Rep. Ro Khanna diagnoses America’s economic crisis—80% of Americans fear their children’s future—blaming Trump-era tariffs ($6B+ food price hikes), healthcare premium spikes, and deindustrialization that left regions like Bucks County behind while Silicon Valley amassed five trillion-dollar firms. His "Marshall Plan for America" merges FDR-style relief (Medicare for all, $10/day childcare) with structural reforms: a White House Economic Development Council, national industrial banks, 1,000 trade schools, AI academies, and wealth redistribution, funded by billionaire taxes and defense cuts. Khanna ties stagnant wages to rising costs—healthcare, housing, childcare—and elite impunity, like the Epstein files’ revelations, demanding bipartisan accountability to rebuild trust in a multiracial democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
The flag replacement program got started by a good friend of mine who a Navy vet saw the flag at the office that needed to be replaced and said wouldn't this be great if this was going to be something that we did for anyone.
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This is one of those great examples of the way we're getting out there.
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California Democratic Congressman Roe Conna spoke about affordability and the economy at the Center for American Progress.
He also highlighted how the Democratic Party can shape its economic agenda for the 2026 midterm elections.
My name is Neera Tandon, and I'm president and CEO of the Center for American Progress.
I'm really grateful that you're all here today.
I believe this conversation could not be more urgent.
Across the country, Americans feel stuck because really they are stuck.
We are facing declining economic mobility.
Families are having a real struggle making ends meet.
And really, for the entirety of American history, each succeeding American generation has been economically better off than the preceding one until now.
Wages aren't keeping up with costs.
Many communities are losing employers faster than they can attract new ones.
And the path to the middle class is shrinking, even as the wealthiest own more and more of the pie.
And if we want to be truly honest, the current administration is making the situation worse.
While one in two Americans struggle to afford health care, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are letting health insurance premiums double for more than 20 million people.
And they are doing that as we speak.
While 80% of adults report feeling incredible stress to just pay for groceries and 73% worry about paying their utility bills, the president's tariffs are making food more expensive and his attacks on renewables are raising prices on utilities as well.
So it's really important that we recognize the economic harm that we're seeing from this administration.
But it's not enough for us to just offer criticism.
It's incredibly vital that we have ideas about how to meet this moment, how to ensure that future generations will have real opportunity, how the United States actually remains a country that is based on opportunity and hope as well.
Currently, almost 80% of Americans feel like their children will be worse off than them.
And that creates a level of anger and pessimism that I believe is changing our politics and making us much more open to hate and demagoguery.
And that is exactly why I'm so excited to have Congressman Roe Connant here today to really talk about his vision on the economy and his views on a kind of new economic patriotism.
I truly believe that this moment demands a new vision for a 21st century economy, one that resists the harmful policies of the Trump administration, but really restores a sense of economic dynamism, hope, fairness, opportunity for all.
And Representative Khanna has really put forward that vision.
He'll talk more about it, but it is really a national mission to innovate, to create opportunity for every community, and to build more in the United States.
It means new factories, tech hubs, hospitals, and universities, and it means investing in all of us, not just some of us.
I would be remiss if I didn't also note that Representative Khanna is not just a leader who's putting out a new economic vision and addressing some of our core issues and concerns as a country, but he is also a true fighter.
And nothing demonstrates that more than his principled resolve and fight to ensure that we have actual accountability in our country for those who create the greatest harm to the most vulnerable.
And I just want to say, express my thanks to him for his leadership with Congressman Massey on ensuring that we have actual information, hopefully soon, out of our Justice Department on the Epstein files.
So I'm going to applaud that.
It is really one of the first times we have actually seen true accountability in the Trump administration.
And so I think if you are able to deliver a bipartisan vote in that and one of the toughest issues, then I think we can also look for real leadership on economic issues as well.
So with that, it is my great honor to bring to the stage Congressman Ro Khanna from California.
You know, I was a young person in politics, Indian American of Hindu faith.
When I had my first internship, someone said to me, Mr. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, I interned for her because she was the daughter of Robert Kennedy.
And a staff person said, well, Roe, you can't ever get elected as someone of Indian origin and Hindu faith, but maybe you could go work for someone one day.
This was before Obama.
And there was one Indian American back then who was incredibly prominent, and that was Niratundan.
So I've admired her career and her contributions to so many in our party on a personal level and on a substantive level.
Thank you.
And it's wonderful to be here at CAP.
Our country needs ideas and substance to meet the moment.
