| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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And supporting this industry is supporting those great jobs. | |
| Couldn't have said it better. | ||
| And what a wonderful, hopeful note to end our panel on. | ||
| Please give a warm round of applause to our incredible panelists. | ||
| Can we do a quick picture? | ||
| Oh, I hope so. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| I'm sure someone told you the wrong thing. | ||
| I'm sorry about that. | ||
| If it wasn't for the faculty, I wouldn't do it for the council, I would just like to see it on my panel. | ||
| I was like, pretty sure it was happening in here. | ||
| I was like, I'm pretty sure it was happening in here. | ||
| It's here. | ||
| Hey, everyone. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| Thank you for being here. | ||
| We are counter-programmed against Francis Fukuyama. | ||
| So I know he's like top billing. | ||
| So I appreciate you caring about fiscal policy because nowadays it seems like nobody does. | ||
| So we're trying to make fiscal policy cool again and also convince you that it is like the most important issue out there and Democrats should care deeply about it. | ||
| So we have three amazing panelists to speak today about it. | ||
| I will ask each of them as they speak up to introduce themselves and their work and their background. | ||
| I'm going to start with a question for all of you. | ||
| So we can start with you, Zach, and work our way towards me. | ||
| During the 2020 primaries, Democrat candidates offered some very ambitious and expensive fiscal policies. | ||
| Apologies, it was labeled wrong. | ||
| This question is just for Ben. | ||
| It said for all, and then it says, Ben, please speak to this. | ||
| Okay, so Ben, you estimated near the end of the campaign that Bernie Sanders' proposals would add $25 trillion to national debt over the next 10 years. | ||
| We're now in a very difficult, different fiscal environment. | ||
| So how should the 2028 candidates change their approach to reconcile their goals with fiscal reality? | ||
| I think we actually can have you touch on this, Zach, and then work our way down. | ||
| Okay, sounds good. | ||
| So look, barring the severe economic crisis, like I think Social Security might actually be the top economic policy issue in the 2028 campaign. | ||
| And debt is so tied into that, right? | ||
| Like its finances are hard-pressed. | ||
| Its solutions are kind of just math. | ||
| But candidates are going to need to think hard about how they actually deal with that because Social Security is a pivotal Democratic priority. | ||
| The other piece of that, and like how Democrats are rethinking this, big and bold policy doesn't need a big and bold price tag anymore, right? | ||
| Like you have to think through the various things that you're going to do to address the costs of middle-class life. | ||
| We think about it at Third Way calling it like the five tickets to the middle class. | ||
| How are you going to reduce the costs of housing, child care, education, make sure you can save for retirement and lower the cost of health care? | ||
| So you can't only throw money at these issues. | ||
| You've got to do more than that, and that's going to be on the kind of the supply side of things. | ||
| So you need bold supply and abundance related things to kind of tackle that. | ||
| And that's going to be how it's going to need to look different in 2028. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a pretty great place for us to start. | ||
| I was also going to, Social Security, I think as a lot of folks here know, it's going to start, going to run out of money within the next president's turn. | ||
| And that's going to really occupy our space and thinking. | ||
| 2020, we had all of these big ideas about big things government could do to help us. | ||
| But the reality is, if you look at our finances, you look at the 20% cut in benefits to active retirees that we're looking at, if we don't do anything here, what we really need to be doing is thinking about how do we renew the promise of the New Deal for the next generation. | ||
| We need to start thinking about how to reimagine the things that have really made this country great, have built our middle class, and how do we renew that promise for the future generations? | ||
| Because when we promise everybody a pie in the sky and we have no intention or no thoughts about how to pay for it, as the Medicare for All plan had in 2020, we're not really promising things people they can actually believe in. | ||
| They want to know that they can live an honest and fruitful middle-class life. | ||
| They want to be able to buy a home, which is something that interest rates related to debt is impacting. | ||
| They want to see how we can get government not out of our way in the way Ronald Reagan talked about, but how can we use the government to be a value add to the things everybody wants in their lives, which is to build a strong and resilient future for them and their families. | ||
| Ben? | ||
| I think the 2020 fiscal environment really couldn't have been any more different from the one that we have right now. | ||
| 2020, we had just come out of the last crisis that we'd had, 2009. | ||
| We didn't have a lot of fiscal stimulus in response to it. | ||
| We had relatively sluggish growth for the first half of the decade. | ||
| But then we still had growing deficits and low inflation and low interest rates. | ||
| And I think there was a view among Democrats that, number one, we didn't spend enough when we should have. | ||
| And number two, there's so much space we can kind of do whatever we want to do. | ||
| Let's try to push the envelope on spending where we can. | ||
| And maybe we don't even need to pay for it because borrowing is so cheap. | ||
| Let's just run it hot. | ||
| And then, of course, COVID happened. | ||
| And we said, well, now we have an emergency where we need to do more spending to support the economy. | ||
| Let's really take advantage of it. | ||
| Sure, all of you remember Money Printer Go Burr. | ||
| And so we really put the pedal to the metal. | ||
