site as a hunger crisis in the territory deepens. | ||
| It says hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past two months in Gaza while trying to secure food aid, which has led to growing international pressure on Israel to ease the humanitarian situation. | ||
| Mr. Witkoff posted a photograph on social media of himself and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, at an aid site, at an aid site overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, the much-criticized Israel-backed group run by an American security contractor that's taken over a large part of aid distribution system in Gaza since May. | ||
| The post says we spent over five hours inside Gaza level setting the facts on the ground, assessing conditions and meeting with GHF updates and other agencies. | ||
| Mr. Witkoff said in the ex-post, the purpose of the visit was to give POTUS a clear understanding of humanitarian situation and help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza. | ||
| It goes on to say that the GHF has aided Israel in overhauling the system for aid distribution in Gaza as part of an effort that Israeli officials have said was meant to prevent Hamas from benefiting from supplies entering the territory. | ||
| However, some Israeli military officials told the New York Times recently that the military has found no evidence that Hamas systematically stole aid from the United Nations, which has provided much of the aid to Gaza since the war there began almost two years ago. | ||
| It was while President Trump was in Scotland this week during a meeting with British Prime Minister Kare Starmer, where he discussed the situation in Gaza and efforts to get humanitarian aid there. | ||
| Here's a clip from that. | ||
| We also discussed, obviously, Gaza. | ||
| And I think before we get to phase two, which is, you know, what's going to happen afterwards, we want to get the children fed, we made a contribution a week ago of $60 million all going into food. | ||
| We only hope the food goes to the people that need it because so much, as you know, when you do something there, it gets taken by Hamas or somebody, but it gets taken. | ||
| And we're prepared to help. | ||
| We want to help. | ||
| It's a terrible situation. | ||
| The whole thing is terrible. | ||
| It's been bad for many years. | ||
| But it's great to hear you feel the same way that I do. | ||
| We have to help on a humanitarian basis before we do anything. | ||
| We have to get the kids fed. | ||
| So we've been sending in a lot of food. | ||
| A lot of the food that's been going there has been sent by the United States. | ||
| I spoke yesterday with the President of the European Union, Ursula, who was terrific also on the subject, and she's going to play a big role also in helping us. | ||
| So we have a good group of countries that are going to help with the humanitarian needs, which is food, sanitation, and some other things. | ||
| It's very difficult to deal with Hamas, as I said. | ||
| You know, we got a tremendous amount of hostages out, but it would take place in drips and drabs. | ||
| You'd get 10, you'd get five, you'd get two, you'd get ten, twelve, we get twelve one time. | ||
| Many of them would come to the White House, and they were so thankful. | ||
| But I always said when you get down to the final 10 or 20, you're not going to be able to make a deal with these people because they use them as a shield. | ||
| And when they give them up, they no longer have a shield. | ||
| And the people of Israel feel so strongly about the hostages. | ||
| Some people would take a different view, but they feel so strongly about the hostages. | ||
| So that's an ongoing process. | ||
| Hamas has become very difficult to deal with in the last couple of days because they don't want to give up these last 20 because they think as long as we have them, they have them, they have protection. | ||
| But I don't think it can work that way. | ||
| So I'm speaking to BB Netanyahu, and we are coming up with various plans. | ||
| We're going to say it's a very difficult situation. | ||
| If they didn't have the hostages, things would go very quickly. | ||
| But they do, and we know where they have them in some cases. | ||
| And you don't want to go riding roughshod over that area because that means those hostages will be killed. | ||
| Back to your calls asking your top news story of the week. | ||
| Let's hear from Paul, who is calling on the independent line from across the pond in the UK. | ||
| Good morning, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Maria. | |
| Yes, regarding Gaza. | ||
| One day, either Trump, Donald Trump, or whoever's going to get in the next presidency, solve the world's problems and the wars that goes on, the wars finish as soon as possible. | ||
| Someone sorts it out. | ||
| It's not Donald Trump, but somebody has got to finish these wars and have a world peace or some sort of peace, forever peace and forever peace. | ||
| That's what we want. | ||
| That's the aim, I think. | ||
| So Annie's right what you said about having humanitarian help for the Gaz people. | ||
| I think it's very important to that. | ||
| And we'll set a world peace at some point. | ||
| Paul, where are you? | ||
| You're in the UK there. | ||
| What does news about the top stories that we've been talking about, Gaza and the economic situation here in the US look like from over there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the economic situation is having problems, but obviously that's the part of life and that's get there in the end. | |
| I think with these wars going on, I think it's costing people's bills go up and I think Ukraine included. | ||
| So if you've got to get to get these wars sorted out as soon as possible, I think, and world peace and get forever peace as well and get it stable and get it really important, get stable world, that's what we want in time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was Paul calling in from the UK. | ||
| Let's hear from Baba in Memphis, Tennessee, who's calling on the Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Babba. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Before I get to the news story of the week for me, you just had a gentleman, or I ain't gonna call him a gentleman, but a dude that called in from Florida, I believe it was, that called President Trump a known rapist, a known molester. | ||
| And he said that several times, and he didn't correct him. | ||
| He hadn't been charged for anything like that. | ||
| But anyway, my news story, actually, somebody has touched on it, was the black mob in Ohio that knocked out a white woman. | ||
| I mean, cold cocked her, knocked her out, beat the white dude up. | ||
| No major news carried that except Fox. | ||
| And I don't even think y'all touched on it. | ||
| And there was actually another one. | ||
| A white gentleman from Alabama was killed by a black police officer, which actually the officer had his knee on the guy's neck. | ||
| So that kind of reminds me maybe of a George Floyd thing that got 24-7 coverage when that happened. | ||
| And nobody's touched that. | ||
| So it's just, I don't understand why if it was the other way around, y'all would be covering this, and you know it. | ||
| But anyway, Donald Trump's doing a great job. | ||
| And I wish y'all would be more fair on what y'all report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Beba in Tennessee. | ||
| Greg, calling from Texas on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Greg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How you doing today? | ||
| Greg, having a hard time hearing you? | ||
| Can you talk closer to your phone? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing today? | |
| There we go. | ||
| Hi, Greg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Greg, hi. | |
| Hey, I want to come back. | ||
| You know, listen to me. | ||
| This is what happened. | ||
| When I was a little kid, I grew up to love America, believe in America. | ||
| And I didn't understand why people say, well, you're a communist. | ||
| You're not American. | ||
| We pledge allegiance to the flag. | ||
| We did this. | ||
| Okay, this has been going on for years. | ||
| The stuff that I've been through and been abused, and always, when I stand up for myself, I'm always being prosecuted. | ||
| I got to apologize to people that then kick me in the butt, people for doing stuff. | ||
| Listen to this. | ||
| The stuff that happened in Connecticut, they don't want to see. | ||
| They're only showing you that video because what they're doing, they're trying to order martial law on black folks. | ||
| And we're smarter than that. | ||
| We don't have enough envy against white folk. | ||
| They just got to prove their point that we're going to do to them what they did to us. | ||
| We don't think like that. | ||
| But let me tell you what, listen to me. | ||
| This is what's going on. | ||
| What happened with those people up at that man in Connecticut? | ||
| There was some Russians. | ||
| They came in at the real videos. | ||
| They only pull out the ones that they want to show that the little lady, the lady attacked those people, ran up, and she got knocked out. | ||
| She didn't earn that. | ||
| And then the other man, he came, I got out of the car with N-words and all this here. | ||
| Some Russians, and they slapped that man. | ||
| And that man, they fought back. | ||
| This is what they want to do, pull us out of the street. | ||
| Now, JD Vance, if that's what he did, the vice president, JD Vance said that they declared martial war on black folk. | ||
| They've been coming at us for this for a long time. | ||
| And I feel bad for the white folks that's out here believing the American dream. | ||
| Everybody get along and love it. | ||
| They've been doing this, killing us for days. | ||
| They already went out here and dumped and pushed the dunk truck over. | ||
| They don't show it on the news because white people, when they do stuff to us, when the little white went, when they pushed that man dump truck over at that landfill and then pulled guns on him, not a man dead. | ||
| Nobody's talking about that, but they justifying it. | ||
| Now, when the little boy was passing, black, black, black man was jogging just this week and they shot him. | ||
| The white boy shot him. | ||
| They put him on the news and talking about it was assault. | ||
| It should have been an attempted murder. | ||
| This been going on. | ||
| You know, we've been attacked every day in this country, and they want to talk about defending some white woman got knocked out. | ||
| See, they ain't showing you the full video when the Russians came out there, jumped out of their car calling us N-words and all this and all that, jumped out there and slapped that black man and got their head handle. | ||
| See, they want to hit us like slavery, and then they want to justify what they're doing to us. | ||
| This is what's going on. | ||
| Now they want to talk about it because what they want to do, they want to take us out, but we're not their enemies. | ||
| But they're going to tell you, black folk, protect yourself like they did back in the day. | ||
| Walk in pairs and be prepared. | ||
| Arm yourself. | ||
| Don't worry about the consequences. | ||
| Knock them down. | ||
| I told my nieces and nephew, you in school, they're spitting on you, calling you N-word, beat their ass, and then they'll learn to leave us. | ||
| That was Greg in Texas. | ||
| Let's hear from Jim in Florida on the line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| I was going to talk about the big story of the week, but your callers today think you need more discipline on allowing callers like the last one and the guy that was, I think, from Florida also went on about Trump being a pedophile and all that. | ||
| You let them go on and on and on. | ||
| What's going on there? | ||
| Is there some new guidance out to you guys to just let these people just run on and on? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I'm disgusted with what you're letting go on. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| That was Jim in Florida. | ||
| Mike in Heartland, Wisconsin, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Well, anytime Trump can end conflict with the trade deal and bring countries together, that is fair for all parties, that's always a good thing. | ||
| Bringing back the presidential fitness test this week, that's also a good thing. | ||
| And, you know, the list of athletes that he has on that committee are pretty good people. | ||
| You put on MSNBC and CNN, and they didn't even, they don't cover Trump when he's speaking directly to your TV. | ||
| They don't show it. | ||
| They show what they want to tell you. | ||
| They tell you what they want you to know, and that's it. | ||
| You guys want to talk, you Democrats, want to talk about job numbers? | ||
| How about at the DNC last year when Biden's Commerce Secretary got called out for them inflating the jobs by 800,000? | ||
| 800,000. | ||
| Jobs that were never created that they took credit for. | ||
| And then you want to talk about inflation? | ||
| It wasn't the tariffs under Biden that caused inflation. | ||
| It was him printing mass amounts of money and just sending it into the economy with no regard for what's going to happen. | ||
| So, and I agree. | ||
| And C-SPAN, you didn't, you know, you hit Trump speaking directly to the American people on C-SPAN 3. | ||
| I mean, there was some other stuff going on that day, so I'll give you a pass on that. | ||
| But I mean, anytime the president is speaking directly to us, the people deserve the right to know and not have it cut and snipped the way you feel is necessary. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Mike in Wisconsin. | ||
| Mike mentioning tariffs. | ||
| This is a story from this morning's New York Times headline: Switzerland is stunned by 39% U.S. tariff among the highest in the world. | ||
| It says that Switzerland got a rude awakening on Friday, a national holiday, when President Trump set the tariff rate on goods imported from the Alpine country at 39%, one of the highest rates for any nation. | ||
| Karen Keller-Sutter, the Swiss president, said she had spoken with Mr. Trump on Thursday, but that no agreement could be reached. | ||
| Swiss watches, precision machinery, and even coffee capsules and chocolate will be subject to the punishing tariff once they cross the U.S. border if the two sides don't hash out a trade deal by August 7th, the day the revised tariffs are set to take effect. | ||
| It says on Friday, Mrs. Keller Settner vowed to press ahead with negotiations. | ||
| It goes on to say, despite the showing of sangforade, the Swiss were already indignant about Mr. Trump's initial threat in April to levy a 31 percent tariff on goods. | ||
| When the White House announced altered rates on late Thursday, the Swiss were shocked to see the rate had increased. | ||
| Many other countries had their tariffs maintained or lowered in Mr. Trump's revisions. | ||
| The article also says that without a new deal, Swiss goods in America would become significantly more costly than goods imported from its neighbors in the European Union, which negotiated a 15% tariff, and Britain with a 10% tariff. | ||
| Back to your calls. | ||
| Let's hear from Mary in Las Vegas, Nevada, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
| What's your top news story this week? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi. | |
| There's many, but Fox News got sued, okay, for $7 almost $50 billion. | ||
| You aren't getting fair news there. | ||
| As far as our president goes, this big, beautiful bill is going to hurt us, and we're going to find out after the midterms how it's going to affect his Treasury Secretary. | ||
| The word got out that he was talking about finding a back door, going into Social Security to privatize it. | ||
| That's going after it's an insurance policy, and the dividend comes due when you retire. | ||
| They want those trillion dollars in our trust fund to gamble with it. | ||
| Okay, our country is being privatized. | ||
| They weren't going in. | ||
| Musk was to dismantle our government and get data, all of our personal information. | ||
| And all of our institutions are being gutted and run by people off of Fox News who don't know what they're doing. | ||
| Okay, and it's just you people have got to learn. | ||
| I ran Contra. | ||
| Read William Crockett and William Barr, all conservatives. | ||
| Find out the truth about that. | ||
| And as far as read the Senate report by Marco, the Republican-led Senate report by Marco Rubio. | ||
| Read that. | ||
| Find out some real information. | ||
| Don't listen to Tulsi Gabbard because that's all BS. | ||
| And we're in for big trouble, and we're being left with our country's turning into a banana republic. | ||
| And you don't see it. | ||
| You're going after free speech telling you everything you need to do. | ||
| You know, where are our tax dollars going? | ||
| These tariffs are being paid by us. | ||
| And where are they going to renovate Trump's airplane that he shouldn't have from Qatar to remodel the White House, private prisons? | ||
| Meanwhile, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are going to be cut. | ||
| Medicare is going to be cut because it's automatically triggered because of the debt to give tax cuts from the needy to the greedy, to the billionaires who don't need more money. | ||
| That was Mary in Nevada. | ||
