taxes for the very wealthy have been cut for the last 40 years. working people are working carter and harder, productivity is going up, but the employers are keeping all of the benefits. they are not taking that money they are taking in to create new jobs because they want there to be a lot of unemployed people and come position between unemployed people. they are not using that to pay for the kind of services we need as a society. they are not using it to pay for the kind of thing like more health care, better infrastructure, better roads, more teachers pay an adequate wage -- they are not investing money. another thing i heard bernie sanders say, he pointed out that it is not the immigrant workers that are deciding to move factories overseas, it is the >> we will go to the white house

briefing room shortly, we are expecting a briefing with sarah sanders. president trump has called on attorney general jeff sessions to end the russia probe. live coverage of the briefing when it comes underway, scheduled for 1:15 eastern on c-span. right now, more of this morning's "washington journal" with the increasing use of automation and its affect on the human workforce. seniorass is a fellow at the manhattan institute and author of the book hee once and future worker." joins us a day after president trump signed a new technical education bill into law and after president trump signed an executive order last week on workforce education. the focus on the trump administration when it comes to preparing american workers for the jobs tomorrow -- the jobs of tomorrow. there's a lot of focus on

career and technical education, which we used to call vocational idea wen, which is the cannot just be trying to do high school, college, four year degree for everybody. when you do have a lot of other options that help while you're in high school and certainly after you leave high school to give you the kinds of skills you need to get drops -- to get jobs in the modern economy. the trump administration has been doing a lot of work focusing on how we develop those alternatives. what are some of the best ways to do that and house the trump administration focusing their efforts? guest: first of all, doing more cte type work in high school. our high schools are college prep schools. we say the goal is to have througho to college, up 11th and 12th grade all of curriculum is focused on preparing you for more study. if you are not likely to and up

with a college degree that is not the best used of 11th and 12th grade. technical education into high schools, connecting people with employers sooner is one powerful route. the other one is what gets called apprenticeships. differentean a lot of things but ultimately it means creating a program that connects people who are still students with jobs and on-the-job training. you actually need to bring the employer into the education process in partnership with the school in a way that has the student in class part of the time but also on the job for part of the time as well. that is obviously a different model for running education, and for the trump administration and the federal government, it means we have to change the rules for how we test, what our standards are, what certification teachers have to have and where all of the funding goes. all of the funding goes to college. we spend about a hundred $50 billion a year trying to support

students in college. $1 billion aram is year supporting cte. host: we will be talking about the future of the american workforce and american workers for about the next 40 minutes on the washington journal. oren cass is with us for that discussion. eastern and central time zones can call in at (202) 748-8000, mountain pacific time zones, , a special line for displaced workers, i want to hear your stories, (202) 748-8002 is that number. you can start calling you now. the book is not out yet. when is it coming out? guest: it will come out the week after the midterms. host: "the once and future worker." why do we need to have this discussion now? guest: in the aftermath of the 2016 election a lot of folks who

are real policy experts did not take the lesson that we had gotten anything wrong, they thought it was a marketing problem. they said people do not understand how great the economy is, maybe they do not like the way trump sounds, but the model that we will keep doing globalization and keep expanding the safety net and somehow get people more skills, that has to be the recipe. i think what that missed is that at the end of the day that treated everybody like a consumer. if we grow the pie big and up and give everybody a slice they will be happy. i think we have learned that it is wrong. youle do not care how much give them to consume, they care about their own ability to produce and contribute to society and be included in the economy. if that is correct, then our policy cannot just be grow the economy as fast as possible and give everybody a slice.

it has to be go back and look at how our labor market works, what kind of jobs are available, how much do they pay and how we -- and how can we change those conditions in ways that make sure a majority of people who are not going to earn a college degree still have good work opportunities that allow them to support a family. host: what is your vision for the future of the american workforce? what kind of jobs will be going away in the decades to come? guest: obviously the workforce will change. the idea that manufacturing is going to go away or that robots will take all of the jobs is severely overstated. the reality is that we still consume an enormous amount of stuff that has to get made. as people get richer, what to they consume more of? they consume more of stuff that has to get made. it is not like they consume services and digital downloads. they consume houses, bigger

cars, more electronics. the future potential of the economy looks just as things intensive as the past has. are we going to use more automation and more robots to produce those things? absolutely. that is the same as it has always been. we have always been introducing new processes city can make more things with fewer people. the question of what everyone is going to do is how are we going to find more things that need to be made to ensure there is more demand for not just high end knowledge work but also for building things, for making things, for providing the kinds of services that someone with a high school education or a little bit more than a high school education can perform. that can happen. the idea of capitalism is you have people with capital and you