| And we had this environment where I think it was like Betto O'Rourke got attacked because he only had $2 trillion of climate spending, like stuff that just sounds insane now. | ||
| I don't think we can do that the next time. | ||
| I think we really pushed the envelope on spending and especially deficit spending under Biden more than any Democratic presidency in modern history. | ||
| And I think we did see inflation come back. | ||
| There's been a big backlash to that. | ||
| And so I think hopefully that was our touch the stove moment. | ||
| I think for voters it definitely was. | ||
| And now we need to think about how we're going to actually, as Hannah said, figure out how we're going to pay for the things we're promising because otherwise people aren't going to believe them. | ||
| Zach, I want you to elaborate a little on what you're talking about about your organization's priorities, particularly when it comes to housing, child care, and whatnot. | ||
| You guys do a lot of message testing around this. | ||
| Can you talk about what lands with, I guess, just Americans broadly, but specifically, I guess, to the purposes of this conference where we're talking about Democrats, Democrats, and how they feel about fiscal issues when you frame it the way you guys are framing it? | ||
| Yeah, so I think one of the most important things to recognize here, now that I'm speaking into the mic, sorry about that for the first time. | ||
| Look, Democrats want to be able to regain majorities and rewin the White House. | ||
| And to do that, you're going to need to sound like a little bit of a different Democrat when you're running for office. | ||
| If you sound like every other Democrat, people are going to think you're every other Democrat. | ||
| So, you hear a lot of Democrats talk about: oh, if we could only tax the rich more, that would solve X, Y, and Z issue. | ||
| And sure, in a messaging vacuum, that might make sense. | ||
| Or, importantly, like, you know, there's some policy pieces where that is true. | ||
| But sounding different matters because the majority makers are going to need to sound different. | ||
| You're going to need to sound less like an AOC and more like MGP, Marie-Glues, and Camp Perez. | ||
| So, how do you do that? | ||
| We think talking about the deficit, even bringing it up, is going to be important to making you sound like a different Democrat. | ||
| Talking about being reasonable and responsible. | ||
| By doing that, you're going to have to talk about both sides of the fiscal equation. | ||
| You're going to have to talk about spending cuts and you're going to have to talk about revenue increases. | ||
| We did a poll over the summer, and about half of all respondents said if you were going to sound fiscally responsible, you needed to talk about spending cuts and revenue. | ||
| And then 40% said you need to talk about spending cuts. | ||
| So, if you are alone on an island, an electoral island, if you are only willing to talk about tax increases as a Democrat, to be your message for fiscal responsibility, a revenue-only message is really missing the boat. | ||
| And then you can also talk about how debt deficits impact people. | ||
| I think that's the biggest thing. | ||
| Tie it back to the fact that inflation is too high, it's too expensive at the grocery store, interest rates are too high. | ||
| You know, there are a lot of economic situations that are exacerbated in today's economic environment from increased deficit spending. | ||
| And then, the last thing, find other ways to bring fiscal messaging into what you're talking about. | ||
| We did a piece recently talking about how this Republican tax bill is bad for kids. | ||
| Well, it's bad for kids, even though they have some child tax credit, they have these weird Trump accounts, they do all that. | ||
| But from the share of spending cuts from Medicaid and SNAP that actually are going to impact kids, plus the interest rate costs, because this bill balloons the debt, that is actually going to drive and make it be a net harm for children than a net benefit for children. | ||
| So, think about other ways to bring fiscal into the conversation as well. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Hannah, I want to turn to you because you spent a long time on Capitol Hill working on tax issues. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm glad you made it out alive. | ||
| You have seen what I think is a really large change in the way that we're approaching fiscal policy in Congress. | ||
| Can you kind of talk through how things have changed, not only in your time there, but maybe how you perceive how it's changed after you left? | ||
| Sure, happy to do that. | ||
| I'll start a little bit before TCJA passes. | ||
| Starting around 2011 or so, you start seeing the Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, the Republican chair of the Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp, go on these I Called Max and Dave's road show to really start banging the drum for comprehensive tax reform. | ||
| The goal for both chairmen was that that would be a deficit-neutral tax reform, not unlike what happened in 1986, where we are broadening the base, we are lowering rates, and in doing so, you're getting rid of some of those horizontal inequities in the code. | ||
| So, you're looking at a world where families with two kids making $60,000 a year, no matter what they do for a living, are paying roughly the same amount in taxes. | ||
| TCJA, in many ways, was a base broadener. | ||
| It did a lot of those things that were meant to reform the code out of the 1980s. | ||
| But in a Republican trifecta, they decided to cut $1.5 trillion in taxes, which is what Republicans do when they get a trifecta. | ||
| We'll later get to the fact that Democrats have let them own the message on fiscal responsibility, despite that fact. | ||
| So I'm going to put that aside. | ||
| But they did that. | ||
| Democrats talked a little bit about it, but as Ben noted, 2017 was kind of the period of like modern monetary theory where people thought that interest rates were like never going to go up and the salience of these questions felt a little bit hazy as AOC is winning primaries against members of the Ways and Means Committee where I was sitting at the time. | ||