I want to just speak for five to seven minutes because I'd much rather have a conversation.
But let me frame the big issue is the central divide I see.
I represent a district that has $18 trillion of value.
It's the most wealth that has been generated in a single area, arguably, in human history.
We have five companies that are over a trillion dollars.
East of the Mississippi, there isn't a single trillion-dollar company.
In my district, people see the world as their oyster.
At the same time where I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, people feel that the economy has stagnated.
So many steel factories shut down, not just in Bucks County, but western Pennsylvania.
Industry hollowed out.
Communities that don't see the American dream for them.
One of the mistakes I think the Democratic Party makes is we think, okay, Donald Trump went and he just talked to blue-collar workers, and if we just give them a living wage increase, somehow they'll vote for us.
But his message, in some sense, was deeper.
He said, Rose family just got here.
What happened to you?
You built the country.
You fought the wars.
You built the steel.
You made, you mine the coal.
What has happened to you?
What happened to your communities?
I'm going to bring it back.
I'm going to bring back that American dream and that pride that they took from you, that the elites took from you, that they offshored your jobs, they let wealth pile up.
I'm going to bring back that pride.
Now, he offered 19th century vision to do it.
I often joke: if he had been president after James Polk, we would have had not just the illegal Mexican-American War, we would have had an illegal Canadian-American War.
But he's sort of president in the wrong century.
No American really believes that we're going to build wealth from grabbing land.
Take it from the guy who sees how the wealth is being built in the 21st century.
And no person really believes that just mass tariffs are going to create factories.
No industrial power has ever done that just through tariffs.
The Democratic Party should say we have an understanding of where this economy is going.
We understand the future.
Trump is kind of a 1980s guy stuck in the 19th century.
We have a 21st century vision to make sure that every family in every community are going to have success and independence in a modern economy.
And that will be our highest mission.
That will be our North Star.
Morning, afternoon, night, we are going to focus on the economic empowerment and roadmap for families and communities across this country.
I call it economic patriotism.
I believe it can be our new national purpose.
Americans coming together to build, rebuild every community across this nation so that we can actually have families thrive in a modern economy and so that we can become a cohesive multiracial democracy that leads the world in this new era.
How should we do it?
We should have a Marshall Plan for the United States of America.
Let me offer five components and then we'll open it up for conversation.
We should have a White House Economic Development Council.
I did that with Marco Rubio.
He never implemented it when he became Secretary of State, but we had a bipartisan bill to do that.
What would it be?
It would be modeled after Lyndon Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity, where Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity helped develop the Black South, grants directly to communities and counties to help invest in projects that they wanted for jobs and for training.
We could do that not just for the Black South, but for communities across this country with the White House Economic Development Council.
We should have a national industrial bank that finances new factories in places that have been deindustrialized.
But we should recognize that manufacturing is not going to be more than 10% of employment and that we're going to need care jobs and child care and in elder care and in health care also in these communities.
That we're going to need trade schools, both with the traditional trades of plumbers and electricians and cosmetologists, but also of the tech trades that are going to create jobs in drones and animation and in surgical technicians.
And that we should build a thousand new of these trade schools across this country.
We should build AI academies so that young people have the opportunity to get trained in the skills that they can then use for small businesses.
And we should offer a comprehensive economic development plan across this country so that the wealth doesn't just pile up in a few places.
And we should go to these communities and say, look, you tried the tariff thing.
You tried the land grab thing.
Here is the roadmap to building economic success, and we want your communities to be part of doing that.
One provocative point.
We can't just go there, and I wrote the help write the Chips and Science Act.
We can't just go to these communities that were hollowed out that had steel factories and say, okay, now you're going to get a battery plant.
How about asking them what they want?
First, we ignored them for 50 years and hollowed them out.
Then we had Brookings papers say they want a battery plant.
Did anyone ask them what they wanted?
Did anyone go and say, what do you want to build?
Our party needs more humility.
I've said we've spent so much time railing against Donald Trump.
We need to spend more time railing against the system that has shafted people and given rise to the anger that created the conditions for Donald Trump.
I believe we're going to have a historic realignment.
I believe that 2026 and 2028 offer us the opportunity to really give a new national purpose to this country, to offer a real plan for how we're going to build jobs and economic prosperity across this country.
And by working together to do that, that's how we're going to come together to be a multiracial democracy.
My parents came here when Kennedy had called for us to go to the moon.
We were humming.
We were the place to be.
