| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
The inspectors general as their eyes and ears in the agency. | |
| You know, members of Congress have a lot of responsibilities, not just in their legislative role, but also as politicians, whereas inspectors general and the teams that they leave are actually in these agencies have a lot of influence, authority to be able to investigate these matters, and then Congress is able to use that information. | ||
| For much more on Inspectors General, Sean Newhouse covers the issue for government executive. | ||
| It's govexec.com to see his work, and we appreciate your time this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're going to leave this, but you can continue watching him. | |
| He's a Republican of California and a member of the budget committee. | ||
| Congressman, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thanks for having me. | |
| Politico is reporting that House Republicans are going to be meeting today or having a conference call, I should say, at 11.30 a.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| What will you be discussing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we'll be discussing what we've discussed over the past 27 days, and that is the shutdown. | |
| And unfortunately, there's not an awful lot the House can do until the Senate acts. | ||
| We passed the bill to keep the government open back on September 19th. | ||
| And everybody remembers their schoolhouse rock. | ||
| The House sends an appropriation to the Senate. | ||
| We did that. | ||
| Then the Senate either changes the bill and sends it back to us or passes the bill on to the president. | ||
| Schumer won't do either. | ||
| So the government remains in shutdown. | ||
| It's not clear to me what more the House can do at this point that it hasn't already done. | ||
| Is there any discussions going on at all about a change of tactics or about any kind of point of negotiation to move this towards an opening of the government? | ||
| Well, I mean, the big concern right now is that the continuing resolution, which by the way, had no Republican priorities in it, it made no changes in law. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It simply continued spending at current levels to keep the government open. | |
| But it runs out on November the 21st. | ||
| So we've run out about half the clock on this already, and it's probably going to have to be extended again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, you know, that's where a lot of the discussion is going. | |
| But also just the utter frustration with Senate Democrats holding the government hostage on their demands for a trillion and a half dollars of new spending. | ||
| That's, by the way, that'll cost an average household about $12,000. | ||
| And the public's very clear. | ||
| They don't want to shut down. | ||
| They don't want increased federal spending. | ||
| And yet the Senate Democrats have delivered a shutdown trying to get $1.5 trillion of increased federal spending. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's very frustrating. | |
| And I'm hoping that they will soon come to their senses. | ||
| So let's talk about the ACA tax subsidies that the Democrats are asking for, that those be extended. | ||
| Those run out December 31st, as you know. | ||
| Are you completely against those subsidies, tax subsidies being extended? | ||
| And would you want those to expire given what we know about where premiums are going and how much they would increase for people on the ACA? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I am very much opposed to extending the premiums. | |
| And by the way, when those subsidies expire, the premiums will simply revert to the original Obamacare premium levels. | ||
| The premium subsidies that they're talking about extending were radically increased during COVID to extend to families earning six figures of income. | ||
| That was a temporary measure because lockdowns were throwing people out of work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the Democrats are demanding to make these temporary subsidies permanent. | |
| This at a time when the federal government is running an historic debt, the interest on which now exceeds our entire defense budget. | ||
| Now, about 2 million people in your state and California do purchase health insurance through the ACA. | ||
| What do you tell them about their concerns about premiums doubling? | ||
| We've heard increases of up to 500 percent of these premiums, enough so that a lot of people would not be able to afford health care anymore. | ||
| What do you say to them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the Obamacare premiums have already skyrocketed. | |
| As many of us, by the way, warned at the time it was being put in, the only question is who's going to pay for the increases, the policyholders or the taxpayers? | ||
| And if it's the taxpayers, explain to me where they're going to get the money, considering the fact that every dollar of the discretionary federal budget is now being borrowed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And as I said, interest on the debt now exceeds our entire defense budget. | |
| At some points, you have to stop the cost spiral, and that means restoring a competitive, open insurance market. | ||
| And that's ultimately what has to be done, and that's where the discussion should be going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, let's get down to basics here. | |
| Our health care costs have grown three times as fast as inflation and population combined, while patient satisfaction continues to decline. | ||
| And the fundamental problem is we've severed the connection between the consumer and the payer. | ||
| If somebody else is paying the bill, the consumer doesn't care about costs, and the payer doesn't care about quality. | ||
| That connection needs to be restored. | ||