| And then we sort of doubled down on that going into the 2020 election. | ||
| It was who can do more for people, who can give out more to different segments of the population. | ||
| And parents with children under school age love child care. | ||
| Small group of the population. | ||
| So we have that, we have something for seniors, we have something for first-time homebuyers. | ||
| It's just a grab bag of goodies we're offering to different interests in the Democratic coalition. | ||
| And they don't really have a cohesive message to them. | ||
| Other than let's spend more money. | ||
| That is very much what I saw Democrats doing during Build Back Better. | ||
| So when you say, I'm sorry, that's when I left. | ||
| We put out $4 trillion of big ideas. | ||
| The thing is, not one of those ideas was going to be permanent. | ||
| There are going to be all these cliffs. | ||
| It was paid for with all these tax increases that there was never the buy-in for in the caucus. | ||
| So what we did at the end of that was fail to meet the promises, as Ben was sort of mentioning, to the people we were offering child care to, to people trying to buy homes. | ||
| The Inflation Reduction Act is a really good bill. | ||
| It did a lot to help with the green energy transition. | ||
| May it rest in peace. | ||
| It reduced deficits, which is something we hadn't seen in a reconciliation bill, but people are unhappy about it because we offered them some sort of ideal. | ||
| From a Democratic perspective, wearing my Democratic hat for a second, Republicans just what we did and they said, let's do that. | ||
| But the problem is, rather than giving things to most people, they also got to take a lot away from people. | ||
| And I sort of wonder at this moment, after Democrats went too big, followed by Republicans going too big, it feels like a good time to start talking to people in an honest way about what we can do to make their lives easier, but not offering them some sort of panacea. | ||
| Ideas from our friends further on the left sound great, but in order to have a European safety net, you're going to need to have European taxes. | ||
| And I don't think Americans are ready for the middle class and lower. | ||
| What do we want to do? | ||
| In order to continue the promises we've made in the system that we have, how are we going to offer not social security to my aging boomer parents who are in the line for these 20% cuts, but how does their social security look different than mine? | ||
| I would like to have some. | ||
| I don't know if I necessarily need it to be the 100% I'm being promised right now because in many ways that feels good. | ||
| What do we do for millennials and Gen Z when it comes to the retirement programs that are currently being promised and none of them believe they're going to get? | ||
| We have moved really far away from that. | ||
| I think Democrats jacking up the deficit so much, cutting benefits directly, drawing that straight line, have an opportunity to get back towards that reasonable governance that people really crave. | ||
| As Zach sort of talked about talking about this, differently is important because the way we have been talking about this hasn't been working for people. | ||
| And I think we're in a really unique moment where we can renew the promises that we have made. | ||
| We can make things more affordable by cutting red tape, as a lot of our friends in the abundance movement want to talk about. | ||
| Like, how do we reimagine government? | ||
| Bill Clinton talked about this. | ||
| Barack Obama talked about this. | ||
| Joe Biden did not. | ||
| How do we get back to this idea that we can build a better mousetrap? | ||
| It doesn't need to be the same as it was. | ||
| Building on the same broken platforms is only going to lead to bigger, broken policies. | ||
| I did a panel, I think it was maybe the beginning of last year, with a lot of folks who were definitely further to my left and more personally invested in the current retirement system. | ||
| And I asked the panel, I said, if you could choose to have a guarantee that you can get 90% of the Social Security benefit you're being promised now, or you have to take a gamble that we're going to keep doing what we're doing, and then it could end up anywhere between 70 and 100%. | ||
| Which of those do you pick? | ||
| And every single one of them said, you know, obviously we think we should take the guaranteed 90%. | ||
| And I think that speaks to your point about, you know, if we can fix the problems and show that we can make the system work better, people will take that over just perpetuating the status quo. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Zach called it a math problem. | ||
| Social Security is the easiest of our fiscal problems to solve. | ||
| You have two options, benefits and taxes. | ||
| And you can pick from column A and column B. | ||
| And we're going to be forced to. | ||
| Like, what if we had an actual idea that was going to, that young people could believe that they're actually going to get this promise that was made to them by Franklin Delano Roosevelt 100 years ago? | ||
| You mentioned something about product-based taxes, which I want to get back to a little bit because I think it relates to the $400,000 pledge and how that's kind of warped our thinking of tax policy in America. | ||
| I think all three of you can kind of speak to that. | ||
| But Ben, I want to ask you something first. | ||
| I kind of want to ground this in reality a little bit. | ||
| MMTers, they talk about it's a big number, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| And I think a lot of America thinks the big number is bad but doesn't understand why the big number is bad. | ||
| Maybe it's inflation, but like beyond that, they don't really think of it. | ||
| Can you talk about the stakes of this conversation and just like the broader deficit fiscal debate that we're having as a country? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, I think, I mean, it's interesting that you bring up the point about MMT because the big thing before 2021 was MMTers saying the only thing that matters for spending and deficits is inflation. | ||
