April 20, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| What I think you're going to see happen is my sense is that as there are amendments and modifications made to these restrictions, they're going to be geographic in nature. | ||
| They're going to happen in regions and or states, and they're not going to happen all at once. | ||
| There's going to be a slow progression to a point that we can sustain because there is a balance here, right? | ||
| We're always going to err on the side of public health and public safety. | ||
| There is also only so much you can ask of a society before it begins to sort of push back or not comply. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. | |
| Joining me today is the senior senator from Florida, Senator Marco Rubio. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you're doing this. | ||
| We've been trying to get you for a long time. | ||
| We were hoping we were maybe gonna do it live in Florida, although the pandemic has at least temporarily stopped us. | ||
| But let's just get right to it, because I know you have limited time. | ||
| Well, how's life in the middle of lockdown? | ||
| What are you going through? | ||
| What are you hearing from people in Florida, the whole thing? | ||
| Yeah, it's a tough time for a lot of people on multiple levels. | ||
| Obviously, economically, it's a time of tremendous uncertainty. | ||
| It's disrupted people's daily routines, people stuck at home for weeks on end. | ||
| And so that's been a challenge. | ||
| Then, obviously, the health care part at this point, I can tell you, we know at least three people who've had somebody in their family either die or are very seriously ill at this point from the virus. | ||
| So it's getting become personal. | ||
| And then there's things you don't really necessarily think about, but you know, I told you before we got on the air here that I have a senior in high school, my daughter, she, that whole senior class across the country, that the rites of passage, the prom, the graduation ceremony, all that's up in the air about what's going to happen next. | ||
| So it's just challenging on multiple fronts, but, but obviously, you know, you're, you also think about these people that are going out every day, whether it's working at the grocery store and exposing themselves to hundreds of people daily. | ||
| or working in those hospitals, whether it's cleaning them or all the way up to doctors, many of whom have been infected themselves. | ||
| It's just a tremendous challenge that, I know this word's been used a lot, but there really is nothing to compare it to. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanna spend most of our chat talking about the things that you're actually helping pass to help people. | ||
| But one quick thing before we get to that, what's your general philosophy on what the states should be doing right now versus what the federal government should be doing? | ||
| No, I think federalism really helps us here. | ||
| It should be a state response. | ||
| And the reason why is because states, every state is in a different situation, you know, and I think they are number one, most accountable to the people directly. | ||
| And second, in a country this big, this diverse, there's very rarely you're going to have a one size fits all approach that really functions well. | ||
| And so I think that's why having the state response is not just the right thing to do on a constitutional basis, in my view, it's also common sense. | ||
| And what I think you're going to see happen is my sense is that as there are amendments and modifications made to these restrictions, they're going to be geographic in nature. | ||
| They're going to be, they're going to happen in regions and or states. | ||
| And they're not going to happen all at once. | ||
| There's going to be a slow progression to a point that we can sustain because we're still, there is a balance here, right? | ||
| We're always going to err on the side of public health and public safety. | ||
| There is also only so much you can ask of a society before it begins to sort of push back or not comply with some of these requirements. | ||
| So it's not like we have unlimited time to continue to leave these things in place forever. | ||
| At some point, there will have to be some modifications because people will simply stop complying and make it hard to comply. | ||
| And so it's a delicate balancing act. | ||
| And that's why I think it's important that we have a state basis for it. | ||
| Do you guys have a particularly unique situation in Florida, because weather-wise, it's warm, and everyone's been saying, hopefully, as the summer rolls around, that'll help. | ||
| But on the other hand, I assume Florida probably has one of the oldest populations in the United States. | ||
| Well, that's a good point. | ||
| So, for example, we do have rural areas that are sparse. | ||
| None of our urban areas are as densely populated as New York City, for example. | ||
| Same in California. | ||
| These are big cities, but people drive. | ||
| You can tell by how many... | ||
| People are driving or do people use public transportation tells you a lot about density. | ||
| But the other thing that's unique and you've mentioned to it is we do have not just a large senior population, but a large concentrated senior population everywhere from the villages in north central Florida to multiple facilities and southeast Florida and very vibrant retiree communities in southwest Florida. | ||
| And so we have places where a lot of people in that high risk category over 65 or whatever live together. | ||
| And so outbreaks in any of those places could have quickly, you know, strained the local health services. | ||
| So that is one unique aspect. | ||
| And the other is we have a lot of international travel that comes through here from all over the world and spread from over the hemisphere. | ||