| And the best way to do that is to restore a competitive health insurance market where patients can shop among hundreds of plans competing for their business, select the one that best meets their needs and budget. | ||
| And for those who can't afford a basic plan, the government can provide enough support to bring it within their financial reach. | ||
| And pre-existing conditions can be covered by an assigned risk pool, as we do for auto insurance. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We proposed that at the time Obamacare was being adopted. | |
| If we had done that, I think our health care costs would be far lower than they are today, and patient satisfaction would be far higher. | ||
| Republican Tom McClintock of California will take your calls. | ||
| You can give us a call now up until the end of the show. | ||
| Republicans are on 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| You can start calling in now. | ||
| Congressman, I want to ask you about SNAP. | ||
| 42 million Americans use SNAP for food aid. | ||
| That's 12% of the total American population. | ||
| It's roughly 5.5 million just in your state of California. | ||
| That runs out on Saturday. | ||
| What do you think should be done about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we should reopen the government. | |
| I mean, it's not complicated. | ||
| And the Democratic leaders have already acknowledged that they know the shutdown is causing immense harm to those, particularly who are dependent on government services. | ||
| But they view this suffering, as Catherine Clark, the Democratic witch, said, they view it as leverage, leverage in their demands for $1.5 trillion in new spending. | ||
| And again, that in turn comes out of the earnings of American families. | ||
| Every trillion dollars we talk about, think of that as about $8,000 that your family is going to have to repay, either through current taxes, borrowing and future taxes, or higher prices as businesses pass their taxes on to you as a consumer. | ||
| So, Congressman, would you be in favor of just a temporary extension of just SNAP benefits? | ||
| Given if the government does not reopen by Saturday, would you vote for that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I certainly would be leaning toward it. | |
| Obviously, it depends upon the details, but the direct answer is yes. | ||
| But don't forget, Senator Johnson last week introduced a bill on the Senate floor to assure that the essential government workers, the air traffic controllers, the TSA officers, law enforcement that are required to show up for work anyway are going to be paid on time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the Democrats shot that down because it reduced their leverage. | |
| Well, at some point, people are going to have to make a judgment on a party that would put that kind of suffering as a priority to maintain their political leverage in this process. | ||
| I want to ask you about a headline in Axios about it says the economy is an unchartered territory that data went dark this month. | ||
| The government shutdown is halting the collection and release of statistics tracking the job market, public health, and crop production, as well as other economic indicators. | ||
| Congressman, you serve on the budget committee. | ||
| What kind of impact are you fearing from this lack of government data and what can be done about it? | ||
| Well, first of all, the government data has not always proven to be accurate. | ||
| So there are a lot of discussions right now on how far we need to reform the process to assure that we're getting more consistent economic data. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the bottom line is everybody knows in their own lives how the economy is doing. | |
| You can't spin that. | ||
| And that's ultimately what the election, I think, is going to be determined by. | ||
| And it's not going to be on political spins because it's going to be to the answer that every American gives to this question. | ||
| You're better off today than you were two years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think because of the big, beautiful bill and the enormous regulatory and tax relief that it delivers, the answer is going to be yes. | |
| But again, that's not my question to answer. | ||
| That is the answer the American people have got to make for themselves based upon their own experience. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's talk to Frank, who's in San Francisco, Independent Line. | ||
| Hi, Frank. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Mimi. | |
| You're calling in an independent this time because Democrats running Newcomb or Bama Laher is not enthusing me about 2028, if we get an election at all. | ||
| But Mr. McClintock, it seems like you've misstated a few points. | ||
| And returning, we're not going to return to premiums of Obamacare. | ||
| We're going to return to a higher premium because of the inflation we've been having in the health industry. | ||
| But that inflation is because of Obamacare, which is what we warned at the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, you know, listen, I understand that if the government subsidizes something, it increases the price. | |
| That's why originally Obamacare was RomneyCare. | ||
| It was a Heritage Foundation idea. | ||
| Before Heritage Foundation was promoting, I mean, after they were promoting health mandates, then they were arguing it's unconstitutional. | ||
| So basically, we have a tweedle-dun, tweedledee, power corrupts. | ||
| Money is concentrating in more and more hands. | ||
| As Thomas Jefferson said, an aristocracy of wealth is more harm and danger than benefit to society. | ||
| Well, I mean, here's where we can agree. | ||
| Use of subsidies increase the price of whatever it is that you're subsidizing. | ||