| And so until you have inflation, there's no need to reduce deficits. | ||
| And then, of course, we had inflation and they did not pivot to deficit reduction. | ||
| They changed to this metaphor about helmets where they're like, oh, if you had done deficit reduction before, you wouldn't have had inflation. | ||
| But now that you do have inflation, it's too late and you got to do some, you got to do price controls. | ||
| It's just all over the place. | ||
| So I mean, I do think there's a lot of lessons to be learned there. | ||
| But to a specific question about what the stakes are, we are now paying more on interest than we have, interest on the debt than we have ever in history. | ||
| We spend a trillion dollars a year on interest payments. | ||
| Not just the most in nominal dollars or inflation-adjusted dollars. | ||
| As a percent of GDP, we have never in American history spent as much as we are spending now on interest payments. | ||
| We spend more on interest than we spend on Medicare and more on interest than we do on defense. | ||
| And we don't really get anything for that. | ||
| We don't become safer, we don't make people healthier, we don't invest in the future. | ||
| That's just money we are paying to have made, to have not had to deal with problems in the past. | ||
| And that's only going to get bigger over time. | ||
| With the one big beautiful bill, if nothing changes and if we decide to fix Social Security and Medicare by just borrowing and continuing on the status quo, it's going to double from that already high level in not too many years. | ||
| Currently, CBO projects that we're going to be spending more on interest than literally anything else, even more on interest than Social Security. | ||
| I think it's in about 30 years. | ||
| I forget in the latest estimate if it's right around then. | ||
| So that's money that we are not going to be able to use for childcare, roads, bridges, public transportation, housing. | ||
| It's just going to be going to pay down the debt or to continue perpetuating the debt. | ||
| That's the tax cuts that we can't give people, the middle class, if we want to. | ||
| Can't do child tax credit, or we could have done a much bigger child tax credit for the price of interest. | ||
| And so it's going to crowd out basically everything that people care about. | ||
| And that's, you know, again, even before we talk about how it raises inflation and slows growth and all of those broader problems. | ||
| So I now want to turn to what I mentioned about broad-based tax increases. | ||
| It's somewhat ironic that the center left is now the people saying we need broad-based taxes across the board, and the left is now the one who wants these big crazy programs and being like, no, no, no, but only the rich are going to pay for it. | ||
| Can someone like literally, any three of you can jump in who maybe knows this best? | ||
| If we tax billionaires or millionaires by some absurd amount, how much is that actually going to pay for? | ||
| Can we kind of push back on that myth? | ||
| Because it's a myth, but I don't know just how much of it. | ||
| It's a myth. | ||
| So we put out a paper at the beginning of last year about the 400K tax pledge. | ||
| And we found that if you did revenue maximizing rates on the top 2% of the country, which is people making over $400,000, you would not be able to pay for the promises that we are already making, let alone the policies in the Biden budget and let alone the progressive wish list. | ||
| And so I forget the exact number. | ||
| I think you could get something like $4 or $5 trillion over 10 years. | ||
| But it doesn't come, I shouldn't say it doesn't come remotely close, but that's if you're doing, like, you're really squeezing out every nickel and dime you can. | ||
| And in practice, it's even harder than to do that. | ||
| And Democrats didn't have the votes in the last presidency to raise the top rate. | ||
| So the political viability is somewhat questionable there as well. | ||
| If you look at our peers in Western Europe, our tax rates for the wealthy are somewhat comparable. | ||
| It is in that middle and lower class that they are lower. | ||
| And no one wants to have that conversation, certainly not the people who want to give everybody health care, because that's the trade-off for things like socialized medicine that they have made in Europe. | ||
| We have not made here. | ||
| And we keep being promised that taxing the wealthy is going to solve our problems. | ||
| But that's not the paradigm being used by our peer countries across the ocean. | ||
| Zach, specifically, I'd love for you to talk about polling or message testing you've done on broad-based tax increases, if you have that knowledge on hand. | ||
| I have not pulled broad-based tax increases. | ||
| I think when I think about it, the thing that's driving me crazy right now is all the talk about Democrats doubling down on their tax on tips. | ||
| We already live in a world where athletes are paying full rate and hedge fund managers who on paper have the same amount of money don't. | ||
| We're going to do that in the working class too. | ||
| We need to think about ways that flat, that aren't picking winners and losers within income classes. | ||
| We need to think about ways that we are not flattening the code between the wealthy and the middle class, but within that middle class, within that working class, why do you have to work 60 hours a week in order to get tax cut? | ||
| Instead, we are the $400,000 pledge is like this. | ||
| We keep accepting 80% of whatever tax cuts Republicans put out. | ||
| We're afraid of having the cost. | ||
| I just, very quickly, and then I think I want to let Zach get a word in. | ||
| But I was at an event yesterday, and one of the panelists pointed out that this goes to your point about European-style taxation. | ||
| He said that we spend, our tax and spending is about 7% of GDP less than the OECD average. | ||
| And if you look at where OECD countries get their revenue, on average, they get 7% of GDP from value-added and consumption taxes. | ||
| And so, you know, that's like the broadest base, non-distortionary tax there is. | ||
| And I think is a very obvious answer where all of this data points you to. | ||
