| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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Democracy Unfiltered. | |
| And a live look from the White House as we wait for Press Secretary Caroline Levitt to speak to reporters shortly. | ||
| This is the first press briefing since yesterday's Catholic school shooting in Minneapolis that killed two children. | ||
| Ms. Levitt is also expected to face more questions on the administration's federal law enforcement operations in Washington, D.C. and the firing of CDC Director Susan Menares. | ||
| While we wait for the briefing to begin, we'll show a discussion from our own Washington Journal. | ||
| And we're glad to welcome back to our desk economist Steve Moore, a longtime advisor to President Trump on economic issues, syndicated columnist, co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. | ||
| I want to start with the news that the U.S. government is going to take a 10% stake in the chip manufacturing company Intel. | ||
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What are the economic implications of that, and is this a good deal for Americans? | |
| No, it isn't. | ||
| And the federal government should never give money to corporations. | ||
| It's a terrible idea. | ||
| It becomes corporate welfare. | ||
| The government does not do a good job of picking winners and losers. | ||
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We should have learned that over the last 30 years with Salindra and Fisker and the solar power companies. | |
| And so many of these things that the government has invested in, the California high-speed rail system, have just been boondoggles that have lost a lot of money for taxpayers. | ||
| So it's not appropriate for the federal government ever to bail out companies. | ||
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We have a vibrant semiconductor industry. | |
| NVIDIA is one of their major companies, a trillion-dollar company. | ||
| So, no, we shouldn't do this. | ||
| It is privatization in reverse. | ||
| Instead of the government selling off assets, it would be buying assets. | ||
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So I think this is a very bad idea. | |
| And I'm a Trump guy. | ||
| I admire a lot of what Trump is doing, but I don't like this idea. | ||
| And we should not be giving money to companies. | ||
| Did President Trump consult you at all before? | ||
| I have not talked to him about this particular. | ||
| Because he said on his True Social page, this is a great deal for America. | ||
| He said that Intel and chip building is fundamental to the future of our nation. | ||
| So I think it's important for people to understand: you know, we have lived through an internet digital age over the last 30 or 40 years. | ||
| And it was really driven by, and by the way, the United States is completely dominant in the Internet age. | ||
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All of the major companies in the world, whether it's Google, whether it's Apple, whether it's Meta, whether it's Amazon, were all spawned here in the United States. | |
| And we made a decision back in the early 1990s under Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress that we were going to allow this industry to be like the Wild West. | ||
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The government wasn't going to subsidize it, it wasn't going to tax it, it wasn't going to regulate it. | |
| And boom, we have completely dominated Europe and the Asian countries and that. | ||
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We should allow that to happen with artificial intelligence, with robotics, with the microchip industry. | |
| No, we don't want the government to be subsidizing it. | ||
| Does a 10% stake in Intel mean that Intel now can't fail? | ||
| Because the AIDS is a good idea. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Can't fail. | ||
| Well, the question is whether the government would allow it to fail. | ||
| You know, companies go through a lifespan just like we do. | ||
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So companies go through growth phases, and then sometimes they grow old and sometimes they die. | |
| And that's the appropriate thing to allow happen. | ||
| So I don't think this is going. | ||
| And by the way, one of the things, if you're a free market guy like I am, that I worry about is if the government takes some kind of ownership stake in the company, is it going to dictate ESG policies? | ||
| You have to do environmental policies, this, that, the other thing. | ||
| We don't want the government to be telling companies what to do. | ||
| What counts in your mind is the nationalization of an industry? | ||
| Is it a 10% stake, a 15%, a 50% stake? | ||
| I don't know exactly. | ||
| I mean, look, certainly if it's 51%, it is nationalizing an industry. | ||
| You know, 10% is a pretty big stake in the company. | ||
| And people say, well, if the government's going to give them money, we should take a government ownership of it. | ||
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And my attitude is, no, well, the problem here is giving them money in the first place. | |
| Remember, we passed one of the worst pieces of legislation in 20 years with this CHIP Act. | ||
| It was supposed to resurrect the chip industry, and it had exactly the opposite approach. | ||
| Oftentimes, when the government subsidizes an industry, it becomes a curse, not a blessing. | ||
| By the way, let me give you a good example of this. | ||
| The auto industry in the last five or six years, where the Biden administration said, we'll give you all of this money if you invest in electric vehicles. | ||
| By the way, I don't have anything against electric vehicle. | ||
| I have a hybrid. | ||
| But so, in other words, what happened was GM and Ford chased the government money rather than trying to make cars that Americans actually wanted to drive. | ||
| People want hybrids. | ||