| That's why we've got to get back to a competitive market system where individual plans, hundreds and hundreds of them, are competing for people's business based upon what they're offering and the value that they're delivering. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Obamacare is exactly the opposite. | |
| Obamacare is basically a one-size-fits-all process, heavily subsidized by taxpayers. | ||
| And by the way, if the subsidies expire, a single individual earning $40,000 a year is still only going to pay about 7% of his income for his health care. | ||
| That's about $2,700. | ||
| Taxpayers will pick up the other $5,400 a year of the price of that policy. | ||
| If a single individual at the poverty level, $15,000, if the premiums expire, or the premium subsidies expire, will only pay $3.45 a week with the taxpayers picking up the other 98% of the policy. | ||
| And that has to be addressed. | ||
| Here's Maria in New Jersey, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Maria. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Oh, all this baloney about the shutdown. | ||
| Now, about the shutdown, I think it's a real sin. | ||
| All of these people working without pay when our members of Congress, who are millionaires and billionaires, they get their pay. | ||
| What I know of, I think there's one Republican who is not taking his pay. | ||
| This is a real sin. | ||
| And these members of Congress during the shutdown, they still take their time off. | ||
| They're off for a week or whatever. | ||
| And they get paid big time. | ||
| Something should definitely be done about it. | ||
| Congressman McClintock. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, I'm certainly not a millionaire. | |
| My paycheck is my salary as a member of Congress. | ||
| And that said, I've been in public service now for 40 years. | ||
| And I'm no wealthier today than I was when I started. | ||
| And that wasn't wealthy at all. | ||
| And I've, as many members of Congress, have deferred my paycheck until the shutdown is over. | ||
| That's the only way I could look our TSA officers in the eye at the airport. | ||
| So there are a number of factual inaccuracies there. | ||
| But the core point is people are being harmed by this, and it has to end. | ||
| And the simple way to end it is to pass the continuing resolution that continues current levels of spending that the Democrats already agreed to back in March through November 21st. | ||
| And obviously, there's probably going to need to be another extension because we've now lost a month because of the Democrats holding the government hostage. | ||
| And, Congressman, I wanted to ask you, since you're from California, is your district being affected by possible redistricting there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I mean, all of the districts are. | |
| We had an independent commission. | ||
| We have an independent commission that drew lines after holding 196 public meetings. | ||
| They received 33,000 communications from Californians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They listened to every constituency in every community. | |
| And over a period of nine months, they drafted a consensus redistricting plan. | ||
| Newsome has placed on the ballot for November 4th a measure that would completely shred the work of that commission and replace it with the highly partisan Gary Matter that was drafted by partisan zealots over a few days behind closed doors. | ||
| Republican candidates for Congress in the last election got 40% of the vote in California. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We got 8%. | |
| We're going to leave this, but you can continue watching at C-SPAN.org as we take you live now to Kyongjoo, South Korea, where President Trump will be speaking at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit CEO luncheon. | ||
| You're watching live coverage on C-SPAN. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| It's a great honor to be here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Incredible people, incredible country. | |
| I'm thrilled to be back with so many visionary innovators and titans of industry, the most brilliant in the world, actually. | ||
| So many different locations, and they come from all over, but this is a very special country that I'm in. | ||
| And the business leaders here at AIPAC are really, really fantastic. | ||
| So many friends, and I want to thank our host at this important summit, President Lee of South Korea. | ||
| He's a terrific person, and I'm going to be meeting with him this afternoon. | ||
| And I look forward to that very much. | ||
| The Republic of Korea is a cherished American friend and a close ally. | ||
| And as we can see in this beautiful city, it's truly one of the most remarkable nations anywhere on earth. | ||
| Here in this peninsula, the people of South Korea have forged a miracle of economic development like you rarely see an industrial and technological powerhouse, and above all, a free society and enduring democracy and a thriving civilization. | ||
| And I want to congratulate you. | ||
| Very few places like it. | ||
| The entire world should be inspired by all that you have achieved, and they study you and they do so much to understand what you've done, but most of them don't get it. | ||
| And it's probably good for you. | ||
| Keep it this way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Most of them don't get it. | |
| They want to get it, but it doesn't quite work out for them the same way it works out for you. | ||
| So that's a great tribute to you. | ||
| We have some very special people with us today, and I want to thank for the great job he's done and also for being here. | ||
| Secretary of State Marco Rubio. | ||
| Marco, you're around here someplace. | ||
| Where's Marco Marco? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Man who's doing a fantastic job, who understands the markets maybe better than anybody. | ||
| Our Treasury Secretary Scott Besant. | ||
| Scott, thank you very much. | ||