| I'll just say that when we have these conversations about the optimal level of taxes, Republicans often point a big finger at, well, revenue is about where it is historically over time. | ||
| And they're so misleading when they do that because our historic level of revenue has led to historic levels of debt. | ||
| And so we have this big mismatch over time on this. | ||
| And the Republican tax bill that just passed makes it all worse. | ||
| Like, you know, we were doing the math in my office the other day that we're probably going to stay under or right around and under 17% of GDP. | ||
| Revenue is going to stay under about 17% of GDP for the foreseeable future. | ||
| And it will stay that way if they continue to extend things like no tax on tips. | ||
| I think one of the things that's so weird about when they say that is they say I've been about roughly the same level and it's been between 16 and 21 percent of GDP. | ||
| There's like a big difference between those numbers. | ||
| I know that 4% doesn't sound 4% or 5% doesn't sound like a lot, but as a percent of the base, it's a quarter difference, a third difference. | ||
| That's actually a big difference. | ||
| And part of the reason that it fluctuates like that is because we keep cutting taxes in this way. | ||
| And then Democrats accept a lot of those tax cuts and we just kind of do this process over and over again. | ||
| So keeping in the theme then of being a conference talking about the future of the Democratic Party and what we should be thinking about in 26 and 28, I'm going to ask everyone to put their campaign political hats on. | ||
| How do Democrats not only seize the mantle of fiscal responsibility, because I think everyone on this panel believes that we should be a more fiscally responsible party, but how do we make that popular? | ||
| How do we make that something that voters want to elect Democrats for? | ||
| Because if we just run on the party of, hey, we're going to raise your taxes to get rid of the deficit, I would love for that to go well, but I don't think it's going to go too well. | ||
| How do we talk about this and how do we propose policies in a way that has the best shot of catching on with the public? | ||
| Start with you, Zach, and work our way down. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, look, I think, you know, try to capture the mantle of fiscal responsibility. | ||
| You need both a sword and a shield, right? | ||
| You need what are you going to stand for that you can use to attack Republicans with, because we're talking about elections. | ||
| There's going to be a tax. | ||
| And then you need a shield because there's an inherent bias in the electorate that says, all right, Democrats aren't the party of fiscal responsibility. | ||
| They aren't a party I can trust to spend my money, and they aren't a party that cares about these issues. | ||
| So on the sword side, you just got to call them out, right? | ||
| Call the Republicans out that their big tax bill has completely blown up the debt. | ||
| We did another poll on this, and it's actually the thing that Republicans hate the most about their own tax bill is how deficit-financed it was. | ||
| And then on the shield side, look, as I said earlier, you're going to need some balance. | ||
| You're going to need to be able to talk about things that you feel like you could cut. | ||
| What are the actual waste, fraud, and abuse that you are going after? | ||
| And then you want to do things that you want to show the balanced side. | ||
| What are your reasonable revenue options as well? | ||
| I think you're just going to need to be able to attack Republicans and then figure out how to defend yourself on that. | ||
| I think all of that's right. | ||
| A couple other notes. | ||
| Base broadening is a lot more popular than rate increases. | ||
| When you're talking about those loopholes about flattening and making the code more fair, there's a reason Democrats defaulted away from a corporate tax increase and towards a corporate minimum alternative minimum tax, because there's this fundamental sense of fairness that people understand that people who make around the same amount should be paying around the same amount in taxes. | ||
| So getting away from this idea of like we're going to jack up all the rates, like there's ways to talk about tax loophole closures that inherently raise money that are not so tax and spendy of Democrats. | ||
| That reimagining piece I think is really important. | ||
| Like how do we want to make, and Democrats do this all the time when we think about health care, the Inflation Reduction Act, negotiated drug prices, saving Medicare money, extending the life of Medicare. | ||
| How are we going to make programs work better for people in ways that are going to make them more solvent in the long run as well? | ||
| We need to start talking about the Republican record on taxes, not just starting this year. | ||
| There's this great visualization in the Wall Street Journal a few months back about how our deficits would be just if not for the tax cut starting in 2001. | ||
| In 2001, they actually got, JCT was actually in CBO, were actually concerned about the size of the surplus. | ||
| What a throwback. | ||
| But our 10-to-GDP ratio is around 56%. | ||
| Now it's at 125%. | ||
| But in that period, we've racked up so much cost. | ||
| Democrats have allowed and actively supported so many opportunities to just kind of further that away. | ||
| The other thing, there's a lot of consternation in the Democratic Party right now around the age of our leadership. | ||
| For those who find themselves in the place where they're going to capitalize on that, continuing to run up deficits is borrowing from the young to pay for the old. | ||
| There is this sense in the Democratic Party right now that leadership is not focused on the needs of young people. | ||
| We saw a drop in Gen Z support of Democrats last Congress. | ||
| For folks who are in that universe, I don't know if everyone is, you don't have to be, but if you find yourself being a young candidate running, our continuing to mortgage the future of young people feels very salient to people who really aren't even that young anymore. | ||