| So even if we emerge from this at some point with good numbers, you know, we're only an outbreak in Latin America and the Western hemisphere away from seeing some of that, you know, coming into our state from a lot of, whether it's visitors to Disney world or people are coming to do business in South Florida. | ||
| All right, so I really wanna focus in on what the government is actually hopefully doing right, but maybe some of what it's fumbling across the way. | ||
| I know you've been heavily involved in the Paycheck Protection Program. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about that? | ||
| Yeah, the first thing I wanna say about all of it is understand the reason why government's even involved is because the government has told businesses they can't function. | ||
| You can't open your doors, you can't make any money, you can't work. | ||
| So it is a government order. | ||
| It's an essence of taking in the public interest. | ||
| It's if I take your property, we have to compensate you for the government. | ||
| If I close your business, there's got to be some level of compensation for that. | ||
| So what's the right way to do is what we've worked on. | ||
| We focused on the small business sector and the committee that I chair, and we came up with a formula because we don't believe, and I think I've been proven right, that the existing emergency loan program was going to function. | ||
| That program was designed for a tornado or a flood or a hurricane that hit or a wildfire that hits a geographic area, not a nationwide emergency. | ||
| So, There's been a lot of criticism about the glitches the programs had, and I just asked myself, what did people expect? | ||
| This bill passed on March 27th, 17 days ago. | ||
| Seven days later, the program was up and running, but not perfectly. | ||
| We have $350 billion program. | ||
| Half the businesses in America are eligible for it. | ||
| It's a massive program, and it's never been done before. | ||
| So on that day, almost two Fridays ago, it was the first time ever that anyone on this planet had ever done a PPP loan, whether you were a banker, the SBA, or even somebody applying for it. | ||
| So that was, you know, seven days after the bill passed. | ||
| 11 days after this program has started, which is where we are today, we already have billions of dollars being dispersed into the accounts of small businesses. | ||
| There are over a million small businesses that have already been approved and are in some process of getting this funding, representing millions of American jobs, that there's now a funding source to keep them on payroll for six to eight weeks. | ||
| I think that's a pretty significant achievement over a very short period of time. | ||
| Yes, there were glitches. | ||
| Of course there were glitches. | ||
| That's the nature of crisis situations. | ||
| But I don't know of any precedent where you have a program of this size and magnitude that ramps up and begins to reach people at such a massive level in 17 days from the day it was signed into law. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not making this up. | ||
| I have a small business here, obviously, my production company that backs this show. | ||
| We found out about an hour ago that we were actually cleared for one of the small business loans. | ||
| So I know that, you know, firsthand that this is actually affecting people. | ||
| How do you decide whether money should go to the small businesses themselves or whether it should just be put in people's pocket for that sort of immediate burst if they have to deal with mortgage and, you know, buying groceries and medical supplies, things like that? | ||
| Well, the way we viewed it was, at least from our perspective, was two things. | ||
| It was good for most small businesses to hold on to their employees as long as they could, because it would be disruptive for them to have to lose all their employees and try to rehire everybody. | ||
| It would add time and complexity to starting up again, depending on what industry you're in. | ||
| They may never be able to start up again. | ||
| You can't just hire someone off the street and in 12 minutes train them how to use the dry cleaning machine or even know how to work the systems for your restaurant and so forth. | ||
| We also think it's better for people. | ||
| To be attached to an employer, even if they're not going into work. | ||
| And the evidence of that is there are plenty of people out there that are still getting paid, but either working from home in some cases, not even working at all, but still getting paid. | ||
| I don't see them, you know, asking to, to, to be laid off, uh, for the most part. | ||
| And so my, my, the issue is we wanted to keep that attachment in a time of so much uncertainty. | ||
| The last thing you want is people sitting at home, not just out of a job, but not even knowing that there's a job for them to go back to at any point in the near future. | ||
| So that was the rationale behind it. | ||
| And then the question is, well, what is the best way to deliver it? | ||
| And the answer was not through the SBA directly, because this is a small agency, but no federal agency could have handled it. | ||
| And we argued that virtually every small business has some banking relationship or financial relationship of some kind. | ||
| Let's pay the bankers and the lenders a processing fee to basically do a no risk loan on their part, because most of this is going to be forgiven. | ||
| And whatever portion of it becomes a loan, if it does, is 100% guaranteed by the federal government. | ||
| And that was the general concept that we directly began working on weeks before we were called upon because we kind of saw this coming and that was the idea behind it. | ||
| Do you think this is all working basically as well as it could be worked? | ||
| As you said, there's going to be some flubs, there's going to be some hiccups along the way, but do you think that the system basically is functioning as it should right now? | ||
| Yeah, there's two impediments that people have to understand. | ||