I want our party to lead this country to that kind of excitement and vision again.
And the economics will allow us to be the cohesive multiracial democracy that, in my view, is the American destiny.
So with that, Nira, I'd love to open it up for a conversation.
I was born in Philadelphia in 1976, our bicentenary.
My wife's tired of hearing me say that, but it is a great biographical fact for a politician.
And I grew up in Bucks County.
Like I said, as a grandson of someone whose grandfather fought in Gandhi's independence movement for four years as a son of immigrants, as Indian American of Hindu faith.
And I had teachers who believed in me, and I couldn't hit for anything, and I had little league coaches who believed in me.
I remember my first op-ed, it got published about the Gulf War, and it said, read this 14-year-old's lips, George, in the Bucks County Courier Times.
I have it framed in my office.
I thought the President of the United States was going to read my op-ed.
Now I write in the New York Times, they still don't read it.
But the point is this country gave me everything.
It believed in me.
My mom said, you can be anything in this country.
You can do anything if you work hard.
It is a remarkable country.
It is still the most open democratic system in the face of the world.
And we're going to become the first cohesive multiracial democracy in the history of civilization.
We as Democrats need to talk about all the things that are right about America as we also criticize what's wrong about America.
We need to understand that there is no greater honor, no greater privilege than being an American citizen.
That is how I was raised.
My mom talked at the kitchen table, used to have me memorize English words because she thought that that was the way that learning American language and English and American history was the way up in this nation.
And I think we have been that party, and we need to just emphasize that.
I guess I wanted to touch on maybe a hard question here, but it's one we're honestly struggling with, which is you reference an Invest in America agenda and investing in communities that are left behind.
As you know, the Biden administration also tried to have an Invest in America agenda.
Some of it was too slow and has been halted now.
But the theory of that was to invest in places that have been left behind.
You make an excellent point about not asking, often not asking what people wanted.
But I wanted to just get your sense.
Is it that the policies weren't well communicated in the past?
Is that still the right, obviously you think it's the right strategy?
How would we do that differently in the future to ensure a greater degree of success?
I think we have to replicate the modern FDR coalition.
There are two components to it.
One of it is people not feeling that they can pay the bills and their costs going up.
And so we missed that part of it, not because the President Biden didn't care, but we weren't able to do things like get health care costs down, get child care costs down, get college costs down.
And that part of the agenda wasn't there, get grocery prices down.
So there has to be an immediate impact on the rising costs that people have and a willingness to offer structural change.
I mean, in my view, it's Medicare for all.
It's $10 a day child care.
It's taxing billionaires with a wealth tax.
It's saying that we understand the economic system isn't working for you.
Second, you have to be willing to say, and I think this comes unnaturally to Democrats because we're very polite, that the governing system shafted you, that the governing class didn't do the right things.
And you have to be willing to call that out and say we're going to need a new guard, a new generation, that the old guard has failed us.
And, you know, we're some of these folks, you'll be offending people who may have been colleagues and who you were part of that system, but we have to recognize there's a righteous anger at the system.
And third, I would say that the economic development strategy has to be modern.
It has to include the private sector.
It has to include labor.
It has to include tech jobs and AI jobs and health care jobs and care jobs and nursing jobs.
Yes, it's got to have some types of factories, but it can't just be, let's just build factories.
I mean, that's not going to convince people that you really understand the modern economy.
And so President Biden's strength was a sense that he really got these communities, but I don't think we were able to convey to that young person that we really have a strategy for that community's future and we were going to implement it.
So those would be my senses of how we can build on that work.
You talk a lot about training and vocational training, other forms of training.
We're doing a fair amount of work on this here at CAP, but I also wanted to just get your sense of the differential.
You emphasize a lot of training opportunities for people who don't go to college across a wide spectrum, AI jobs, other areas.
Could you talk a little bit more about that, That vision you have and why that is important, and what kind of message it sends to working class people when you build a system that's designed around their opportunities as well.
Well, 400 to 1 is the amount the federal government spends on college and college-oriented programs compared to career, technical, and vocational education programs.
So, partly we just have not done enough to tackle the challenge for 60 percent of Americans who don't go to college and what their future was going to be.
Now, here's the interesting thing that I think is happening in our country.
When deindustrialization took place, the first people to sound the alarm was William Julius Wilson.
Has anyone read William Julius Wilson here?
Yeah, it was at University of Chicago, and he was basically saying you're ruining black inner cities because black jobs are disappearing through deindustrialization.