| I think there's a huge number of people who just see this country is not working for them and their concerns. | ||
| And I think there is a real opportunity to engage young people on debts and deficits. | ||
| People feel priced out of buying that first home because of mortgage rates. | ||
| We can tie this to the affordability crisis. | ||
| I think Zach talked about this a little bit. | ||
| Continuing to run up debts is only going to continue to threaten the affordability of life for middle-class Americans. | ||
| And making that a part of that message rather than we're going to do the bipartisan debt commission and get the grand bargain that Barack Obama and John Boehner failed to get. | ||
| I think there are ways to talk about this that are about renewing our promises to one another and not being the person to force people to eat their vegetables. | ||
| I think there's also, I'm thinking back to a conversation we had with David Shore, I think it was maybe two years ago, where we were talking about making this message salient to young people. | ||
| He said, that's great, you should do that, but you also have to remember that old people vote a lot more than young people, and you kind of need a message that's going to hit them too. | ||
| And what he said was very effective was talk about their grandkids. | ||
| People like their kids, they love their grandkids. | ||
| And when you appeal to it on that moral dimension, you actually could get a lot of buy-in for a lot of things. | ||
| I think there's been a lot of polling that shows that actually sometimes it's older voters who are most concerned about the deficit for that reason. | ||
| They're also, as you said, they vote the most. | ||
| And so I think it needs to be a mobilizing issue for young people from a self-interested perspective, but also needs to be an issue that we can talk about with everybody from a more family perspective and values perspective. | ||
| I think Zach's point about how the most unpopular thing among Republicans about their own bill is about how much it increased the deficit. | ||
| We did some polling of working class voters last year, asked them what's the thing, and these were the folks who basically threw the election to Trump. | ||
| We asked them, what's your biggest concern with both parties? | ||
| For Democrats, fiscal irresponsibility was actually one of the top three. | ||
| Immigration and a lot of the cultural stuff was one and two. | ||
| But for Republicans, number one, the number one thing they were most concerned about with Republicans was that they would increase the debt too much. | ||
| So clearly, Trump has pushed the Republican Party off of being the party of fiscal responsibility, and voters see that. | ||
| The question is: can Democrats actually offer something that is a compelling alternative that they'll believe, especially when we frittered away whatever credibility Bill Clinton built up for us in the 90s over the last four years? | ||
| So, Hannah, I want to ask you a question because you've been in the room when a lot of these decisions have been made. | ||
| We asked this question to Greg Schultz this morning, who was Biden's primary campaign manager, and it's just understanding the thinking that goes behind a lot of Democratic decisions. | ||
| Deep down, I believe that most Democrats in elected office think the deficit is a bad thing and that we have to get it under control. | ||
| However, and Republicans do, however, we continue to pass legislation that makes this problem worse. | ||
| What is their justification for continuing to perpetuate this problem, if they even have one at all? | ||
| I think Democratic policymakers on a growing basis are concerned about the debt. | ||
| I think coming out of the Obama era, there was a lot, our politics is just so often just one team wronging the other and then using that as justification. | ||
| But there was a lot of consternation in the Obama era and the recovery from the Great Recession about getting the debt in line. | ||
| It was proven out in Europe that doing that in the recovery period, and this isn't a new idea. | ||
| Keynes talks about this. | ||
| Cutting as you're trying to get your way out of a recession is not a great idea. | ||
| Democrats felt like that constrained their ability to respond to the recession. | ||
| It created this frustration, the created the Tea Party. | ||
| It lost a lot of working-class voters who didn't see anything working for them. | ||
| And for a long time, as interest rates stayed low, I think there was fairly low concern about the debt in the short to medium term. | ||
| There was a lot of this is a problem for future me. | ||
| We're going to have to deal with this. | ||
| The problem isn't today. | ||
| I do think that that has changed post-pandemic. | ||
| I think that has changed in part because prices are 25% higher than they were, and you can actually feel that A to B connection. | ||
| But doing hard things is hard. | ||
| The reality is, is like a major, like if you really wanted to do a grand debt bargain, like that's hard, and you're going to have to have people do really hard things. | ||
| And as you watch Republicans hand out tax cuts like candy, it didn't seem like they were being punished for it. | ||
| So why would we do any different? | ||
| I do think that the response of voters to inflation in the Biden years and what I expect and hope to be the response to voters to OB3 can really change that paradigm where people realize that, yes, it's hard, but the politically salient thing to do is actually to solve the problem and show people that government works for them. | ||
| They thought that by giving people things, they'd see the value in government, but it really is in solving the problems of government. | ||
| And I think people are starting to get there, and we can actually solve these problems. | ||
| There's just very little consensus about the right path forward. | ||
| There are some members of the Democratic Party who've never met a tax increase that they do not like. | ||
| And then there are others, like a lot of the folks represented here today, who want to be more thoughtful about it. | ||
| And in that push and pull, it just seems easier to do none of the above. | ||
