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Speaker Mike Johnson announced plans to schedule a floor vote after 218 members signed a discharge petition, enough to force the House to action on the bill. | |
| Watch live coverage of the House on C-SPAN. | ||
| See the Senate on C-SPAN 2. | ||
| And all of our congressional coverage is available on our free video app, C-SPAN Now, and our website, c-span.org. | ||
| And pass precedent denominations. | ||
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unidentified
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Why are you doing this? | |
| This is outrageous. | ||
| This is a canal clock. | ||
| Fridays, C-SPAN presents a rare moment of unity. | ||
| Ceasefire, where the shouting stops and the conversation begins. | ||
| Politico Playbook chief correspondent and White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns is host of Ceasefire, bringing two leaders from opposite sides of the aisle into a dialogue. | ||
| Ceasefire on the network that doesn't take sides. | ||
| Fridays at 7 and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | ||
| For former Congressional Budget Office Director, current American Action Forum President Douglas Holtz-Akin is back with us now for a focus on all things U.S. economy. | ||
| Mr. Holt-Aiken, I want to start with the Congressional Budget Office and its projections about the cost of the longest shutdown in U.S. history. | ||
| The urban shutdown cost the government, according to U.S. fourth quarter GDP reduction, some $28 billion, with maybe $14 billion of that considered unrecoverable. | ||
| Explain what that means and what are the biggest drivers of that loss in the fourth quarter here. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, the government got shut down. | ||
| People didn't get paid. | ||
| Some got furloughed. | ||
| Some continued to work, but they did not get paid. | ||
| And that's somebody's customer. | ||
| So they stopped buying things. | ||
| And that feedback goes through the economy. | ||
| It diminishes both the production and the purchases of things. | ||
| And that's about a $28 billion price tag. | ||
| So it was $9 to $10 billion in direct sort of payroll that didn't go out. | ||
| And then it gets multiplied through the economy. | ||
| Now, the recoverable part is that people did want to buy a new couch, say. | ||
| Maybe they'll buy it in January. | ||
| That'll show up in the next quarter's GDP. | ||
| It'll be higher. | ||
| Because some of the workers are going to get paid at the time that they were furloughed. | ||
| And so a lot of things just got put off in the fourth quarter and will show up in the first quarter. | ||
| That's the pattern in past shutdowns. | ||
| Why are some things unrecoverable then? | ||
| Well, some things are not durable goods. | ||
| They are, you know, going out to dinner. | ||
| There's no good way to recover that. | ||
| You missed the chance for the birthday party or whatever it might have been. | ||
| And so you don't get that back. | ||
| If the shutdown does mean a softening in the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter, where does that leave us in January, one year into the second Trump administration? | ||
| So first of all, some perspective. | ||
| It's a $30 trillion economy. | ||
| So even $28 billion, which is real money in the real world, is not a dramatic movement in the U.S. economy. | ||
| So we don't know exactly where we are because of the government shutdown. | ||
| We haven't received the typical updates on the data, but we know that there's been evidence of softness. | ||
| Certainly in the labor market, no great evidence of a robust labor market right now. | ||
| That usually means that there's no great evidence of a robust business sector, and that's a sign of a relatively flat economy. | ||
| A headline from today's Wall Street Journal, the bond market is headed for its best year since 2020. | ||
| Is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? | ||
| It depends if you're holding bonds. | ||
| If the price of bonds go up and you're holding them, that's a great thing. | ||
| If you want to buy a bond, then the price goes up, it's a bad thing. | ||
| So it's like most prices in the economy. | ||
| It's good news if you own it. | ||
| It's bad news if you want to buy it. | ||
| Inflation usually seems like bad news from people and impacting affordability. | ||
| Where are we on inflation right now? | ||
| Last measured inflation was about 3% year over year. | ||
| That's the top-line consumer price index. | ||
| That's not high inflation by any means. | ||
| The bad news is we were down to 2.3%, and we've now done a U-turn and we're headed back north. | ||
| That's an uncomfortable position for the Fed, which has a target of 2%, wanted to get back to 2%, and has now lost ground on that battle. | ||
| Affordability, the key issue, according to polls in the off-year elections. | ||
| How do you fight the problem of affordability? | ||
| We spent the first hour of this program today asking yours for their suggestions and what the government could do to help them lower prices or help lower prices for them. | ||
| How do you fight the affordability question? | ||
| I think the first thing is to frame it correctly. | ||
| Affordability is broadly prices. | ||
| It's not a single price. | ||
| And so you do want the Fed to get inflation back to 2%. | ||
| You don't want to do things that make that harder. | ||
| And I think the president's job owning of the Fed has not been helpful, but his tariffs have been a real problem. | ||
| And they're the source of the upward pressure that's going to continue. | ||
| And so if you wanted to pick one thing, undo the tariffs. | ||
| I mean, that would be a big help to the Fed. | ||
| And if you have high prices, in the end, it's always a supply problem. | ||
| You need more supply. | ||
| That's how you bring prices down. | ||
