C-SPAN’s Washington Journal (12/23/2025) features callers divided over Trump’s economic claims—61% say policies fail them, with Democrats citing $6K healthcare struggles and Schumer blaming tariffs for 4.6% unemployment—while Republicans like Rick highlight full Walmart lots. Economist Tremaine Lee links gun violence to systemic racial trauma, from Jim Crow-era lynchings to modern urban crises, framing it as a "thousand ways" Black lives are lost, including his family’s history of shootings tied to poverty and over-policing. Powell’s 2% inflation target clashes with tariff-driven price spikes, while GDP surged 4.3% in Q3. Callers’ financial fears—$12K childcare, $300K homes, and stimulus taxbacks—reveal deepening class divides, exposing partisan rhetoric as disconnected from lived economic hardship. [Automatically generated summary]
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Next, on today's edition of Washington Journal, we'll continue our Holiday Authors Week series featuring live conversations with a new author each day.
Coming up, after a look at the news of the day and some viewer calls, we'll talk with journalist, author, and MSNOW contributor Tremaine Lee, discussing his book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America.
After years of record-setting falling incomes, our policies are boosting take-home pay at a historic pace.
Under Biden, real wages plummeted by $3,000.
Under Trump, the typical factory worker is seeing a wage increase of $1,300.
For construction workers, it's $1,800.
For miners, we're bringing back clean, beautiful coal.
It's $3,300.
And for the first time in years, wages are rising much faster than inflation.
Remember that rate, the wages, just look at it.
Wages are going up much faster than inflation.
How big is that?
Very importantly, there are more people working today than at any time in American history, and 100% of all jobs created since I took office have been in the private sector.
Think of that.
100% of all jobs have been in the private sector rather than government, which is the only way to make a country powerful and great.
This historic trend will continue.
Already, I've secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States, which means jobs, wage increases, growth, factory openings, and far greater national security.
Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs.
My favorite word, tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us, but not anymore.
Companies know that if they build in America, there are no tariffs, and that's why they're coming home to the USA in record numbers.
They're building factories and plants at levels we haven't seen, AI, automobiles.
We're doing what nobody thought was even possible, not even remotely possible.
There has never, frankly, been anything like it.
One year ago, our country was dead.
We were absolutely dead.
Our country was ready to fail, totally failed.
Now, we're the hottest country anywhere in the world.
Mr. President Trump, and we have that full address to the nation on our website, cspan.org, if you missed it.
We are asking you, how are you feeling about your finances, your personal finances going into the new year?
Do you feel optimistic?
Do you feel pessimistic?
How are things going for you personally?
The numbers are on your screen.
So Republicans are on 202-748-8001.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
And Independents 202-748-8002.
Our phones are open.
We're taking your calls.
And you can also text us if you can't talk on the phone.
It's 202-748-8003 to send us a text.
Well, there's some fact-checking here from NBC News.
It's fact-checking Trump on the economy, wages, and immigration, and more.
Few of those we can go through from the NBC News article.
Trump said, quote, wages are going up much faster than inflation.
It says wages are outpacing inflation, but much is up for some debate.
As the pace of wage growth has slowed significantly this year, in January, average wages were increasing at a pace of 4.1%.
As of Tuesday, when the BLS released the October and November jobs report, the pace had fallen to 3.5%.
Inflation is currently at 3%.
It says, Trump said this is about inflation, so we'll about immigration, so we'll skip that.
He said the price of eggs is down 82% since March, and everything else is falling rapidly.
That assertion is false.
The price of eggs is down 43.9% since March, according to government consumer price index data.
Prices for some items in the BLS's inflation report may be falling, but prices broadly continue to increase.
He talked about gas.
This is about, he talked about the price of a Thanksgiving turkey was down 33% compared to the Biden last year.
It says that claim is false.
The price of a Thanksgiving turkey this year was down but only by 3.7% for national brands according to data from the Wells Fargo Agri-Foods Institute.
It continues about record-breaking $18 trillion of investment in the United States.
It says that that figure is $9.6 trillion on the website.
That's from the White House website.
The figure is $9.6 trillion.
And a recent Bloomberg news fact check found the real figure closer to $7 trillion.
Again, that's bringing in investment into the United States.
Let's take your calls now.
John in District Heights, Maryland, Democrat.
Hi, John.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning to you, and thank you for taking my call.
I am so sick and tired of this man's lies.
It's just unbelievable.
High in the world, America people can't believe anything this man says.
He's a piece of true.
It's unbelievable.
That's number one.
Number two, the first time he took office, he came in, he deregulated everything.
Every safety net that Barack Obama put on to protect American consumers, he took it away.
He came back this time with that dose, and every safety net that was on that Biden tried to put back on is all gone.
This inflation is not going to go away because he's deregulated everything.
After I retired from the police department, I went to private security to have my Social Security.
But as far as I'm concerned, right now, at my age at 81, I'm not doing bad, but my family members, my nephews, my nieces, my grandchildren, they are in horrible condition.
I have to help them, and I go into my savings to keep them from going under with the cars, the rents, the health care, and everything else.
See, so it's unbelievable what is happening here.
And he's lying like that.
I don't want American people to believe anything he says.
And the Republicans, that judiciary committee, they all should be kicked out of office.
And Mark Zandy is the chief economist for Moody's Analytics.
He was on CNBC, and he talked about his views on the economy and consumer spending.
unidentified
Well, it's been okay.
I mean, if you look at it, you've got retail sales for the month of September.
That looked pretty tired.
But abstracting from the ups and downs of the monthly data, it feels like real consumer spending is kind of 2%-ish, which is kind of right down the middle of the strike zone.
But that hides a lot of differences.
The folks at the top end of the income and wealth distribution, they're doing quite well.
Spending is very strong.
Folks in the lower parts and the middle parts of the income and wealth distribution, not so much.
I mean, just to give you a statistic, looking back since the pandemic, if you look at the spending by folks in the bottom 80% of the income distribution, it's just barely kept pace with the rate of inflation.
So their real spending, their real purchasing power has gone nowhere.
All of the action has been at the high in the top 20%.
That's where all the growth has been.
So yeah, the aggregate number is okay.
In the middle of the distribution, you don't see a whole lot, but if you look at the distribution and the tails of the distribution, you see some pretty big differences.
So what do you see as the primary reason or driver?
Well, I mean, the affordability crisis has been long in the making.
I mean, I think the pandemic and the Russian war go a long way to explain the higher prices for everything from food and health care, rent, child care, elder care.
I think the thing that's really brought this back to the fore as an issue is the acceleration in inflation that we've seen since the beginning of the year and the weakening in the job market and income and wages since the beginning of the year.
And I think that all goes back to deglobalization.
It goes back to the tariffs and immigration policy.
How are you feeling about your finances going into the new year?
And here's Eric, Eastern Shore, Maryland, Independent Line.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Yeah, I'm just, this is another issue that I'm just very confused about.
Have people call in.
And I mean, I work very hard.
Eric, are we losing you?
You know, I'm doing very well.
And, you know, I keep hearing this.
You just talked about inflation.
I mean, there is no inflation.
Stop talking about inflation.
Get on the country's side and stop trying to talk bad about the country and leave the president, you know, trying to say the president is bad and doing a bad job.
He's doing a great job.
If you compare it from when Biden's numbers were worse, were the worst, he's doing awesome.
I was listening to a sorry, sorry to cut you off, but I was listening to an economist talk about how on the upper scale of the income level, they're doing very well.
The stock market is doing well, so they're making more money on capital gains and things like that on their investments.
It's the lower side of the economic scale that is really suffering.
What do you make of that?
unidentified
I make that people need to work harder.
You need to put yourself in the situation to grow.
I am the person that you're talking about.
I started at $2.35 an hour in 87, I think, when I first got my first job.
It was like $2.35 an hour, something like that.
And I took out trash and I washed dishes.
And in five years, I was running my own little strip mall restaurant for the company.
In another year, I was training every manager in the place before I was 20 years old.
Okay.
I went to college.
I didn't do great in college the first time, you know, so I went back to work.
I worked hard in the construction industry and I was, again, gave up my body.
And I've been, I'm busted up.
Okay.
I'm disabled.
I had my legs snapping to.
My back is killing me.
But I keep going.
I don't claim disability, although I could.
All right.
And I work hard for what I have, and I get what I deserve.
What I don't understand is all these ships they're building.
They're going to build all the Navy new ships.
But yet, that was on the planning board.
They knew he was going to do this, but they sell U.S. steel to Japan.
Why?
Instead of dusting, he'd rather tear it down and sell it than investing into an American company where now Japan still is going to be building all our Navy ships.
This morning, the American people got more proof that Donald Trump's policies are a disaster for them.
This morning's jobs report show the unemployment rate rode to 4.6% in November.
That's the highest level since 2021.
The highest level in four years under Donald Trump's leadership, or lack thereof, more appropriately.
This is what Donald Trump's so-called golden age looks like in all its ugly glory.
Higher costs, more tariffs, and the highest unemployment rate since COVID.
And make no mistake, this unemployment number didn't just come out of the blue.
It didn't just come because of external forces.
This high, awful unemployment number, the highest since COVID, is a consequence of Donald Trump's failures, his reckless tariff agenda, his draconian cuts to basic services like health care, and his refusal to listen to Americans who are already struggling to pay for what they need.
Donald Trump can try and spin these job numbers all he wants.
That's his nature.
That's what he does.
He doesn't care about the truth.
He just cares about his own ego.
But Americans aren't buying his fantasy.
They're fed up with his agenda, and the damage is beginning to set in.
And hopefully everyone will have a Merry Christmas.
It's a beautiful day in Ackworth.
I am doing okay.
I worked hard.
I got married.
I had children and supported all of them.
And things are good.
When I go to Walmart, the parking lot is full.
When I go out to dinner at Longhorn or whatever, I'll back.
Everybody is, the place is crowded with all types of different people.
That's in this, whatever, different types of people.
One thing, though, is the Democrats and the media does a good job on spinning all this because, you know, you're asking how you're doing, Buyer.
