The president with late yesterday. What do you think republican strategy, House Republicans in particular, their strategy from here will be . Guest i think it is pretty clear they will try to say, look, this is sort of a very partisan driven process. Democrats have been out to get trump from day one, and they are going to use whatever they can to try to get at him. First, it was the russia collusion thing, then they moved on to ukraine. It is pretty obvious that is what they wanted to do, and some of our reporters visited with President Trump in the white house and he was very defiant. He even talked about how he might want to have a fireside chat where he reads the transcript. It ishe vote yesterday, clear the battle lines have been drawn. There is no backing off, and democrats are dug into that position. I think that is particularly in some of the swing states and thaticts, republicans feel they might be able to press and push back against this idea that this is a partisan effort to oust trump. Host your reporters from that interview, we mentioned this, it is at washingtonexaminer. Com. The president says the impeachment will backfire on the democrats, and we will get a first take of that when the president campaigns in tupelo, mississippi. Is there a downside to the president resisting what the democrats are asking for in terms of testimony from officials, documents from the administration . Could this lead to a constitutional crisis . Guest obviously as a journalist, i am always for more transparency. If President Trump feels that he has done nothing wrong, i feel like more testimony on that would be helpful in illuminating what this is. Yesterday, we had testimony from jim morrison, who worked on the National Security council. It was an interesting testimony spun as boths sides felt like it proved their point because basically previouse had heard testimony from the u. S. Diplomat in ukraine which had conflicted and had a more sort of negative portrayal of the interactions between the Trump Administration and the ukrainians, and he basically the trumput how administration had made clear that the white house visit and Security Officials were consistent test were contingent on the ukraine investigating. When he came out with that testimony, they attacked him as sort of biased and out to get trump and so forth. Now you have this other witness who has been a longtime republican National Security staffer and official, and he substantially confirmed bill taylors testimony. On the key points, he did say sondlandssador gordon to the e. U. , has said to the ukrainians that if they want Security Systems to solidify that, they should investigate the firm that hunter biden works for. That clearlyk hurts trumps case because now you have multiple people saying to theis was conveyed they idea of this link between Security Assistance and investigation. However, at the same time, morrison said that he did not see anything illegal in what was done in the call at the time. Now, certainly democrats are saying, well, what a witness says is legal or illegal doesnt matter, what matters are the facts, and he confirmed a substantial fact. Nonetheless, that is clearly something republicans feel that they could jump onto. For republicans basically, they should say, look, there are not going to be 20 republicans in the senate that are going to be voting to remove trump from office. So this is really about a are al race these we that we are seeking. A tough moveit is for republicans to defend trump, and somebody saying i did not see anything wrong with this call, that could be something that they could grasp onto as a talking point to make it feel like they could defend what happened. This isaying impeachable. I think that a lot of state ands in this district, where they are going to be very competitive, are going to get to a place where they say, well, it is not the way i would have preferred he would have acted, but i dont think it bears removing somebody who has been elected from office. Guest,hilip klein is our the executive editor of the washington examiner, here to talk about politics, but mainly here to talk about his new book, how it isfuture stacked against millennials and how socialism would make it worse why did you write the book . Iest this is something that wanted to write for a long time. I think millenials as a generation and we are talking about basically people born in the early 1980s to the mid to late 1990s, Something Like 1981 to 1997. Basically, i feel like they often get a raw deal. They have gotten a raw deal because they often get mocked for being whiny or complaining avocadoigate or eating toast and so forth, and a lot of their economics concerns do not hear that. But when i looked at it, i found that they are basically facing two sets of challenges. One is the unprecedented federal debt. And the other is the economic challenges when it comes to personal finances. Massive increases in the costs of college education, housing, health care, child care, that has made it difficult for them to build wealth and families and save for the future. That will be endangered by the unsustainable nature of the federal programs. Host when you look at how millenials are in terms of relation to debt, whether it is student debt or buying a house, and you compare it to the baby boomers were, where they were at their age, what do you find . Guest first of all, the cost of housing. , mediane early 1970s income has gone up for the 25 to ityearold age group there age group. About 4. 