want them to try to earn money by finding productive ways to employ workers. if we keep that structure in money can find ways to employ people productively. host: i've have seen projections of very large percentages of this country's job that might be impacted by robots. what study do believe? guest: there is an important distinction that sometimes get lost. are we talking about jobs that can be replaced entirely or jobs that can be augmented or helped by automation? there are bad studies that will say -- the most famous study is from oxford university that says 50% of jobs will be replaced by robots. some of the jobs they say are most likely to be replaced are things like fashion models, real estate agents, school bus drivers, as if we would just

walk kids in a metal box with robot driving them around. that is not going to happen. what has historically happened and what studies find is going to continue to happen is a lot of jobs will have some of their tasks automated. if it instead of thinking of the job as a thing, automated or no, look at the job and see what are the tasks in this job and which of those tasks do you automate. when you look at it that way you find maybe half of the tasks could be automated but you will still need a person involved in that. that is the secret sauce for prosperity and rising wages. the person still has to be there to do the job but now he will do it twice as much as he could before. that is the way to think about it. host: what about the other people who are not needed to do those jobs? they're still be a job for a few people. how willing are they to retrain and how much should we invest in that retraining or how much

support should we give those folks during the retraining process? guest: a lot of them do not necessarily have to go anywhere because there are two things that happen when you make twice as much stuff as you did before. one is you make twice as much , the other is you make twice as much stuff. let's say you could get 5% more productive every year which would be astronomically high. historically we rarely get above 2%. let's say you get 5% more productive every year. a business that is successful and growing is growing their sales at least 5% per year. this means that in theory you still want all the workers you have and you need to use this automation and these productivity gains not to get rid of your workers but to meet the growing demand for your product. historically, if you look at what happened in the heyday of

the 1950's or 1960's, productivity growth was much faster than it is now. we would call automation destroying jobs used to happen a lot faster. back then, demand also grew. as the automation occurred and people can make more stuff, they need more stuff. we do not use fewer people. the question is, is that what is going to happen in the future? can we make sure we use automation to allow us to make more stuff, or is it going to be a situation where we make the same amount of stuff and do not use a lot of the people? host: the future of the american workforce is the topic of our conversation. we want you to join into that conversation as well. a special line for displaced workers, (202) 748-8002. i want to hear your stories and what happened in your industry. eastern and central time zones, (202) 748-8000.

mehlman specific -- mountain and pacific, (202) 748-8001. you are on with oren cass. caller: my question is about how we have a five-day work week. are we going to do any adjustments on the working conditions because studies have been saying the american worker is more productive but it seems to me that the gulf we have is our productivity has risen but that has noton for come back to us. for instance, i'm getting more work done working the same hours, but my wages are not rising. you see that all over. weekhould i work a 40 hour when the reality of it is we could probably get this work done in 25 hours but people are

not going to adjust that 40 hour week. that seems to be impacted in our mind

>test scores do not look different than they do in the 1970's. students going into college is much higher. graduating from college, the rate has not gone up much, especially for -- if you look what is happening, a share of

our population that goes successfully, complete high school, completes college and uses the degree they earn, a fifth of our students. double the numbers of vocational programs, would they come? with the demand be there? guest: it depends on the quality. it depends on employer engagement. learned is if you want to do concrete skill trainings well, you have to have employers involved. it is a culture shift for employers who do not think it is their job to be involved. they expect the school system to provide ready workers for them.

the last piece is it is a culture shift for families. we moved away from an idea everyone should go to college. everyone has not to go to college is for someone else's kid. is ife half to understand you are succeeding in college, then absolutely, college is the right choice for you. likely to achieve, going to college is not a good choice. you'll end up with debt. you will waste years. if you'rend up better on a track with investing society into you. host: is the government's job to

make that pitch to people? guest: government has a role in it. way of creating a viable track. are the winners and losers in our economy -- who are the winners and losers in our economy? people who complete a college degree are those with a golden ticket. those are the ones we put all of the investment into in terms of taxpayer money. the message we sent to somebody in high school right now is you may as well go as far down the college track as you can because if you do there is so much money for you. if you're somebody who thinks maybe i should get into the workforce, there is no money, there is no support. that is what sends a message and it creates a practical choice. i would like to see us say we are going to invest at least as much in somebody who is trying