| Patricia in Circleville, Ohio, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Patricia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just want to say that I was surprised at the way you treated, let them treat our commander-in-chief. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We'll go to Michelle in Montgomery, Alabama, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Michelle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| My top news story is actually about the Maxwell coming out of high security prison to a low-camp federal prison overnight when Virginia's family asked that they did not change her security or give her a pardon. | ||
| But I do want to touch briefly on the people who are angry about the brawl that happened in Cincinnati, Ohio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I haven't seen it. | |
| It's on social media and Fox shows it because that creates a race problem. | ||
| But it's interesting that in revisionist history, we here in the South have a museum of all the black people who have been hung, lynched in this country. | ||
| In 1915, 236 black sharecroppers were lynched because the landowners did not want to pay them for their work. | ||
| And so this country, you know, we have a lot to pay for as far as harm. | ||
| So the men that are calling in, complaining because people of color, particularly those of black people, are sick and tired of being harmed in this country. | ||
| And the children, the young people, are not our ancestors. | ||
| They are not going to take being called out of their name in the derogatory terms. | ||
| But back to Maxwell and this situation here. | ||
| The gentleman in Florida was correct. | ||
| Trump was convicted by his peers of being a rapist, and he will not release the Epstein files because he is in them. | ||
| And if he's in the Epstein files, then that is considered a pedo black book. | ||
| And so, you know, you say, Commander-in-Chief, I didn't vote for him. | ||
| I voted for Kamala. | ||
| And, you know, now, and I agree with this woman, the lady that you have from Las Vegas on, she is correct. | ||
| Our country is being gutted from within. | ||
| Israel gives their citizens free health care, free education. | ||
| Women have access to female care to include abortions. | ||
| And we send Israel billions of dollars. | ||
| So they have their freedoms, but our freedoms are being taken away systematically, one by one. | ||
| And one more point: the lady from Las Vegas was right. | ||
| Fox News was sued over $700 million for lying to the American people. | ||
| So if you think you're getting the truth out of Fox News, that is not the truth. | ||
| It is entertainment. | ||
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| That was Michelle from Alabama. | ||
| She, along with others, bringing up a story out of Ohio. | ||
| This is from NBC News. | ||
| It says videos circulating online show a chaotic scene involving at least a dozen people in one video. | ||
| Few men can be seen standing face to face, having what appears to be a verbal altercation before one man seems to hit another in the face. | ||
| That seems to set off a full-blown physical altercation in which the man who threw the first hit is beaten by multiple people in the middle of the street. | ||
| The violence includes kicks and stomps to his face, says that the crowd also appear to attack two other men who appear to know the man being beaten. | ||
| In another video, a woman trying to defend him gets knocked unconscious by someone in the crowd. | ||
| Blood can be seen running from her mouth as she lies on the ground. | ||
| It goes on to say it's not clear what happened before the video recorded. | ||
| It says the incident got much attention on social media over the weekend, particularly on Elon Musk's ex, where many high-profile right-wing accounts such as Libs of TikTok and In Wokeness framed the fight as an assault by a black quote mob on a white couple. | ||
| Just about 20 minutes left in this first hour of Washington Journal asking your top news story of the week. | ||
| Let's hear from Jeff in Ohio on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I am shocked. | ||
| My top news story is a shocking story that I'm learning more and more about. | ||
| And thanks to C-SPAN for covering it. | ||
| But, you know, the Homeland Security Inspector is testifying, recently testified, about the unaccompanied, undocumented migrant children that crossed our border during the four years under the Biden administration. | ||
| And this is not a political comment, so please don't get me wrong, but we're supposed to be a nation of caring. | ||
| And 400,000, over 400,000 children are lost in our system. | ||
| 300,000, according to the Homeland Security person testifying, were to appear in court. | ||
| They're lost in our system. | ||
| They're lost in the United States. | ||
| They can't find them. | ||
| And of the over 400,000 children that were undocumented, 58,000 were under the age of 12, according to the people testifying here. | ||
| So I'm just shocked to learn about these details where we were told the border was secure for four years, there was control, and now we have hundreds of thousands of children unaccompanied. | ||
| Where are they? | ||
| Do we really care? | ||
| And so I'm just disappointed in our government under Biden to let this happen. | ||
| And I think everyone should be concerned about this. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Jeff in Ohio. | ||
| Chris in Lafayette, Louisiana, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yes, good morning, guys. | ||
| Guys, thank you all for having C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN gives us an opportunity to share our views and our points about what's currently going on in our country. | ||
| Our country, very important. | ||
| I'll say it again. | ||
| Our country. | ||
| Citizens of the United States of America have to understand that we have the authority and the power over presidents, over Congress, men, and women, over et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Guys, the Supreme Court has become a joke. | ||
| All forms of our government, like they said, are being dismantled. | ||
| The delegates in the United States, that's becoming a joke. | ||
| Lawyers in the United States, that's becoming a joke. | ||
| In fact, it's getting to the point where the outside, the outer parts of our world, other countries, they are laughing at us. | ||
| We are becoming a comical joke. | ||
| With all due respect, the children of our country, we have forgotten the children. | ||
| We have forgotten the elders. | ||
| This country is sliding into a situation where it won't be able to get itself out from. | ||
| We won't be able to pull ourselves out from the direction that we're headed. | ||
| We are being led by ignorant, obnoxious. | ||
| There are so many horrible words I could use, but not using anything in profane language because of respect for our soldiers, our many men and women who have served. | ||
| Many of them are dead. | ||
| Many of them are still alive. | ||
| Some of them are ignorant, rude, obnoxious because they are believing something that they know it's a lie, but then they won't even stand up for what they went into service for. | ||
| They agreed to do the things that is good for the American people, but they are doing things that are in the benefit of this current administration, which doesn't know nothing. | ||
| How many ignorant people can we have in our government? | ||
| At your point, Chris, we'll go to David in Wisconsin on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I guess my new story for the week has been really with all the tariffs and stuff because I do follow finance a lot. | ||
| So that's been really my new story of the week. | ||
| But just like a number of the other ones making comments after the fact and the news story, the one that, again, these are all the Democrats coming in. | ||
| When you have hate, hate leads to darkness, darkness leads to blindness. | ||
| Blindness needs to know the truth. | ||
| And to come out and start being racist now and saying all these things about racists, I mean, on a personal level, my sister-in-law, 25 years ago, with two little children, she was held as a sex slave for five years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. | ||
| We could never get her out of there because they would move her every time she called to try to get away. | ||
| And at that time, they didn't have cell phones. | ||
| They had just the little landlines. | ||
| And ultimately, she was murdered. | ||
| She's white. | ||
| They were black. | ||
| You know, I don't hold it against all black people. | ||
| I only hold it against those two people. | ||
| And those two people are now out on the streets walking free while she is still in the ground. | ||
| You know, it's amazing how illiterate or how foolish that some of these people are in the race wars that they put out there. | ||
| It's just amazing. | ||
| I did studies in college back 40 years ago writing papers about this stuff and being warned actually by the college people up in the University of Wisconsin that I shouldn't be even saying this, but you do your studies and you'll find Dil C. Pope, black woman who actually was a slave, enslaved her own husband. | ||
| You have Anthony Johnson, first black man or first man in the United States to be able to, by the Supreme Court, be able to have slavery. | ||
| And he was actually the first person. | ||
| He just happens to be black. | ||
| William Ellison, who had the worst notorious black slavery plantation down in South Carolina. | ||
| There were 700 blacks killed in the wilderness war during the Civil War, which, again, the Democrats started. | ||
| And they started Ku Klux Klan. | ||
| All this stuff was done by Democrats, and they're still doing it. | ||
| And the black culture, who I talk to a lot up here, they don't even know any of this stuff. | ||
| And they hear it and they're like, why do we even hear this? | ||
| Well, because they don't want you to hear this. | ||
| They're communists. | ||
| They only want you to hear what they want you to hear. | ||
| And they'll tell you this every day. | ||
| That was David in Wisconsin. | ||
| Another story C-SPAN has been following and airing some hearings is this from the Texas Tribune. | ||
| Texas House Republicans unveil new congressional map that looks to pick up five GOP seats. | ||
| The article says that the lawmakers released the first draft of the state's new congressional map Wednesday proposing revamped district lines that attempt to flip five Democratic seats in next year's midterm elections. | ||
| It says the new map targets Democratic U.S. House members in the Austin, Dallas, and Houston metro areas and in South Texas. | ||
| It says the draft unveiled by State Representative Todd Hunter of Republican of Corpus Christi says will likely change before the final map is approved by both chambers and assigned by Governor Greg Abbott. | ||
| Democrats have said they might try to thwart the process by fleeing the state. | ||
| It was on Thursday that U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies traveled to Texas to speak out against the efforts in Texas. | ||
| Here are some of his comments. | ||
| First and foremost, we have to make clear to the people of Texas what's taking place because it's unacceptable, unconscionable, and un-American. | ||
| And as elected officials, we have that responsibility. | ||
| That's not something we can just brush aside. | ||
| At 50 states in America, I'm here in Texas for a reason. | ||
| Because these legislators are standing up. | ||
| These members of Congress are standing up and communicating to the people of Texas what's occurring right now in the middle of the summer at a special session. | ||
| And we will make clear that we're going to do everything possible to support the Texas legislators as they consider the best ways to push back. | ||
| It's an all-hands-on-deck moment and all options should be on the table to protect the people of Texas. | ||
| But Texas Democrats are going to be the ones to decide that. | ||
| We will fight them politically. | ||
| We will fight them governmentally. | ||
| We will fight them in court. | ||
| We will fight them in terms of winning the hearts and minds of the people of Texas and beyond. | ||
| The Texas Democrats are going to show up and stand up and speak up for what's right for the people of Texas. | ||
| And they're showing courage and conviction and character in doing that. | ||
| And we'll see what happens over the next few days over the next few weeks. | ||
| But the one thing I know is clear, that Texas Democrats are fighting for the people. | ||
| This is a headline in this morning's Washington Post. | ||
| Blue States Democrats face hurdles countering Texas's new election map. | ||
| It says that as Texas Republicans prepare to redraw their state's congressional districts to gain five House seats and protect their narrow majority in the midterm elections, Democrats in some of the country's blue states are preparing to retaliate, but they are facing legal hurdles and some political risk for a gambit that could quickly be challenged, that could be challenging to pull off quickly, according to lawmakers and redistricting experts. | ||
| It says in California, Democrats are likely to need permission from voters before they can establish new lines. | ||
| In New York, they may not be able to establish new districts until after next year's midterms because the process for amending the state constitution is so drawn out. | ||
| And in Illinois, lawmakers can act right away, but the impact could be limited because they have already tilted many of the state's districts in their favor. | ||
| It goes on to say that all states must abide by the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act when they draw maps, but other rules differ by state. | ||
| Some let lawmakers devise the lines. | ||
| Others use commissions that create more competitive districts. | ||
| Often, courts are called on to review the districts, and they sometimes order major changes to the maps. | ||
| Just a few minutes left in this first hour asking your top news story of the week. | ||
| Let's hear from Michael in Wilmington, North Carolina, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Michael. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| There's so much stuff to talk about, and it's so challenging. | ||
| I am concerned about the demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. | ||
| I think that's been a vast of free speech and supporting local nonprofit radio stations. | ||
| I'm also concerned that with corporation gone, is C-STAN the next target? | ||
| Free speech is a right that needs to be protected, and I am concerned that anybody who speaks out, and some of your listeners have been complaining about the way you're covering things. | ||
| You don't cover things, you just report things. | ||
| So I'm really concerned about that. | ||
| There's, again, a list of mile long, but I want to focus on the corporation of public broadcasting and the threat to free speech that our country is going under. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Michael in North Carolina. | ||
| Ed in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Ed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, go ahead, Ed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, the beatdown in Cincinnati, top story, don't go there and shut the city down would be a good idea, and that's what's going to happen. | ||
| So good luck. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Have a nice day. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| That was Ed in South Carolina. | ||
| Allie is in Albany, New York, on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Allie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I just wanted to say that Trump with the Epstein files, Bill Clinton was at Epstein's Island 28 times. | ||
| Trump was never on Epstein's Island. | ||
| And when Bill Clinton looked into the camera with Monica Lewinsky and said, I never had sex with that woman, and told all the American people, lied straight face to the American public. | ||
| Now, what did he do on Epstein's Island 28 times? | ||
| Think about that one. | ||
| He should be the one being investigated. | ||
| Also, when one of your callers was talking about her worrying about Social Security and Medicaid being, you know, eliminated, what, you know, she should be thinking about the 20 million illegals that are in our country, thanks to Biden and the Democrats, that are draining Social Security, draining Medicaid, and we're the ones, American taxpayers are the ones paying for this. | ||
| And she should look at that, not at the Republicans. | ||
| And I also want to say that the Democratic Party are now a bunch of communists. | ||
| I live in New York and I see it. | ||
| It's, it's, I can't say that word, but it's ridiculous. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| They're a communist party and the whole party is heading in that direction. | ||
| And that's what I have to say. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Allie in New York. | ||
| Mary is in Ohio on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Yes, go ahead, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So I was calling about the redistricting in Texas. | ||
| You know, Trump's doing so good, he shouldn't worry about changing the map, but he is. | ||
| But we went through this in Ohio where Ohio voters tried to change the redistricting process, and the Republican legislature totally, not only totally ignored it, but they blatantly said in public that they weren't going to follow it, delayed it so much that they kept it up in court. | ||
| They threatened to impeach their own Republican Supreme Court judge because she was voting against what they wanted. | ||
| But they ultimately did not fold the plan. | ||
| And now the voters came back with a supplemental plan that got defeated because it was so changed by the Attorney General and wording that people got confused. | ||