| And somebody that you're dealing with who you made a very good deal with, because you have very good negotiators, but he's pretty good too. | ||
| Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce. | ||
| Thank you, Howard. | ||
| U.S. Trade Representative, Ambassador Jameson Greer, is a fantastic person. | ||
| And your careers, Minister of Trade, Industry and Resources, Mr. Jung Kwan Kim, who's an incredible man, actually. | ||
| My people say he's very tough, however. | ||
| We wish we had somebody of a little bit lesser caliber, but they decided not to do that. | ||
| And so many other distinguished guests are here, so I just want to thank you very much. | ||
| It's an incredible room. | ||
| It's a beautiful room, by the way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All those beautiful people up there so high up. | |
| This place is packed. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that. | |
| We're waving. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| But as you know, APEC Unites Pacific Nations around our growing economies and promoting our shared interests. | ||
| And today I come with exciting news from one of the largest Pacific nations. | ||
| We'll call ourselves a Pacific nation, but one of the largest of them all, the United States of America. | ||
| I'm pleased to report to you that this afternoon, after four years of weakness, disaster, really decline, America is back and it's back stronger than ever before. | ||
| We're doing numbers that nobody's ever seen before. | ||
| We're the hottest country in the world, actually. | ||
| And I say that with other countries represented, and they admit it. | ||
| But I do say it very proudly. | ||
| One year ago, our country was in very, very serious trouble. | ||
| Some people thought our country was dead. | ||
| Now we're literally the sort of an inspiration to a lot of other countries. | ||
| We are indeed, I use the term hottest country, but we're the hottest country anywhere in the world by far. | ||
| The United States is blessed with the, right now, the strongest economy, the strongest borders. | ||
| This all happened over the last nine months. | ||
| The strongest military, the strongest friendships, and the strongest spirit of any nation on the face of the earth. | ||
| This is a golden age. | ||
| In a short period of time, I knew we could do it. | ||
| I didn't know we were going to do it this quickly. | ||
| It's a little bit more than nine months. | ||
| So in less than one year, we've secured commitments for over $18 trillion of new investments. | ||
| As an example, the previous administration, in four years, they did less than a trillion. | ||
| I think much less, actually. | ||
| And hurt our country very badly. | ||
| Who would have known? | ||
| But we're going to be 18, so I figure that we'll probably be at 20 or 21, maybe even 22 trillion dollars of investments coming into our country by the end of the first year of my second term. | ||
| And, you know, we had a tremendously successful first term. | ||
| We had the strongest economy in history for our country, strongest we ever had. | ||
| But this is, I think, blowing it away. | ||
| We have great policy. | ||
| We have some very good things happening. | ||
| The stock market, as you know, is set 45 all-time highs since in a period of, it's pretty good, in a period of nine months, breaking new records week after week, including one just yesterday. | ||
| We set the record GDP growth in the second quarter. | ||
| And that's with all of the things that we're doing. | ||
| When they are built in a year and two years, we're going to go through the roof. | ||
| I mean, we're going to see numbers that I don't think have ever been seen before. | ||
| But even during this period of, a little bit of a period of transition, you could go, because I think we're in an economic revolution in America. | ||
| We went at 3.8%. | ||
| We're up 3.8% GDP, triple and even quadruple the rate that a lot of people thought we'd be. | ||
| They thought that during this period that we'd be at a much lower rate. | ||
| Some people predicted one, one and a half, and we're going to be very close to four. | ||
| The next quarter, we're expected to be at about 4% growth. | ||
| And after that, I mean, I can't even predict because when all of these factories that are moving in, the car plants are moving in. | ||
| Yesterday I was with Mr. Toyota in Japan, and He's just announced he's going to spend, they are going to spend $10 billion, and they're going to build new car plants, and they're going to build them in numerous states, about six or seven different states. | ||
| And we're bringing our car industry back. | ||
| We're bringing AI. | ||
| We're leading everybody in AI. | ||
| We're leading every nation in AI, actually by a lot. | ||
| In nine months, we've lifted over 600,000 Americans off food stamps. | ||
| Wages for workers are rising at the fastest pace in more than 60 years. | ||
| And meanwhile, energy prices are down. | ||
| Gasoline prices are down. | ||
| Grocery prices are down. | ||
| Mortgage rates are down, despite the fact that we have an incompetent head of the Fed. | ||
| He's incompetent. | ||
| I call him Jerome Too Late. | ||
| He's always too late. | ||
| Jerome Too Late, Powell. | ||
| But he's out of there in another couple of months. | ||
| We'll be very happy about that. | ||
| We'll appoint somebody that we all like because we should have the lowest interest rates of any country. | ||
| Because without us, there are no other countries, really. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing falls apart. | ||
| You know, America always had the lowest interest rates, and now we don't do that. | ||
| You know, we're like number 28. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| And we're a much different country than we were two years ago or a year ago even. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| The crazy thing is in the old days, I call the old days. | ||