If you can, the Democrats and the media doesn't want you to think that anybody can afford to eat or live, but everyone has their cell phone, so things are going pretty well.
That's my opinion, and thank you very much for allowing me to speak.
And this is Stephen, Lexington, Kentucky, Independent.
Hi, Stephen.
unidentified
Hi.
Good morning, Mimi.
Thank you for having me.
Good morning, America.
Thank you for C-SPAN.
It's always great to speak your opinion.
I guess I'm very pessimistic about the economy.
Personally, I'm a millennial, so a lot of people calling in are older, getting their Social Security.
Maybe they had one job supporting three kids and a wife like Homer Simpson, bought their house for $50,000.
That's very far from the reality right now.
When you guys talk about the economy and how they're affecting people, we rarely hear about the people with children in daycare or in childcare, how expensive that is.
I'm going to say a number that's on the low end: $12,000 for childcare a year.
$12,000.
I'm talking to the elderly people that maybe paid $50 a week.
It's not the same, guys.
It's not the same.
And I am not looking forward to tax season coming up because it's just going to be ridiculous.
Everybody's going to be suffering except the top percent, the billionaires and the millionaires.
I just don't understand where the difference is between the elderly people, like the guy from Maryland saying, work harder.
No, you have to have two jobs now.
A $100,000 salary is not the same as it was 10, 15, 20 years ago.
You need two incomes now to support a family.
And so you want us to work harder while you guys are all just collecting your Social Security and we're supposed to raise the next generation with less?
Next year, you will also see the results of the largest tax cuts in American history that were really accomplished through our great, big, beautiful bill, perhaps the most sweeping legislation ever passed in Congress.
We wrapped 12 different bills up into one beautiful bill.
That includes no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.
Under these cuts, many families will be saving between $11,000 and $20,000 a year, and next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time.
Here is Michelle Dearborn Heights, Michigan, Independent Line.
Go ahead, Michelle.
unidentified
Good morning, guys.
The economy, it's so rough right now.
I had more money last year.
I have four children.
They're all grown, all with master's or bachelor's degree, making six-figure income.
I have two that's married and two that's single, and they are barely making it.
They were able to buy a home.
I'm not even able to buy a home.
I'm over 60 years old, and I work part-time, and I'm like in a semi-retirement stage.
I rent, rent is astronomical.
I'm on a fixed income, and my part-time work is only seasonal, so I only have a certain amount of money that I have to put up for the latter part of the year.
And last year, I put up money.
This year, I put up a thousand more, and I couldn't even make it all the way till November.
I just got a job in a nursing home at 71 years old, taking care of elderly patients.
I had over 30 years in the medical field, okay?
Where else could I get a decent wage?
In a deli?
No.
I thought I was done with health care when I retired six years ago.
I'm not.
My Social Security doesn't near make it.
It's $1,500 a month.
Look what our increase was this year.
Look what our increase in Medicare is, almost the same amount.
Okay?
So I just want to say many of us boomers, 24% increase, are working again like me.
And I was so thankful that this nursing home gave me a chance to go in there and work 24 hours a week and make enough so that I wouldn't end up going bankrupt.
And speaking of senior citizens, PolitiFact has this, older Americans get a tax deduction, but no elimination of Social Security taxation.
It says the bill, the One Big Beautiful bill, does not end Social Security taxes.
It provides many older Americans who qualify for Social Security with a tax break.
It says a quirk in Senate rules made fully ending Social Security taxation impossible under the massive bill stuffed with policy priorities.
So Republicans use a workaround that achieves a measure of tax relief for older Americans while falling short of a full repeal of taxing Social Security benefits.
That's at PolitiFact if you would like to see the rest of that.
Okay, so before you went on Medicare, you had private insurance through your employer.
unidentified
Well, I was actually, because of the situation that I had, if I would have gotten rid of the previous, and I had a switch, I had a I got thrown out of my job in 2006 when the plant where I worked closed down.
So I had to actually, and if I would have gotten rid of my medical with that insurer with my previous company, I would have lost it.
And this is an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that you might be interested in.
It says AI means the end of entry-level jobs.
It starts this way.
This month's lackluster employment numbers spurred talk that artificial intelligence is destroying jobs.
It says, data shows rising unemployment since 2022 among 22 to 25-year-olds in AI-affected sectors, even while employment for older workers remains stable.
The traditional bottom rung of the career ladder is disappearing.
We need to think about how younger workers will be affected in an AI-driven future to ensure that we have enough talent to replace retiring workforces.
It says it ends this way.
The missing lower rung in today's career ladder isn't a problem to be solved.
It presents an opportunity to build something better.
Organizations that act now to create these new pathways will define what success looks like in the emerging AI era.
So that's in the Wall Street Journal on the opinion page.
If you'd like to read that about AI replacing these entry-level workers and some things to do about it.
Sean, Columbia, Maryland, Republican, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, Amy.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
I think that there's a lot of answers to what's going on, and a lot of people aren't going to like the results.
I'm not going to like how to fix them.
One, if you dump 12 to 20 million undocumented people into a country, they have to live somewhere.
So, of course, the demand for housing is going to go up.
So we got to address that problem.
Two, like the previous caller, the taxes.
Nobody's talking about the taxes.
Then we are getting taxed in Maryland damn near for everything.
And that's fine, okay?
I choose to live here, so I've got to bite the bullet and live with it.
Electricity.
We have got to continue Trump's plan and reopening these non-environmental ways of producing electricity.
If you want a green planet, you're going to pay for high electric bills.
Gasoline's the same way.
He opened it up, and I'm now paying $2.50 a gallon of gas.
He's not going to be able to turn around what happened in the previous four years and a year.
It's not going to happen that quick, and people are going to have to bite the bullet.
You just mentioned artificial intelligence, these hubs that they're building, these data centers, they're crushing us with electricity costs.
People have got to look at what is the cause of what's happening now.
Yeah, I was going to say, did you see the news about the wind offshore wind projects?
So I'll just show it real quick.
Here's the Washington Times.
It's on the front page.
Trump halts five offshore wind projects, cites national security and radar risks.
Yeah, go ahead, Sean.
What did you want to say?
unidentified
Well, you know, I'm all for generating any other kind of energy we can, but I'm not at the cost of shutting down traditional ways of producing electricity.
If we're going to pull off this crap with the artificial intelligence hubs that are just turning energy and needing energy at the cost of people that are living in these communities, that's insane.
And it's insane to think that the windmills are going to be the replacement.
And unfortunately, the way artificial intelligence is going, it's going to outweigh all of our rights.
They're going to crush us with this crap.
And it's scary and it's dangerous.
But anyway, I feel optimistic.
You know, I'm optimistic that as long as I can get up and go to work, I'll be fine.
And more from the Marist poll on asking the question: what's the economic issue that concerns you the most?
And this is how it came out.
So prices were on top, as you would imagine, at 45%.
It was followed by housing costs, then tariffs at 15%, job security, 10%, interest rates at 9%, and then stock market volatility at the end at only 4%.
Franklin, Washington, D.C., Independent Line, you're on the air.
unidentified
You know, thanks.
You know, I think I am optimistic because I'm 40 years old and I grew up, you know, sort of in an easier, a little bit of an easier time that I think we're experiencing now.
And I always believed that, you know, America was a land of opportunity and a melting pot, and we should help each other out and all those sort of humanistic, decent, sort of, you know, Christian values that we hear everyone talk about, used to talk about.
But I've been paying attention the last couple of years, and I think these Republicans are really on to something.
You know, we need to take a much, you know, harsher view of society.
We need to look out for ourselves and we need to trim the fat.
And you're absolutely right.
We can't have people hanging as anchors around our neck.
We don't need these people coming in here.
And so I think we need to do, and why I'm optimistic, is we need to take all of these boomers, everyone over 65, we need to round them up and get them out.
No, and quite frankly, that's probably the only reason I'm able to make it.
Unfortunately, I'm disabled.
I'm not able to have children.
Me and my wife are not able to have children.
We don't have kids.
But these people my age, who do have kids?
They're completely underwater.
You can't afford children these days.
So, blessing and curse, I can't have kids.
If I could, we probably couldn't make it.
But no, I mean, I'm optimistic.
We're doing fine.
I think, you know, there are corners of the economy that work.
But no, but let's, I mean, all sarcasm aside, let's be serious.
How far do we want to pull the thread on the sort of moral view that everyone's been espousing the last 10 years under Trump, which is nobody can have anything?
We started a year, and Donald Trump promised that this would be the golden age in America.
We're ending the year, and the overwhelming majority of the American people, including many so-called Trump supporters, know that this year has been a disaster for the American people.
Last night, Donald Trump once again made it clear to the American people that he apparently still believes that the affordability crisis in this country is a hoax.
It is not a hoax.
The affordability crisis is very real.
And one of the reasons why this year has been such a disaster for everyday Americans under complete Republican control of government, they have the House, the Senate, and the Presidency they've had all year, they've had complete control of the government, and they've done nothing to lower the high cost of living in this country.
Now, Donald Trump and Mike Johnson and John Thune and House Republicans and Senate Republicans repeatedly promised to the American people last year that they were going to lower the high cost of living.
In fact, they said that costs would go down on day one.
They lied to the American people.
Costs haven't gone down in the United States of America, and everybody knows it.
Costs have gone up.
Housing costs are out of control.
Grocery costs are out of control.
Electricity bills are out of control.
Child care costs are out of control.
And health care costs are out of control.
And about to get worse because of the Republican health care crisis that has been devastating everyday Americans throughout this year.
And that was Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Leader of the House.
We are going to be talking, we are going to continue our conversation about how you're feeling about your finances ahead in the new year, whether you're optimistic or pessimistic.
Just a quick update for you on some breaking news.
From ABC News, it says five dead, one missing after Mexican Navy plane crashes near Galveston, Texas.
Eight people were on board the small plane when it crashed, according to officials.
There's a picture there of first responders.
It says out of the eight, five people died.