| So, you know, it's just so disheartening to be a voter and know that your ability to vote for a candidate is totally reliant on the people in power at the time. | ||
| And I know the Democrats did this at a time in Ohio, too, that they believed in changing redistricting until they got control and then they didn't. | ||
| So it's just very disheartening. | ||
| And this is just so blatant against what it should be. | ||
| And that was my concern. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Mary in Ohio and Corey in Minneapolis, Minnesota, line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, Corey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| My top news story of the week is the deep state that has infiltrated our media and our government. | ||
| It's clear. | ||
| We can see it. | ||
| I can't believe you just showed that clip of the fight in Cincinnati. | ||
| There's been 17 people on here that have mentioned the Epstein files and wanting to know about that. | ||
| You have no clips about that, but one mention of that fight in Cincinnati, and you have a clip, and we see Lou getting his head kicked in. | ||
| You're the problem. | ||
| That was Corey in Minnesota. | ||
| Our last call in this hour. | ||
| If you didn't get a chance to talk about your top news story, we will be in open forum at about 9:30. | ||
| You can give us a call back then. | ||
| And also later this morning on Washington Journal, we'll get an update on efforts to combat the fentanyl in the U.S. with Mazen Saleh, a harm reduction policy expert at the R Street Institute. | ||
| And next, after the break from the July jobs report to tariffs, we'll dive deep into this week's economic news with politicoeconomics correspondent Victoria Guida. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
American History TV, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | |
| This weekend, as the nation begins to celebrate its semi-quincentennial, American History TV begins a year-long series, America 250, on the American Revolution and its impact on the country. | ||
| On Lectures in History, Texas Christian University professor Gene Ellen Smith on George Washington's character, how Washington interacted with his contemporaries, how he viewed himself, and how we remember him today. | ||
| Then we continue exploring America's founding with the parade marking the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. | ||
| The celebration includes an enlistment ceremony, a parachute demonstration, and fireworks. | ||
| And on the Civil War, historians discuss technology developed during the war, African-American regiments, and the Civil War's impact on American society at a conference hosted by the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. | ||
| Exploring the American story, watch American History TV every weekend and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| 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 king 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. | ||
| Washington Journal continues. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss the latest on U.S. economic news is politico economics correspondent Victoria Guida. | ||
| Victoria, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me on. | |
| We'll start with the news of the July jobs report that was released yesterday. | ||
| Tell us the best way to look at the numbers, look at the job creation numbers for last month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So job creation was relatively low. | |
| It wasn't bad. | ||
| It was 73,000 net jobs added. | ||
| That's a little bit lower than economists were expecting. | ||
| They were expecting around 100,000, but it's not a terrible number. | ||
| The unemployment rate did tick up to 4.2%, but that's also still quite a low number. | ||
| And basically what it reflects is that the job market is really kind of, you hear people describe it as sort of frozen, where there are a lot of people that are employed, but you're not seeing a lot of movement around, not necessarily a lot of hiring, not necessarily a lot of layoffs. | ||
| And there's a sign that demand for workers is weakening a lot, but also the supply of workers has been coming down because of the administration's crackdown on immigration. | ||
| And so we're sort of seeing a labor market cool, but we're not necessarily seeing a really troubling rise in unemployment. | ||
| You mentioned a couple of the factors, but what else has contributed to job loss? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, so again, it's not necessarily job loss. | |
| It's just that they're hiring at a much lower rate. | ||
| And one of the problems with this is, you know, if you're, for example, a younger person who's coming into the labor market and you're looking for employment opportunities, there might be fewer of them. | ||
| And so there is sort of fewer employment opportunities for new entrants into the labor force. | ||
| And so over time, that is going to drive up joblessness, even if you're not necessarily having active layoffs across the economy. | ||
| But it's sort of ticking up. | ||
| And also announced yesterday was revised numbers for the previous two jobs reports. | ||
| How significant are those numbers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This was actually the thing that most people really focused on from this report because it was a really surprising shift where basically total between the months of May and June, the number of jobs that were added had been now the BLS believes overstated by 258,000 jobs, which basically means that the job market is looking a lot worse than we actually thought. | |
| You had a headline yesterday. | ||
| The job market isn't as good as we thought. | ||
| There might be an upside for Trump. | ||
| Elaborate on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So one of the things that President Trump has been repeatedly calling for is for interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve. | |
| And the Fed has been holding off on cutting interest rates while they see through how tariffs feed through the economy because the Fed has two things that it watches, inflation, and it wants to keep rates elevated if it's worried about inflation. | ||
| And employment, it's supposed to also pursue maximum employment and it wants to cut rates if it's worried that growth might really be slowing in a way that's going to hurt workers. | ||
| So those are sort of telling you to move in two different directions. | ||
| So they've sort of been holding steady until they're for sure they really understand what's happening in the economy. | ||
| And so if there are signs that the labor market really is starting to weaken, that could help prompt the Fed to cut interest rates sooner. | ||
| Our guest is Victoria Guida. | ||
| She is an economics correspondent for Politico. | ||
| She'll be with us for the next 40 minutes or so. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for her, you can start giving us a call now. | ||
| The lines, Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| And a reminder, you can also send us a text. | ||
| It's 202-748-8003. | ||
| Victoria, when we see these recent jobs reports, especially July, what sectors are being hit the hardest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So one of the really striking things about this report is that we actually saw employment net go down in basically every sector other than health care and social assistance. | |
| And so it's sort of leading to this question of, oh, you know, is the economy broadly sort of starting to slow down? | ||
| And again, these are net jobs. | ||
| So it's not like, you know, nobody is getting hired at any of these sectors. | ||
| It's just on net they're losing jobs. | ||
| And particularly notably, you know, for the last few months, manufacturing jobs have shrunk. | ||
| And, you know, this is something that has been very important to President Trump is to bring back manufacturing jobs. | ||
| And so, you know, that will be an important number to track over time. | ||
| But of course, one of the things that's been a dynamic in the first half of the year is some of the uncertainty around his trade war has led to a lot less economic activity where people aren't necessarily, where businesses aren't necessarily investing because they're not sure how the tariffs are going to shake out. | ||
| And so it'll be interesting to watch as businesses get more certainty about what the tariffs are going to look like, what kind of investments they make and whether that can sort of help boost that employment in manufacturing or not. | ||
| And how could these recent jobs numbers from July, how could that affect future decisions from the Federal Reserve about rate cuts, which is something President Trump has been pushing for for several months now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so as I mentioned, it could potentially prompt them to cut sooner. | |
| Their next meeting, they just had a meeting this past week, and it could prompt them to cut at their next meeting in September. | ||
| They will get a fair amount of data, more data, between now and then. | ||
| And so we'll have to see. | ||
| I mean, they're going to get another jobs report at the beginning of September. | ||
| And they're also going to get inflation data. | ||
| And we've started to see inflation tick up a bit because of the tariffs. | ||
| It hasn't surged, but you can definitely see it in certain sectors, like apparel, like furniture, like toys. | ||
| And so a big question will be in the coming months in inflation reports, are we starting to see that tick up in a way that is really concerning to the Fed? | ||
| And it's sort of the balance of that data that will determine how quickly they start cutting. | ||
| And you mentioned that the Fed had their meeting. | ||
| It was this week. | ||
| Right after that meeting, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced rates would stay the same. | ||
| How did he justify that decision? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So he said that right now, the economy doesn't look like it needs, you know, that it's really suffering. | |
| Interest rates are set at a level where the Fed believes that they are what they call restrictive, which basically means that it is, you know, to an extent cutting into economic growth. | ||
| And they're doing that on purpose as sort of a guard against inflation because they've been engaged in this process over the last few years where inflation was very high and they brought it down into the twos of percent because the Fed's target is 2% inflation. | ||
| But basically right now, they still feel like they don't totally have certainty. | ||
| And he was basically saying, you know, the economy doesn't seem to be crying out for help right now. | ||
| Although then we got this jobs report that suggests that actually the jobs report was maybe a little bit weaker than we thought over the last couple of months. | ||
| But as I mentioned at the top, it's not like a horrifying jobs report. | ||
| It's just that it looks like things are a lot weaker than we thought they were. | ||
| And on the topic of the Federal Reserve Board, there were two members, two governors who dissented with Powell's decision to hold rates where they are. | ||
| How significant is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was a very unusual move. | |
| So the Fed, about 12 people vote on the interest rate decision that we all see. | ||
| And some of those are board members and some of them are regional bank heads. | ||
| And it's much more normal for, but, you know, there hasn't been that much dissent lately over the years. | ||
| But in general, when you see dissents, you tend to see them from those regional branch heads. | ||
| And this time we saw a dissent from two governors, two board members. | ||
| And that hasn't happened since 1993. | ||
| Now, both of these people were appointees of President Trump. | ||
| But the case that they were making for a rate cut is that they're worried about the job market. | ||
| And it's especially notable because Chris Waller, who is on President Trump's shortlist to be the next Fed chair, is somebody that is consistently a really respected economist on the Fed that people really listen to. | ||
| And so it'll be really interesting to see whether the argument that he made is something that starts to sway some of his fellow Fed officials. | ||
| And more news about Reserve Board governors. | ||
| It was yesterday that one of them announced they will be stepping down earlier before their term is over. | ||
| For our audience, remind them what the responsibilities of the governors are and how significant it is that they're stepping aside, what it means for President Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so Adriana Kugler, her term was up in January anyway, so she was going to be leaving, but she's leaving early, which is, you know, it's unclear the reason, but she says that she's going to be going back later this fall to be a professor at Georgetown University. | |
| In terms of the duties of Fed board members, so obviously they have a vote on interest rates, but also the Fed has multiple other jobs. | ||
| They regulate banks and they are involved in the payment system. | ||
| They, you know, depending on which governor you are, they have different internal committees that they sit on. | ||
| But, you know, there's, you know, statistical parts of the Fed. | ||
| And, you know, Adriana Kugler only joined the board in 2023. | ||
| So she hasn't been there that long. | ||
| You know, Fed board members, a standard term for a Fed board member is 14 years. | ||
| But yeah, they sort of split up the duties and all the different things that the Fed is responsible for. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We'll start with Joe, who's in Texas on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Joe. | ||
| Joe, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm seeing it. | |
| You got me? | ||
| Go ahead, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to ask this lady: do you say you're going to get a true draft report now to Trump that fired himself since he did a report that he didn't like? | |
| I believe every time something don't go the way he wanted to go, he fired him. | ||
| So now, people can keep on believing everything Trump tells you, and you're going to fool around and he's going to bankrupt the United States where he did all his businesses. | ||
| So, as you mentioned, one of the things that happened yesterday is that President Trump did fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics later in the day after we got this jobs data. | ||
| And President Trump basically said that he thinks that the numbers were wrong. | ||
| And we can talk about that too, about how the BLS calculates its data. | ||
| But I would say that it's still sort of unclear now what that means for the agency. | ||
| People who, economists who rely on this data and investors who rely on this data, and people who were at the BLS previously, the person who ran BLS during Trump's first term, | ||
| you're seeing a lot of people really express concern about this and the idea that he might put someone in there who isn't going to necessarily approach the statistical aspects of this job with as much independence as the BLS has been set up to do. | ||
| But we don't know that yet because we don't know exactly, you know, we don't know who they're putting in there. | ||
| And, you know, it's definitely something that people are watching very closely. | ||
| Victoria, explain how they come up with the job numbers you just alluded to it, but how they came up with the jobs numbers, as well as what we saw with the revisions in previous reports, how those happen, and how common they are, how common it is to have revisions in past reports. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the way that the BLS calculates these numbers is based on surveys. | |
| So they talk to households and they talk to businesses. | ||
| And when they talk to businesses, they track their employment over time, How many positions they have, whether they've added some, whether they've subtracted some, what kind of jobs they've added. | ||
| And they have, you know, they send out these surveys to businesses across the country. | ||
| Obviously, they are not polling every single business in the entire country. | ||
| That would not be possible. | ||
| And so there's also some, you know, some economic assumptions that you have to put into that. | ||
| For example, they have to have a good sense of how many businesses exist in the country, right? | ||
| How many workers? | ||
| You know, this has been an interesting question under President Joe Biden when we saw a big jump in immigration of like, you know, what is the worker base? | ||
| And so there's a lot of complexity to what the BLS has to do. | ||
| And, you know, from month to month, they sometimes get survey responses from businesses after they've initially reported the information. | ||
| And there's also a bunch of other additional data that they get that might affect the number. | ||
| So the revisions themselves are completely normal. | ||
| The BLS regularly updates the numbers in subsequent months. | ||
| The thing that was really striking about this report is the revisions were quite large. | ||
| And another thing I'll note is that the BLS also has had staffing shortages. | ||
| There's been a hiring freeze, and that has also limited their ability to deal with the fact that response rates from businesses have gone down since the pandemic. | ||
| And it's a little bit harder to address that, where you need to sort of follow up and find the proper responses that you need without the proper staffing. | ||