| So focusing on, like, what people are buying and the president's, like, you know, most of the nation drug pricing or 50-year mortgages or all those things which are meant to manipulate a particular price, what you want is to have a broad agenda to increase supply and availability in need. | ||
| On Friday, the president issued an executive order rolling back tariffs on certain grocery items. | ||
| Is that an acknowledgment there by the Trump administration that tariffs have real costs for Americans? | ||
| It was a welcome return to reality on tariffs. | ||
| I mean, there's been this denial that Americans pay the tariffs. | ||
| Americans pay the tariffs. | ||
| They're a tax on imports, and American pays it. | ||
| And they have an impact on prices. | ||
| There's no way around it. | ||
| If it's a consumer good, you add the tariff to the price. | ||
| Prices are higher. | ||
| And most of our trade is actually now in intermediate goods. | ||
| That's a cost of doing business. | ||
| Businesses pass that along. | ||
| So we'll see, and they haven't passed all of it along yet. | ||
| So we will see more upward pressure on prices. | ||
| The more things change, the more they stay the same. | ||
| Affordability and inflation were issues that we heard about during the Biden administration. | ||
| Are there lessons for the Trump administration right now on how the Biden administration tried to address this problem and lower costs for people? | ||
| I think there are certainly some economic lessons, which is you do need to actually focus on supply. | ||
| So a classic example is housing is expensive. | ||
| Let's give people bigger subsidies for housing. | ||
| That just causes them to buy more housing. | ||
| And what you need is more supply of houses. | ||
| And that's how you deal with the affordability. | ||
| And that takes a lot longer, though, to come to fruition. | ||
| So you look for quick fixes, and sending checks out is not going to fix anything. | ||
| The $2,000 dividend tariffs, that's going the wrong direction. | ||
| That's a very Biden-esque proposal. | ||
| I wouldn't do that. | ||
| So, you know, that's one lesson. | ||
| The second is how you talk about it. | ||
| Sort of finger-pointing, demagoguing didn't work for the Biden administration. | ||
| Remember, shrinkflation, greedflation, all sorts of things. | ||
| In the end, the problem was inflation. | ||
| Inflation had to be dealt with. | ||
| And, you know, the Federal Reserve has the job of price stability in the economy, and let them do their job. | ||
| Douglas Holtz-Aiken is our guest in this segment of the Washington Journal. | ||
| He's with us until about 8.45 Eastern, another 35 minutes or so. | ||
| So go ahead and get your calls in. | ||
| A very good person to chat economic issues with. | ||
| The American, let me get the numbers out for folks. | ||
| Democrats, Republicans, Independents, it's 202, 748, 8,000 for Democrats. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748, 8001. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| And for folks who don't know what the American Action Forum is, remind them what you do there. | ||
| We are a center-right think tank. | ||
| We do domestic and economic policy. | ||
| And the niche that we try to fill is, let's write in English for non-specialists and cover the things that are happening in Congress or the agencies. | ||
| So we're really trying to keep track of what's going on in the policy world on a daily basis. | ||
| When it comes to things happening in Congress, the impetus for the shutdown, Democrats putting the cost of health care front and center. | ||
| Do you think extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies was something that should happen to lower the cost of health care? | ||
| It's not the cost of health care. | ||
| It's the cost of an insurance policy that covers the cost of health care. | ||
| So what's missing in this debate is, A, as a sense of perspective, this isn't all the subsidies and it's not all the health insurance. | ||
| We have 310 million Americans and this is about 20 million of them. | ||
| So the broader health insurance cost problem is not even on the table. | ||
| And in the end, insurance covers the cost of doctors and hospitals and drugs and devices and all the things that are healthcare. | ||
| And that's where the money is and that's what we have to control the cost of. | ||
| A caller earlier said, you can fix this just by going single payer. | ||
| Let the government be the single payer for health care and that's how you fix this problem. | ||
| Where are you on that? | ||
| I think that's the wrong direction to go. | ||
| The cost of health care is not who writes the check to pay the doctor, it's the cost of the doctor. | ||
| And we've always focused on insurance and drugs. | ||
| The money in the American health care system is doctors and hospitals in the end. | ||
| That's the vast majority of it. | ||
| And that's the bill we have to cover. | ||
| So if you were fixing health care costs are, how would you do it? | ||
| I've been asked this question for 25 years. | ||
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unidentified
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We still have high costs, so I don't know. | |
| No, what you want to do is simple to say and hard to execute on. | ||
| You want to have the care coordinated. | ||
| You don't want people running from doctor to doctor to doctor and they don't know what the other one's doing. | ||
| So you want to have some sort of coordination of the care and you want to pay for outcomes, not for doing things to people. | ||
| For a long time, we just paid fee for service. | ||
| You go in, you get paid, and it's an incentive to do more things. | ||
| If the person's healthy and you get paid, that's the outcome you want. | ||
| And then you have to have some incentive to do that at a reasonable cost. |