Bill Foster Responds To Constituent’s Concerns Of GOP Raising The Debt Ceiling

20 hours ago

During a town hall on Tuesday, Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) spoke about the debt ceiling.

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Transcript

00:00Is there any way, at this point, to prevent the Republicans from unilaterally raising or eliminating the debt ceiling?

00:08Legally, no, because the debt ceiling is an act of Congress, and if they have a majority vote to do that, they can't.

00:18So that is the leverage we have.

00:21I think, however, there are probably 20 Republicans who have campaigned on the fact that they never ever voted to raise the debt ceiling.

00:31And this is why, in this negotiation, there are two real leverage points in negotiations we have coming up.

00:39One of them is the debt ceiling, where the Republicans have this group of members who are just the super Freedom Caucus,

00:46zero government types, who will never ever vote, they say, to raise the debt ceiling,

00:51and presumably they would never ever vote to eliminate it entirely.

00:55So that is one break on the whole behavior.

00:59On the other hand, we're one of the only two countries in the world that have the debt ceiling.

01:04The other one, I think maybe Finland or something like this, it's not a major country.

01:10And it's not a good thing for policy.

01:12The way most countries do their budgeting is you control your spending when you make your budget, and then you follow your budget.

01:19It's sort of like trying to control credit card spending by refusing to pay your credit card bill.

01:25It doesn't make sense, and it doesn't work well in countries where we've tried it.

01:30And it hasn't been effective at limiting our debt.

01:33So if I could snap my fingers in a non-Trump world to make it disappear, I would make it disappear.

01:41Because frankly, just from a Democratic point of view, it's been more of a break on Democrats than on Republicans over time.

01:48And it provides a sort of specious argument, set of arguments and talking points about,

01:54oh no, our debt's out of control, without ever talking about the tax side of the issue.

01:59And that's a, you know, one of the things that, you know, the tax, I think we have, do we have,

02:04I thought you said there was going to be a question on the debt, is that one?

02:08I don't know, maybe I'm mistaken.

02:10But yeah, I get it all the time, so I won't make up, this is the question for me.

02:14You know, you see this all the time.

02:16Oh no, you know, we have a $36 trillion debt, you know, we're about to go bankrupt.

02:21But the thing is that when people talk about the $36 trillion federal debt,

02:27they say, well what is the wealth of America to compare that against?

02:30And does anyone know the net worth of the United States?

02:33It's $160 trillion.

02:37Alright, so if you have $160 trillion and a debt of $36 trillion,

02:43you are not bankrupt or anywhere close to it.

02:46And the truth of the matter is that, you know, one third of that money,

02:50one third of that $160 trillion is held by the top 1%, okay?

02:56And the bottom 50% is zero net worth, okay?

03:01And this is often, when you strip down what we're arguing about in Congress,

03:09it's whether we're going to fix that problem or not.

03:12When we talk about whether we're adjusting Obamacare subsidies or something like that,

03:16part of it is, are we going to try to do something about the 50% of the United States that has no net worth?

03:22You know, do they deserve some decent form of healthcare too or not?

03:27And frankly, whether we make the top 1% and above their fair share.

03:43Young people, and one of the things we hear all the time is the student debt problem.

03:49And I think I will now break your heart and tell you that when I went to college,

03:53I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and it cost me $2,500 a year, including dorms.

04:00Now, I've got to say, they weren't great dorms.

04:03They were sort of, you know, they went like, it was basically army cots and cinder block dorms.

04:08But it got a hell of a good education.

04:10And we paid for that at the time by top marginal tax rates on the very rich, above 90%.

04:17And that was the time when the US's economy became the envy of the world.

04:22That's when we took over economic leadership.

04:24And we did that, so that's sort of a proof that asking the wealthy to pay their fair share makes the economy work better.

Bill Foster Responds To Constituent’s Concerns Of GOP Raising The Debt Ceiling

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