| Victoria, Ben in Arlington, Virginia, sent us a text with this question. | ||
| Is it true that most of the prices used for the CBI are now just guesses and inflation could worse than assumed? | ||
| We don't have enough accurate data under Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So most of the prices are not assumed, but I do think that there is the caller is referring to something that it's called imputation, where there are certain prices that factor into the consumer price index that are not observable prices. | |
| So for example, there's something called owner equivalent rent, where so there's rent, which is an observable price, right? | ||
| Like there are people out there who are charging rent. | ||
| But there's also housing costs that are faced by homeowners. | ||
| And one of the ways that that number is included in the CPI is through owner equivalent rent, which is basically like if you had your house up for rent, what would it go for? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that kind of data is a little bit, you know, more based on imputation, as they call it. | ||
| But that's not like the majority of CPI. | ||
| I mean, it's consumer prices. | ||
| So it is, they're largely looking at prices that are faced by consumers. | ||
| There's also something called the personal consumption expenditures index, which is another key inflation metric. | ||
| And that looks at a broader range of prices, including things like health insurance that's paid for by your employer. | ||
| And so both of these kind of give you different snapshots of price pressures in the economy. | ||
| But to answer the question, no, it's not like they're just making stuff up. | ||
| Let's talk with Rory in Greensboro, North Carolina, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Ray. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| I've been noticing a lot lately. | ||
| This is anecdotal evidence of a declining job market. | ||
| But for one thing, the restaurants I like to go to, one's a seafood restaurant my sister works at, and their business is just like falling off a cliff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's terrible business. | |
| Now, I guess people are holding on to their money. | ||
| They've laid off people. | ||
| And a couple of Mexican restaurants I like that you usually had to wait to get a booth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They have practically nobody in them. | |
| Even the Walgreens that I go to, it has hardly any customers. | ||
| I think it's obvious that the job market is declining. | ||
| Like a caller said a few callers ago, Trump is going to do what he did to all his businesses, run them into the ground. | ||
| That's what he's doing. | ||
| That's what he's done. | ||
| Get ready for a real depression here. | ||
| So, you know, we have, I mean, you know, obviously the United States is a very large country. | ||
| And so we might see different job market trends that look a little bit different in every place. | ||
| But one of the things that we have seen across the country is, you know, based on data from the Bank of America Institute, which looks at aggregate bank account data, we have seen declines in spending, particularly from people who are on the lower income end, where they're spending less money on discretionary things like restaurants, | ||
| because they're spending a lot more on things like rent, which has obviously gone up a lot over the last few years. | ||
| And so that's something to really watch for, as you were indicating, because economic activity is ultimately really driven by consumer spending. | ||
| And it's all kind of tied together where, you know, if you have businesses, businesses do well when people spend there, and so they're able to employ people. | ||
| And when people are employed, they're able to keep spending. | ||
| So everything is kind of connected to each other. | ||
| Victoria, the caller, listing off some places where he's seen changes in the workforce. | ||
| And we talked about job sectors that were hardest hit in recent reports. | ||
| Are there areas that have seen above average hiring or no changes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Healthcare has seen the biggest amount of hiring. | |
| It's consistently been an area of growth. | ||
| And as I think I mentioned at the top, it's actually this past month, it was other than social assistance, I think the only sector that by itself net-added jobs. | ||
| You know, it will be very interesting to see the data going forward. | ||
| Obviously, as I mentioned before, we don't know who the next head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to be. | ||
| And, you know, but presumably the process will not change. | ||
| I guess we'll have to see how that plays out. | ||
| But we'll have to see whether that trend continues of other sectors nets losing jobs. | ||
| Let's hear from Bruce in Maryland, Line for Independence. | ||
| Hi, Bruce. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Considering that the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they like to, he liked Trump liked the statistics the day before, but now when he got the ones he doesn't like, she's suddenly doing a bad job. | ||
| Do you think if he hires somebody that is not doing it correctly, are there other ways to derive that data? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| This is actually something that Fed Chair Powell was asked about at his press conference, not in the context of anything to do with President Trump, but because of what I was mentioning earlier, which is sort of the statistical challenges of what the BLS has to do and the fact that they have staffing shortages, less response rates. | ||
| And there are private sources of data. | ||
| So, for example, during the pandemic, a lot of people really turned to, you know, there are things like ADP, which is a private payroll company that I think it's something like a quarter of the workforce or a quarter of companies. | ||
| And so that gives you a snapshot. | ||
| There's also data from Home Base that gives you some employment data. | ||
| You can look at, you know, Indeed to get senses of hiring and job postings and things like that. | ||
| You know, and they have all sorts of statistical ways of trying to estimate what's happening in the economy. | ||
| But what you hear consistently from Chair Powell and also from just economists in general that really rely on this data is that there's no good perfect substitute for the data we get from the government. | ||
| I mean, this is something that actually, you know, other countries, not all other countries, but like many other countries don't have access to this, you know, high quality of information about what is happening in the labor market. | ||
| And so it's really something that we maybe take for granted here that we have this kind of data and this kind of snapshot into what's happening in the economy. | ||
| Victoria, on the topic of the jobs report, Donald in South Bend, Indiana sent in this question: asked Ms. Guida if moving the report of the jobs numbers be pushed to the middle of the month to give a more accurate number instead of the first Friday of the new month. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I don't really have a sense of whether certain weeks of the month offer a more better snapshot than others. | |
| But the survey week I think is in the middle of the month and then it's reported because then they have to go through the data and it's reported at the at the beginning of the month. | ||
| But unfortunately, I can't speak to whether that timing is better or worse than it should be. | ||
| Sharon and Aloa, Oregon, Line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Sharon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| I have a couple of questions that we got expert here. | ||
| She can help me with. | ||
| Okay, with the jobs report, yesterday's thing was down 25% of projection. | ||
| In other reports like earlier in other administrations, that would be seen as a big dump. | ||
| But you're saying that it really wasn't. | ||
| It's not that big a deal, 25%? | ||
| So, yeah, it's a great question. | ||
| The thing is, there is, as we were sort of talking about, right, there's usually revisions the later that you get. | ||
| And actually, eventually, you know, we actually get hard data on how much employment there is. | ||
| It just takes a while. | ||
| It takes, I think it's like a year. | ||
| So eventually you can literally go back and see more about the accuracy of the BLS's data. | ||
| And this is, you might remember what happened last year when there was a huge revision in August. | ||
| And this usually happens in August. | ||
| And that's because they got a lot of hard data that they didn't have before on employment numbers. | ||
| But in terms of a miss, something like 25,000 jobs, when you consider the churn of the U.S. economy, I mean, at any given time, in a given month, there's roughly 6 million people leaving their job and 6 million people getting hired. | ||
| And then the net number is what you see. | ||
| And so something like 25,000 difference is not that large. | ||
| There's also some margin of error. | ||
| And so, you know, something like that level of a miss is not that unusual to have it like 73,000 instead of, I think it was 104. | ||
| But obviously the base number matters, right? | ||
| And the fact that it was only 73,000, that's something that's getting closer to where the margin of error is just kind of like, it's unclear whether we added jobs at all, right? | ||
| And so that's one of the reasons why it's something to watch really closely. | ||
| The last thing I'll say here is we also are in a situation in the economy right now, as I mentioned earlier, where demand for workers is slowing, but also supply of workers is slowing because of the immigration crackdown. | ||
| And so in order to sustain the employment rate, the economy doesn't actually need to add as many jobs. | ||
| And so that's another reason why you kind of have to look at the whole picture and something like adding 73,000 jobs isn't enough to cause like crazy, crazy amounts of concern right now. | ||
| Sharon, did you have a second question for Victoria? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I did, if I could. | |
| Okay, because the other question is, you know, the tariffs have gone in, and that will cause prices to go up. | ||
| You know, the Procter and Gamble has already said they're going to raise tide and dawn, and Walmart says they're going to raise prices. | ||
| Target does. | ||
| We're already seeing it at Costco. | ||
| And in the tariffs, we have now come to learn that we, the people, pay them, just like Procter Gamble raising the taxes or raising the prices. | ||
| And so my question is that the people that really get hit with that are the middle class and the poor, because the poor spend 100% of their income just to live. | ||
| The middle class spend a lot more than the very rich. | ||
| And so what that's doing is, in effect, the tariffs are really a tax on the poor and the middle class through raising the cost, the prices. | ||
| And then they talk about if inflation goes up, and it is, because Procter Gamble, they're all saying they're going to raise chocolate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everybody's raising their prices. | |
| At the same time, if these jobs numbers continue to go down, what will that mean for our economy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is exactly what the Fed is worried about, the situation that you just described. | |
| You know, some people may remember that in the 1970s, we experienced something known as stagflation, which is basically where you have high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. | ||
| And we're not in that place right now. | ||
| Unemployment is at 4.2%, which is quite low. | ||
| And inflation has ticked up. | ||
| As I mentioned, we have seen some price increases. | ||
| And as you mentioned, we have seen some price increases as a result of the tariffs. | ||
| But so far, it hasn't been a large jump. | ||
| But the concern is that we will see both of those effects where inflation is pushing up and everything else is slowing. | ||
| Now, the way that that could just play out is that the slowing is enough to kind of make inflation not so much of a concern in terms of economic growth, because this gets a little confusing, right? | ||
| But like the inflation that the Fed is worried about is sustained price increases, as opposed to just, okay, businesses are leveling up their prices one time in response to tariffs. | ||
| That's not something that the Fed can really do anything about or stop. | ||
| What they're worried about is a situation where prices go up because of tariffs, and maybe they keep going up because of tariffs, either because the policy is really dragged out and how it's implemented over time, or because things just get more expensive for businesses. | ||
| And so they keep having to raise their prices. | ||
| And then they also then have to pay their workers more because their workers are having to spend more money. | ||
| And then that leads to a situation where things, everything just keeps going up. | ||
| But also, the economy could just slow to where if you're spending more money on things that you need to spend money on, food, gas, rent, things like that, and then you don't have enough money left over for a lot of other stuff, which then just, instead of being able to sustain price increases, just leads to a slowdown or even recession in the sort of worst case scenario. | ||
| Let's hear from Shirley in Alabama on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Shirley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, and thank you for the program. | |
| And thank Ms. Victoria for her information. | ||
| I talk about the economy because I go from day to day. | ||
| I don't have any kids in school, have grandchildren, great-grands, but I look at the parents that have children that they have to feed every day. | ||
| They have to clothe every day. | ||
| And the working class families are really struggling. | ||
| I believe that the last job information for May and June was not accurate. | ||
| I think it was fudged to make the president look good. | ||
| July is more accurate. | ||
| I see they went back and did some corrections. | ||
| But I need to ask her: what am I supposed to look at to judge the prices of everything because of tariffs? | ||
| I see everything going up. | ||
| I'm in a small town. | ||
| There's no stores. | ||
| Drive 35, 40 miles to Walmart. | ||
| Walmart went up on their prices when the president first announced the tariffs. | ||
| I don't know if anybody was watching except me, but the prices are already up. | ||
| So could you ask her, what are we supposed to look at to judge the economy, whether it's going up or down, when day to day people are struggling and suffering? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll wait on her answers. | ||
| So I think what you're asking is how do you judge whether tariffs are pushing up prices as opposed to whatever else is going on? | ||
| I'll come back to your job's point. | ||
| You know, you do, to an extent, you get some direct explanations from businesses themselves on earnings calls, you know, when executives talk to their shareholders, and they're actually bound by SEC rules to not be misleading to investors in explaining their strategy. | ||
| So, you know, a lot of them will talk about tariffs and the extent to which that might drive price increases. | ||
| It's a little bit hard to always know exactly, though. | ||
| Obviously, businesses have had a bit more power to raise prices lately for a very long time. | ||
| We didn't see significant inflation. | ||
| And then when you get to a situation where, you know, like the pandemic where we saw shortages, it was kind of hard to separate out how much of that was because they saw increased costs and how much of it was because they also had a little bit of wiggle room to raise prices. | ||
| And so I feel like you'll probably see a similar dynamic here with the tariffs. | ||
| But it's also not totally surprising where the tariff price increases might come. | ||
| You know, I mentioned earlier things like apparel, which is heavily imported. | ||
| And so it's not surprising that that would be an industry that is particularly affected by tariffs. | ||
| In terms of where to look for data, I mean, you know, the government does put out a lot of really high quality data. | ||
| And it's not even just from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. | ||
| You know, we also have the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis that all put out a lot of data. | ||
| But I will also mention, I mean, the U.S. economy is huge. | ||
| This is a huge country. | ||
| And, you know, it's not simple and it's not straightforward to get a sense necessarily of what is happening across the economy. | ||
| And, you know, there's regional trends, there's local trends where the things that certain places, parts of the economy are experiencing is different from what other parts of the economy are experiencing. | ||
| So it's a very difficult thing to constantly have to try and figure out. | ||
| Clarence is in North Carolina on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Clarence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, good morning. | |
| Hi, everyone. | ||
| I'm listening to everyone. | ||
| I stay here in Charlotte, North Carolina. | ||
| Walmart, I go to Walmart every other day. | ||
| I'm retired. | ||
| It's packed every time I go into Walmart. | ||