| The first is there was some lateness in issuing the guidance, you know, they opened up applications that Friday, the guidance didn't come out until Thursday, because the original guidance that was put out by SBA was did not reflect legislative intent. | ||
| It was very too complicated. | ||
| And so Treasury came in, they spent all day that Thursday fixing it, finally came out on Friday, then there were some follow up questions, simple things, you know, but important, like what note do we use? | ||
| What document do we use to close the loan? | ||
| Because We're not going to close unless you tell us what's approved. | ||
| Because a year from now, we don't want you to come and tell us that it's not guaranteed because we use the wrong form. | ||
| So getting Treasury to answer that question is what really opened up the door. | ||
| And then the third is, is there a market to sell some of these? | ||
| Because if you hold these on your books, that's capital. | ||
| That's not federal cash that's going out. | ||
| It's cash out of the balances of these lenders. | ||
| They want to make sure that at some point in six, seven, eight weeks, they can sell these things to somebody. | ||
| And so when the Fed came out Friday and announced that they would be able to take them to the discount window and get rid of these loans off the books and have the feds own it, that opened up the spigot as well. | ||
| So I wish we would have done all those things, you know, three days earlier, but, uh, but there's a lot that goes into that, but, but it happened. | ||
| And then the other issue is frankly, just capacity. | ||
| I mean, these are big banks. | ||
| But they didn't have 1000 people assigned to processing loans, they had to repurpose a lot of their internal systems and employees to handle this kind of work and train them up on how to do it. | ||
| So some of the backlog we've seen has been inside the banks themselves, who just weren't, you know, internally, this is not what they do every day. | ||
| And so they had to repurpose a lot of their existing folks to be able to do some of this. | ||
| So I want to shift a little bit and talk about China directly because one of the reasons I've wanted to have you on the show for so long is I've heard you give many speeches on the Senate floor about the uniqueness of America and why you love this country so much and your family story and the whole thing. | ||
| We seem to be at this odd moment right now where we're in this relationship with China that nobody can quite Tell if it's good, if it's bad, if it's beneficial. | ||
| Did they spread it and now they're also supposed to be our savior? | ||
| Can you clean up a little bit about what's going on with China and how we should be dealing with them during this? | ||
| Well, I doubt I could do it in 10 minutes or 15 minutes or a much broader topic, but let me say this. | ||
| Look, China is a rich and powerful and important country and will be for the rest of our lifetime. | ||
| In fact, this entire century will be defined by the relationship between the United States and China. | ||
| They, for historic reasons and others, they view it as their rightful role in the world. | ||
| From a historical perspective, they view the last hundred years as an aberration, and it's their rightful role in the world to sort of be the most dominant and powerful country on the planet. | ||
| And every nation is entitled to whatever ambitions they want. | ||
| But from our perspective, we have a relationship with them, and it has to be a balanced relationship. | ||
| Because if the relationship becomes unbalanced, whether it's geopolitically or economically, we're going to have a conflict. | ||
| We're already seeing conflict with them when it comes to economics. | ||
| And we could eventually see armed conflict as well, which would be disastrous. | ||
| And so the only way to avoid that is to have a balanced relationship. | ||
| I don't like the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| I wish they were more democratic and they adhered to human rights. | ||
| And I talk about those things. | ||
| But ultimately, that's something that has to change over there internally. | ||
| What we can control is what our relationship is like with them. | ||
| And we have made decisions in public policy in this country for 25 years that have disadvantaged us. | ||
| Because we thought that when China got rich, they would become like us. | ||
| We didn't realize till recently, I guess most people is that what they were actually undertaking is a very meticulous, carefully crafted and patient effort to displace us and no longer to be the place that makes cheap knockoffs, but the actual place that is innovating and they've become great innovators. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But if their innovations are largely built on intellectual property for an unfair competition where their companies can do whatever they want here, but other companies from abroad can't do whatever they want over there. | ||
| Well, that's not a fair playing field. | ||
| So we need to bring some balance to that relationship, and that's not what exists right now. | ||
| And so I think we have to spend a lot of time working on restoring a level of strategic balance, both economically and geopolitically. | ||
| So speaking of strategic balance, I mean, the fact that we're getting so many of our supplies from China, the fact that our supply chain has so much to do with China, I mean, in a certain way, has the ship sailed on that? | ||
| Like, how do we actually fix some of this stuff? | ||
| Especially because we're going through this right now. | ||
| It's not like, all right, maybe six months from now we can do the post-mortem on it and figure out here are the mistakes we made, but we actually do need things right now. | ||
| Yeah, for the most part, it's not like oil, or it's in the ground, and they have it, and we don't. | ||
| Well, that's not the case in the United States. | ||