Two people are alive and one person is still missing, according to the Mexican Navy.
The aircraft that crashed was conducting a humanitarian mission focused on specialized medical transport.
And it says that the crash occurred on Monday near Galveston, about 50 miles southeast of Houston.
Here is Richard, South Carolina, Republican line.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
I'm optimistic about next year.
I think Trump's tax plan will really kick in next year.
Also, the tariffs, of course, the tariffs have not, the latest numbers, have not had the inflation that everybody thought they would.
I think that the problem with tariffs, of course, is a long-term investment economic decision, and people live from week to week.
So I think the tariffs had to be done at some point.
The balance of trade deficits were terrible.
And as far as Hakeem Jeffries, you had the White House for four years, 9% inflation at the top.
That becomes the base.
So even if you get inflation down to 2%, you still got the base plus 2%.
So it's extremely difficult to do away with inflation.
Inflation breaks the backbone of middle-class society.
So I think Trump's cut in regulations, especially for smaller companies, is going to have great benefit.
The affordable health care plan, why did it become unaffordable?
What happened?
And Richard, you're all the premiums, all the premiums went up.
A dollar an hour after graduation, after having taken a business course and learning how to take shorthand typing business machines, run an office, do everything.
I'm making a buck an hour with an insurance company, and I finally went up to $1.20 an hour working for lawyers, builders, apartment people, and everything else.
My first home when I got married was $13,000 for an all-brick, brand new home in a new area.
We managed on less and we expected less, but we were a hell of a lot happier than all the people that came after us that needed this and needed that, and they didn't need it, and they didn't need that.
They just wanted to live large and be impressive to people.
Hey, get off your high horse, folks.
Get down to the level that life is livable.
You'll be a hell of a lot happier.
And then when you go out for dinners to family and friends and everything, everybody won't have to take a dish in order to put a meal on a table.
Get over it, folks.
Stop living so damn pretentiously, and you'll be a hell of a lot happier.
I'm doing what no politician of either party has ever done, standing up to the special interest to dramatically reduce the price of prescription drugs.
I negotiated directly with the drug companies and foreign nations, which were taking advantage of our country for many decades, to slash prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400, 500, and even 600%.
In other words, your drug costs will be plummeting downward.
And I use the threat of tariffs to get foreign countries who would never have done it to pay the cost of this giant dollar reduction.
They stop ripping us off.
And it began as of four days ago.
There has never been anything like this in the history of our country.
Drugs have only gone up, but now they'll be going down by numbers never conceived possible.
It's called Most Favored Nation, and no president has ever had the courage or ability to get this done until now.
The first of these unprecedented price reductions will be available starting in January through a new website, trumprx.gov.
And these big price cuts will greatly reduce the cost of health care.
I'm also taking on the gigantic health insurance companies that have gotten rich on billions of dollars of money that should go directly to the people.
The money should go to the people.
That's you.
So they can buy their own health insurance, which will give far better benefits at much lower costs.
It will be far better health insurance.
The current Unaffordable Care Act was created to make insurance companies rich.
It was bad health care at much too high a cost.
And you see that now in the steep increase in premiums being demanded by the Democrats, and they are demanding those increases.
And it's their fault.
It is not the Republicans' fault.
It's the Democrats' fault.
It's the Unaffordable Care Act, and everybody knew it.
Again, I want the money to go directly to the people so you can buy your own health care.
You'll get much better health care at a much lower price.
The only losers will be insurance companies that have gotten rich and the Democrat Party, which is totally controlled by those same insurance companies.
I am a naturally optimistic person, but I am very pessimistic about what we're going into.
Now, I am a boomer.
I'm retired.
I'm 77.
And it took four generations of my family to go from the factory floor to management.
And Trump has basically reversed that in a year because there are a lot of people my age who are now decimating their savings if they're lucky enough to have retirement plans to help the next generations, their children and their grandchildren who are trying really hard, who have done everything, quote unquote, right.
And between AI and the economy, are just having such bad breaks.
And these people who say, oh, you know, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps.
Well, you know, my family benefited from government programs, you know, from rent stabilization.
I went, was the first of my family to go on college with a state scholarship that doesn't exist anymore, with a work study program that doesn't exist anymore.
And this person who said, oh, you know, we paid $13,000 for our first house, and these people just want more and better that they can't afford.
Well, I've traced my first department after college.
I earned $6,000 and it was $90 a month.
Now it is a co-op that costs almost $300,000.
You have $300,000.
It's a little studio in Brooklyn.
And somebody just out of college, if they were lucky enough to get a job, they couldn't even afford that little studio apartment.
I live in New York, Long Island, and we're being invaded, and they go into hospitals and they get free treatment at my expense.
So, and the other thing is, I want to say, people could say what they want about Donald J. Trump, but let me tell you, I tell people, sit in his shoes after the last four years.
God bless Donald Trump.
He's doing the right thing.
He's making people held accountable.
That's what we need to be done.
With healthcare, he's doing the right thing, insurance companies.
Yes, I'm listening to the previous caller a couple few calls back, and he said they were making $235,000.
And I'm around the same age, and I remember that was exactly what I was making.
And he said that was a lot of money.
I made the difference.
That wasn't a lot of money.
And if it wasn't that I was splitting my apartment with my brother, I don't know how I would have made it.
But I ended up buying a house in 1992, a house of $39,000.
My interest rate was $875,000, and my mortgage was $680,000.
I went to, I'm married, I had a family.
I went to college, a community college.
And it's a two-year college I finished in four years because I was going taking my classes through layaway because the price was low enough that I can pay as I go.
And you can't do that as a young person today.
And, you know, everybody I was talking about, you got to get out here and work.
Well, you can work all you want, but the money compared to what the economy is now, it doesn't match.
It doesn't come to you.
The economy is way higher.
You can work until you're blue in the face, but you're not going to make ends meet.
And Glenn, are you still working now or are you retired?
unidentified
No, I'm retired.
I'm retired.
I'm doing well.
And I just, you know, I go out and I help my family are doing well, but I have a lot of extra money.
I help with, you know, watching cares.
Help my family out with a little grocery money and stuff like that.
Just take a little add the pressure off of them.
But as far as back in the day, yeah, my house, I was able to pay for it, you know, but if college was in, I couldn't afford to go to a four-year college.
I finished with electrical engineering, but I couldn't afford to go to four-year.
If it wasn't that the tuition was almost like a layaway, I don't think I would have been able to do it because I had three kids.
So for like the housing thing that the guy mentioned earlier, the thing with the generation we're in now is that the number we see for the housing market is so much higher than when, you know, like the guy who said he was making $2 an hour was making.
He was $25,000.
Now, yes, we have a little bit higher rates because, you know, he was looking at like six and a half years for his $25,000, but he was only making $4,000 a year on his $25,000 house.
And we can be able to, unless you, at a baseline job, you can make $40,000 a year.
And for a $400,000 house, you're making like $10,000.
So I think for my generation, I'm, you know, early 20s, I think that people just, it's a bigger number and it's really daunting.
And that's our last call for this segment, but we are going to revisit this same question later in the program.
So if you weren't able to get in now to share your thoughts, you will definitely have time later in the program.
Up next, Washington Journal's annual Holiday Authors Week series continues this morning.
Nine days of authors from across the political spectrum whose books shine the spotlight on an important aspect of American life.
This morning's featured author is journalist and filmmaker Tremaine Lee on his book, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
This week's encore interview is from BookNotes from September the 21st, 1997, 28 years ago.
Our guest was Peter J. Gomes, former minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard.
His father was from Cape Verde Islands, and his mother was an African-American.
In 1991, he identified himself as gay, but says he remained celibate.
Professor Gomes passed away in 2011 at age 69.
During his lifetime, he received over 40 honorary degrees.
Professor Gomes was a registered Republican for most of his life and offered prayer at the inaugurations of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
However, in August of 2006, he changed his registration to the Democratic Party.
unidentified
We revisit an interview with Peter Gomes and his book, The Good Book, Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart.
Book Notes Plus, with our host, Brian Lamb, is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
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And then at 2 p.m. Eastern, North Carolina high school teacher Valencia Abbott receives the 2025 History Teacher of the Year Award from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Historian Stacey Schiff headlines the award ceremony.
And at 5 p.m. Eastern, prepare to ring in the new year with addresses from Presidents Ronald Reagan in 1983 and Bill Clinton in 2000.
Exploring the American story, watch American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find the full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history.
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This Sunday with our guest Pulitzer Prize winner, Stacey Schiff, author of biographies, including Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams, and Cleopatra.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
So writing a second book on Franklin, you must admire him.
I feel as if he is in all ways admirable in so many ways.
Just the essential DNA of America.
His voice is the voice of America, literally.
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In so many ways, that was the starting point of what the book would become.
Until that point, I had been writing a book about the true cost of gun violence in this country in terms of actual dollars.
But once I had my heart attack, it forced me to widen the aperture on what it means to experience violence in this country and what we carry within us and how all of the violence we see and experience, especially as black people in this country, can manifest in physical ways.
And so at 38, I had this heart attack, and my then five, turning, six-year-old daughter was asking me how and why.
And so I had to be honest about what it was that was bearing down on my heart.
And it had been a career of carrying bits of trauma and violence that I covered as a reporter, but also a family history that had been marked with gun violence.
And so it made sense to start there because it changed a lot for me personally, but also in the writing of the book.
So this wasn't the original name, but after the heart attack, I was wrestling with the difference between a blood clot that caused my heart attack and a bullet.
And how they are very different things, but both have the power to take an end or shred a life.
And I arrived at my blood clot in the same ways that many other people experienced the bullet from this kind of structures of American society and the history and everything that we carry.
And so it was, you know, important, I think, to kind of clarify the many ways in which we die in this country.
So there are a thousand ways a bullet is just one.
But the original idea was sparked after I met a young man back in 2003 when I was just an intern at the Philadelphia Daily News covering the police and crime beat, a young man named Kevin Johnson, who was left paralyzed after being shot during a robbery.