| I don't see the prices going up because I shop there every day. | ||
| Matter of fact, the economy here in Charlotte is booming. | ||
| More houses. | ||
| Matter of fact, to get a home here in Charlotte, you've got to at least have $500,000 because so many people moving here in North Carolina and South Carolina. | ||
| Matter of fact, I'm getting ready to buy me another house down in South Carolina. | ||
| The economy here is booming. | ||
| They got jobs open everywhere I go. | ||
| All the people here, if you want a job, you can get a job. | ||
| I sat here and I listened to these people say the economy is bad. | ||
| I'm retired. | ||
| I'm retired. | ||
| My money is great. | ||
| I get over $6,000 a month. | ||
| I can work if I want to. | ||
| I'm over 65. | ||
| I'm 72 years old. | ||
| I'm a black man. | ||
| I don't see more black folks are moving here, own homes than I ever see. | ||
| Just met a man move here from New York City. | ||
| He said he didn't know black folks own homes until he came here to Charlotte, North Carolina. | ||
| And I told him one of the best economy in the world right now, I think, is here. | ||
| So when I hear people complaining about the economy back, I'm just, where are they staying at? | ||
| What are they going through? | ||
| And I realize most of the people are senior people. | ||
| And I understand they don't work and they're high everywhere you go to render side and buy a home is buy. | ||
| But the economy here is booming. | ||
| So move to Charlotte. | ||
| If you're having that much problem, I promise you, it'll be a blessing if you move here. | ||
| So God bless you. | ||
| And put dog food. | ||
| Well, I'm glad to hear that. | ||
| It's good to hear Charlotte is doing well. | ||
| As I mentioned, all of these experiences can be true. | ||
| This is a large economy. | ||
| There are a lot of different places that people live and have a lot of different experiences. | ||
| I mean, it is really interesting where this question of moving to places where the jobs are. | ||
| We did during and after the pandemic see a lot of people move and that's created to an extent in some places a housing problem because now there isn't necessarily enough supply of housing in the places where people want to live and that's contributed to an affordability problem. | ||
| Of course, also some people don't have the ability to move for various reasons, whether it's because of their job or maybe they're caring for an aging parent or whatever. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I think that also the nature of this economy is that some places are always going to be doing better than others. | ||
| Bernie is in, sorry, Bernie is in Louisville, Kentucky, line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Bernie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Morning, Tammy. | |
| Good morning, Victoria. | ||
| I had a question about the jobs numbers. | ||
| Are you familiar with the term soft money? | ||
| And do these numbers, do they include people who are hired using soft money? | ||
| I assume you're, I don't know if you're familiar with what that means, people who are hired full-time benefits. | ||
| They're full-time employees, but they're paid through a certain grant or a project. | ||
| And as long as that project or grant money is coming in, they have a job. | ||
| But as soon as it leaves, they generally, the job goes with it too. | ||
| Are they included in this 73,000? | ||
| So the jobs report does include a lot of different types of formalized work arrangements, and some of them are temporary. | ||
| And that's why, you know, so for example, when we do the census every 10 years, you'll actually sometimes see a temporary jump in employment because people are being hired to be census workers. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, I don't know all of the different categories because there are many of what is and isn't included because there are some work arrangements that are harder for BLS to track. | ||
| But they also ask households, right? | ||
| So they can also get a sense in terms of employment without having to ask businesses themselves. | ||
| So for people who are self-employed, for example, they would have to get that information from households. | ||
| But yes, that kind of arrangement is captured. | ||
| Just a few minutes left. | ||
| Let's hear from Tom in Maryland, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Tom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I have two questions. | ||
| One, when Trump first started with the tariffs, many economists said it would cause a recession. | ||
| Are we in a recession yet? | ||
| And if not, when do you figure out that we're going to? | ||
| And how would you rate today's economy versus the economy of last year? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All great questions. | ||
| So the first thing I'll say is if we were in a recession right now, if we were entering a recession right now, we might not know yet. | ||
| That is true at any time. | ||
| I'm not just saying that for right now. | ||
| It's that oftentimes these things seem obvious in retrospect as to when they started, but it's not always clear immediately. | ||
| However, looking at the data, we do not seem to be in recession. | ||
| I mentioned the unemployment rate is 4.2%. | ||
| That's quite low. | ||
| It would be extremely surprising if we were in a recession right now. | ||
| And then you asked, he asked a question about tariffs. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| This is what I was going to say. | ||
| You were saying that people were predicting the tariffs were going to cause a recession. | ||
| So this is an interesting arc of events because one of the things that happened was President Trump announced very high tariffs on April 2nd, what he called Liberation Day. | ||
| And those tariffs were at such high levels that you saw a lot of economists saying this is going to cause a recession. | ||
| So that was when we had all, in the wake of that, we had a lot of market turmoil. | ||
| And then ultimately, even the bond market started to get a little shaky. | ||
| And so at that time, the president then announced a pause of those higher rates. | ||
| Now, we've had tariffs in the interim. | ||
| You know, he had that 10% baseline tariff. | ||
| But the higher rates had been paused. | ||
| Now, more recently, as you may know, this past week, he announced rates for most countries, some of which were negotiated, some of which weren't. | ||
| Those are still not quite back to the Liberation Day levels. | ||
| And so the reason why I bring that up is because it was the Liberation Day levels in particular that economists said this is going to cause a recession. | ||
| The tariffs that we have now and that we are getting now as a result of these latest tariff rates that the president's announced are likely to slow growth, but it's unclear whether they're actually going to cause a recession. | ||
| It seems like for a lot of corporations, they have healthy profit margins. | ||
| Maybe they can absorb some of that. | ||
| And the U.S. economy has been quite resilient. | ||
| Just over the last few years, people have been predicting recession. | ||
| The Fed was able to bring down inflation without causing a recession. | ||
| That basically never happens. | ||
| And it's a testament to sort of the resilience of the U.S. economy and the U.S. consumer. | ||
| And then the other question you asked was to compare this year's economy to last year's economy. | ||
| So I would say this year's economy is quite similar to last year's economy, but with tariffs added in. | ||
| So a lot of the impulses that have shifted have shifted as a result of tariffs. | ||
| So, you know, I think inflation is about, having ticked back up a little bit, is now back to levels that it was last year because it had cooled even more at the beginning of the year. | ||
| So at the beginning of the year, the economy was better than it was last year or now in terms of inflation. | ||
| In terms of the job market, it's pretty similar, actually. | ||
| So I think that to the extent that we've seen big macro shifts, it's particularly as a result of tariffs and sort of general uncertainty about where the tariffs are going to land. | ||
| Victoria Guida is an economics correspondent for Politico. | ||
| You can find her work online at politico.com. | ||
| Victoria, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Up next on Washington Journal, we will get an update on efforts to combat the fentanyl in the U.S. with Mazin Saleh, a harm reduction policy expert at the R Street Institute. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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, you know, 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 Q ⁇ A in all of our podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, or in our free C-SPAN Now app. | |
| 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 Karita 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 Dawson, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnstorff 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. | ||
| Joining us now to discuss the recently signed Halt All Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl or HALT Act is Mazen Swale. | ||
| He is a harm, I'm sorry, Integrated Harm Reduction Senior Policy Director at the R Street Institute. | ||
| Mazen, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me on. | |
| We'll start by having you tell our audience about the R Street Institute, its political point of view, and also how you're funded. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So the R Street Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy research organization. | ||
| We have a mission to engage in policy research and outreach to advance free markets and limited effective government. | ||
| And the team that I lead at R Street are experts that conduct in-depth research on a variety of harm reduction issues from tobacco use to opioid and illicit drugs to sexual health and more often than not how those interact with one another. | ||
| We are funded by a variety of philanthropic and corporate donors, which allows us to be fully independent in both our research and our writing. | ||
| And both your title and your team, you just mentioned it. | ||
| It's Integrated Harm Reduction Senior Policy Director. | ||
| Explain the concept of harm reduction when it comes to public health. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, harm reduction is a set of practical strategies aimed at reducing the negative effects of illicit drug use. | |
| Harm reduction really got its start in the 80s during the HIV and AIDS epidemic when individuals who injected drugs started cleaning syringes. | ||
| And so that was really where the harm reduction kind of ethos was born out of. | ||
| And it was a few weeks ago that President Trump signed legislation to combat the fentanyl crisis in the U.S. We're going to talk about that legislation, but before we do, where are we in this fight? | ||
| Have there been any gains made the past few years? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There have been some gains made, which is encouraging, but we are cautiously optimistic. | |
| We are currently in the third wave of the opioid crisis. | ||
| The first wave was around 1999 with opioid prescribing. | ||
| The second wave hit around 2010, and those were when we started seeing overdoses involving heroin. | ||
| Now, the third wave, the one we are currently in, started in 2013, and that was with the introduction of synthetic opioids like fentanyl into the market. | ||
| Now, for the first time since 2018, we are seeing a sustained reduction and deceleration in the number of overdose deaths per year since mid-August of 2023, so about 17 months, we've seen roughly a 30% reduction across the country, which is promising. | ||
| Unfortunately, those reductions have not been evenly felt amongst a variety of populations. | ||
| So black and brown communities, Indigenous communities, even older Americans. | ||
| So there's still more work to be done. | ||
| And unfortunately, probably as of data a week old now, we are starting to see upticks again in overdose deaths, primarily driven by increases in Texas and Arizona, in California, and in Washington. | ||
| And our topic is fentanyl. | ||
| Explain what exactly that is and the impact it has on a body. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. | |
| And so what it does when somebody either snorts, injects it, or smokes it, it acts like other opioids like morphine or oxycodone in the sense that the medication binds to the opioid receptors in the brain. | ||
| Now when it does bind to the opioid receptors in the brain, it blocks pain signals. | ||
| So individuals don't experience pain. | ||
| It also increases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is the reward part of the brain. | ||
| And so that is the kind of euphoric high that individuals might experience. | ||
| And so the combination of the blocking the pain and the euphoria is what makes fentanyl particularly addictive. | ||
| Our guest is Mazen Swale. | ||
| He is an Integrated Harm Reduction Senior Policy Director at the R Street Institute. | ||
| Our discussion is looking at new legislation cracking down on the fentanyl epidemic. | ||
| If you would like to ask him a question, if you have a comment, you can start calling. | ||
| And now the lines for the segment are broken down regionally. | ||
| If you're in the eastern or central time zone, it's 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you are mountain or Pacific, it's 202-748-8001. | ||
| I want to let you know we also have a line for those who have been impacted by the fentanyl, and that is 202-748-8002. | ||
| And Mazin wanted to talk about the HALT Fentanyl Act that President Trump signed a few weeks ago. | ||
| Here is a look at some of the main tenets. | ||
| It's permanent Schedule 1 classification under the Controlled Substances Act, stricter penalties for trafficking fentanyl variants. | ||
| That includes a 10-year minimum for possessing 100 grams or more of fentanyl or fentanyl-related substances. | ||
| It also facilitates research on fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances. | ||
| Does this law and its provisions adequately address what we're seeing when it comes to the overdose crisis that you were talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so we don't think it actually adequately addresses the fentanyl overdose crisis for a variety of reasons. | |
| The first of which is this is not a new thing. | ||
| So, the first class-wide scheduling actually took effect under Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the first Trump administration. | ||
| It was a temporary order to extend class-wide scheduling to all fentanyl-related substances. | ||
| And so, we have five years of experience now with this law kind of on the books, and we are still seeing the most volatile drug supply in the United States, the most toxic and lethal it's ever been. | ||
| And in addition, we saw overdose deaths really peak in 2013 again at 115,000 per year. | ||
| So, it's safe to say, with five years of experience, that the legislation as crafted is not making the impact that was hoped for. | ||
| We have callers waiting to talk with you. | ||
| We will start with Gerald, who's in Fayetteville, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning, Gerald. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Sale, C-SPAN America, good morning. | |
| How are y'all in a beautiful day? | ||
| Good, thank you. | ||
| See, I'd like to have a brief follow-up if I could after I asked him, because I'm speaking for a large subset where this particular policy has really hurt. | ||
| First of all, I'm a known elderly physically disabled patient, negatively afflicted with severe chronic non-malignant pain. | ||
| After 40-plus years of being perfect, no problems at all in my record documented for them if any abuse or anything. | ||
| Yet, after a singular, abnormal touch screen, which was proven to be wrong, for a THC, nothing serious, and I don't smoke because I'm allergic to smoke and stuff like that, I was kicked off. | ||
| Now, that forces us with what's known as a Hobson's choice. | ||
| Do we suffer? | ||
| Do we go to the dark side of the street to self-medicate? | ||
| Or do we contemplate worse? | ||
| I have the appropriate empathy and sympathy, or we do, for those who have suffered from the negative effects of this particular medication or similarly. | ||
| But what about those of us who this type of medication is appropriate and necessary? | ||
| It seems like based on their actions or lack thereof, certain clinicians seem to have been trained at the Joseph Mingler School of Medicine with advanced training at the Marcus DeSot Institute of Pain Management. | ||
| The question is this: please enlighten us, the subset of the group who have done nothing wrong for 40 years or more due to illness like paralysis and things like that. | ||
| Where do we go? | ||
| And I'd like to have a brief follow-up because everybody seems to dodge these questions when we ask them. | ||
| Please respond, sir. | ||
| Yes, I'm so sorry for the pain in the situation that you are dealing with, and you are not alone in that. | ||
| There's a number of pain patients over the last 10, 15 years who have been in similar situations. | ||
| And this really kind of stemmed from when the Drug Enforcement Administration started clamping down on how physicians prescribe opioids. | ||
| And so we find ourselves in a situation, and we certainly did back in roughly around 2007 to 2010, where individuals were out of options to manage that pain and certainly went to the illicit market to do so. | ||