| They don't necessarily want all-electric vehicle. | ||
| My point is, Ford lost $45,000 for every electric vehicle it made. | ||
| So that wasn't a very good decision. | ||
| You mentioned the company Solyndra. | ||
| What's Solyndra? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Solyndra? | ||
| Solyndra was a solar company that went bankrupt. | ||
| And we had dozens of these experiments where we invested. | ||
| Invested in Fisker was a car company. | ||
| It was supposed to be the next big electric vehicle company. | ||
| And it failed as well. | ||
| I mean, we could go on and on and on with these failures. | ||
| But the point is the government is not very good at deciding what industries to invest in, what not. | ||
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One of the things that makes American industry so hyper-productive is that we have the most sophisticated capital markets in the world. | |
| We're really, really good as a country at directing capital to its highest value-added industries. | ||
| And that's how we got these trillion-dollar industries like Google. | ||
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So why would we think that politicians could make better decisions about where money should be directed than people on Wall Street? | |
| Steve Moore with us for about another 35 minutes. | ||
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unidentified
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He's always happy to take your questions. | |
| So let me promote the phone lines. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
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Independents 202-748-8002. | |
| While folks are calling in another topic I wanted to get to. | ||
| What's your view of President Trump's efforts, his attempts to fire Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook? | ||
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I was hoping you were going to ask me about Taylor Swift. | |
| Happy to get your thoughts on the economic implications of that as well. | ||
| Her tour certainly has economic. | ||
| That has been a hot potato issue, no question about it. | ||
| The question is whether the president has the legal authority to fire her. | ||
| Now, that's something I'm not a constitutional scholar. | ||
| I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know about the legality of this. | ||
| But I will say this. | ||
| And by the way, you may recall that I was actually nominated by Donald Trump to be on the Federal Reserve Board back in 2017 or 18. | ||
| So I've gone through that process. | ||
| I didn't make it through the process. | ||
| I had skeletons in my closet. | ||
| But my point is that having gone through that, one of the things that they do is you go through all your financial records to make sure that you're qualified for this thing. | ||
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And one thing that I find puzzling about this whole incident is if, and it's if, because she's only alleged to have committed this mortgage fraud, we don't have any kind of conviction. | |
| But if she did, if she, and basically the allegation is she had two, she was claiming two different homes as her principal residence, and that is mortgage fraud. | ||
| Now, some people are saying, well, this isn't really that big a transgression. | ||
| And I disagree with that. | ||
| If you look at what happened in 2008 when we had the mortgage crisis and it destroyed the American economy, hundreds and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars had to bail out these companies. | ||
| The single biggest factor that caused the mortgage crisis was mortgage fraud. | ||
| People lied on their mortgage applications. | ||
| So I would say this, that if this woman, if she did, if she is guilty of this mortgage fraud, she cannot be on the Federal Reserve Board. | ||
| They have oversight over the whole housing industry. | ||
| So the question is whether he should have fired her now or waited till we had more evidence. | ||
| Between this and between President Trump's criticism of Jerome Powell over whether to lower the interest rate, is Donald Trump politicizing the Fed? | ||
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And if the answer is yes to that question, what does that mean for markets, for the economy? | |
| So this is a tough one because I do believe, as most economists do, that we should have an independent Federal Reserve Board that is, you know, and by the way, this is one of the most powerful institutions of Washington. | ||
| They control the money supply, how much money is coming in, how much coming out, how much inflation we have, et cetera. | ||
| So it's a powerful institution. | ||
| And the chairman of the Federal Reserve, you know, you could argue other than the president, the vice president, maybe the people on the Supreme Court are extremely powerful. | ||
| They are an independent agency. | ||
| The question is whether they should be, who are they accountable to? | ||
| In other words, who is, if Jerome Powell screws up, and I would say that he's been a very bad Fed chairman, he's the one that allowed prices to go up by 22 percent when Biden was president. | ||
| How do you get rid of someone like that if they're not performing in their job? | ||
| And so that's the question. | ||
| Yes, we want independence, but we also want accountability. | ||
| And Jerome Powell is just saying, you can't fire me. | ||
| And, you know, I'm going to, now his term is up. | ||
| I think it's in March, April, or May or something like that. | ||
| So he only has about six months left to go. | ||
| I think what's going to happen is that he'll probably serve that six months out and then Trump will replace him. | ||
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There's plenty more you and I could talk about. | |
| Let me bring in some callers though. | ||
| They always enjoy chatting with you. | ||
| Deborah Lee in Black Mountain, North Carolina, Independent. | ||