5 . But the median price of a home has gone up nine it times the re that same period. Rent has, over the past saved past same the decades, has nearly doubled. Health care has gone up 10 times. College has gone up 200 to 300 . Boomers, the baby first of all there were more Jobs Available for people who did not have college degrees. You wanted to go to college, you could also work part time and be paying a substantial part of the tuition. That is not realistic today, costs. He massive runaway so we do see a number of data points in the book that millenials are purchasing houses. Ater than early generations there are studies linking them to high student debt among other factors. Millenials were obviously very affected by the 2008 financial crisis. Many of them coming in, graduating at college at about that age. At 2008 and after. Were there similar headwinds facing baby boomers at about the same age . Different. S sort of it depends on when if i baby boomers we are talking about those born between 1946 and 1964, certainly the 1960s was a time of a large economic expansion and very low unemployment. Tooke baby boomers advantage of a long period of the same postwar expansion. Obviously if somebody graduated in the late 1970s where you had high unemployment and high inflation, they would have faced a similarly poor situation. But that certainly has been a big factor hurting millenials. Guest is philip klein, talking about his new book, fear the future. We welcome your calls. Emocrats, 2027488000 republicans, 2027488001. For independents and others, 2027488002. Book, the charts in your the declining number of workers relative to beneficiaries in 2000, you have 3. 5 workers per recipient. Up to looking at 2035, 2. 5. Why is this a problem, and what can millenials do about it . It is a problem because it means that when baby boomers were in the workforce, because they were a very large group of people they had more with whom to share the benefit because the way Social Security worked is that people who were current workers paid for current retirees. So as a result of that, they had a lot more people to share the burden with, paying taxes into the system. And you were retirees. Are aw the baby boomers Massive Retirement generation. The Life Expectancy is longer, so they are living longer. Fewerere are relatively people in the workforce to pay for each person. So what is going to have to happen is that most likely it means that millenials are going to have to pay significantly higher taxes. We are going to have much more debt. Or you are going to have to see some sort of changes to the program that makes the benefits less generous. Host the current statistics on student debt excuse me, consumer debt. This is consumer debt. Mortgages at 9. 5 trillion. Student loans, 1. 6 trillion. Card, american outstanding debt is 1 trillion. You also get into a bit of politics about this. I want to show you a poll that viewsne about americans of socialism. 36 , according to the poll, have a favorable view of socialism. A of millenials have favorable view of socialism. 50 of millenials are somewhat likely to vote for it. Vote formely likely to a socialist candidate. Among theu find people you write about . Guest there is definitely this trend, and i think my book helps explain why we have seen this shift. There are a number of facets. First, if you think about life experiences. Millenials the earliest millenials were eight years old when the berlin wall fell. They do not have as much historical memory of a lot of the socialist experiment. So it does not have the same stigma as it might for later generations. The other factor is that as we just spoke about, many graduated into the great recession. As an example of the failures and excesses of capitalism. Oftop of that, you have all these financial headwinds, and then you have people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders saying, well, we will worry about housing, health care the government can take on that burden and take it off your hands. So that is very appealing to them. And in time, the republicans are not really speaking and at the same time, the republicans are not really speaking to that generation. That is the reason for the shift. My fear is that basically going down that path, when you are talking about, in the case of just the healthcare proposal, 34 trillion price tag, going down that path make the first of challenges, the unprecedented debt, much worse. , one of the chart first charts which i think it definitely backs to 1790. It is from the Congressional Budget Office and they track it as a percentage of the economy. You can get you can compare things fairly. Host we will find that book. Our guest is philip klein. Againstdeck is stacked millenials and why socialism wont work is this your first book . Caller no. Guest no. Host al on the independent line. Caller good morning. Good morning, mr. Cline. A quick question or comment, anyway. President trump has said this is the best economy we have ever had. He is repeating that. It is the best, the biggest, the brightest, all this crap. However, the economy is good. Why are we not paying down the National Debt . To pay down the National Debt, you have to raise taxes. Is, i am 71. T when i was 21 back in the baby boomer days, i figured if i made it to 22, i was going to be