| And so it really brings up, it really legitimizes, I think, what we call the iron law of prohibition, right? | ||
| Which is as enforcement gets greater, the substances involved also become more potent. | ||
| And so really that clamping down on the opioid crisis or the opioid prescribing in the early 2000s really led to the situation that we are in now. | ||
| And Joe, go ahead with your follow-up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, basically as this is, we're the ones who basically there's been a casting of the broadcasting of the net because the docs, certain doctors, and certain people manipulated the system. | |
| And those of us who have done nothing wrong are being abused. | ||
| Is that basically what the result is? | ||
| That is the result when we start thinking about class-wide scheduling. | ||
| And that is the dangerous precedent that's set when we permanently schedule all potential substances under the Schedule I classification of the Controlled Substances Act. | ||
| Now, Schedule I essentially indicates that these substances have no medical use and they have a high potential for abuse. | ||
| Now, historically, in order to schedule them on using that classification, each substance would be studied and analyzed on its own merits and the risks that it proposed to the population. | ||
| And so unfortunately, that is the situation we find ourselves in when we only focus on supply-side interventions to address the opioid crisis. | ||
| And those supply-side interventions really home in on criminalization. | ||
| Let's hear from John in Wilmington, Illinois, on the line for Impacted. | ||
| Good morning, John. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Adon. | |
| I'm pretty upset at what I'm hearing from you. | ||
| I hear nothing that gives Donald Trump credit for his public health emergency, his opioid commission, and the Support Act, which actually pays doctors a bonus to torture us patients. | ||
| I'm a chronic pain patient, just like that other gentleman. | ||
| As far as the impact that buried a brother, a sister, and a daughter, all because of untreated pain, and they ended up going out to the streets to get some kind of relief. | ||
| All of these people got cut off from their medication while they were still in pain. | ||
| I was poisoned by a statin in 2012 and developed inclusive body myopathy. | ||
| The only drugs available for this incurable and untreatable disease are opiates and amphetamines to give me the opportunity to function. | ||
| After Donald Trump decided that he was going to manipulate the CDC dosage guidelines, guidelines that were written specifically for new naive patients, and manipulated those guidelines to establish prosecutorial justification for Jeff Sessions DOJ, DEA, things started hitting the fang. | ||
| All of a sudden, I got caught off. | ||
| I'm married to a doctor. | ||
| I got caught off. | ||
| I had to prove that I still have inclusive naughty myopathy. | ||
| You go run a mile, I'll sit on my behind, and guess what? | ||
| My CPK will be 10 times higher than yours. | ||
| That means that my muscles never stop running. | ||
| If I don't have medication, I can't swallow. | ||
| I can't breathe. | ||
| I've lost a house. | ||
| I've lost all kinds of financial deals. | ||
| I'm involved in a multi-million dollar lawsuit. | ||
| And even after Illinois passed HB 5373, which basically freed up doctors to prescribe as they saw fit without having to fear any kind of legal ramifications from the federal government, I'm still being tortured. | ||
| So I want to know after reading through your website as classic liberalism, why are we giving credit to the man who increased overdoses by 350% from 2017 to 2018? | ||
| The same man who took all kinds of credit for reducing opioid scripts by 50% in his 2020 campaign and now doesn't mention nothing. | ||
| John will get a response from our guest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to begin by saying how incredibly sorry I am for the multiple losses that you suffered. | |
| That is an unimaginable tragedy and I can't really fathom that sense of loss. | ||
| But you're touching on something I think that is really important to highlight and that is what happens when the federal government gets involved in kind of the prescribing guidelines and also the role that it plays kind of in the patient doctor relationship. | ||
| I will say that the overdose crisis has been contributed to for the last 30 to 40 years from a variety of administrations that vary the political spectrum. | ||
| You know, from Nixon and the start of the war on drugs that have that enforcement first strategy to George Bush and Bill Clinton, Biden and Trump. | ||
| And so we continue to see the same types of interventions that are promoted that over the past 50 years or so have resulted in the most toxic drug supply that we have and the most amount of overdose deaths that this country has experienced. | ||
| So we think it's really time for a new way. | ||
| And that new way involves demand reduction interventions. | ||
| And so those are things like harm reduction. | ||
| It is things like getting naloxone, which is the opioid overdose reversal medication, commonly known as one of the brands, Narcan, getting that in all communities, so community saturation of that. | ||
| And something that we haven't talked about today, which is expanding the treatment infrastructure of the United States. | ||
| Now, there have been some recent actions by this administration and this Congress, unfortunately, that are moving in the opposite direction of being able to expand that treatment infrastructure. | ||
| But in order for us to be able to treat the amount of individuals with substance use disorder or dealing with pain, things of that nature, we need to really refocus on those demand side interventions. | ||
| Let's hear from Dee in Connecticut. | ||
| Good morning, Dee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | ||
| I just have a brief question, and that is, given the fact that fentanyl is so lethal, how does the government dispose of the massive amounts of fentanyl that it seizes? | ||
| And also, is there a chance that this seized fentanyl can turn up in our food or water supply if it's improperly disposed of during the disposal process? | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| So I am not an expert on kind of the disposal of those illicit drugs. | ||
| I think what we have seen when the federal government disposes of medications, whether licit or illicit, is it's usually through incineration, so burning those medications. | ||
| But I can't speak to where that is done or the impacts on the environment that that might have. | ||
| Mazen, you touched on this, but this question came in on X from MLB says, what are some of the most effective programs to fight drug abuse? | ||
| We never hear about them. | ||
| Are there any programs that are highly effective that target fentanyl abuse? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the first thing is the gold standard treatment for opioid use disorder, which are medications for opioid use disorder. | |
| They include two particular medications, buprenorphine and methadone. | ||
| Now, out of the millions that are suffering with substance use disorder, only a fraction, roughly 6.3%, have access to those medications. | ||
| And that's for a variety of reasons. | ||
| Methadone is extremely regulated. | ||
| You can only get them in opioid treatment programs. | ||
| And opioid treatment programs are not spread evenly geographically throughout the United States. | ||
| And so for individuals to be able to take their dose of methadone, oftentimes they have to travel a few hours each way to be able to do that. | ||
| And if they have multiple doses throughout the day, you can imagine how much interruption that is to trying to hold down a job or feeding a family or taking care of kids. | ||
| Buprenorphin is available through physician prescribing, but what we are seeing in pharmacies across the United States are that it is actually not being dispensed as much as it could be or prescribed. | ||
| And a lot of that has to deal with stigma around people who use drugs and their appearance in pharmacy settings. | ||
| Stanley is in Delaware. | ||
| Good morning, Stanley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I'd like to thank C-SPAN for the format. | ||
| Go ahead, Stanley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yes. | |
| My first question is, what are the total opiate or opiates overdose deaths during the three waves of the overdose events that you talked about? | ||
| And the second question is that research has noted that the overdose deaths have decreased. | ||
| And the myth or urban legend is that there's a burnout rate or we're just running out of people or it's running out of people to kill. | ||
| So in response to your first question, with the three waves of the opioid crisis, so if we stretch back about 25 years or so, what we are actually experiencing is nearing 1 million lives lost, which is an astronomical figure. | ||
| And regarding your second question in terms of the reasons for the current deceleration of overdose deaths across the country, researchers are trying to pinpoint what exactly that is, but it's not one particular thing. | ||
| We think it's a combination of things. | ||
| One being that the supply itself is changing. | ||
| To give you an idea of how volatile the drug supply is in the United States, there's a great researcher at University of North Carolina. | ||
| His name is Dr. Naburan Daskupta. | ||
| And his lab at North Carolina brings in and tests street drugs from around the United States. | ||
| And his lab has found 400 unique substances in the U.S. drug supply. | ||
| And so part of the reduction could be the shift in how fentanyl has spread across the country. | ||
| Now, work that we have done at the R Street Institute also shows that shift where fentanyl really was involved in opioid overdose deaths starting on the East Coast and then working its way westward. | ||
| And so that's one particular reason. | ||
| The other reason is the frequency of naloxone in the community. | ||
| And so there's been federal efforts to equip first responders and other kind of institutions. | ||
| There's been activity at the state level to get naloxone in schools and community centers and public parks. | ||
| And so that is really the community saturation that we talk about when we want naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal agent in the country. | ||
| And then the third, which you touched on, which is the more devastating statistic, is that the people that would be most vulnerable to overdose have unfortunately succumbed. | ||
| And you just mentioned one of the drugs that can be used to revive those. | ||
| This question coming in from Barb in Long Grove, Illinois, she asked, would Mr. Saleh have information regarding Narcan availability for the general public to use in emergency situations? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, so Narcan received over-the-counter designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about a year and a half, two years ago. | |
| And so it should be available in retail pharmacies. | ||
| If you don't see it on the shelves, I would certainly ask a pharmacist or a front desk attendant to get that Narcan. | ||
| The second is Narcan has a very easy-to-use auto injecture, and there's actually an insert in the package that shows you how you can administer the drug and what you should do in terms of waiting times. | ||
| And so it should be available. | ||
| If it is not available in retail pharmacies, I would encourage you to reach out to community health centers or harm reduction organizations that you might be close to, and they will have that information. | ||
| You just mentioned community health centers. | ||
| We've done segments looking at how they have been impacted by cuts to the federal government. | ||
| When looking at the fentanyl epidemic, what is the impact spending cuts have on addiction-related public health and science programs, including funding for Medicaid? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The cuts are going to have a pretty dramatic impact, but it's not going to happen all at once. | |
| And the reason they're going to have a dramatic impact is there have been staff reductions and funding reductions at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, known as SAMHSA, at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Human Resources and Services Administration. | ||
| So these three federal agencies really do a lot of kind of grant funding to communities and states across the country to address some of these issues. | ||
| And also what's looming quite large are the deep cuts to Medicaid that are anticipated. | ||
| Now, Medicaid has around 71 million enrollees. | ||
| And out of those, around 21% qualify for a substance use disorder, whether that is alcohol or illicit drugs. | ||
| Now, out of those, so because of that sheer volume, Medicaid is the single largest payer for substance use disorder treatment in the United States. | ||
| And so we can certainly expect reductions in staff, reduction in funding to really affect naloxone reaching community centers, equipping first-line responders, and really starting to limit how individuals can get medications for opioid use disorder if they are in treatment, how opioid treatment programs are paid through insurance schemes and the sort. | ||
| Byron is in Wilson, North Carolina. | ||
| Good morning, Byron. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I got something very that nobody has thought about, and it's so simple. | ||
| We are 4% of the population, I'll say, in the United States says, we consume 50% of the world's illegal drugs. | ||
| We are a sick nation mentally. | ||
| Nobody is looking at that. | ||
| Even with our politics, we're getting sicker and sicker now mentally. | ||
| It's affecting me. | ||
| And so when you look at this, you got to look at if we could stop all the fentanyl from coming in here tomorrow. | ||
| If you're a sick mentally nation, and every nation is, but we are over the limit. | ||
| If you're a nation like that, people are going to find something to ease their pain. | ||
| And you can stop the fentanyl, but you'll get something else to take the fentanyl's place. | ||
| Now, we're spending all this money to stop the fentanyl from coming in. | ||
| Now, if you as an addict, you're sitting down here, you need something. | ||
| Oh, I can't get no fentanyl. | ||
| You don't think they'll come up with another synthetic drug. | ||
| You are putting band-aids on the problem. | ||
| We have been doing it for years. | ||
| And nobody's looking at the real problem. | ||
| And we, like I said, we are a sick nation. | ||
| One other thing, C-SPAN, that I want to tell you, please listen to this, and it's good advice. | ||
| You had a show on the Israel thing, I think it was yesterday, the day before. | ||
| And the guy you had up there was a professional talker, and all he did was filibuster. | ||
| You had three calls to come in from people. | ||
| Now, you'll get these people up there that can run their mouth and influence you, and you just let them go on and on and on. | ||
| And you don't let the people that's calling in talk. | ||
| I said, that's a shame. | ||
| And then you didn't have no one up there that's telling the side from the other side of the story. | ||
| So y'all guys getting better, like that Carla said the other day, but you still can go a lot further. | ||
| And if you don't do this, you're going to end up being just like Wall Street Journal and all them other stations. | ||
| And you're going to be, if you're not already influenced by the people that own all of our media, you're going to be in the same boat there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you got to stand up and be the people stationed. | |
| And, you know, I hope you do, but I really want everyone to look at our sickness here in this nation and think about it. | ||
| If you took all the fentanyl away, what would happen? | ||
| All these people would come straight? | ||
| No, you've got to go to the problem, to the root of the problem. | ||
| And we seem to do this with everything. | ||
| And I would like to see you have a show on Haiti because we got it. | ||
| Byron, we're going to get a response from Mazin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I believe you're touching on something that's extremely important. | |
| And one of the reasons why I'm here today, which is to really advocate for an intensive focus on demand reduction. | ||
| And so we can do as much as we want trying to reduce the amount of drugs that are coming into this nation. | ||
| But until we really address the demand, that's really going to be for naught. | ||
| And ways that we can certainly do that is ramping up our mental and behavioral health workforce and ramping up our treatment infrastructure. | ||
| Individuals who want to access treatment today can't access treatment for a variety of reasons. | ||
| It's out of touch, it's too far, it's too expensive. | ||
| And so we need to make treatment affordable and accessible to all in that sense. | ||
| And you have really good comments on what is, you know, fentanyl today might be something else tomorrow. | ||
| We are seeing research emerge from Europe right now and the introduction here over the last 15 months or so of an ultra-potent synthetic opioid called nitazine. | ||
| And it is up to five times more powerful than fentanyl, which again talks about that iron law of prohibition. | ||
| The more we focus on enforcement, the more compact and potent the substances that we're trying to enforce are. | ||