And I met Kevin and his family, and he just had so much hope and buoyance despite his condition.
But then I spoke to his mother about the true cost to this family, not just in Kevin's mobility, but all the myriad costs it would take just to get him out of the hospital, which meant a new wheel, a special wheelchair, a special van to transport the wheelchair, a ramp for their North Philadelphia Rohome, the widening of the doors just to get the wheelchair in the door, a changing of the receptacles, all of these actual costs.
And in that moment, I was thinking to myself, like, you know, I don't think people care about the Kevin Johnsons of the world, but maybe they care that we're all paying a literal cost for gun violence.
Because most people who, you know, survive a gunshot, most of them don't have private insurance.
It's public insurance.
So the public, we're literally paying the price.
And so maybe that might get people's attention and force us to have the conversation about the cost we're willing to pay for this gun violence.
And so that was like the initial seed of the idea.
And then once I had my heart attack and I had to weigh again the aperture of violence, it changed everything.
And I'll just share a quote from your book about that.
It says this, although I have been physically healthy most of my life, my heart and spirit have taken on tremendous psychic burdens.
I've spent more than 20 years as a journalist reporting on stories that led me to people who had just missed death or others who were withering from the weight of someone else's.
I've chronicled the tragedy of lives taken too soon, most often with guns.
I have traced the paths of bullets ricocheting from person to person, wreaking physical and emotional havoc long after victims are laid to rest or their scars colloid over.
That is a quote from A Thousand Ways to Die, and our guest is Tremaine Lee, the author of that book.
If you'd like to join us, like to ask a question or add to the conversation, you can go ahead and start calling in now.
Republicans are on 202-748-8001, Democrats 202-748-8000, and Independents 202-748-8002.
I want to ask you about guns in particular because you talk in your book about kind of the history of guns and how it has played a role in African-American life and history.
You know, it's important for me as I was tracking back, excuse me, the ways in which the gun in particular has shaped black life in this country.
In some ways, it's the literal physical gun, the violence of the trigger and the bullet.
But it's also important to talk about the systems and structures of systemic violence that are almost requisite before you ever get to a gun being fired.
By the time you get to the gun and its impact on black life, there's been generations of other violence.
But in doing my research and trying to understand from the very beginning how guns have shaped our American experience, we actually have to go back to Africa, which I do in the book.
I think there's this conception from a lot of us, the way we're taught about slavery, is that there were just a surplus of humans from these wars that were happening.
And Europeans came and Americans came and just wanted to take advantage of this untapped labor force, right, to handle the needs, the growing needs of labor in the Western world.
When in fact, what we see is what's known as the guns for slave cycle, in which as gun technology was rising in Europe, the powers in Europe were applying regional African powers with guns to create the war, to create the slave, to create the conditions for the slave.
And so before the first shackle feet of black people landed in what would become the United States, their bodies, their lives were bartered and sold between European powers and their African co-conspirators.
And so this notion that black people were pushed out of Africa with the muzzle of a flintlock rifle at their backs and then introduced to the Western world where there would be more men, white men with guns, to maintain a system of chattel slavery for generations and generations.
And it would take guns and violence to free enslaved people, hundreds of thousands of which of those soldiers were black men with guns, only to have to fight to push back against the black codes and Jim Crow and all the violence and tumult of the lynching era and through the civil rights era to the modern day America we see today with streets flooded with guns and blood and violence.
And so the ways in which guns have certainly physically shaped black life and limited black life, while also guns in some situations used to defend and protect black life has created a dynamic that we carry with us today.
So growing up, I was always aware of my grandfather's murder back in 1976, just a couple years before I was born.
My grandparents had an apartment in Camden, New Jersey, and they went to rent it to a prospective tenant who left a deposit of $160.
And he left for many weeks.
And then he came back, wanted his money back.
And my grandfather told him that the deposit was non-refundable and that he would see him in court.
Instead of meeting my grandfather in court, he came back and shot and killed my grandfather.
And so growing up, I was always aware of the tremendous burden and loss of my grandfather's murder.
But it wasn't the first time someone in my family had been killed.
In researching and reporting this book, I discovered the first killing in our family was back in 1922.
My great-grandparents and my grandmother were tenant farmers in rural Jim Crow, Georgia.
And around the end of the year, my grandmother's brother, 12 years old, Cornelius, was sent off to run errands, and he was shot and killed in a neighboring Sundown town.
For those who don't know, Sundowntowns are communities where it was explicit, not necessarily in law, but in practice, that black people couldn't be there during certain times of the day or evening.
And so this is where he was killed.
My family then joins the Great Migration after that, joining millions of other Black Americans fleeing the violence of the South to the North in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia and Baltimore and New Jersey.
And many years after they arrived, another of my grandmother's brothers, a teenager named McClinton, was shot and killed by a state trooper under very mysterious circumstances.
And then my grandfather's killing in 76.
And then in 96, I had a stepbrother who was murdered in Camden.
And so my family has experienced the many ways in which Black people in this country experience violence.
The white supremacist, overtly racist kind of violence, the violence of the state, police, and law enforcement, the violence of community.
And so in so many ways, my family's story tracks right alongside Black America's story in how we experience the violence and carry the violence.
If you'd like to join the conversation with our guest, Tremaine Lee, author of the book A Thousand Ways to Die, you can go ahead and do so now.
Republicans 202-748-8001, Democrats 202-748-8000, and Independents 202-748-8002.
I'll read to you another portion of your book and get your comment on it.
It says this, my mother would never let us play with toy guns.
On birthdays and other celebrations, she would grow anxious at the sight of balloons because they threatened to explode unexpectedly like gunfire.
Decades later, she is still racked by the memory of the images of her daddy's body on a gurney on full display during the trial of the man who killed him.
My mother told me that losing a loved one to murder is like losing a limb.
Quote, it's almost like cutting off a major part of your body.
It's just like you have to learn to compensate and you can't really because it's gone and it's never coming back.
They did their best to cope, but we're reminded every moment that they had been disfigured.
There's a deep unfairness in the pangs of this kind of death, of having a loved one snatched away so violently.
But there's also the unfairness of a carceral system that doesn't have the capacity or desire to value black life, let alone justice to black victims of violence, especially when the perpetrator is also black.
Can you talk about that last part, Tremaine, on black and black violence and what you consider dismissiveness on the part of the criminal justice system?
The idea of black lives mattering is almost cliche at this point, and it's such a charged up and loaded idea and phrase.
But when you think about in this country, the level of gun violence that we experience, and even though black people experience gun violence disproportionately, about half, almost a half of those who die by guns are also white.
And so America has a gun violence problem.
But then when we get into the engagement with the carcassal system, the police and the investigators, the judges, and how we're sentenced, it's as disparate as and unequal as in life.
That if you kill a white man, you do substantially more time than you kill a black man.
So even in how we sentence folks, it still comes down to race and the value of the victim of that violence.
And so among the many layers of unfairness is what justice is, especially when you are black in this country and grappling with all of the, again, the literal violence, the social and political violence.
And that the man who killed my grandfather, who murdered him over $160, was out in just a number of years.
And can you imagine if the roles were reversed?
And my grandfather or one of my uncles had murdered a white man, a white landowner, a white apartment owner, a landlord, what kind of time he would be doing.
And so it's just, it smacks in the face of the unfairness of it all, Mimi.
Let's talk to callers now, and we'll start with John in Leland, Mississippi, Independent Line.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
So I just want to explain to you that this gun violence in America is just getting systemic.
It's ridiculous.
I just got out of the military 35 years ago in Chicago.
I was home like a week, and I get shot up.
My mother has to move to Mississippi.
I was in a mass shooting just two months ago, but 30 people were shot and eight people were killed.
I lost my cousin, my best friend, and it was just at a homecoming.
And the town has only had like 3,000 people.
And to have a mass shooting of 30 people and lose eight people in a town where everybody knows everybody, it affects you.
And it's just, and I'm just sick of this.
I'm a gun owner, but I would gladly give up all my weapons.
I would gladly do that if it would make people safe because this is our lives don't mean as much.
That's why people say black lives don't matter because, you know, it's like, like you say, if a person knows that they can just kill a person and they just get a slap on the wrist, they'll be out in three or four years.
And they know if they'll kill this other person, they'll get life or the death penalty.
Which one do you think is going to die?
Just like hunting animals, the animals that are going to get the most or get the most penalty.
You know, and I can feel the pain and the weight in your voice, brother.
And I think that's, there's two sides of this.
I think it's like not fully recognizing, and we have a phrase for this now.
Now we have more language that we're comfortable using, but the actual trauma of what it means to experience loss from guns.
And I often compare it to like if we, if you're walking down the street with your child and you see somebody being jumped or beat up, you would shield their faces from that because of the level of violence.
But we have communities in this country that experience horrific gun violence every single day.
And it's been so normalized that it's garden variety, right?
It's garden variety.
But I really do believe that on the other side of that, and I speak to this in the book, while there are some communities that experience this horrific kind of routine violence, there are other places who their entire industries are built on the backs of selling guns and not just selling guns, but selling the fear of those who experience it most a world away, spurring this kind of pipeline of unchecked weapons into this country,
where gun manufacturers get political and economic deference while other communities are left to carry the true burden.
And I'm sorry to hear that.
Knowing what people have to carry.
And it's so routine that one death would gut a family, a single death, let alone a community where you lose multiple people and you go house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, and everyone is carrying a bit of that burden.
Everyone is carrying a bit of that trauma.
Everyone, their insides are a little twisted up and trying to cope and move forward.
It's an unfair burden.
And we have to wonder at what cost, at what cost, and who is benefiting from this?
I grew up in East LA and I worked in South Central Los Angeles.
I, too, have had violence touch my family.
My stepfather was killed with a gun.
But I have a question because it's not the weapon.
What I found was it's education and educating children that there's something else out there other than where they live in the neighborhood that they grew up in.
There's a thing called learned helplessness.
And when you have that from generation to generation, you feel that there's no way out.
So, my question is: what do you think, sir, is a way to help the children?