| But this is, we've given it away, because we made a decision, and the market said that the most efficient place for these activities to happen is somewhere else. | ||
| And China became that place. | ||
| And it became the most efficient place initially because of low labor costs, but now it's also because they subsidize and protect their companies at the expense of everybody else. | ||
| And generally, that's fine. | ||
| That's the way capitalism should work. | ||
| That's why I support markets. | ||
| But what happens when the most efficient outcome is opposite of our national interests? | ||
| So for example, what happens when the most efficient outcome is that airplanes are only made in China and rare earth minerals can only be procured from China and key medications can only come from China? | ||
| Well, I'm not sure that's in our national interest. | ||
| And some of that is being exposed right now. | ||
| You know, I'll tell you something that we can't do here, that it's very difficult to offshore is agriculture. | ||
| And so while, you know, you'll have some shortages of some commodities and some disruptions, The one thing you're not hearing about is there may not be any toilet paper at the grocery store, but there's meat and there's chicken and there's rice and there's vegetables. | ||
| That issue is not hurting us because we can feed ourselves. | ||
| And that's not an industry you can just pick up and move somewhere else. | ||
| We're very fortunate. | ||
| We need to be able to do some other things that may not be the most efficient place to do, but we have to have some capability of doing certain things. | ||
| And I think one of the key pieces of work that we have to put together The aftermath of all this is defining what are those industries that we're going to have to have some domestic capacity in for purposes of national economic and national security. | ||
| So as we look at, you know, the stimulus package and we look at, you know, refiguring out our situation with China and everything else, what does getting America back to work look like? | ||
| I mean, I know you're saying the states should all sort of do their own thing, but like, are we, is this now the rest of the year, do you think? | ||
| Is this well beyond that? | ||
| I mean, what does this actually kind of look like? | ||
| Well, that's the hardest question. | ||
| You know, we just don't know because there's nothing to model. | ||
| I think a lot of it is still unknown and uncertain. | ||
| Anyone who goes around telling the dates is lying. | ||
| No one really knows yet. | ||
| But I think it really begins a sort of setting in our mind a criteria for what is an acceptable level of risk. | ||
| And remembering that we don't have an unlimited amount of time here. | ||
| We're asking people to comply with these orders, but eventually people will begin to push back on compliance. | ||
| They'll just stop complying. | ||
| And we're not going to be arresting everyone who decides they're going to break a curfew or because 10 people are together in a home somewhere. | ||
| So this is not forever. | ||
| We cannot do this even if we wanted to forever, and we don't want to, and we can't from an economic perspective. | ||
| The second is, what have we done in the interim? | ||
| What are we doing right now? | ||
| Are we developing? | ||
| If we can develop an antiviral that keeps people off respirators, keeps people out of ICU, maybe even keeps them out of the hospital, that's a major development. | ||
| And we're much closer to that than we are to a vaccine, which will eventually come. | ||
| And then I think part of it for all of us is recognizing that it's not going to be like we're going to go back to March 1st and everything's going to open up and be the same. | ||
| I think it's going to be a gradual process of adjustment. | ||
| And I still expect that for some significant period of time, many of us will still be wearing masks in public places. | ||
| We'll still have to stand six feet apart in the lines, and we may not be able to gather in large groups at certain places. | ||
| And you know what that could mean. | ||
| I mean, all kinds of things that would be disrupted by it. | ||
| So things may reopen, some jobs may come back, but it won't be the same for a while. | ||
| And that's going to have economic consequences to it as well. | ||
| And so it reminds me a lot of the hurricanes that we've become accustomed to here in Florida. | ||
| You're sitting at home. | ||
| You know it's a bad storm. | ||
| You've heard about it on the radio. | ||
| You can hear the wind howling. | ||
| You can see the trees bending, maybe even breaking. | ||
| But you don't really know how bad it is until the storm passes and you go outside and take an assessment. | ||
| And we're still in the middle of that storm. | ||
| And this storm's going to linger a little bit even after we go outside. | ||
| It's still going to be blowing. | ||
| There's going to be a tail to some of this economic damage for a while. | ||
| Yeah, I want to ask you something that I talk to a lot of my non-political guests about, but it might be interesting to hear a politician's view on this. | ||
| Have you been able to have any time to sort of just rethink what you're doing with your life? | ||
| What do you want to do in the future? | ||
| What you're doing with your family? | ||
| Just, you know, everyone trapped at home, I do sense that the silver lining to all of this is that we are going to start thinking about the world In a new way, what job we have, whether we want to commute, where we're living, are we too close to a big city, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Have you guys had any time to talk about that, either with your wife, with your kids, what they want to do, all that sort of thing? | ||
| Well, a little different, I think. | ||
| And for me, it's been more about what a humbling experience this is for everybody. | ||
| This is not a disease that wealth, fame, power protects you from. | ||