| I'm a little bit older. | ||
| I'm looking at all these young, brilliant faces. | ||
| I'm a slight, you know, a couple of years older than you, just a couple of years. | ||
| But you know, in the old days, when you announced good news, the stock market went up. | ||
| You announced good news, the stock market would go up. | ||
| Now, when you announce good news, the stock market goes down because people say, oh, that's terrible. | ||
| You're doing well. | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| Interest rates will go up. | ||
| So they think because of that, interest rates will go up because that's, it's inverse of what it should be. | ||
| We're going to go back to the way it used to be. | ||
| When we announce good news, the stock markets are going to go up. | ||
| And that's the way it should be. | ||
| And we're going to really ride that very hard. | ||
| And when we announce good news, we're not going to have a Fed that's going to raise interest rates because they're worried about inflation in three years from now or something. | ||
| When we announce good news, we want the stock market to go up, not to go down. | ||
| And the scourge of inflation we inherited, you know, we inherited the worst inflation ever that we've ever had. | ||
| I inherited from incompetent people. | ||
| And now we're down to a very low rate of inflation, 2.7%. | ||
| And it's going to be a little bit lower than that. | ||
| It's almost a perfect number. | ||
| Believe it or not, you don't want to have zero. | ||
| You want to have like 1% to 2%, and we're very close to that number. | ||
| But we had inflation the worst in the history of our country. | ||
| But factories are booming in the USA, and manufacturing productivity is rising five times faster than it was just one year ago. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| Steel production is way up by 155,000 tons a week. | ||
| Oil production is through the roof by half a million barrels a day. | ||
| And mining of clean, beautiful coal. | ||
| I call it clean, beautiful coal is up by 2.6 million tons every single month. | ||
| And we brought coal back into the picture. | ||
| What you can do with coal today is incredible. | ||
| So I call it clean, beautiful. | ||
| I don't use the word coal, I say, because it's got a little bit of a problem, public relations-wise the word. | ||
| So we call it clean, beautiful. | ||
| My administration's not allowed to use the word coal. | ||
| They have to say clean, beautiful coal. | ||
| We've given it a new name. | ||
| It's a three-name. | ||
| It's a three-name deal. | ||
| Even semiconductor manufacturing is rapidly returning to the United States. | ||
| NVIDIA and TSMC have just produced the first state-of-the-art Blackwell chip that was 100% made in the USA. | ||
| In fact, Jensen, who's an incredible guy, might be here. | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| Is Jensen here? | ||
| I think he's around. | ||
| Somebody said he's here. | ||
| How is he? | ||
| Pretty good, right? | ||
| Got a chip. | ||
| Got a chip that's like 10 years advanced, but he's great. | ||
| And they're all, you know, building now. | ||
| They're building tremendous plants in the United States, Arizona, Texas, all over. | ||
| We're going to have a big portion of the chip market just in a very short period of time. | ||
| But these tremendous strides are also creating great jobs for our citizens. | ||
| 1.9 million more American-born workers are employed today than when I took office nine months ago. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| Almost 2 million people more American workers. | ||
| Nobody's ever had numbers like that. | ||
| And those numbers are going to get much bigger, much better than that, when we open these plants that are being built all over the AI plants. | ||
| I've never seen plants this big. | ||
| You know, I built shopping centers. | ||
| I built a lot of things. | ||
| But if you spend $250, $300 million, you can build a big shopping center. | ||
| These people are spending $50 billion to build a building. | ||
| And I say, what's your product? | ||
| Information. | ||
| I said, well, good luck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a lot of information you're going to have to have. | |
| But, you know, they're the smartest people in the world doing it, and they all think it's great. | ||
| All I can do is make it easy for them. | ||
| And what I've done, one of the things that I'm most proud of, because I thought of it like every country, our electricity production, our energy production is now, it's not, nobody ever thought it, nobody ever saw this kind of a revolution with the AI. | ||
| And what they need more than anything is electricity. | ||
| So if a country was able to do that, it would be pretty unusual. | ||
| It would be very hard. | ||
| Maybe you could say impossible. | ||
| So I came up with the concept when they build this massive plant, sometimes the size of Manhattan. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| The size of Manhattan, these plants are the biggest. | ||
| I've never seen anything like it. | ||
| Actually, nobody has. | ||
| There's never been anything like it. | ||
| But I let them build their own electricity generating plants with it. | ||
| So they're building their own electric. | ||
| They're sort of becoming an electric producing company in addition to all of the other things that they produce, including information. | ||
| And what they're able to do is start immediately. | ||
| We're giving them very fast permits. | ||
| We're no longer having them wait for 10 years, 12 years, 15 years prior to rejection. | ||
| They'd go 15 years and then they'd get a vote, a rejection. | ||
| And by that time, their concepts were old and obsolete anyway. | ||
| So, you know, it's terrible. | ||
| And we're getting it done rapidly, literally rapidly. | ||
| And they're coming up with electric generating plants, the likes of which nobody has seen. |