lucky. Between the war in vietnam and cuba and all the rest of that stuff. Now i am in my retirement. I have earned it. I climbed utility poles for 30 years. My children graduated from college debtfree because they went to, instead of these big expensive colleges, they started at the Community College and worked their way up into graduate programs in fouryear colleges in the State University system. Now, the reason why they like socialism is because, one, they have never lived under socialism. Social that security is a flavor of socialism. It is a benevolent socialism. We always think of socialism as some czar or dictator coming down the street with tanks and soldiers, pushing us around. That is not how socialism works. Host ok, the response from philip klein. Guest thank you for your comments. I think that there is a lot there. Thatoint which is true is we are in a comparatively strong peace, and relative you would expect that the debt would be shrinking, and get it is still going up. Doubt that if we add more tax revenue coming in, the simple math is that the deficits would be narrower. But that does not tell you most after story because even the trump tax cuts, if you look at the coming decades, taxes are actually expected to meet and exceed what the historical average has been for the last 50 years. Get in lineble to with the historical average, there would be plenty of tax revenues coming into be able to stabilize the longterm debt we are experiencing. However, the spending is going out of control. Driven by Retirement Programs and health care costs. Bighat is why you see this debt growing. You we have lines for, if are a millennial, 2027488003. Joe on our democrats lie. You are with philip klein. On our democrats line. You are with philip klein. Caller good morning. There is snow on the ground here. I have to ask you a question. I have three millennial children. They are woke. We walked their age, around on a cloud. Yourt you to talk around republican god, reagan, who destroyed this nation. Republicans did nothing with intrastructure with infrastructure but spend all the money on our military. Talk about the military budget today. Want to talk about the numbers with your false promise . Please talk about the military. Policeout our woeful budgets. 50 of all our money goes to the police. Thank you. Guest well, thank you for the call. I do, in my book, talk about the defense budget. But the thing is, the defense agent as a share of our economy the defense budget, as a share of our economy, is substantially less than it was during the 1980s. During the cold war, it was about twice as large as it is now, and it has been shrinking to a historically low postworld war ii rate. However, spending on Social Security has gone up considerably, and those two programs now account for 40 of the federal budget. Host the jobs numbers are out. Speaking of the economy, the u. S. Economy adding 128,000 jobs in october. Back to calls. To North Carolina. Good morning to william. Caller yes, good morning. To the caller of new york, i would like to say as far as the budget with the military, our last president depleted our military. With everything going on in the and allhe baghdadis these types who infiltrate our country and come in here, and as far as the person who said crackers and white trash from North Carolina i believe in our president. If people want to go down the road, go back to gas that is four dollars, five dollars, six we are a gallon, bringing companies back. Whether or not you agree with it they are not coming back to america. If we could work with the democrats and help them out, we could bring companies back, employ more people to it as far as this education that we keep spending budgeted money on, we now look at the statistics that came in on millenials. All these people are faltering in math, english. We are spending money in all the wrong places and not getting anything but teachers striking, begging for more money, big pensions. But by the time they leave the tenure at their schools, we have as much money going out with pensions as they were making in salary. So at some point we need to all look. Every time you go to the gas station, you need to be thinking donald trump, i just paid 2. 26 a gallon on fuel. You ever want to complain about fracking and all the stuff, we have created a bunch of jobs. We still have a lot of initiative in the country, that if we just unleash it and allow people to get their minds set in a way that this is one country, one people, come together and try to build on what we have, no matter how you feel about one another and i know our president and i voted for trump, used to be a lifelong democrat, but i have to put my face in him. I know he dont speak a lot to the things like we normally would hear from an obama type person that half of us could not understand what he was saying to start with. He is trying to speak directly to us. If we could all Work Together pelosi, schumer, and everyone get together, i think we could get this country too far out reach us. Hopefully we will keep good numbers coming in and everybody can Work Together. Host all right, william, thank you. Guest thank you, william. I think it is important you mentioned infrastructure and other priorities. It is important to realize we cannot have all of the above. We cannot have more taxes and more military spending and more Infrastructure Spending and not do anything about our