And no one really cared, paid attention to them.
And then Deaton and Case and others started writing about blue-collar jobs disappearing in largely white working-class communities.
And more people started to pay attention.
They basically were saying the exact same thing that William Julius Wilson was talking about 15 years earlier, calling him debts of despair, but more people paid attention.
But it was still just the blue-collar class.
Now, AI is threatening white-collar jobs.
So, suddenly, the whole country has woken up that jobs are an issue, that we need to have a jobs agenda, that this is going to require both trade schools, AI academies, the federal government, perhaps hiring people right after high school or college.
I call it a future workforce administration, putting them to work to rebuild communities, to do health care jobs, child care jobs, to do national security jobs, science jobs, and that we can have the most bold, patriotic jobs agenda in this moment.
And that's, I think, the opportunity because now you have a broad class of people across race that understand that we need a good jobs agenda in this country.
You also raised, you know, a living wage and being for minimum wage increases.
I guess one of the questions here is also just as part of that kind of basic bargain, social contract, where is corporate responsibility and federal policy on things like the minimum wage?
Well, I think there's great consensus in the Democratic Party that we need to be for a living wage.
We've passed this multiple times in the House of Representatives.
And I had called for firing the parliamentarian back when we couldn't get it through the Senate.
But if you look in Mexico, for example, Amlow and President Schoenbaum, who I just saw, one of the things she pointed out was that they raised the minimum wage there, which was about $4.65 a day, to $15 a day, six times in the course of Amlo's presidency.
And it's one reason they were one of the only examples of an incumbent party post-COVID that won.
This should be a no-brainer for the next Democratic administration to call for raising the wage, and we should do it at a living wage.
I mean, right now, Sanders and Bobby Scott have the $17 bill.
We can see what that number is, but we should, day one, be fighting to increase the wage.
This is the anger people have, right?
I mean, think about it.
You finally get a job at a trillion-dollar-plus company like Amazon.
You would think you hit the lottery, and yet you can't pay the bills.
I've taken to calling the Walt Techs to my tech friends, not the WaltX.
They call it the anti-revolution tax.
Just pay it that way.
You know, we are in an FDR moment.
FDR stood up to the economic royalists to be able to save capitalism from itself.
And I believe we need the same thing.
We're making so much wealth, so much wealth that we need to make sure that that prosperity is shared, that people have a stake in it, who may not be the CEOs or the venture capitalists in the friends and family rounds of these tech companies.
Because I do think when people are kind of angry at the system and feel that it's rigged, perhaps the most obvious example of that is in our country today, billionaires don't just have a billion, you know, they don't just have billions of dollars.
They have billions of dollars of political power as well.
I mean, we've never seen a system in which the president's largest political contributor becomes the person who has the largest sway on which federal workers are hired and fired, right?
It's like a whole new era.
So I also guess I'd ask you, as the representative of Silicon Valley, how they see the need for patriotism, how they see their role and responsibility in a country where you could say all these policies are great for companies because they get to do what they want.
Yet the democracy is fraying, systems are, there's more and more anger across the board.
Are people thinking in the long term about how to solve this problem or not?
Well, too many people in the Valley unfortunately supported Trump, but I think they're slowly having some buyers' remorse.
And that buyer's remorse is that they see the ugliness of those policies, that it could mean trade wars.
It could mean firing people at the Fed in total destabilization.
It could mean the banning of international students from coming here and being competitive.
It could mean an ugly nativism emerging in the United States.
I had to stand up for Sri Ram, who was an appointee to the Trump administration, because MAGA was attacking him based on his race and being an immigrant.
And so I think that it's hitting them now that they're seeing this, what Darren A. Smoglu, the MIT Nobel laureate, won the Nobel Prize for, that stable economic systems and the rule of law actually produce economic growth.
And Reid Hoffman was saying this, but it was so abstract, and now I think people are realizing this.
But that doesn't mean that we can just rely on their benevolence to have the right policies.
I think what we need to say is, look, you have to, we want to have innovation, but this innovation that has just enriched a few billionaires is not sustainable for American democracy.
You're going to pay more tax.
We're going to invest in universal national health insurance and Medicare for all.
We're going to have $10 a day child care.
We're going to have a living wage.
We're going to invest in these communities.
You're going to help with creating these trade schools.
You're going to help with creating these AI academies.
I said to someone in the Obama administration, and they thought I was a little naive, I said, couldn't the president just tell these tech leaders to do it?
And they say, come on, Roe.