Because getting rid of the guns is not going to happen because if we turn in our weapons, the criminals will not turn in their weapons.
It's just not going to happen.
So we'd end up not protected.
So, my question is: how can we turn the tide on this from generational issues that have been going on?
I don't think you're too far off base, but I think two things can be true.
I think the devastating actual power of a small concealable handgun, that kind of violence and that kind of tool designed to kill very efficiently and shatter flesh and bone, we have to engage with the gun itself.
We actually have to do that.
But I think you're right in long before the violence of the gun, there is the violence of hunger.
There is a violence of inadequate housing and health care.
There is a violence of existing in a capitalist society without any capital or resources.
There is the violence of being physically and psychologically targeted by law enforcement.
And so I think you are right.
You know, when I was a child, despite it all, my mother raised me with the idea that I am somebody, that I am special, and my life is worth protecting and maintaining at all costs, right?
I think there are a lot of young people in this country and children who experience all of those other forms of violence.
And then you add to that the trauma of witnessing actual violence and the loss from gun violence.
And so we do need to engage with people and not just tell them that they are somebody, but show them.
And how does a society who says it believes in equality and the future of its children, how do they engage with those communities?
Are we making sure that children are fed?
Are we making sure that they're not being exposed to lead in their pipes, right?
That there's some sort of remediation for all of the toxic exposure from chemicals, from the violence, from how they're portrayed on television.
All those things really do matter.
And so I think that for a lot of people in this country, young people in particular, it does feel that there is a big gaping hole that can't be filled by anything.
And so what happens when you have that tension and hurt and anger, oftentimes you turn it on yourself or you turn it against people closest to you.
And then you introduce into that formula of so much deprivation and so much hurt and so much anxiety and uncertainty and literal hunger.
You introduce a very cheap tool that can obliterate life in a second, in an instant.
I think what I hear you saying is, we got here by virtue of a very violent, inhumane system of chattel slavery that was only made possible by the genocide, intended genocide of peoples who already existed in this place.
And so the idea that, and we say this almost flippantly, but it's true that the blood of many peoples is in this soil.
And it was taken by force and taken by violence by people who had also gone across the world, deploying the same amount of violence to subjugate and control and oppress other peoples.
And so there's zero doubt to me that the connection from which the violence from which this country was founded has been seeded in us and we carry it in various ways.
And there is this theory of epigenetics, that what a people's experience, what a people's experience, they carry with them in their genetics and it starts to reshape and reform people on a cellular level.
And so when you think about what black people have experienced in this country, even before we got here, and then all of the violence from which this country was founded, you know, it's shocking, but also obvious of how we've gotten here to this point.
Yeah, that trip to Africa was one that helped reshape my thoughts around the gun issue and the violence, but also what was actually lost.
And so in 2019, to commemorate the 400th year of the first enslaved Africans being dragged to what would become the United States, my family, along with hundreds of others, took a trip back to West Africa and we were in Ghana.
And there was this really profound moment that I experienced in a dungeon of one of these so-called slave castles.
And one thing that struck me was one, that was like, it was dank and dark.
And imagining human beings being kept in these conditions.
But one of the tour guides mentioned that above these cells where Black men and women and children would often be separated and held, that the European enslavers built a church right above the holding cell.
And so imagining that as these African peoples were having their gods and their spirits stripped away, that others were praying to their own gods and being in that space where human beings were traded for gold and minerals and other materials, as well as guns.
And that when we were shipped out of Africa, so few of us ever returned and made it back.
And so 400 years later, to stand there with my wife and my then small child, doing what our people could never do, return, it felt empowering,
but also knowing full well what they never knew, what they would face in the Western world and the violence and the stripping of languages and cultures and their own sense of God and seeing themselves in God replaced with violence and a God that looks nothing like them and languages that were foreign on their tongues.
It was such a profound moment that just reshaped the way I thought about the slave trade.
I thought about humanity, but also boiling it back down to the research around the book, that our bodies were traded for guns and we'd carry with us literally that violence for generations after.
Let's talk to Melissa next in Bloomfield, Iowa, Independent Line.
Good morning, Melissa.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
This is a little bit off what I was going to say, but since you started talking about slavery and everything, we got to remember who actually sold the black Africans.
It was their own people that sold them to the white man.
So we need to get that story straight.
And number two, as far as gun violence goes, we need to remember that it's not the guns that kill people, it's the people that do it.
And if individuals could learn to use their mouths instead of using weapons, then maybe there wouldn't be so many people that get shot and killed nowadays because people can't use their mouths anymore because they don't have a good argument for what they're fighting over.
They're fighting over territory.
They're fighting over a corner to sell their drugs and this, that, and the other.
That is so stupid.
You want to talk about how people, you know, conquer other people to win land?
That's been going on since man was ever made.
That's never going to change.
But it's how it's done inside our states and inside our cities.
That's what needs to change.
And it changes with individuals' mindsets, not with taking away guns or anything else.
It's changing their mindsets on how they deal with things and how they handle things using their words, their mouths.
And I think there are some seeds of truth in some of what you're saying.
And I detailed this in the book, that certainly Europeans came to exploit conflict on the region of Africa and did have African co-conspirators involved in this.
But I think there are a couple of layers here that you need to understand.
It's almost like how the mob comes to the neighborhood and says, hey, I can protect you.
You know, get down with us or you don't want any problems.
With European powers and gun technology rising and the sheer amount of gunpowder and firepower being shipped to West Africa under duress and force, right?
And so the idea that African regional powers were just super willingly, you know, fine, we'll just sell our own people.
That's not the total truth.
But also not knowing full well that what Europeans were doing was creating a brand new kind of slavery.
Certainly slavery existed for centuries before Europeans got involved.
But those enslaved people were still considered human, still were able to speak their language and have their religion, oftentimes the same religion as their enslavers, but they were always human.
Slavery in the United States would become a brand new kind of slavery where these enslaved people were no longer human beings.
And if you were born to an enslaved mother, you would forever be a slave.
That was a brand new kind of slavery.
So again, in the beginning, certainly there was collusion between co-conspirating co-conspirators on the continent and Europeans.
But this idea that their own people, also, they were selling prisoners of war.
These weren't their own family members.
And so we have to understand that even though we consider all Africans the same peoples, they were not the same peoples as much as Europeans were the same peoples.
They were different.
And certainly as we get to this point now, we have to work on de-escalation.
We have to work on what's operating in folks before the gun is ever introduced.
And so I think you're right in some ways and very, very terribly miseducated and wrong with others.
Yes, Tremaine, I'd just like to let you know that in 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina experienced their first insurrection in the United States for America with a man named Pitchfork Tillman, Tillis, Red Shirts, killed over 1,500 to 2,000, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 black people in Wilmington, North Carolina.
It's never been given an insurrection, but it was the first insurrection in America.
That's the first part of my question.
The next one is that as gun violence goes, from 60 to 65, we were very not as gun-violent people as black people in America.
We had a few little guns here and there.
We were more or less people who were fight fought our arguments through fist fights, and maybe somebody would pull out a knife every now and then.
But that kind of our overall mentality of how guns played a role in our lives did not take effect until around 1980, 85, when we had the guns in the black community.
My question to you is that can you kind of like give us some feel of how the guns get grow so quickly and it does did so much in the black community over a 15 to 20 year period.
And we did not necessarily bring those guns in.
Those guns are laid into our laps and we use them as a reverse of a way of protection, police protection, being a civil unrest for us to take care of our communities.
And then after that, it evolved into a more widespread thing because then the drugs came in.
But between 1964, 63, 64, and 1980, 85 were our whole tumultuous problem with guns and drugs and the violence of guns that has caused us a problem all the way up to today.
Please give me some sense of what that's all about.
I think, you know, many people became aware of the Tulsa Race Massacre through popular TV shows, right?
But when we think about the violence after Reconstruction was torn down into the early part of the 20th century, Wilmington, North Carolina, Elaine, Arkansas, there were so many racial massacres in this country.
And in Wilmington, let's not forget who they targeted first, black newspapers.
And they were trying to track down the editor who was spurring what they believed was dangerous propaganda of black people asserting their rights.
And so there's so much violence that isn't taught in our textbooks.
So we don't understand the true nature of historic violence against black people.
But when it comes to the kind of apex of the violence we experienced in the 80s into the early 90s, and you mentioned the 60s, and you were right.
And I talk about this in the book.
After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and then the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in 64, 65, that was seen as a destabilizing force in the American hierarchy, social hierarchy.
Before then, the NRA was still pretty much a sports shooting foundation.
But after the massive civil rights gains of the 50s into the 60s, gun rights activists started turning the issue of guns and tying it to this expansion of freedom and citizenship to black people as something to be feared, as something dangerous.
As now that black folks have freedoms, they might be moving into your neighborhood and they might be coming to your children's school.
And there is something inherently dangerous and inherently violent in these people, inherently criminal.
And so what that did is empowered a gun rights movement, which in turn fueled and empowered the gun industry.
And so what we saw is a ramping up of not just the sale of guns, the legitimate boosting of the number of guns in society, but also seeding in white Americans in particular, that you need a gun to protect yourself against this growing group of people who now have the freedom to come to your neighborhoods to live and to go to school and work next to you.
And so it's one of the most undercovered aspects of the civil rights movement is that the modern gun rights movement as we know it, which has given so much fuel and power and political and economic heft to the gun industry, is a direct response from the expansion of citizenship to black people and the fear it induced in so many in this country.
Ma'am, first of all, thank you very much for sharing that.
I know it's never easy for any of us to speak on the pain that we've had to carry.
And I think one of the things that has driven me in writing this book and talking about this book and sharing our story is that there isn't anything wrong with us.
And if we understand what's wrong with us and we want to understand the violence that we experience, look no further than the society from which we've come from and the level of deprivation and the level of harm, physical and psychological harm, so we can finally engage with that actual trauma.
Because what we've experienced in this country has been so normalized that we don't even call it trauma.
We just call it black life in America, right, for the large part.
This is how we experience it.