| You're up first with Steve Moore. | ||
| Yes, good morning, America. | ||
| And my question actually is not for Mr. Moore. | ||
| It is for C-SPAN. | ||
| And it is about how often that you have representatives of the Heritage Foundation on your show. | ||
| I believe that that gives them an awful lot of credibility. | ||
| And in my book, they really don't have that much credibility because they're the authors of this Project 2025 that is stripping America of every good thing we have. | ||
| I just like to know why. | ||
| I wonder if the Heritage Foundation doesn't make very large financial contributions to C-SPAN. | ||
| Deborah, I can assure you that's not true. | ||
| The reason we have folks from the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks, and not just the Heritage Foundation, there's plenty here in Washington, D.C., is that these people are the people that talk to the folks on Capitol Hill who make the laws. | ||
| So if members of Congress who are making those laws are talking to these people and getting advice and information from these people, we want you to hear from them as well. | ||
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So you can go back into our archives. | |
| All of our segments are available to see how many times we have somebody from the American Enterprise Institute, from the Heritage Foundation, from Third Way, all these institutions here in D.C. | ||
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And again, there are plenty of them. | |
| Steve Moore, I'll say something about that, if I may, because one of the things I really appreciate about C-SPAN, and thanks again for having me on, is you do provide all different perspectives of issues, and that I think is fantastic. | ||
| Now, the Heritage Foundation was just rated the most influential think tank in the world, not just in the United States in the world. | ||
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And by the way, I'm a visiting senior fellow with Heritage, so I do other things, and I'm very proud of my association with Heritage. | |
| But come on, I mean, the most, we're really proud of the fact that in our Project 2025, now there are some issues in 2025 that I don't even agree with, some of the recommendations. | ||
| But we were very influential in the passage of the Trump Tax Cut, which saves the average family $4,000 a year on trade policy, on defense, on coming up with all sorts of proposals that most Americans would agree with about how we can downsize government, make it more efficient, which was Doge used. | ||
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The Doge people used a lot of our recommendations. | |
| So it is a very impactful organization. | ||
| I'm proud of my association. | ||
| Since you cracked the door on it, what was one recommendation in Project 2025 that you did not agree with? | ||
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Some of the issues, well, for example, I'm much more of a free trade guy, and Heritage was a little bit more interested in more of a kind of managed trade. | |
| I'm not really involved. | ||
| We're talking tariffs? | ||
| Down tariffs. | ||
| I'm not really too involved in some of the social policy issues. | ||
| So I'm much more of a kind of libertarian. | ||
| But I would say I agreed with 80 to 90 percent of the and look, Trump did use, no, he distanced himself from some of the issues that were in Project 2025. | ||
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But we're very proud of the fact that so many of our recommendations actually have been implemented. | |
| Palm Bay, Florida, Keith, Republican line, you are on with Steve Moore. | ||
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Go ahead. | |
| Hey, good morning, and thank you for taking our calls and answering our questions, especially Stephen Moore. | ||
| You know, back to current issues and not guilt by association background of a person commenting and giving opinions. | ||
| I'll accept your opinion, John. | ||
| Now, my philosophy is government, anything government touches goes bad. | ||
| So there really shouldn't be any loans or taking over, you know, free market, like you said. | ||
| The government shouldn't be involved in the ownership of businesses and stuff. | ||
| But now, if I'm not mistaken, a couple years back in the CHIPS Act, President Biden's administration gave Intel $20 billion or something to save the company because there are more factors of strategy toward AI and defense and everything else. | ||
| And now the Republicans are doing just the opposite wanting to take ownership. | ||
| Now, even though I don't believe government should be involved until something happens, what about something like an equity stake where like a loan? | ||
| Like we got small business loans. | ||
| Let's make big business loans. | ||
| Let me take up. | ||
| So, you know, it's a good point this gentleman is making. | ||
| And if we're going to give money to companies, and I'm almost always against that. | ||
| Now, by the way, the one kind of thing that makes Intel a little bit different is a lot of my friends in the national security area are saying, well, we need to do this for national security. | ||
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And I'm not a national security expert, so I can't really respond to that. | |
| But I would say that if, if, if we're going to give money to companies, it should always be in the form of a loan. | ||
| In other words, you know, if Intel is facing tough times right now, their stock has fallen, et cetera, and they need a cash infusion, we could do that. | ||
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We did this with the car companies, remember. | |
| That money should be repaid in the form of a loan, not in terms of an equity share by the federal government. | ||
| Logan, Utah, Bob, Democrats, go ahead. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Good morning, Mr. Moore. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You kind of made me wonder how I was going to ask that question. | ||