entitlement programs. A lot of times this is something that president obama would talk about a lot. Why cant we do big things anymore . He used to talk about infrastructure a lot, and often example that gets invoked is the interstate highway system. When the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s, medicare did not exist and Social Security was still in its relative youth as a program. There were plenty of people paying into it relative to the number of retirees. So it was a lot easier to invest in an ambitious infrastructure program. Isht now, 40 of the budget easing up before a penny goes out to pay a fair to pay for another to pay for other national priorities. It is only going to get worse. It is going to be more difficult to address infrastructure. Our caller,r expressed optimism. What did you hear from millenials as far as their optimism and the future of the country . Very millenials have a negative view of their future. Cite an the beginning, i poll showing that the Younger Generation is a lot more fearful than hopeful about their future. And i think that there is this that our bestse days are behind us. And i think that to some extent that can be chalked up to the usual typical, when people are young they sort of worry about their futures and they think that everything great happened before they were born. That there are significant points of data that show that we are in sort of unprecedented territory. Host extrapolated for you. I do think there are, significant points of data to show we are in unprecedented territory. Host you had a New York Times base and the headline was trumps deficits are in existential threat to can serve it is him conservatism. Here is the chart of federal data going back to 1790 as a percentage of gross domestic product. If you look beyond where we are now, the spike well above 120 of gross domestic product. Of gross domestic product. What does that mean for the millennial generation . Guest it means a lot. The era we are entering in, we have never seen before. The current debt, even before it starts going up even further is higher than at any point in history other than world war ii. You had ald war ii brief huge extraordinary spike but it was only for a brief period. Once the war was over there was a drop. Now the problem we have been talking about today in terms of Retirement Program and health care costs, those will potentially rich 144 of gross domestic product. In theory if you took all the economic output we have in a year and put it exclusively towards paying off the debt it would still not be enough to pay off the debt and it will continue to grow. That is a huge worry. When economists fear is known as a fiscal crisis. It is now in a fiscal crisis scenario essentially markets start to become skittish about purchasing u. S. Debt. Maybe they demand much higher interest rates. Then it becomes a vicious cycle. Interestemand higher rates your borrowing costs go up and it gets harder to make a dent in the debt and it gets harder to reassure investors. Make ugly choices like immediate, massive tax increases, massive severe spending cuts, you have to worry about inflation and it is an ugly place. We dont know what the magic number is, when this would happen. There is a broad consensus among economists that the larger the debt grows without any plan to do anything about it increases the likelihood we will see some sort of crisis. Host we have a phone line for millennials. 202 7488003. Millennialnd, and thank you for calling in. Caller thanks for taking my call. I am right between millennials and jen c. I find this notion of socialism among young people is about not wanting to work is off base. It is about the fact that jobs are being automated away. I know the democratic field is catering to twitter activists, i know hason allegiance to socialism, it is about the outcomes. Bogeymane mad at the because they are too afraid to think about policy. Because they are too afraid to think about policy. We are not going to have to deal with the negative consequences of socialism if we dont become a socialist nation but i dont think we will. Conservatism has been about owning the libs. Before i was even alive. I know i am making an ideological case, but as a field or. This is a field report. Guest thank you. Certainly there are people saying that millennials are lazy, that is not the point i make in my book. How theyk i talk about get a raw deal, how many ways they have been much more practical than prior generations. Things like not playing the lottery as much as prior generations. They are moral verse to Credit Card Debt than other generations. I think they are trying to be more responsible than they are given credit for. Thesere facing a lot of tremendous costs. They are tempted by the seemingly easy solutions. Thatealth care proposal Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are endorsing, who largetively have a contingent of support within the democratic primary field, would be disastrous. Basically more income tax anded corporate taxes that we currently pay. If you double those it still would not be enough to finance this program. Host also on our millennial line, elliott. Caller thank you. I think im one of the few millennials that listens to cspan still. Notgeneration is looking at wanting socialism altogether, we not feel like we are having enough answers for big problems and we need a socialist program. The