But I think once we can point to it, we can put shape to it, we can understand the source of it, we can begin to untether ourselves and unburden ourselves and unload the weight of that trauma as much as we can so we can move freely.
Because as you mentioned, the way your family responded to that violence is to, it's like a chilling effect.
You have to move softer.
You have to move more carefully.
There is a limitation on our, not just our dreams, but our imagination of what's possible.
So we fall in line.
And that's one of the biggest, you know, the dangers of not fully addressing the trauma is that it can crush you in ways that we can put language to and ways that we can't.
It shifts the way we move.
You mentioned averting your gaze, lowering your shoulders, and teaching the next generation to tiptoe around a society that requires you to put your back up and move forward.
And so I think it's, you know, the idea of naming it and pointing to it and recognizing the source, which I'm trying to do in this book, is one of the most powerful things we can do to move past the trauma.
And to that point, Tremaine, you say in your book that there was this unspoken rule in your family not to speak about the violence that your family experienced.
Why is that?
Why was that rule in your family and so many black families?
And why, I mean, to continue your thought about why you've decided to break that rule and to speak out.
We think about generations before who experienced, who came back from the war, the silent generation who weathered so much and wouldn't talk about what they experienced.
The hurt and pain that continues to be in my family from the loss of my grandfather and then the bits of pain and hurt carried on from generations earlier.
It's just too much to bear.
And so part of the moving, trying to move forward, there is no full moving forward, but trying to move forward is to move on the best you can and not fully engage with that not sitting in your stomach, right?
Or that weight on your heart or that burden on your shoulders.
It's best just to move on.
But I do believe that the only way that we can fully process what we've been dealing with is to actually process it and talk about it.
And in that gap of information, understanding and historical and contemporary context and structural and racial context, we fill it with, it must be our fault.
It must be a people's fault, right?
And I think we need to loosen ourselves from that.
And so I think it was time to not only speak openly and honestly about what we've carried, but also put some respect on the names of those we've lost.
Those who have become part of these statistics and the numbers, but who were actually our grandparents, our uncles, our brothers, our sisters, to put some respect on the name and tell their story as fully and wholly as possible.
So the next generation coming behind us won't have to fill the gap with propaganda or racist tropes.
We can understand it and in hopes, try to avoid it as best way we can.
In Jackson, Tennessee, on the line for independence, Ed, you're on with Author Tremaine Lee.
unidentified
I think it ought to be mentioned that you remember former Supreme Court Justice Warren Berger said the greatest fraud on the American people by special interest groups was that interpretation of the Second Amendment for personal protection.
And also, only three countries in the world have anything like our Second Amendment, of course.
That's us, Mexico, and Guatemala.
Most of the deaths are in the Western Hemisphere, and that's something.
But hey, Jermaine, listen to this fact, Dorid.
They say it's not the gun.
The European Union has 450 million people.
The United States has 350 million people.
Total deaths from firearms in the total European Union is 6,700 people, 1,000 homicides per year, 5,000 suicides.
In the United States, we have about 48,000 firearm deaths, 27,000 suicides, 18,000 homicides.
Think about that.
And no country can make this statement.
The number one cause of death for young people are firearm deaths.
This is shameful of us.
And when people say it's not the gun, I just debunked that.
In 450 million people, they had 1,000 homicides with firearms.
They don't have firearms like we do.
No, and the western hemisphere is dominating homicide and murder and suicide with firearms.
Almost speechless, because I think you're putting a very fine and obvious point on the issue, where it's not just people wrestling with interpersonal issues, it's the tool itself.
And that number you said that I think we don't address enough in the conversation around gun violence and gun homicide and gun death.
It's the suicides, 27,000 averaging a year of gun deaths.
Guns bring us closer to early death, period.
The destructive power of them turned against ourselves and our neighbors should be astounding.
But again, in the society that we have that values profit more than people and politics over people and profit and politics tied together has empowered the gun industry that profits to the tune of billions of dollars every single year for guns that never melt away, never degrade, never wither away.
These guns, seven to eight, nine million additional each year, that there are more guns in this country than Americans.
And then we wonder.
We wonder why they're being used to kill ourselves and kill our fellow Americans.
Without question, leading to the self-destruction of suicide or the self-destruction of recklessness with these guns.
And so I think you're hitting the nail again.
It's like there's this, society has created all of these fissures and gaps within us where based on how much money you have, where you live, your access to resources determines your well-being in this country.
And when you don't have access to those things, and then you introduce drugs as a bomb that doesn't work.
You introduce vice that doesn't work.
And then the natural next step is some degree of violence by gun or by other means.
And it speaks to a very specific kind of phenomenon that we experience in this country.
Well, I think you're right in that it's very disheartening.
I think you're right that most compassionate people ache.
But I think the issue is, and I'll answer the back part of your question first, but I think the issue is that we don't care enough to do anything about that issue because we've seeded this idea that there's something wrong with them as opposed to the conditions in which they're growing and rising in.
Young black people from homes with resources and college degrees aren't experiencing the same level of gun violence.
When we look at who's experiencing the gun violence, black and white, but especially black, we're looking at people who are poor, people who are hungry.
And if you were to take a map of where folks get the least amount of quality health care and where there aren't those jobs and aren't those incomes, and when you look at the wealth gap, where the average white family has 100 times more wealth than black families, you have generations of young people who are growing up hopeless and don't see a path out.
And then you add to that the violence of police brutality, the violence of a system that criminalizes their existence.
And no wonder why, per everything we've talked about this hour, that young people are self-destructive.
And then you add to that these guns that are relatively cheap, relatively easy to get.
And when we look at the rising income and wealth inequality, we look at unemployment rising, where are these young people getting these jobs?
And when we have an education system, school systems that are funded by a property tax in communities where for the better part of the last 70 years, black people have been pushed into with red lines drawn around them, disinvested in, stacked on top of each other, and then told to just make it and get these mystical, magical jobs and opportunities that exist.
You know, as they say, nothing stops a bullet like a paycheck.
Those paychecks are just few and far between.
And so that's not to say that there isn't accountability to be had and that there aren't opportunities in communities to heal folks, to empower folks, to resource folks, but to simply look at them and say it's them.
I don't think anyone would discount the idea of being afraid or not understanding what to do about it because it is so extreme.
But again, look at the violence that precedes the violence of the gun, and that's where the issue lies.
And Tremaine, I just want to read a portion of your book regarding the psychological trauma that you've talked about.
It says this: all of the devastation that gun violence has heaped on people in Chicago's most vulnerable neighborhoods, it's likely the psychological scars, the trauma of war-level exposure to violence that cast the longest shadow.
In recent years, there's been a growing catalog of research around soldiers returning from war with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Federal funding has been set aside and programs have been launched to treat them.
But what happens when the war is at home and the wounded are civilians and the trenches are city blocks, playgrounds, and even front porches?
A study from a trauma center found that 40% of patients showed symptoms of the disorder.
Those wounded by gunfire were about 13 times more likely to suffer symptoms of PTSD, which includes anxiety, isolation, anger, and sleeplessness.
Experts say you don't have to be the one injured or even a witness to suffer from PTSD.
People indirectly exposed to violence can experience debilitating social and cognitive injury.
Repeated exposure to violence can rewire a person's brain.
No, I'm sorry, maybe I'm going to say those, when you read that passage, those are the young people that are our previous caller.
That's who we're talking about here.
Imagine a 12, 13, 14, a 15-year-old experiencing gun death, witnessing gun death, witnessing someone in their family being gunned down and murdered and what that does.
And when we're outside of a very urban, very city, very black context, when we think about in the South or the West, and we think about young white people, teenagers, and their families who get guns for protection out there.
And then you imagine what's happening in cities where if anyone might have a legitimate cause for self-defense, it's in communities where people are seeing people getting shot and seeing people being attacked.
And so, because of that exposure to the trauma, the hypervigilance, all of the winding and twisting emotionally and psychologically, and then introduce the gun and then still introduce the desire for self-protection, it's such a dangerous formula.
Let me just say first, thank you and C-SPAN for having the courage and the foresight to have this guest on the air today, because what happens in the black and brown community directly affects the political landscape of America.
Sir, I hear you.
I've been living in Baltimore for 50 years, and I have seen the violence first fan, and I know how it affects young people and old.
There's a book coming out on the market.
It's called Highway to Nowhere.
All you need is a map.
It tells the tale of how Interstate 70 was dug at one end and dug at the other, and in the middle, there is nothing.
And what it's done is simply destroyed the black neighborhood.
And I do thank you for coming on with this book.
I intend to look at the antiquity of what happened in Africa because I think it's an important point.
But what affects us now is where do we stop and how do we go forward?
Thank you very much again and have yourself a great day.
And I think this idea of violence, and even though this book is centered around the violence of the gun and gun violence, it is very much about the violence that comes before.
And you mentioned those highway projects.
You think about Interstate 10 in New Orleans or any number of cities, how in Atlanta, the highway design itself carved right through black communities that during segregation really relied on itself with business owners and homeowners where kids had green space to play and there was a sense of community despite being segregated and isolated largely socially.
And so when we think about the after effects generations later of what it means to dislodge people from a sense of agency, from a sense of community, literally driving highways and cinder blocks and housing projects through communities that were eking towards a sense of health and stability.
And it's still no wonder why those communities that have experienced that kind of structural violence experience this kind of gun violence.
One more call for you, David, Levittown, New York, Independent Line.
Go ahead, David.
unidentified
Hi, how are you?
Just to start it also.
So I live in Levittown, but I was born in Washington Heights, New York.
And I grew up in Jamaica, New York.
So everybody can understand where I came from.
I grew up watching literally seeing dead bodies in the streets.
I've seen people, friends go to jail.
I've seen most of my friends, they're either in jail or dead.
And that's because of just choices that they've made.
So just coming from where I come from, I know that a big problem with the black community and not just the black community, with other minorities as well, is that they no longer have that family structure, right?
That's not home, right?
There's not a man figure to show young men how to be a man, how to stand up on your own two feet, right?