| This is going to be on tariffs. | ||
| You know, as well as I know, that a tariff is nothing more than a tax on the consumer. | ||
| So the tax that the Republicans say they're going to give the American people. | ||
| You know, that's going to be taken away quick. | ||
| Because every cost a business has, the consumer pays for it. | ||
| You know it, I know it, and the world knows it. | ||
| So if you have an answer for that, please tell me. | ||
| So, well, I'm glad this gentleman called in because obviously this is one of the hottest economic topics of the day is the Trump tariff strategy. | ||
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I'm a kind of a traditional Milton Friedman free trade guy. | |
| And there's no question in my mind that over the last 30 or 40 years, as the United States has moved more towards free trade since the Reagan era, the United States has greatly benefited from that. | ||
| I mean, there's a reason that the United States has just blown, our economy has just blown away the rest of the world, Europe, the Asian countries, et cetera. | ||
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And that is because we benefited so much from free trade. | |
| We globally integrate all of the stuff that's coming in the United States and create incredible high-value added companies. | ||
| Our stock market has gone up 40-fold, whereas you look at Japan and Europe, they've been basically sclerotic with almost no increase. | ||
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And so free trade has been a benefit. | |
| But what Trump is doing, just so people understand, and I think there's some value to this, is saying to these countries like China, like Canada, like the Brits, like the Europeans, hey, you're not playing by the rules. | ||
| There is no level playing field. | ||
| Trump is absolutely correct that most of these countries have applied a lot higher tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers on our goods than we have when they bring stuff in the United States. | ||
| So if we want our farmers to get a fair deal, if we want our manufacturing companies, our manufacturing workers, if we want our technology companies to be number one, our dairy farmers, Trump is going to these countries and saying, stop discriminating against our products made in the US of A. | ||
| And if you don't stop, we're going to whack you with these tariffs. | ||
| And so far, even though it makes me a little uncomfortable because I am a free trade guy, so far, you look at the trade deals that Trump has gotten, the ones with China. | ||
| Now, the China is a special case because they are a villa and they're an enemy of the United States and you can't trust them. | ||
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But we'll see what that turns out. | |
| I love what happened with Canada just the other day said we're going to stop the non-tariff trade barriers. | ||
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Europe is now going to invest hundreds of billions in the United States. | |
| The Brits, same thing. | ||
| These are trade deals that could very well benefit not just American companies, but American workers. | ||
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President Trump will talk about the money raised from tariffs. | |
| Should we be celebrating $100 billion in tariff collections in the first half of 2025? | ||
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Projections of if these tariffs stay. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| $2.8 trillion by the end of the decade in tariff revenue. | ||
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And some are saying it could even be higher than that. | |
| I read $3.6 trillion. | ||
| So, you know, these numbers are all the places. | ||
| I'll give you the $800. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of taxes. | ||
| And so it's funny you should ask me this question because I was just writing a column last night saying, well, wait a minute, all of a sudden Republicans are celebrating all these taxes that they're raising from tariffs. | ||
| I thought we were against taxes. | ||
| But what is interesting about this debate is who bears the burden of a tariff? | ||
| So it could be one of three parties. | ||
| It could be the foreign company that wants to bring in the United States. | ||
| If the tariff is applied to them, clearly they're going to have to absorb some of that cost, right? | ||
| And then you've got the companies in the United States that import that stuff, and they bear some of the burden of that tariff. | ||
| And then, of course, there's the final user, you and me, when we go to the store. | ||
| I mean, if you buy toys from China and we put a 50% tariff on those toys, guess what? | ||
| You're probably going to pay more of that three-legged stool. | ||
| Which party is carrying the most weight? | ||
| Well, we don't know exactly. | ||
| You know, that's an empirical question. | ||
| But certainly some of this is passed on to the consumers. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| How much is borne by the... | ||
| Do you think it's 33%? | ||
| Do you think it's more than that? | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I mean, you'd have to have, you know, maybe, I'd say maybe as much as half of that cost of that tariff might be passed on to the consumer. | ||
| Certainly the companies that make the products abroad bear some of the burden, because if they didn't, why would they be complaining about the tariffs, right? | ||
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So I think everybody bears some of this burden. | |
| But they are taxes. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Tariffs are taxes. | ||
| About 15 minutes left with Steve Moore. | ||
| Bill is in Buffalo, New York Independent. | ||
| Thanks for waiting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I've been following your career for a long time. | ||