I mean, you can't just do it with the president.
But now Trump set a new precedent.
The next Democratic president better tell these tech companies, get on board.
Get on board.
Start to invest in this community or you're going to face more and more pushback.
And I say to folks that, yes, they're realizing the importance of liberal democracy, but they also need to be held accountable.
I mean, just on that point, you haven't had Democratic administrations take actual shares of companies.
You know, there is a kind of intervention that we're seeing.
And, you know, those are powers.
I'm not saying we should take shares of companies, but the president has discovered new powers.
And it's important to really think through how to use those for good in the future.
I'm going to ask one or two more questions, and then I'll turn it to the audience.
So get your questions ready.
They should be actual questions.
I actually enforce that.
So I hope you get them ready.
I do have to ask, just because it's been such a newsworthy event, that you and Congressman Massey formed a really strong bipartisan partnership to deliver accountability around the Epstein files to actually just get the information out.
How do you see that now?
What are your thoughts on where we are with the Justice Department?
And really, just how was it to have that actually succeed?
And are there other areas of opportunity in the future for bipartisan action on accountability?
Well, first, the people who are the heroes of the story are the survivors.
They had to come to the Capitol twice, and that's really what shifted the votes on the Capitol.
They came in September 3rd, and then they came later in November after the shutdown.
And those stories were so harrowing.
I mean, these are women who've been denied justice for decades.
People who were told to recruit other junior high school students or high school students to be raped because Epstein or his associates told him to do that.
One of the stories that stands out in my mind is someone who ended up recruiting a junior high student to take her place and still 30 years later had the guilt of that.
So what started out as an intellectual pursuit of justice for me and for Thomas Massey and for Marjorie Taylor Greene became very personal as we spent time with these survivors, hearing their stories.
It is so offensive to me, to anyone who calls it a hoax without having ever met them, without ever listening to them, and the trauma that these women are living with, a thousand victims.
And just being heard, just having the Congress pass this, at least gave them a sense of being seen, being heard for a government that has betrayed them.
The second thing is, and I've taken to this calling of an Epstein class, and I got into a polite conversation with David Brooks.
He says, well, are you calling everyone in government a rapist?
I said, no, I'm not saying that.
This is not QAnon.
What I'm saying is this Epstein class sensibility.
When you look at people who felt that the rules didn't apply to them, that they didn't have to worry about the cost to society, that there is an anger in this country that too many people in our governing class have not paid enough attention to folks who have been abandoned, who've been let down, and that we need to call out that elite impunity.
We need to say that there's a class of people really who are disconnected with small town life, disconnected from how I grew up in Bucks County, who are responsible for killing the American dream for 80% of Americans or whatever statistic you had.
And we need to call that out.
And calling that out is the first step to offering something positive.
Now, Trump just calls it out in its nihilism, and he doesn't even follow through on it.
We need to then do the hardest thing, which is offer something positive.
And that's the final point here.
The coalition is a proof of concept that you can build an enduring coalition and a majority that includes people in MAGA represented areas.
Last night's election, even though we didn't win, shows that you can do well in a place in Tennessee.
We need to think about 26 and 28, not just about how do we win, but how do we create a governing majority in this country that is going to bring transformational change for people who feel left out of a modern economy?
How do we have that modern FDR coalition?
I genuinely believe it's possible, and this is a proof of concept that in certain cases you can do it.
And just to follow up on that, I mean, I do think that you made these connections, but another way to think about this is that the people who were the most victimized, people who were victimized in this situation, were the most vulnerable, like girls of working-class families who were working in areas who got recruited basically because their parents had little political power.
They never worried about them being able to marshal the forces of the police.
They thought that they were essentially, you know, basically people would ignore them, that they were basically invisible.
And that's what made them so vulnerable.
So it is a similar issue of how people do feel like there's two systems of justice, there's two systems in the economy.
And I think that might be one of the other reasons why it's resonated so much and brought so much bipartisan support.
And when you hear Marjorie Taylor Greene talk about these survivors, she talks about forgotten Americans, abandoned Americans.
You know, forgotten Americans, I mean, Trump basically stole all the slogans from the most popular presidents.
He stole forgotten Americans from FDR, and he stole Make America Great Again from Reagan.
But to me, I don't understand why this is so controversial to look at FDR as the model.
He's the most successful Democratic president in history.
He did four terms.
I was at a blind spot on some issues of race.
So we should adopt it with Dr. King's connection of a freedom budget.