There's not that structure of forget about your emotions.
Don't act on your emotions.
Like there's nothing more dangerous than a young emotional man acting just, I feel this and I'm going to act, right?
So God is one thing that's been missing for a long time.
Like I think back to Black Wall Street, that was pretty much the generation after slavery.
And look what they accomplished because they had a father and they have strong belief in God, right?
We need to go back to that and forget about the state.
It's like one man cannot serve two masters, right?
David, I think you're right in the healthier and more stable and more intact our communities and families are, the safer we are.
I think the only danger in any of that is as long as you can put it on the structure, you don't have to engage with policy or the infrastructure of violence or any of these industries or any of the history, right?
And so I think there's two things.
Both things are true in our communities where there is a question of are men in position to protect the community and family?
Are they in position to make an adequate living to provide for their families?
And how do we disrupt those structures that siphon off men in particular from families and communities like the carcinogen system and over-policing?
But I think you're right.
There's a few things more dangerous than a gun in the hands of a burdened, emotional young person with their frontal cortex still growing who is also hungry and who's also experienced PTSD.
We'll go back to the question we asked you earlier this morning, and that is, as you look ahead to the new year, are you feeling optimistic or pessimistic about your personal finances?
You can start calling in now.
The lines are 202-748-8001 for Republicans, 202-748-8000 for Democrats, and 202748-8002 for Independents.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books.
Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend.
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And then at 8.15 p.m. Eastern, explore the history of criminal psychological profiling and its impact on the justice system with Rachel Corbett, author of The Monsters We Make.
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We are taking your calls until the end of the program at 10 a.m. Eastern on your personal finances and how optimistic or pessimistic you may be feeling going into the new year about your finances.
Before we get to your calls, some breaking news for you.
This is NBC News that the Justice Department has released a third batch of Jeffrey Epstein files, including some that mention Trump.
It says there have been growing concerns from lawmakers and survivors that the department had fallen short of releasing all of its records as required by law.
We are uploading all the Epstein files as we get them from the Justice Department on our website, c-span.org, if you would like to take a look at what's there and peruse them.
One more thing for you: this is the front page of the Washington Post: Trump to name Navy battleships in his honor.
It says that President Trump yesterday, Monday, will oversee the development of a new class of Navy battleship named after himself.
The move was cast in part as an effort to give the nation's stagnant shipbuilding industry a shot in the arm, but also will upend the Navy's ship naming norms and thrust presidential politics firmly into the program from its genesis.
The announcement follows a flurry of recent actions by Trump to rebrand existing institutions to include his name, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
This is on the Washington Post.
And let's take a look at President Trump from yesterday in Mar-a-Lago making that announcement about the battleships and also about rising tensions with Venezuela.
You know, I thought about taking some that are in dry dock and changing them.
And then when I said that, you know, if we did, would be about we could increase, if we doubled them, they'd be at like just a tiny fraction of what one of these was.
Ms. President, Coolie Rosas with MostPeace Without Media.
You just referenced the lower amount of illegal drugs that are coming by sea, and you just said that you're going to start that same program on land soon.
Are you just referring to Venezuela or are you referring to other cities of land money?
And regarding Venezuela, there is a United Nations Security Council emergency meeting being convened today at 3 p.m.
And C-SPAN will have live coverage of that meeting.
Venezuela has requested that the council meet to discuss U.S. aggression toward the South American nation, citing President Trump's order of a blockade of Venezuelan ships and seizure of oil tankers.
Again, we have live coverage from New York City at 3 p.m. Eastern Time here on C-SPAN.
You can watch it on our app, C-SPANNOW, or online at c-span.org.
Now back to your calls on your personal finances going into the new year.
Byron in Wilson, North Carolina, Independent Line.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I want to, let me ask you a quick question, Lise, and I got a comment after that.
How do y'all pick the subjects that y'all going to have for today?
So let me just mention it since it's on the front page.
I get your point.
It says, in eastern Congo, where rape is widespread, the cancellation of U.S. AID funding for PepKits have left many victims vulnerable, according to nearly 50 interviews.
This is a picture from a clinic there in the Congo.
We're talking about your personal finances going into the new year.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah, Trump's the devil.
I'm looking optimistic.
I retired from U.S. Steel Gary Works.
I was born and raised in Gary Works or in Gary.
Actually, I was raised in Gary Works.
I started here at 19.
They're putting a ton of money into that plant over the next 10 years, I believe it is.
And it's really going to help this area.
My wife is about ready to retire because she can, you know.
But I was calling, I wanted to talk to your previous guest because I sat there and listened to him talk about how, you know, it's, you know, the white folks is killing the black folks and blah, blah, blah.
Let me give you a perspective from the white side of Gary, Indiana.
I was born in 1959 in Gary.
My dad was born in Miller.
That's where I grew up, which was a town before Gary even existed.
Miller was heaven.
After Gordon Hatcher became president or became mayor, the place just the whole town went to hell.
Black gangs of teenagers would go and harass store owners and bust out their windows.
My colleagues and I remain squarely focused on achieving our dual mandate goals of maximum employment and stable prices for the benefit of the American people.
Although important federal government data for the past couple of months have yet to be released, available public and private sector data suggests that the outlook for employment and inflation has not changed as much since our meeting in October.
Conditions in the labor market appear to be gradually cooling, and inflation remains somewhat elevated.
In support of our goals, in light of the balance of risks to employment and inflation, today the Federal Open Market Committee decided to lower our policy interest rate by a quarter percentage point.
As a separate matter, we also decided to initiate purchases of shorter-term treasury securities solely for the purpose of maintaining an ample supply of reserves over time, thus supporting effective control of our policy rate.
And Cordell in Columbia, Pennsylvania, Independent Line, you're on the air.
unidentified
You're on the air.
Yes, hi, Mimi.
I can't really see what's going on on the screen, so I kind of have to just go off memory.
But anyway, to make a long story short, I feel optimist about my future financially just because I've been working on a small business for a while, over 20 years now.
Like, my business plan was finished in 06, way back when there was like a lot of venture type of education that the state was putting out for people that was on unemployment.
You know, I flipped the card looking for the PAT number to call in my hours, and in actuality, the state was doing entrepreneurial training.
That was in 06, you know.
We're in 2026, and I've been weathering the storm, Mimi, for about 20 years now, you know.
So I say I'm looking, you know, forward to my financial future just because, you know, I've been on the battlefield of financing for the past 20 years.
So, you know, like a soldier on the battlefield that's been fighting a war for 20 years, you kind of get a little good at how to maneuver around through the potholes and landmines and stuff like that.
And my perspective on the topic of optimistic finance future is the horror of what's done to seniors in losing their homes because I'll be getting $2,000, but that's the only thing I have.
And unfortunately, I thought it was wrong to take government money when you're in your working years.
So I never took a benefit of any kind from any source other than what I could make, starting out at $650 and ending up at $12.
And being a veteran's family members, the people from World War II, since I'm the youngest and the last one, there was a fire, so there's no paperwork available to help the spouse or daughter or anybody from veterans,
even the one that was my husband, Purple Heart.
And my problem is that you cannot get a reverse mortgage.
So they take away your house with the taxes and all that you're talking about, about affordability and how you could pay for everything, the utilities and so forth.
Then there's nothing left.
So then the bank doesn't give you a reverse mortgage.
And here's where the government is one of the worst.
And this is supposed to be blue and they care about sanctuary.
They care about the poor.
And of course, of course, the United States, we love our senior citizens.
But you know what they're going to do?
They're taking their house is taken away and then they evict you.
And then the government puts you in a shelter, which I could never endure.
It's not just healthy seniors who are completely ambulatory and self-caring, but all people with all types of problems.
So Beth, are you in danger of losing your house?
Or they put you in a nursing home and they place your Social Security and they tell you what to eat, when to get up and so forth, which another self-care person with all their models couldn't endure.
You cannot get a reverse mortgage, but we love our seniors.
So instead, they put you in the shelter when you're ambulatory and you're completely self-care and you have all your marbles in a dangerous situation.
Now that everyone there is in that condition, or they put you in a nursing home and take your entire check and you become a prisoner of their rules and their authority.
Hi, I just want to say my future financial future, and I hope that everyone understands we are where we are, but our financial future depends on what we can leverage where we are.
And right now, investing in the markets, and everybody says, oh, I don't have money in the markets.
I don't, you know, my mother-in-law used to say, Troy, if I had $5, I would try to save $2 in savings and investment.
She wasn't investing in the market, but she was just letting me know that sometimes we have to leverage what we have.
And if you need to work for somebody else, you need to also pay yourself.
And right now, it is easy to get in the markets, even invest in small accounts, small mutual funds that grows over time outside of your own 401k.
And for everyone, because we do have a president who doesn't understand everything, but what he does understand is he's increasing the markets and he's making things better in that regard.
I'm not talking about anything else.
I'm just talking about right now is the time to invest and small, make small increments.
You can get on any platform, Robin Hood, all these investor platforms that we didn't have advantage of years ago.
You can get on there and make your own investments.
And more from the Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, speaking about inflation and tariffs.
unidentified
Just to follow up on that, I mean, this is now the third time that you've cut this year and inflation is around 3%.
So is the message that you're sort of trying to send with that, that you're okay with where inflation is for now, as long as people understand that at some point you still want to get back to 2% because inflation is relatively stable where it is?
Everyone should understand, and the surveys show that they do, that we're committed to 2% inflation, and we will deliver 2% inflation.
But it's a complicated, unusual, difficult situation where the labor market is also under pressure, where job creation may actually be negative.
Now, supply of workers has also gone way down, so the unemployment rate hasn't moved that much.
But, you know, it's a labor market that seems to have significant downside risks.
People care a lot about that.
That's their jobs.
That's their ability, if they get laid off or if they're entering the labor force to find work.
So that's really important to people.
The story with inflation, and we're well aware that this is a story at this point, is that if you get away from tariffs, inflation is in the low twos, right?
So it's really tariffs that's causing most of the inflation overshoot.