| You're always for tax cuts for the rich, but now the consumer's paying these taxes to pay for our military. | ||
| It's impossible to have a world-class military at 15% corporate tax rate. | ||
| The last century, for 100 years, there was a point where the corporate tax rate was at 1 or 2 percent. | ||
| But in 1950, after the Second World War, it was over 50 percent. | ||
| And you supported George Bush Jr.'s administration, which was the worst economy since the Great Depression. | ||
| And in 23 or 24, 2023, 2024, my NASDAQ stock was up over 50%. | ||
| And what I get a kick out of Trump is he's against what Reagan and Bush and Nixon did by sending jobs to China, NAFTA. | ||
| He's against all that. | ||
| And it was all created by the conservatives. | ||
| And now he's going to tell the states how to run their elections. | ||
| When I listened to you guys last 40 years, you're talking about state rights are the most important thing. | ||
| So you bring up a lot of different topics. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of tough. | ||
| Listen, I mean, the gentleman is making an interesting point, which is that, you know, look, the Republican Party is a Trump party right now. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| And in most areas, I think for better, in some areas, for worse. | ||
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So we need to really, okay, let's take taxes, for example. | |
| One of the things that I believe in is we want a tax code where the tax rates are as low as possible, but you have a broad base, so everybody is paying the tax. | ||
| And by the way, there used to be a national consensus on that. | ||
| In 1986, we passed a law that dramatically lowered tax rates, broadened the base so everybody paid their fair share. | ||
| And that passed 97 to 3 in the Senate. | ||
| So that seemed like a bygone. | ||
| What do you think of 97 to 3? | ||
| We passed 97.3 today. | ||
| So we have lowered our tax rates, and that has been highly effective for the United States. | ||
| It's one of the reasons we've seen the big boom of the U.S. and the fact that we've kind of taken over the global economy. | ||
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So I'm not going to apologize for that. | |
| I think that the Trump tax cut was fantastic. | ||
| I mean, we're basically making our American companies more competitive. | ||
| We're allowing American manufacturing companies to immediately expense when they buy equipment or build a plant in the United States. | ||
| They write that off, which is appropriate. | ||
| So I think this is going to create jobs and help American workers. | ||
| On jobs, and the caller brought up jobs as well. | ||
| Do you trust the jobs numbers that come out each month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics? | ||
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And if the answer is no, how long have you not trusted them? | |
| So that's a good question. | ||
| I've been following this stuff for 40 years. | ||
| Every first Friday of the month, you know, I'm on one of the networks talking about the jobs report because this is what we all pay attention to. | ||
| It's the number one gauge of how the economy is doing month after month, is how many jobs were created. | ||
| And what I've discovered, having done this for a long time, is the numbers are becoming more and more unreliable. | ||
| And I'm not pointing fingers at anybody. | ||
| I'm not saying this, it's just a fact. | ||
| Why? | ||
| We don't really know why the numbers are becoming more. | ||
| One of the reasons is that these are done by samples. | ||
| We sample people and we ask people, are you working or are you not working? | ||
| And what we're finding out is that the response rate from these surveys is way down from what it used to be. | ||
| And when you have a reduced number of people responding, you're not getting as good numbers. | ||
| So let me give you an example. | ||
| If you look over the last two or three years, what you're seeing is the fluctuation of the numbers are way up and down. | ||
| And also the correct, in other words, they do revisions each month. | ||
| Previous the number, the headline number, and then they revise it and they revise it again. | ||
| We're finding the revisions are getting bigger and bigger. | ||
| So one of the things, and by the way, E.J. Antonio, I think, will be an excellent Bureau of Statistics. | ||
| He's an outstanding economist. | ||
| He's worked at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| He's worked with me. | ||
| He's a really good statistician. | ||
| And he's been nominated to be the new head. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| The Bureau of Labor Statistics. | ||
| He's really good with numbers. | ||
| I think he's going to get us more accurate. | ||
| And we need to, it's not just the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by the way. | ||
| So many of the numbers that we're generating in Washington, like the census numbers, the census numbers in 2020, even the Census Bureau admits that we miscounted millions of people. | ||
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So we've got to do something. | |
| I mean, the Census Bureau said, yeah, we overcounted people in New York. | ||
| We undercounted people in Florida. | ||
| And that makes a difference. | ||
| So we've got to figure out how. | ||
| I'm not trying to be partisan here. | ||
| I'm just saying, let's make sure we have accurate numbers. | ||
| In your mind, what is the most reliable economic number that comes out of Washington on any topic? | ||
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unidentified
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That's a good question. | |
| I think the inflation numbers are pretty good. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it's easier to measure what's happening with prices than measuring how many people working. |