| I think that the circumstances on the ground have fundamentally changed as we look at what's happened to the debt post-pandemic, as we look at what's happened to interest rates as a result of that. | ||
| So it just requires a few people being willing to kind of bang that drum. | ||
| And as we get fewer and fewer people in competitive districts, like we're talking about you sound a little different for them to do. | ||
| But as we think about trying to win back working-class families, have to balance their budget every day. | ||
| And I think that's something that we're getting back to, and that affordability piece of it. | ||
| We can't ask people to be responsible if we're not being responsible with it in exchange. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm an optimist, but it does truly seem like that thing that if we were to be able to lift the mantle of someone like Bill Clinton again and say we have a surplus, that voters would reward that. | ||
| It might be a little bit painful to get there. | ||
| My follow-up question might touch on this in a little bit, but it's something that I would hope that a lot of Americans would reward Democrats for because it is something that even to this day we talk about the fact that Bill Clinton did a bunch of good things. | ||
| He's really well known for having a surplus. | ||
| That's like one of the top things people know about his presidency. | ||
| And his reimagining government plan was about how do you do more with less. | ||
| Doge did a lot of things. | ||
| It did none of that. | ||
| It's built on the Obama-era platform meant to digitize government. | ||
| There are absolutely ways to cut the cost of government programs and increase their efficacy thanks to digital tools that we are not using. | ||
| We don't need to go in and just say we're getting rid of foreign aid in order to save $35 billion. | ||
| There are actual ways to make programs work better and faster in a digital age that are still entirely on the table because all of the things that Doge was purportedly supposed to do did not do. | ||
| There are opportunities for us to save money and not change people's benefits. | ||
| Like how do we actually start doing some of those easier, lower-level wins so we can convince people, get the buy-in from the American voters to really try to take bigger swings or faster dopamine cycles almost as we think about our modern age. | ||
| Like what can we do quickly? | ||
| How can we make it easier to file for student loans? | ||
| How can we make it easier to interact with the internal revenue service? | ||
| All of those things would probably save money because they're going to save man hours. | ||
| There are ways to do this that are actually going to show proof of concept the government can do things better and cheaper than we're doing them right now. | ||
| And we very well might be forced to have to do that because we're not going to have the federal workforce in 28 if we get the presidency back to necessarily do all these things and we might need technology to help assist us there. | ||
| It is almost a political up. | ||
| We're not firing people anymore. | ||
| But we can actually make the program work better. | ||
| The program can work better because we don't have the people there. | ||
| And even if they hadn't just fired a bunch of people, a lot of people of the federal workforce was going to be retiring. | ||
| That's why so many people took that deal. | ||
| They were already close to retirement. | ||
| We're going to have to do this. | ||
| So I think this, I think the first time I made this observation was at an event that Zach you hosted on the Hill, I don't know, maybe it was a year ago. | ||
| But I think there's going to be, you know, all the stuff Doge is doing and Trump is doing and Rust Vo is doing is obviously bad. | ||
| But I think there's also an opportunity there for the next administration that we should take advantage of and not use to hurt ourselves even more. | ||
| And that is, don't try to just do, don't try to restore the status quo. | ||
| Let's not just try to reverse everything Dojin Trump did. | ||
| They are going to level government. | ||
| They are going to break everything. | ||
| That gives us an opportunity to, I wish I've come up with a better phrase than this. | ||
| Since then, I still obviously haven't. | ||
| You've got to build the government back better. | ||
| And not do it, build that better style. | ||
| You know, when they have broken how the Social Security Administration works, instead of trying to just unbreak the old system, let's build a new one. | ||
| Instead of trying to, you know, put back all the regulations they've repealed, let's figure out the ones that were actually worth keeping. | ||
| Let's come up with new ones that are more streamlined, make it easier to build things in this country. | ||
| Obviously, a lot of that is more state than federal, but I think there is some leading by example there. | ||
| And that is something that the next president and Democratic government should prioritize: doing things better than we did them in the past. | ||
| So we are coming up on time, but I want to give each of you 90 seconds to tell me and tell the audience what you would advise the next Democratic presidential nominee run on. | ||
| One, you could talk about something that would just be popular on its own, of just like, here's a fiscally responsible thing that we should be doing that voters would probably be happy about. | ||
| But if we're going to say we have to care about fiscal responsibility no matter what, it's just essential for us to take this seriously, even if it won't be popular. | ||
| What is your top proposal that is just going to be so effective or so politically salient or popular that you would recommend to them to adopt to tackle this problem? | ||
| Star at the end again. | ||
| I get the hard question first. | ||
| Look, I think the next Democrat, you know, the next Democratic nominee is going to need to talk about policy in a different way because we've broken a lot of our promises of I'll give you this, I'll give you that, and then we can't follow through. | ||