reason we are seeing a lot of millennials getting into politics, we are starting to get 401 k s and thinking about buying houses. We are looking at the situation and we are going to see a lot more millennials getting into politics and becoming more active area thanks. Active. Thanks. Guest that is absolutely true. One of the things i point out in my book is how millennials in the coming years are going to be largest generation Largest Adult age population in the united states. To, it might not be this election but in the coming elections they are going to be the dominant force. That is why i think that republicans are making a huge mistake by often times just writing off millennials as a bunch of whiny socialists. I think that is a problematic concession to make that will hurt the party in the future. Host lets hear from our democrat line. Miles from new jersey. Allt caller first of we need to stop denigrating each other. You talk about this and that. Stop criticizing the other side. Up we had onewing parent inuse the house who went to work to support the family. Now you have to get two or three jobs just to pay the rent area nobody is home to watch the kids. Are in school trying to get an education but it costs too much. You have these Big Companies that will hire people for less pay and then you have the people that deserve to get the right pay and they cannot get it because these Companies Wont charge them that. When i was growing up i had a job and i worked 40 hours a week , i got benefits from that. You 36 hours give a week and then you have to get another job and another job after that. All the rent is going up, clothing is going up, food goes up. Always talk about what barack obama did but they know the Republican Party never helped that man do a thing for this country. When the economy goes up now donald trump gets credit for it . Lets get real. If we stop spending money like crazy ever since donald trump became president the debt went up. It is supposed to go down. It keeps going up and going up. I dont understand that. How are you going to go to school if you cant afford to pay for it . Thats why a lot of kids drop out. If you look back if you look back at the circle of people you know who are millennials and you look back 10 years, how did they think their careers and lives have progressed from where they were . Do you think they are generally happy . Guest there is trepidation. Measuresy objective incomes and unemployment and all of those Economic Indicators are improved over where they were 10 years ago. There are a lot of these difficulties in terms of trying and a delay these big life events that prior generations get used to. , gettinguying a house married, having kids and so forth. Those milestones are being delayed. There is certainly various cultural change factors you can but there are also these economic factors and one issue is that there are a lot more degree requirements and licensing requirements that come with in order to be able to get a decent paying job with good benefits. That means that you have to take , soore educational debt that is the difficulty they have been falling into. Host lets hear a couple more calls. From maine, joe. Guest caller thanks for taking my call. This guy is talking crazy mumbojumbo. I lived through the 80s with reagan. Reagan, there were companies in , norton u. S. Steel company, they hired people. I took8 years old and home a paycheck equal to my friends father. Passing a 15en an hour increase, trump is. His administration, whoever you want to blame. How are you going to live on 15 an hour . You just said about how everything is going up. It is disgusting. The 1 , the owners of the the raise 470 times in pays and the difference between a worker. Mumbojumboall your , you can say blame everybody, putting the blame on the democrats . President trump said he is going to drain the swamp, eliminate, right . Dont shake your head at me, you fool host philip klein we have not touched on it, you write about it. The role of aarp, the retirement lobby in washington. They are an organization that not only relies on membership , they have a large lobbying presence in washington, but they also get royalties from their health plans. Guest that is most of where their money comes from. This is something i think a lot of people dont understand. People think of aarp as some club where retirees can get discounts at hotels and so forth. Essentially an insurance business. They take their name and license it out to Companies LikeUnited Health care to sell Supplemental Benefits that supplement aarp likend have the a Good Housekeeping seal of approval on it. Ofy paid for that privilege licensing it. As i point out in the book, over time, thing fees have become more and more a source of their income. What aarp does is it consistently a panel of middle east experts discuss iraqs political outlook at the Atlantic Council in washington, d. C. They also weighed in on the current relations between the u. S. And iraq under the Trump Administration. Good morning and thank you all for joining us today also our live stream audience, Atlantic Council president c. E. O. Fred kemp. Thanks for joining us both here in the room and virtually for our conversation if you want to aciraq. L media, i use you know, its an important event when the ambassador is here when key members of our board are here. And its always such a pleasure to have our international