And we should say, look, that we need an economic agenda that is for the working class and for the middle class and not for a group of elites who have rigged a system just to benefit them.
If you can identify yourself and say who you're with and then very much try to make your comment an actual question, that would be so great.
Thank you.
unidentified
Right, good distance.
Hi there, Edmund Morris, just an independent researcher.
So of all the many things that beg to be asked, the one that I'm going to throw out is about the disconnect between macroeconomic measures and microeconomic reality.
Because part of how we got to this moment and this, as you described it, two systems in that breakdown in the social contract is that thing where we'll measure the market, we'll measure overall employment figures, we'll measure what people are earning relative to each other, but people's ability to afford isn't part of our poverty measure.
It's not part of how we measure where are they in the country.
The same dollar doesn't go the same way in Chicago as it does in Topeka, as it does in San Francisco or D.C.
So when you're looking at how we retool how people work, what are you looking at for how we retool, how we measure their success and how we compare or assess how well different parts of the country are doing so they're not using a single yardstick that doesn't quite stack up everywhere we're looking?
And if they're economists, I think that's a very worthwhile project because the reality is that while wages have stagnated, the costs of child care have skyrocketed, the costs of health care have skyrocketed, the costs of education have skyrocketed, the cost of housing in many places has skyrocketed.
And so it's not just a subjective feeling.
Most people feel that it's much harder to support a family.
And there's no simple economic statistic that I know.
Someone who taught economics wasn't a PhD, but taught it that captures that.
I mean, you can have GDP per capita, you can look at inflation, you can look at purchasing power of goods, but when you look at the big things in life that people need-health care, childcare, education, and the fact that those costs haven't kept up with income for many, there should be some way of capturing that and measuring that.
And, you know, that's for people smarter than me in economics to figure out how we come up with that.
An absolutely fascinating, very important discussion.
I think, I believe all of us.
Thank you for what has been said.
Just a brief word on my background.
I worked for 10 years in construction.
I have a PhD.
I worked for 30 years in countries all over the world with the World Bank, including some of the very poorest countries in the world.
And for the last decade or more, since I retired, I've been working on America's economic problems, which I think were encapsulated in a phrase.
Many things were said that were just wonderful.
But the thing that struck me is we need to raise wages and lower the cost of things.
Those are intention.
How do you accomplish higher wages if you don't sell your goods for more?
Well, there's an answer to that.
And I'll just put it briefly.
I'll share a paper with you at the end.
Basically, the American goods find it increasingly hard to compete.
The goods that American workers are making, whether it be from Pennsylvania or California or wherever, these goods are finding it very hard to compete against imports.
We know that.
And as exports, we know that.
The United States in some years has had a trade deficit equal to three-quarters of all the trade deficits in the world.
The reason for this is that the dollar has become overvalued against the other currencies or looking at the way the other currencies have become undervalued.
I would like your opinion on a tax on the $90 trillion a year, three times GDP, that pours into the United States.
That could correct the exchange rate differences, and it could give, if it had been in place, a 2 percent tax had been in place in the beginning of this fiscal year, we would have had a zero budget deficit.
One, I think the answer to how you raise wages and lower costs is to increase total factor of productivity.
I mean, that is the way that you can have non-inflationary wage growth while lowering costs.
And that's the challenge for our technology revolution: that technology shouldn't simply be replacing labor, but how does it massively increase productivity?
We saw that with electricity, we saw that with automobiles.
And our challenge as an American society is how do we integrate technology to have that kind of productivity growth.
I also agree with you in lowering trade deficits.
I think there are a lot of ways that we can do that, fighting for fairer market access overseas, making sure that we are actually providing funding for our factories and our workforce.
I'm open to looking at your proposal.
I wouldn't want to make it, though, that you were squelching foreign direct investment into the U.S.
So I think there is a balance, but there are ways I think we have to, we can lower the trade deficit, and that's a worthy goal and increase our exports.
Well, first, we need to have a system that every person, when they finish high school, has a clear path to employment.
That doesn't exist right now.
And you can do two things to make that possible.
For those who are not going to go to college or unsure of whether they're going to go to college, there should be an opportunity to specialize in some trade, whether that is as a cosmetologist, an electrician, a plumber, traditional trades, or whether it is as an AI prompt engineer, a drone operator, a digital marketer.
You should have an ability to get that credential.
And in some cases, you may do that and still go to college.
In other cases, you may do that and know that then you can have a good-paying job when you're done with high school.