| Let's hear from Robert in Utah. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Yeah, Mazan, I just had a question concerning the use of fentanyl and these other drugs here in America. | ||
| Why are we always so defeated by this in America? | ||
| And how do we compare statistically to other parts of the world and developed nations? | ||
| Is it just an addictive society problem or is it a fentanyl problem? | ||
| Currently, it is a fentanyl. | ||
| Fentanyl isn't shipped as much or there isn't really a demand for it as much as other developed nations. | ||
| In addition, there's a variety of other factors that contribute to the treatment of individuals with substance use disorders that might be more resourced or more sophisticated in other nations. | ||
| And so it's really a combination of factors. | ||
| But in the United States, currently, it is fentanyl just given how supply chains for drugs are conducted. | ||
| During last month's bill signing, President Trump touted the harsher penalties for drug dealers. | ||
| This is a question. | ||
| LRB sent in on X says, knowingly trafficking fentanyl should result in capital punishment. | ||
| What punishment do countries with low or no drug problems use that is successful? | ||
| Fentanyl is as effective as any assault weapon and results in what I believe is mass murder. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So really that is representative of the enforcement first approach. | ||
| We have had so fentanyl and other extremely potent substances have been prosecuted for a number of years. | ||
| And so what we tend to find are the harsher prison sentences tend to result in scooping up lower level dealers, so dealers on the bottom of the totem pole of the drug supply chain. | ||
| And those individuals, more often than not, also have substance use disorders. | ||
| And so rather than pushing them into this endless cycle of incarceration, potential for higher overdose once they come out of incarceration and then back into the social network of dealing with illicit substances again, because now they have a criminal record, they can't get a job, they can't afford housing, things of that nature. | ||
| It's time to really kind of take a different approach and really start rehabilitating individuals by ensuring they have access to proven treatments to address substance use disorder. | ||
| And the reason why other countries are a bit more successful in it is really the gold standard treatments and medications that I had alluded to earlier. | ||
| So buprenorphine and methadone are not as restricted and regulated in other countries than they are in the United States. | ||
| A couple minutes left. | ||
| We'll get in a couple more calls. | ||
| Mike in at Strawberry Plains, Tennessee. | ||
| Good morning, Mike. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you, C-SPAN. | ||
| Just a couple of questions for your guest. | ||
| To be honest, right with you, I'm a lifelong drug addict. | ||
| I know I'll always be that. | ||
| But when I was young, I did it for the high. | ||
| And as I'm older, I understand some of the drugs that I did help with my chronic pain. | ||
| But back to the first question I have for him is: why hasn't he talked about the responsibility of the person taking the drug? | ||
| You have to take responsibility for your actions, even though I understand greatly what he's, you know, the program's about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the second question is: I'm older, I say older, I'm a senior. | |
| In chronic pain, I have never asked my doctors for a pain pill because they want to give me the opiate, which makes me, I'm not allergic to it, but it makes me sick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry. | |
| So I'm not going to take that. | ||
| But I do have the right as a human, as whatever you want to call us. | ||
| The way we have the right: is this the rest of my life? | ||
| Am I going to be paying or in pain, this chronic pain that never stops 24-7? | ||
| Am I going to be that kind of person that is in pain for the rest of my life? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why can I not get a straight answer from doctors, physicians, surgeons? | |
| And so maybe he can answer my question, and I'll hang up and listen to his response. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm sorry that you are in pain, and that is the situation you are experiencing with your providers. | ||
| I think you bring up a really good point on personal responsibility. | ||
| There are a lot of things around the ways that we address drug use in the United States that actually strips individual autonomy and personal responsibility and decision-making from the individual who is using drugs. | ||
| Part of that is a byproduct of the War on Drugs mentality, the over-criminalization of the wrong types of drugs versus the right kinds of drugs. | ||
| And also that really starts bleeding into stigmatizing providers who are prescribing these medications for individuals like yourself who are dealing with pain and pain management. | ||
| And so we're finding that providers are concerned that they're going to be flagged in systems that moderate prescribing of opioids and other pain medications in the United States. | ||
| And so really, I want to pinpoint how important it is that as we craft laws to address the overdose crisis in the United States, that we put individual autonomy and personal responsibility at the forefront and give individuals options, which is, I think, the most important thing to be able to live a better and safer life. | ||
| And part of that is making sure that they have access to medications for opioid use disorder, access to surge service programs, and other harm reduction interventions that can keep them safer while they are on that journey. | ||
| Susan in Clarksville, Tennessee. | ||
| Good morning, Susan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning. | |
| I'm in the recovery field. | ||
| I'm a recovering alcoholic. | ||
| I haven't had a drink in 16 years. | ||
| But 10 years ago, I had a boyfriend. | ||
| He was dying of cancer. | ||
| And the husband finally came in, but they left bottles of liquid fentanyl and morphine patches, all kinds of patches. | ||
| And when he finally passed, there was no accounting for the medication that was left. | ||
| And I said something to a lady, and she just stuck all the patches on toilet paper and flushed it. | ||
| And I was like, oh, man. | ||
| And with the baby boomers getting older and grandma and grandpa with their pain medicine in the bathroom that anybody could get a hold of, I have a feeling it's going to get a little worse. | ||
| I kind of do wish they would legalize marijuana to help with people's whatever's going on. | ||
| I hear it helps with pain. | ||
| I don't smoke it, but I don't know. | ||
| I just worry about the baby boomer age getting older and it might have an uptick of drugs. | ||
| I think what we are seeing are older Americans are increasingly more susceptible to overdose deaths. | ||
| I will say that with the clamping down on opioid prescribing in the late 90s and early 2000s, we should be seeing less and less of large amounts of fentanyl and other opioids being prescribed and left available. | ||
| And so I will say that there is currently research right now to look and try and discover new drugs that are not opioid derivatives to help to deal with pain management. | ||
| And so that is something that we are watching closely. | ||
| One more call for you. | ||
| It's Kathy in Murrow, Ohio. | ||
| Good morning, Kathy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Go ahead, Kathy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I was calling to talk about, he was saying back in the 90s and 2000 that they cracked down on the doctors over prescribing opioids. | |
| And then after that, everybody started going to the clinics, which I am in one of the clinics. | ||
| And they're talking about taking federal fundings from the clinics. | ||
| If they take the federal funding from the clinics and the doctors are not allowed to prescribe anything to keep you comfortable, what are people like me supposed to do? | ||
| And also, I have a friend who is very ill and was on pain medication, and his doctor just cut him off completely. | ||
| And he went to the streets to buy drugs, and he got some fentanyl and it killed him. | ||
| Now, I don't want to be one of those people. | ||
| So I was wondering what are people who are in the clinics, what are we supposed to do? | ||
| If history is any indicator of the future, I think unfortunately, we can certainly expect some also devastating incidences. | ||
| I'm so sorry for the loss of your friend. | ||
| And I think that, you know, we can't talk about treatment and recovery as a nation while simultaneously kind of dismantling some of the infrastructure pieces that are required for treatment. | ||
| And so proven effect interventions like surgeon service programs and things of that nature are really helpful to being able to connect people to the care they need and eventual treatment. | ||
| And, you know, Dr. Descupta, who I had mentioned a bit earlier, had a really intriguing and I think innovative thing that hasn't been quite as discussed as much, which is, is it time to move on from a national drug control policy to a regional drug control policy or a state or a city-based drug control policy, just given the volatility of the drug supply, | ||
| the use patterns that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and the solutions that can be better tailored at the community level than they can at the federal level. | ||
| Mazen Saleh is the Integrated Harm Reduction Senior Policy Director at the R Street Institute. | ||
| You can find his work online at RStreet.org. | ||
| Mazen, thank you so much for being with us this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me. | |
| We are wrapping up today's Washington Journal with more of your calls in open form. | ||
| Open form, you can start calling. | ||
| And now the lines there on your screens, Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8000 and 2. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
American History TV, exploring the people and events that tell the American story. | |
| This weekend, as the nation begins to celebrate its semi-quincentennial, American History TV begins a year-long series, America 250, on the American Revolution and its impact on the country. | ||
| On lectures in history, Texas Christian University professor Jean Ellen Smith on George Washington's character, how Washington interacted with his contemporaries, how he viewed himself, and how we remember him today. | ||
| Then we continue exploring America's founding with the parade marking the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. | ||
| The celebration includes an enlistment ceremony, a parachute demonstration, and fireworks. | ||
| And on the Civil War, historians discuss technology developed during the war, African American regiments, and the Civil War's impact on American society at a conference hosted by the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. | ||
| Exploring the American story, watch American History TV every weekend and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| 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 Dawsie, 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. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We are in open form for the duration of today's Washington Journal. | ||
| The next 25 minutes or so, there's a public policy issue you'd like to discuss. | ||
| You can give us a call. | ||
| We'll start with Jack in Ozark, Missouri, Line 4 Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Jack. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Actually, I was going to. | ||
| Jack, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Actually, I was going to talk about the fentanyl. | ||
| Well, good morning. | ||
| Hi, Jack. | ||
| You can still discuss that if you want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay, I was going to talk about the fentanyl crisis, and I was on oxycodone in Wisconsin for seven years, and I moved to, okay. | ||
| I was on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was on Oxycodone. | ||
| Here, let me turn my phone down. | ||
| I was on Oxycodone in Wisconsin for seven years. | ||
| I moved to Springfield, Missouri. | ||
| And due to pain management doctor in Springfield, Missouri over prescribing, there were only two doctors left in Springfield that would prescribe opioids. | ||
| Well, I went to one and I was in their program, but I was given two valions in preparation injection in the back. | ||
| And I ended up being short one valion because someone cleaned my house, stole one. | ||
| Anyway, anyway, I got kicked out. | ||
| I mean, not kicked out, but I got transferred to Bufenorfron. | ||
| Now, Bufen-Norfin made me crazy. | ||
| And what I mean by that is I was disorganized and just acting strange. | ||
| And I went to my primary care doctor. | ||
| They diagnosed me with dementia. | ||
| Well, I went off of it and when, well, I had entered into a nursing home and I went off of it. | ||
| I've taken myself off of it. | ||
| And then went to neurologists and they said, you don't have dementia. | ||
| And I just wondered if anyone else has had a problem with the Bufenorphan impacting their mental capacity or their thinking, creating thinking disorders. | ||
| Anyway, I'm been off of the Buchanorphan for several months now, and I'm fine. | ||
| My cognitive skills are back. | ||
| My daughter says, I'm glad to have my dad back. | ||
| So it's a serious issue. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I'm just wondering if any other people have had that comment, had that problem. | ||
| And that was Jack in Missouri talking about his experience. | ||
| Let's hear from Robert in Virginia Beach, Virginia, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Robert. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I just wanted to say God bless America. | ||
| And my topic is the Cincinnati, Ohio mob beating. | ||
| That was vicious and unacceptable. | ||
| That's why I support President Trump to help get these big cities cleaned up. | ||
| Sadly, the Democrats seem to support lawlessness in favor of siding with criminals. | ||
| I think it's time we get back to traditional values. | ||
| Everyone in Virginia, I hope you vote right in November so we don't become Maryland or New Jersey. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Have a great Saturday, everyone. | ||
| That was Robert in Virginia. | ||
| Pappy is in Minnesota on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Pappy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| I am a proud Union Construction Labor. | ||
| And I'll tell you right now, this Donald Trump, he is nobody. | ||
| He's nothing but a wannabe. | ||
| He thinks he's going to be a dictator of this country. | ||
| I guarantee that people will rise up and they will send him back to Mar-a-Lago where he belongs. | ||
| He should have never been voted. | ||
| All these terrorists he's doing. | ||
| He thinks he's really bad. | ||
| I'll tell you right now, the people in this country, the smart people, the good people in this country, both sides of the aisle, are going to wake up and are going to put him back in Mar-a-Lago where he belongs so he can go cheat on his golf game. | ||
| You hear that me, buddy? | ||
| You cheat on your golf game. | ||
| And I'm going to let this go before I say anything else that will get me in trouble. | ||
| But Donald Trump, you are not going to be a dictator of this country. | ||
| You go back to Mar-a-Lago where you belong. | ||
| That was Pappy in Minnesota. | ||
| Scott in Illinois on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Scott. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning, America. | ||
| And God bless you, Tammy, for talking to me again. | ||
| I'm two months after that honor flight, and I'm almost back to normal, except for the diabetes, but I got to live with that. | ||
| But anyways, there's two points I want to make, and I try not to complain. | ||
| But I'm a baby boomer. | ||
| When I grew up, we had Smokey Bear on TV, don't throw your cigarette, and prevent forest fires, and no littering signs everywhere. | ||
| Now I go through, I won't name the stores, but I go in big parking lots and I pick up trash all the time, and there's more trash cans in this world than ever. | ||
| Or if keep a bag in your car, but I pick up diapers, I pick bottles, I pick up fast food bags. | ||
| I'm like, come on, people, stop littering. | ||
| And they tell me now, I used to drive semi, but the guys, I'm retired. | ||
| But the guys on the road say you should see the roadsides. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Okay, that's that. | ||
| Secondly, we have an epidemic of diabetes and our kids overweight. | ||
| This homeless kid, he stole one of these monster drinks. | ||
| And I was outside having a cigarette and a cup of coffee at a convenience store. | ||
| And anyways, they chased him. | ||
| He dropped it. | ||
| So I picked it up to throw it in the trash. | ||
| There are 24 chemicals on it, 162% of your daily sugar. | ||
| And if our kids are drinking this stuff, no wonder they're getting diabetes. | ||
| 24 chemicals. | ||
| Luckily, I'm educated. | ||
| I can read what they are. | ||
| I don't know what they are, but I can read them. | ||
| And I'm like, wow. | ||
| You know, I think they have to, Ms. Kennedy, please, you have to look at it to make it like beer. | ||
| When I grew up, it was 18 to drink. | ||
| Now it's 21. | ||
| But at 18, you're an adult. | ||
| You can get married. | ||
| You can do everything. | ||
| But anyways, so let's make those energy drinks, you know, 18. | ||
| And if you want to become a diabetic in 21, 20, go, I can't stop you. | ||