| So maybe it's not a specific policy, but a sense of values that the American people can trust. | ||
| That at the end, when you know, if I'm, you know, with whomever is going to be up on that debate stage against JD Vance or whomever else, they're going to say, whatever I do, I'm going to bring your costs down, I'm going to bring your wealth up. | ||
| I'm going to focus on making you richer, and I'm going to focus on making the things that you need to, you know, that cost you a lot of money cheaper. | ||
| Sort of tenth the word, why not better and cheaper? | ||
| Why can't we do, why can't we fulfill all of our promises and do it in a more efficient way? | ||
| How can we harness the technology that was not even available to us early in the Biden administration to make government work better for you? | ||
| How can we take what we have and make it work in a way that's less annoying and make it more affordable for you on an everyday basis? | ||
| I think in terms of specific policies, we have a 160-page plan to balance the budget. | ||
| You go pick whatever you want from there. | ||
| I'm not going to even try to summarize that here or even pick one thing from there. | ||
| But conceptually, I think there are two things. | ||
| The first is, I think it helps to have some sister soldier moments with the left. | ||
| Bill Clinton, famously, the way he kind of got credibility with moderates in the 90s was by repudiating someone who was perceived as a far-left cultural figure. | ||
| I think doing that on fiscal issues can be beneficial. | ||
| I think one of the strongest moments of Joe Biden's presidency, you know, not necessarily the highest bar there, but early on when there was a conversation about student debt cancellation, someone who was relatively on the left asked him at a town hall and said, We need $50,000 of student debt cancellation per borrower at a minimum. | ||
| What are you going to do to make that happen? | ||
| He said, I will not make that happen. | ||
| I don't think it's necessary. | ||
| I think it's regressive, and I'm just going to do $10,000. | ||
| Obviously, I would make the same argument about $10,000, but I think moments like that where you say, you know what, I'm not going to promise you the sun, moon, and stars. | ||
| I'm going to, I'm going to do stuff that is concrete and deliverable, and it's not going to be everything you want, but you can actually trust it when I say it. | ||
| Which goes to the second thing: is I think that Democrats, as the party that believes government can do things, has to make the case to voters that they can trust them to do those things. | ||
| I think showing that you have a fiscally responsible plan, showing that you can pay for things, showing that you are committed to it, means voters can believe more in what you are going to promise. | ||
| Everything individually, or almost everything individually, that was in Build Back Better was popular. | ||
| People didn't like the bill because they didn't think that you could do all of them at once. | ||
| It turned out you couldn't do all of them at once. | ||
| And so I think being able to rebuild that trust is the most important thing for the next Democratic nominee. | ||
| Well, I want to thank you all three for being here. | ||
| Quick round of applause for our panelists. | ||
| I love, I feel like this fiscal conversation has gotten so much more mature. | ||
| When I first started doing this, it felt like it was still just talking about deficits, deficits, spending, spending, spending. | ||
| And I feel like this emphasis on technology, this emphasis on affordability that this moment has offered really, I think, makes this conversation so much more topical and interesting. | ||
| Deficits are important and great, but being able to talk about that. | ||
| Not great, but just talking about deficits, sorry, is great. | ||
| But I think being able to broaden the conversation to include the stuff you're right does actually hit better with people, or at least I hope. | ||
| So thank you so much again for being here today. | ||
| And I hope if any of you have any questions for our wonderful panelists, you'll find them before they have to head out. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That was really interesting. | ||
| I mean, I'm not a fiscal conscious person, so kind of wearing a different angle for my vote. | ||
| Now, three weeks in, Republican and Democratic lawmakers remain at a stalemate in finding a government funding solution. | ||
| On Capitol Hill, the House is not in session. | ||
| The Senate's expected to revote tomorrow on a short-term funding bill through November 21st. | ||
| President Trump met with GOP members only at the White House Rose Garden. | ||
| He called Senate Democrats obstructionists and said, Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats need to vote for the clean, bipartisan continuing resolution and reopen our government. | ||
| Starting this week, the Capital Area Food Bank will launch new food distributions for federal workers and contractors. | ||
| They'll need to present government ID to receive assistance. | ||
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| Then Maryland Democratic Congressman Glenn Ivey, a member of the Appropriations Committee, covers the government shutdown and the Democrats strategy. | ||
| And Ryan Berg with the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the recent tensions between the U.S., Venezuela, and Colombia over allegations of drug trafficking. | ||
| Also, Wisconsin Republican Congressman Glenn Grossman on the government shutdown and the Republican strategy. | ||
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| On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear testimony from President Trump's nominees to serve in the Justice Department. | ||
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| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app or online at c-SPAN.org Wednesday, the three leading candidates in New York City's 2025 mayor's race, Democratic nominee Zorhan Mamdani, Independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, face off for a second time, answering questions from moderators as well as New York City voters. | ||
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