And we need to involve local businesses in thinking through what those credentials are going to be.
I am a progressive.
I mean, you can look me up, but I don't understand how you're going to create good-paying jobs without involving local businesses and big companies to understand what the needs are.
You know, FDR did that.
When he talked about a right to a job, it was not just a right to a government job, it was a right to a job, including in the private sector.
We need to be the jobs party.
We need to convince the American people that we have a better opportunity to help people in their families get jobs and make money than anyone else.
I joke around with some of my colleagues.
Some of them are talking about loving each other, reconciliation.
I said, I just want people to make money together.
That's a more achievable goal.
And the Democratic Party should be the party that says we know how to do this for your family.
We know how to do this for your community.
So I think having employers be part of this.
Randy Weingarten has really done a lot of work in this area.
And then for college, making it so you don't have to go into debt.
You know, $50 billion, you can make free public college in this country.
We used to have free public college in California.
We should have that investment.
Last point on this: Gary Becker, one of the leading Nobel laureates in economics at the University of Chicago.
I took his class in price theory.
He has a paper where he says the single biggest thing that you can do in a digital age, in a technological age as a government, to have economic growth and increase in productivity is to make an investment in people's health care and in their education.
This is a free market economist at the University of Chicago.
It is absurd that we have public college costs as high as they are.
Incei Witherspoon with the Children's Environmental Health Network.
Nice to see you.
With 40% of child health chronic illnesses being attributable to environmental exposures, air pollution, water, you name it, food, our consumer products.
How do we ensure, what are the guardrails or recommendations that you'd have as we are building a new economy that takes advantage of the many mishaps of our current economy that has been putting frontline workers, that has been putting their families in communities that live close to production, manufacturing that is causing problems.
I'm thinking about the threefold increase of the plastics industry, for example, it's going the wrong way.
We know that there's a mounting amount of science and lived experience showing us that increased exposure to plastics, microplastics is causing problems to pregnant women and children, AI data centers.
There's fights all over the country about known exposures.
So while I support increasing and making sure that people make money together, I want to make sure we're doing it in a healthy way so that we're not looking back and looking at a workforce that isn't even healthy enough to go to work.
And that's why I come back to the first principle, which is we need to ask communities what they want.
I was in Rashida Talib's district and the Solantis plant there was causing so much pollution in areas that were largely working class, poorer, and black.
And there was no recognition or agency for that community to say, well, we don't want the pollution coming here.
I am opposed to the build out of just data centers where Amazon or other companies come in and they say, well, we're going to raise your electricity rates because we're going to take your electricity and we're going to take your water and we're not going to invest anything.
And by the way, and I'm not going to single out any person, but you have all these governors saying, oh, look, I brought data centers.
Now you're going to be prosperous.
Give me a break.
You think that's how Silicon Valley built $18 trillion?
I'm telling you, that's not data centers.
That's not how you're going to build jobs.
I know it makes for a nice press release, but yeah, you get some electrician jobs.
They're important, but those are jobs that go away after four years.
What are you doing, Amazon, to put money into startups in that community?
What are you doing to fund tech trade schools?
What are you doing to fund the workforce?
What are you doing to bring new renewable energy?
It needs to be a contract that if a company is going to benefit, they need to be for building in these communities.
And that is what is broken with our contract.
That's why I call myself a progressive capitalist.
I am not against free enterprise.
I am not even against going and becoming a billionaire.
I think Steve Jobs was a genius.
My problem is you can't do that at the expense of 90% of Americans.
What worked in this country is when we built wealth and every person shared in it and it was done with a community responsibility, that is what is broken.
The good news is, unlike 192 other countries in the world, we can do economic development without the trade-off of not having wealth.
Most countries that are developing, they have to worry, do we develop or do we have economic fairness?
Here we have so much wealth.
We can do both.
It's a lack of political will that is our problem, not actual economic constraints.
Well, the bill I have as a North Star modeled after Canada is to have $10 a day child care.
Childcare workers pay $20 to $25.
And you look in New Mexico, you look at Vermont, they have gone in that direction.
But think about it.
What could be a more important job than caring after a baby between the six months and three years?
You don't need James Henkman's economic data to tell you that this is the single biggest investment you can make, which he did.
I mean, his research shows that the single biggest investment of public dollars you can make is before a kid is five years old.
But it's also just common sense.
And so, of course, you want to pay people well to be able to take care of young kids, and it opens up the labor market.