| And the prime minister of the United Kingdom is gravely ill. | ||
| We've seen celebrities and very wealthy people be infected by it. | ||
| This is something that, that sort of reminds you that there are things we still don't control. | ||
| We are an advanced species. | ||
| We've done some extraordinary things over the last hundred years scientifically, and yet there are things we cannot control. | ||
| There are things that, that, that we are, we are still limited. | ||
| I think as much as anything else, and this is a reminder of how all of these things we've built, all of the, I mean, you've seen these massive companies and captains of industry that were brought to their knees very quickly because the economy came to a halt by a virus, by, by, by biology, you know? | ||
| And so it sort of reminds you that in so many ways, while we have great advances and have achieved tremendous things as a species, we still have limits to the things that we have control over. | ||
| And that there are some things that are not easy to solve. | ||
| We've also become a society that's used to, why haven't you invented the pill yet that takes this away in five minutes? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why don't you come up with a magic government program that makes us all go away overnight? | ||
| And it's almost this assumption that somehow there's this logical, easy solution out there and we just haven't done it because people don't want to do it. | ||
| Every country in the world is struggling with this because there are certain things in life still in the 21st century that require a lot of work and a little bit of patience and a little bit of humility in confronting them because they don't have easy answers and don't have easy solutions. | ||
| And for me, that certainly reminded us that no matter how powerful the US government might be and how much influence we may have in it from our role, There's only so much we can do, but our job is to do our best. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So one more then, which is sort of jumps off that and sort of related to some of the speeches that I've heard you give. | ||
| Is there something that is unique about the American experience, about just American drive and ingenuity and the desire and action on freedom that you think will help us get through this, where other countries might struggle in a way because it's not so much in their national ethos, where we have such a strong, just independent streak within us? | ||
| Yeah, two things that I would point to. | ||
| The first is our sense of community, where you see people out there right now at home sewing masks and doing certain things to help out in their own way. | ||
| You've seen entire businesses that have repurposed their production for purposes of filling. | ||
| They heard about a critical need in society and they decided we were going to meet it. | ||
| You see so many people step up to the plate on that. | ||
| Even in this time, there's so much polarization. | ||
| You've seen a lot of that happen. | ||
| And some of the most amazing stories have nothing to do with famous people or political people. | ||
| It has to do with everyday people that are making extraordinary steps to check on a neighbor or provide food for some, an elderly person who's shuttered at home and can't go outside because their life would be at risk. | ||
| So I think that, and some of the stories you hear in these emergency rooms where these patients are completely isolated from loved ones and, you know, doctors are holding up the phone before they intubate them so they could speak to their relatives potentially for the last time and the impact it's had on them psychologically. | ||
| So just extraordinary stuff. | ||
| And then the second part about it is our creativity and innovation. | ||
| You have a lot of creative, innovative people out there right now that are trying to solve all sorts of problems. | ||
| You know, the fact that you and I are having this interview, despite the inability to be together. | ||
| I mean, 20 years ago, I would need a studio and you would need a studio. | ||
| And now we're doing it, you know, on two laptops or two computers. | ||
| And so that is... For the record, as a small businessman, I do have a home studio. | ||
| This is my garage. | ||
| Not bad, right? | ||
| This is not, Matt. | ||
| Studio, but I had to buy a fancy light just to be able to live. | ||
| But the thing is that we have that creativity, not just to solve the problems we're facing now. | ||
| I mean, kids are learning. | ||
| Yeah, it's not ideal in the classroom with their friends, but we're instructing people. | ||
| All these are innovations that America brought about and in many ways have made it possible. | ||
| But the other thing that's happening is they're working on solutions to this problem. | ||
| I believe we have the brightest minds in the world and the brightest minds in this country thinking about How can we come up with a vaccine? | ||
| How can we come up with an antiviral? | ||
| How can we make ventilators? | ||
| And you're already seeing some of these companies turn it around and take small things and repurpose it to be ventilators and medical protective gear and so forth. | ||
| So that extraordinary power is still there when our minds are behind a united purpose. | ||
| And you see that it's evident. | ||
| People aren't just sitting at home saying, when is the government going to come up with answers? | ||
| The media might be asking that, but everyday people are going out and answering the question themselves in their own communities. | ||
| That's a very unique American attribute, and one that I'm glad we still have. | ||
| I love that answer, and Senator, I thank you for taking the time, and stay safe, and hopefully we'll be able to do this in person sometime. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Stay safe. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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