| But for these young kids drinking this stuff, it's the downfall of our youth. | ||
| So thank you, Tammy. | ||
| Good to hear from you again, and God bless the United States. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Scott in Illinois. | ||
| This is a headline in this morning's Washington Post. | ||
| Trump says he's repositioning nuclear subs in veiled threat to Russia. | ||
| The article says that President Trump on Friday said he deployed two nuclear submarines into technical positions after online threats from former Russian President Dmitry Medivedev. | ||
| Says escalating tensions between the two nuclear superpowers as Trump's frustration against Moscow mounts. | ||
| Says Trump said on social media that Medavev's highly provocative statements led him to dispatch the submarines just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. | ||
| Words are very important and can often lead to unintended consequences. | ||
| Trump continued capping and intensifying exchange between the two men who have long been at odds. | ||
| I hope this will not be one of those instances, says Medavev. | ||
| Now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council has referenced the Soviet Union's emerging nuclear strike capabilities in a Telegram post that told Trump to imagine The Walking Dead, an apocalyptic television series. | ||
| Hours after social media posts, Trump said he deployed the submarines because Medavev's threat was inappropriate. | ||
| He did not answer questions about where he sent the subs. | ||
| It was yesterday that President Trump was asked about that deployment. | ||
| Here is his response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what did Medvedev say to you? | |
| That means he's really mad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you just have to read what he said. | |
| He was talking about nuclear. | ||
| When you talk about nuclear, we have to be prepared. | ||
| And we're totally prepared. | ||
| Just about 15 minutes left in this morning's Washington Journal. | ||
| We are in open form. | ||
| Let's hear from Omar in Brooklyn, New York, Line for Independence. | ||
| Good morning, Omar. | ||
| Omar, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm here. | |
| Can you hear me? | ||
| Hi, Omar. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| Yes, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, is this Kimberly or Tammy? | |
| It's Tammy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Hi, good morning, Tammy. | ||
| Good morning, America. | ||
| And most importantly to me, good morning, Black America, Foundation of Black America. | ||
| I just want to remind everybody today that today is James Baldwin's birthday. | ||
| It's his 101st birthday. | ||
| I noticed a lot of the birthdays, like Malcolm X's birthday. | ||
| C-SPAN Washington Journal is doing a horrible job in reminding us of our historical black Americans. | ||
| Also, I want to point out something about Washington Journal. | ||
| The fact that you guys bring on a lot of different people, whether they're podcasters or what have you, I would like to make a request. | ||
| My request is to please have Tariq Nasheed on. | ||
| He is a representative of foundational black American speech, the way we speak it now. | ||
| And what we're talking about is reparations and an anti-black hate crime bill. | ||
| These are the things that are important to foundational black Americans, like Americans like myself. | ||
| So I would have really, really appreciated if you would take my request into consideration and have him on there so he can speak to all of these white supremacists that call and blame every problem of politics and every politic in America on black Americans, black people, like Obama. | ||
| Everything is Obama's fault or Kamala's fault. | ||
| I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent. | ||
| Y'all all do it. | ||
| And this is the acceptable racism that I'm soaked that we black Americans are trying to just stop. | ||
| White supremacy is running rampant in our country. | ||
| And it's making it seem like it's okay. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| You can't have enclaves of white people building communities, talking about they don't want anybody in there. | ||
| Like they have right now online, they have a guy talking about he's building a community, a private community, and only members only that he only wants to allow white people to have the property. | ||
| Like seriously, people, and this is the problem. | ||
| We can't allow this type of stuff. | ||
| Because when you have things like this, you have Mormon communities. | ||
| I saw a lady online. | ||
| She was saying she was a Mormon, grew up a Mormon. | ||
| She literally believed that black people were the salt of the earth. | ||
| Like we are not even valid to be in the quote-unquote gates of heaven based on what she learned in her church. | ||
| So please do me a favor, have Tariq Nasheed on Black First. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was Omar in New York. | ||
| Richard is in Parsons, West Virginia, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Richard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you talking to me? | |
| I'm in Richard. | ||
| Oh, I apologize. | ||
| They put Wyoming or West Virginia on my screen. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I'm talking about Epstein. | |
| You hear me, that guy? | ||
| He supposedly killed himself in jail. | ||
| I believe with this kind of money, he probably reset this up and had somebody else burnt. | ||
| And I think he's alive somewhere. | ||
| Truman or Trump, I think he's a bit jealous of Epstein because Epstein was a better looking guy. | ||
| Now, this deal about food, you know, I've ate sugar and red dye and salt quite a bit all the time in my life. | ||
| I'm 88 years old, and they say that's just going to kill me. | ||
| So I guess I'm ready to go if that's what it takes. | ||
| As far as this deal about all whites, yeah, down there, somebody's trying to get an organization just to have all whites, no Jews or blacks or Hispanics. | ||
| So I guess it's a national thing. | ||
| It looks like it's coming to us. | ||
| Okay, I'll let you go. | ||
| That was Richard in Wyoming. | ||
| We'll talk with Rick in Crawfordsville, Indiana, line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and how are you today? | |
| Doing well, Rick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| You know, I tell you what's wrong with the control right here is, ma'am, is that they're just too much arguments. | ||
| There's just nothing but hatred, hatred, hatred. | ||
| And be honest with you, a lot of it is they're kicking God, kicking Jesus to the curb. | ||
| They're not thinking about him. | ||
| They worship leaders like Trump. | ||
| Sometimes I'm mad at him anyway. | ||
| Leaders like Trump and everybody. | ||
| They always worship the leader. | ||
| They never worship Jesus. | ||
| And the churches are guilty of it, too. | ||
| All they do is talk of politics, politics, politics. | ||
| That's what's making this country so upset and so negative. | ||
| And you know them storms in Texas and stuff. | ||
| Well, I'm going to tell you what, that's mild. | ||
| That's just medium. | ||
| And the earthquake, you guys have not seen anything yet. | ||
| People are going against Jesus Christ. | ||
| And the earth's going to shake. | ||
| He's bringing the waves in to try to wake you people up. | ||
| But if you guys don't wake up and start serving Jesus, and he will heal the land, I guarantee you one thing: you're not going to be around much longer. | ||
| We're on our last days right now. | ||
| That was Rick in Indiana. | ||
| Also, in Indiana, is Sandra on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Sandra. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| Hello. | ||
| I agree with the man who just got through speaking. | ||
| I think the world is coming to an end because of all the lies and everything else that's going on, and people are changing things, and people are accepting the change. | ||
| My biggest concern is about Trump. | ||
| I do not like the man. | ||
| He's a liar. | ||
| We all should hear with our ears and see with our eyes. | ||
| But we better be careful. | ||
| Trump is a liar, and he thinks that he knows it all. | ||
| And his plan is the best plan. | ||
| So far, it hasn't been. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's got people even in the Democrats, I mean, sorry, the Republicans, who still doesn't back him up some, but they're right there beside him. | |
| I don't know when people are going to realize that he is just a joke. | ||
| What he wanted, that's what he gets. | ||
| And it's also stated on TV that he is still mad because he didn't get the presidency back when he first wanted it. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I believe that. | |
| I believe more of what the people is saying than what he is saying. | ||
| And if he doesn't straighten his little butt up, then the people is going to start getting wiser and wiser and wiser because their eyes, I agree with the man, their eyes have to be open and their ears have to hear what God is telling us. | ||
| This world is going to be an end. | ||
| And that was Sandra in Indiana. | ||
| Kim is in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Kim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my calls. | ||
| I was calling about the situation in Gaza. | ||
| I am so glad that Witcoff and Huckabee went over there and actually showed what's happening on the ground. | ||
| There's so much propaganda coming out about those people that are starving. | ||
| I agree that there are some people that are hungry over there, but I don't understand why we are responsible. | ||
| America is responsible, and Israel is responsible for feeding those people. | ||
| Why aren't the Arab countries stepping up to feed those people? | ||
| I believe that there's no solution for those people sitting there in the rubble. | ||
| It's ridiculous that they make them sit there in this rubble and beg for food. | ||
| They have to be moved to a safe place. | ||
| And that's what President Trump with Huckabee and Witcoff, that's what they're working on, is moving those people to a safe place where they can get the food. | ||
| Because Hamas is stealing that food. | ||
| As soon as it's delivered, Hamas takes it and they sell it back to people to get the money to fund more terrorism. | ||
| And it's just insane. | ||
| If they really care about those people, they would move them to a safe place and make sure that they get plenty of food and a clean place to sleep and all of that. | ||
| And then that entire place needs to be just completely cleaned and started over, like President Trump said. | ||
| Just make it a new place because the way it is right now, it's not working. | ||
| That was Kim in Oklahoma. | ||
| This is a headline from the Hill Senate approves more than $180 billion in 2026 funding before August recess. | ||
| It says that the Senate on Friday passed its first trench of government funding bills for fiscal year 2026 ahead of its upcoming August recess. | ||
| But Congress is bracing for a potentially messy fight to prevent a shutdown when they return in September. | ||
| The chamber approved three bills that provide more than $180 billion in discretionary funding for the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, military construction, legislative branch operations, and rural development. | ||
| It says that the bills passed in two parts on an 87 to 9 vote for military construction, VA and agriculture and FDA funding, and an 81 to 15 vote for legislative branch funding. | ||
| It says the votes capped off days of uncertainty over whether the Senate would be joining the House on a month-long recess with any of its 12 annual funding bills passed out of chamber. | ||
| Just a few minutes left in this open form. | ||
| Today's Washington Journal. | ||
| Let's hear from Jay, who's in Tennessee, on the line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Jay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| How are you? | ||
| Doing well, Jay. | ||
| I just want to say, Denver Crash Borough wake up. | ||
| Get out of their ruts. | ||
| They ain't got no sense. | ||
| You look at Booker up yonder and Jeffrey HCC, how they talk and stand for hours and hours talking. | ||
| Well, what they're standing there talking about working with the Republicans and get this weight and abuse out of Medicare and everything else. | ||
| But they don't. | ||
| They just stand up for hours and hours talking. | ||
| Well, you should be talking to the Republicans and working with them because they're starting to straighten this place out while Biden left. | ||
| Biden left it in terrible mess. | ||
| I figured it'd take Trump half of his term to get straightened out. | ||
| Within six months, he's getting it pretty well straightened out. | ||
| He just needs a little bit more time. | ||
| I hope he does, because if not, you know, I just, I mean, I voted for him because I didn't want to vote for Harris, but she's a nutcase. | ||
| And I hope she don't run at all no more. | ||
| She needs to go somewhere and just sit in the background. | ||
| That's where she needs to be. | ||
| I'm a black man, and she don't represent me. | ||
| I mean, majority of black people, I mean, didn't like her because, you know, she don't represent our race because, you know, that woman on the Supreme Court, she don't know what a woman is. | ||
| Jay, who would you, we're still a few years away from the 2028 presidential election, but who would you like to see running? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hope that, well, ain't no Democrats out there. | |
| He's got no policies at all. | ||
| All they want to do is raise taxes and then silly bills, you know, don't help America. | ||
| I hope Rick Puppin stays in there. | ||
| I hope he keeps seeing it in the house. | ||
| Because you're getting the Democrats within six months. | ||
| If they're in there, they're destroying what's going on right now. | ||
| It's like Biden did. | ||
| Like Trump said, he said he should have gone to the beach and stayed there and left everything alone and everything be perfect. | ||
| These people's uncompetent Democrats. | ||
| They just got policy out there. | ||
| You look at Jasmine Crockett, her mouth on her, and Maxine Waters and all these. | ||
| That's cuss and all that stuff. | ||
| They should get some policies. | ||
| They ain't got no policies. | ||
| They don't want Americans to prosper. | ||
| They just want power. | ||
| They don't want to help nobody. | ||
| They just want to have the staff look out closely out there. | ||
| The call of mine she made to the stock market. | ||
| She had inside trading. | ||
| And look at what Hillary Crayton has done trying to put that stuff on him. | ||
| I mean, these people are, I mean, I'm a Democrat, but these people are evil. | ||
| I mean, you can't be like it. | ||
| I mean, the man went through four years and they tried to put him in jail and try to assassinate him. | ||
| You know, these people are evil. | ||
| That was Jay in Tennessee in our last call for today's program. | ||
| Charlotte in London, Kentucky, on the line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Charlotte. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning. | |
| As a senior citizen, my concern is they keep talking about Social Security running out of money in so many years. | ||
| I understand there's a cap on Social Security where people stop paying Social Secure into the Social Security. | ||
| And this is a bipartisan issue. | ||
| I think if they got together and raised that cap, you know, that would make up for the downfall of the money. | ||
| And the people that stopped paying at a certain amount would just continue to pay for up to another cab. | ||
| And basically, that's what I'm just concerned that there's going to be cuts to Social Security and to Medicare. | ||
| And so I'm hoping that Congress gets together and does something to do so that we don't run out of money and lose our benefits. | ||
| I live with a disabled husband, and we live on Social Security and a little veterans. | ||
| And we really need to make sure that our money's still going to be there when we need it. | ||
| And that's what I had to say this morning. | ||
| And thank you for taking my call. | ||
| That was Charlotte in Kentucky, our last call for today's Washington Journal. | ||
| Thank you for being with us. | ||
| We'll be back tomorrow morning with another program at 7 a.m. Eastern and 4 a.m. Pacific. | ||
| Until then, enjoy your Saturday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington to across the country. | |
| Coming up Sunday morning, Sean Trendy of Real Clear Politics discusses political news of the week and previews the upcoming midterm elections. | ||
| And Mother Jones Anna Merlin covers conspiracy theories in U.S. politics. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Sunday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| Next, Virginia's Republican Governor Glenn Young talks about the population increase in Virginia, tax relief, and housing development at an event hosted by Unleash Prosperity in Washington, D.C. | ||
| Then, Oklahoma's Republican Governor Kevin Stitt and Maryland's Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, along with two military veterans, talk about the American Dream at the National Governors Association's summer meeting in Colorado Springs, Colorado. | ||
| And later, a discussion with Senators Bernie Moreno and Tina Smith on the costs of home ownership and ways federal policy could address those rising costs. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. |