I believe that it was a gendered mistake that after COVID, the first thing we didn't do with 2 million women out of the workforce is do child care.
That was Elizabeth Warren was pushing for it.
There was a lot of economic data.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have done infrastructure, but that should have been a priority.
And it's a pro-family, it's pro-economic growth, it is creating good jobs.
You're not going to have AI robots taking care of babies anytime soon.
Certainly, I wouldn't want that.
So I think it should be a priority for our party to get done.
One final point on this, because as you can tell, I'm an FDR fan.
I probably name-dropped him too many times.
We had universal child care in this country.
The reason we had universal child care when we had 3,000 war nurseries is because people, all the men were scaling the cliffs in Normandy and fighting the war.
The women were in the factories, Rosie the Riveter, and suddenly people said, well, who's going to take care of the kids?
And so this country suddenly found the money to put 3,000 war nurseries on.
And by the way, the reason they ended was not because of the money.
The reason they ended is men wanted women to go back to the kitchen.
That's why we got rid of universal child care in this country.
If we could do it in 1945, we can certainly do it in 2025 to have universal child care.
I'm going to tax the billionaires in my district more to pay for the development of the rest of this country.
I don't understand how this, like, 434 other members of Congress don't gang up on my district.
It's mind-boggling to me.
If I can be for taxing that wealth more, why you wouldn't have 434 other members do it?
There are a lot of other places we can raise revenue, from taxing stock buybacks to having a modest financial transaction tax to taxing estates properly in terms of a step-up in basis.
But we also need to end the militarism in our country and the overseas wars.
And here I will say that it was a colossal mistake for us to give a blank check to Netanyahu and the billions of dollars that we gave there.
It turned off a lot of young people.
It's a mistake for the Democratic Party to be championing trillion-dollar defense budgets.
You know, someone said to me, I was doing the paper with a person in defense, and they said, you know, we're doing this paper together, and they said a progressive Democrat lefty Kanna who's calling for a reduction of the defense budget and me, centrist, who disagrees with him there.
And I said, you know who else called for reducing the defense budget?
Bill Clinton.
Look at his speech in 1992.
He said, I'm going to reduce the defense budget.
Since when has our party said, okay, we want 56% of the defense budget to be the budget?
We should have a clear message.
We're going to tax this extraordinary wealth.
We're going to stop spending money on these endless wars and a bloated defense budget.
And we're going to start spending money on real American communities for their health care, education, and jobs.
That is not just a winning political message.
It is a substantively correct message.
And I fundamentally am naive enough to believe that the American people are deeply wise.
That substance in politics still matters.
That at the end of the day, charisma, noise, virality, all that makes a difference.
But ultimately, what people want is a clear roadmap of how our country is going to succeed and how their families are going to succeed.
And if you present that forthrightly and honestly with merit, that you can win the debate.
And in this sense, and maybe I'll end on this point, I do think that the Democrats can have a humility of saying, well, why did we lose two national elections?
What is it that people were upset about?
Not just about us, but about the country.
There's no one, there's no politician.
My favorite is Barack Obama, but no one, no one who's smarter than the collective wisdom of 250 years of the American people.
Of course, there are people who can move the country in directions that are better, but have the humility to say, okay, there's a wisdom in the American people.
They're upset about something.
How do we recognize what the anger is and how do we respond with a new agenda that meets that need?
We can go one of two ways in this country as a party.
We can spend all our time obsessing about how we're going to own MAGA like they try to own the libs, or we can say this country needs to be done not just with Donald Trump, but the politics of Donald Trump.
We need to have a vision that is going to bring this country together and build an enduring majority that can actually start to renew the American dream and make us a country as a cohesive multiracial democracy that's a model to the world.
I believe that when Democrats have won, from Carter to Clinton to Obama, they offer aspiration, not division and fear.
I have to say, we at the Center for American Progress could not agree more that we need ideas that build that hope to people, that provide hope, that we will never be able to outhate the other side, but we will be able to out-hope the other side.
Later this week, C-SPAN will sit down with Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California and Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska for our weekly Ceasefire series to discuss top issues facing the country.
including rising U.S. tensions with Venezuela and the future of Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Watch Ceasefire Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, and online at c-SPAN.org.
I'll look now at some live coverage coming up today on the C-SPAN networks.
On C-SPAN 2 at 9 a.m. Eastern, it's a conversation from Punch Bowl News with Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins and the Alzheimer's Association CEO on the future of Alzheimer's disease diagnosis and treatment.