And we do think of those as likely to, in the current situation, as likely to be a one-time, you know, one-time price increase.
Our job is to make sure that it is, and we will do that job.
But right now, you've got this difficult balance, and there are risks to both sides.
There's no risk-free path.
If it was just inflation and the labor market was just really strong, and then rates would be higher, as they were for more than a year.
We didn't have to worry about inflation.
Sorry, about the labor market, because the labor market unemployment was very low.
If you remember when inflation was very high, there was a labor shortage.
So we could focus entirely on inflation.
Now, it's different.
We actually have risks to both.
And I think we're doing the best we can for people.
They also care about their jobs.
They do care about affordability.
And the best thing we can do there is both to support economic activity, but also make sure that when tariff inflation goes down and disappears, inflation lands around 2%.
The GDP numbers have just been released this morning.
This is CNN.
The U.S. economy was much stronger than expected in the third quarter.
It says an initial reading of third quarter gross domestic product, that's GDP, showed the U.S. economy expanded at an inflation-adjusted annualized rate of 4.3%, a far faster pace than the 3.8% recorded in the second quarter.
According to the Commerce Department data, that was released today.
That's the fastest growth rate in two years.
John in California, Republican Lion.
Good morning, John.
unidentified
Good morning.
How are you?
Merry Christmas.
Things are pretty good for me, I think.
And I feel for that lady that was talking about being put in the home and all that.
And it's really sad.
And our seniors, one of the things we've deluded ourselves into thinking, well, we have Social Security.
Well, I get Social Security, but if I had to live on that alone, it wouldn't cover six months of my living expenses and like that.
And the message there is we have to plan.
We have to plan in our years that we're productive and have full-time jobs and like that, that we're not always going to be able to do that.
And there's a lot of things that I've heard this morning that have really, really struck me.
We talk about inflation.
Well, my gasoline is $1 a gallon cheaper than it was when Joe Biden was president.
The first thing he did when he was sworn in is he stopped the pipeline.
He made war on the petroleum companies in this country.
My gasoline went from a little under $4 to almost, and in some cases, over $5, seemed like overnight.
And so inflation was worse under Joe Biden.
And it was a result of too much spending.
You know, we're going to be all things to all people.
A lot of the problems that we have, we look to the government to solve.
We've got to look to ourselves.
And that sounds cruel.
Well, you've got to work harder.
You've got to do this.
No, you've got to plan more.
And maybe I was shocked when you said the median cost of a home was $400,000.
Geez, I don't think today I could afford a $400,000 house.
So there are problems, but you can't always look to the government to solve them.
You've got to take things on yourselves.
Families got to come together.
You know, the younger people got to take care of their older parents and like that.
And that's the way it used to be.
But the government has stepped in so many places, and we're going to take care of it.
John, what we were talking, he was being sarcastic and saying we need to collect all the senior citizens and get them out of here in a sarcastic way, saying that they're a drain on our economy.
And he was not talking about undocumented immigrants.
Henry in Bethesda, Maryland, Democrat, go ahead, Henry.
unidentified
I just want to say that the biggest issue in the economy is the income disparity between the middle class and the upper or upper middle class and the poverty line people.
And the people that are hurting affordability are all in the lower tax brackets, and there's nothing being done by the government or the Congress to help them with their cost of higher education, housing, or health care.
And why do you think that is, Henry, that there is such a disparity?
Do you think it's a bigger disparity now than it has been in the past between the corporate?
unidentified
Well, I think the disparity has expanded, and I think it's partially due to the fact that small businesses are being reduced down, and we're getting more and more corporate people, and corporate jobs are not paying people in middle management and down as much as they are in middle management and up.
And so there are a lot of people who are in a higher tax bracket who are enjoying all the luxuries and the lower class is seeing the communication of that thing and wanting it, but they can't afford it and are getting into credit card debt.
They can't afford housing or they're buying a house and putting themselves in a situation where they can't afford it.
They need two incomes, maybe two jobs to get to the same bracket.
I mean, living under $100,000 a year with a family of four is almost impossible at this point, where years ago you could have one spouse working and buy a house.
And we are taking your calls for another 25 minutes until the end of the program on your personal finances and how you're feeling going into the new year, your level of optimism, your level of pessimism.
You can give us a call and share your thoughts on that.
Here's Rick in St. Petersburg, Florida, Republican Lion.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, Mimi.
First of all, I wanted to tell you you're my 14-month-old grandson's favorite commentator.
Anyway, we just helped my son get coverage through the exchange.
He's got a job that doesn't have coverage and doesn't pay him enough to buy it himself.
So he just sat down and did a conference call with the people at the exchange and paid his full year premium yesterday, and it was exactly the same as it was last year.
So I'm pretty optimistic in general.
I mean, we're doing okay, but we planned properly and worked hard our whole lives, and we're retired now and doing great.
So I'm pretty optimistic.
And the health care rates didn't, at least for us, it didn't double.
He was on this program, Washington Journal, a few days ago, and he's talking about the concept of affordability.
unidentified
He's wrong.
It's that simple.
When he took over, inflation was about 3%.
And probably when we get some better numbers collected for the month of December and January, it's going to be about the same.
So there's been no progress on inflation during his administration.
Now, he's done a number of things which contribute to inflation.
One of them is create shortages of lower-skilled workers by deporting people who didn't do anything wrong to anybody.
You might not be aware of this, but the economy grew over the Trump won Biden years 2.5% a year, which is really, really quite impressive.
And we're adding about 175,000 jobs a month.
Indigenous population growth and the legal immigration regime we had in place during the Biden years can only give us 90,000 workers a month, additional.
The rest were basically illegal aliens or undocumented workers.
Use which language you want.
But the economy needs more immigrants to function and his extreme policies.
I certainly, you know, deport people who have committed crimes and seal the border and then let's have measured immigration where we let people come here who fill needs and we can do quite well.
But these extreme policies make it very difficult to run businesses, to build homes and so forth and push up prices.
Well, it could come from tariff revenue, but in the end, you know, we get taxes, we get tariffs, we get all revenue from lots of places, and then Congress decides how to spend those monies.
That's an appropriation.
But so this would have to be money that would be an appropriation.
Let's talk to David next in Deerfield Beach, Florida.
Democrat, good morning, David.
unidentified
Good morning.
As far as my personal financial outlook, I honestly believe as a 27-year-old, it's pretty good.
I have a lot more years in life to go, but our economy is running pretty well, though I don't necessarily agree with some of the political aspects of how things change.
The economy itself is advanced.
It's resilient, and I see a good outlook for me personally.
And regarding that, what you're seeing as a shortage, the clampdown on the H-1B visas, what are your thoughts on that as far as bringing in high-skilled engineers and scientists from overseas?
unidentified
Yeah, when I first saw that, it really shocked me because those are exactly the type of people we need.
Even with them, we still need more engineers.
And they provide a lot of experience and knowledge.
They're very good workers, people that come here in those types of visas.
Despite what we're hearing from the administration, we are not seeing a reduction in inflation.
Granted, we have seen some reductions in price, but I don't think the administration is really addressing the day-to-day cost issues that are being confronted by the American people.
But instead of giving Americans a plan on how we'll lower their costs, Donald Trump played the blame game.
That's so typical of him.
Instead of solving a problem, which is what a good president is supposed to do, he just points the fingers at other people.
And that doesn't do a bit of good to remove to get the American people back on the right track.
It's never a good sign when the president begins a speech by saying, I inherited a mess.
Because that's just another way of telling people, I don't want to be responsible for any of this.
Again, President Trump's speech showed he lives in a bubble, a billionaire bubble, completely disconnected from reality that everyday Americans are seeing and feeling.
Senator Chuck Schumer, and this is Barbara in North Carolina, Republican.
Good morning, Barbara.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I am optimistic about the economy.
And the main point I would make is that President Trump's emphasis on private sector is the most important concentration in order to increase competition in the marketplace.
The marketplace does determine pricing and increased competition in the private sector now will determine lower prices.
And the fact that he has decreased federal government government employees is a very important thing for us.
We don't need as many administrators of social programs as we've had in the past.
We need vitality within the private sector.
And I, being born in 1950, experienced that vitality with my parents and other generations.
And being in business for 60-some years, I understand that as a business owner, in order to even hold your position, you must compete, even if that means losing money.
And with more grocery stores and with more competitors in all sectors, this is the natural occurrence in our private markets.
We can hearken back to many, many of the great thinkers in classic literature who have outlined the basics in markets.
And this is what we need more than anything else is increased competition and 10 grocery stores on every corner and 10 parts houses in every sector.
And we will see vitality return to this country again.
Here's the line for Democrats in Washington, D.C. Nikisha, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, yes, me, me.
Yes, I'm pessimistic because I, in 2026, I will have three college students, three African American boys, which I can't bring back to the city of Washington, D.C. because black men die in Washington, D.C. I've been laid off for the last eight months as a federal government employee.
So I am definitely pessimistic because with three college students with the high cost of college, you either eat or you send your children to college.
And as a single mother, I'm pessimistic to this economy.
But unfortunately, I'm in hospitality and the labor market.
This is a slow season.
So unfortunately, they haven't been hiring in the hospitality industry.
I did try to pivot to go to, you know, to go to in other fields.
But unfortunately, right now, there's no funding.
Either A, I get funding for my kids to go to college or I get funding for my education.
And when you living in Washington, D.C., in Southeast D.C., unfortunately, there's no options but to either A, pay your bills or keep your children in college.
For four years, everybody in the media, including yourself, tried to make everybody understand that all the commodity prices were not Joe Biden's fault.
You have beef prices.
Americans eat 100 million tons and only produce 45.
There's just a problem with the beef prices.
There were sugar cane problems because of floods and drought.
Cocoa beans for candy, coffee, everything.
All the weather conditions had nothing to do with anything that anything that's been going on with anybody.
And I think it's kind of disingenuous that you try to make it sound like it's all Trump's fault or anybody else's fault.
We will be back tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern.
unidentified
Have a great day.
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