to get a high school job as somebody who is going to college and if we have to choose between them i would rather invest more in the person who is headed for a slightly lower wage job or a much lower wage job but is going to get out there and the workforce sooner and invest less in the person who may need to borrow to complete their college degree but they are going to be the ones with the higher earnings of the room down the road. host: to clinton, maryland. monroe is waiting. caller: i was reading a book all the end of average and he talks about the father of industrial engineering and it had me do more reading as to when did we get to the dawn of the employee versus mastering apprentice. i read more about why we have an eight hour workday and i kept doing more and more reading. the situation we have in america is not something that happened overnight and it is not going to get undone overnight. as you were just talking about

the college students, we have plenty of studies that show having that degree is going to help, but you have more college students graduating than you have jobs. which causes me to go back to a few callers ago. why doesn't america relook at the eight hour workday? we have more than enough people graduating to where we can go part-time. you made a statement about how people may want to work for $60,000 or $80,000, i would say they need to work that job because of things costing so much. if we could look at insurance costs and what is considered full-time versus part-time benefits, if we could look at credit rating and credit approvals, somebody able to work part-time and so get approved for that house or auto loan, i believe we have more than enough people in america that can work part-time. it would lower poverty, it would lower unemployment rates and so many other things would benefit

if we could take a good look at the eight hour workday. host: thanks for the call. guest: the question with something like that is how much is the government's responsibility versus how much should we be leaving up to people's own arrangements? there are some places in public policy that codify the eight hour workday. for instance the treatment of , full-time under obama care for health insurance where the definition of how we calculate overtime. by and large, the choice of how many hours you work a week is one made by the employer and the employee. there are many eight hour day, five days a week jobs. across the economy, there are a tremendous number of jobs that are much more than that. either because you are not an

hourly employee, you you are --, you are on a salary and working all hours of the day, and part-time workers who are not working 40 hour weeks. it is not true that the eight hour workday is the only option out there now. if we wanted to, we could do something like what france does, which is mandate a less than eight hour workday. all of a sudden, it is a six-hour workday. we are talking about a lot of different groups of people. there are a lot of high earners who are working a lot of hours, but maybe have a lot of control over whether they would rather work fewer hours. a lot of the folks are most affected by the regulations around how many hours they have to work when overtime kicks in, those tend to be lower wage workers and those people are people who are already working overtime, might be working a second job have someone else in , the family working to earn more money. those are not the people wishing they could work less and are

-- work less and earn less. when we asked how much people want to work, relatively speaking, the people earning a lot of money have more choice over how much they work. people who are not earning a lot of money are not the ones wishing they could work fewer hours and earn less. they're the ones trying to work and earn as much as they can. host: that line for displaced workers, (202) 748-8002. rob is on that line. edgewater, maryland. what is your story. caller: i would like to recommend a book called taming the tiger, the struggle to control technology. and another one, the double-edged history of human culture. in lieu of facebook and the way people prefer to the political

system, how technology is a double-edged sword. in the old days, politics was one thing. this new technology has revolutionary implications. the separation between the poor and the rich. all the way back to the rebellions in england, the luddite rebellions and the weavers rebellion. host: how has technology impacted you in your job? caller: i do a lot of gardening. a lot of what i do is by hand. now, you have all of these men with power tools a company can come in and do what it takes me four hours to do in one hour. my hourly wages have gone down because i do things the old-fashioned, more environmentally safe way. i started my business as an environmentally sound way to do things. there are still people that respect that.

technology -- man is the ax maker. he is the one who creates tools. these tools have put our planet in jeopardy and put everything in jeopardy. humankind in jeopardy because of these tools. tools for everything and tools for war. i want to go back to facebook and the political situation. this technology came around and everybody it is great and now it , having implications beyond what everybody thought. guest: i think there are a lot of kinds of technology. when we talk about facebook, we are talking about communication technology. when we talk about weapons of war, we are talking about military technology. when we talk about productivity enhancing technology, which are the power tools you might use for gardening, that is one small subset. it is important to not talk about what technology does.

be more specific about what kind of technology we are talking about and what affects are we talking about. if -- the example he gave about gardeners and what happens when you introduce power tools into gardening is a good one. it is the same sort of thing we have seen over time and all -- time in all sorts of industries. you could still build a house by hand. you can still garden by hand and -- hand. in theory, you can do almost anything by hand. but if everybody does everything by hand, then we can produce a lot less stuff. we will all be less productive, we can all earn a lot less and all have a lot less at the end of the day. it is important to have regulations in place to look at technologies -- are your tools damaging the environment? but where you can use a tool that allows you to do more, and a lot of times better that is

, something you want to have and that is going to benefit workers in the long run. host: staying on the automation and technology discussion -- nobody can agree on getting people money to live on while robots replace them. i wonder your thoughts? guest: robots are not replacing people. it is clear in the data from any angle you look at that the problem in recent years has not been robots replacing people. it has been we are not bringing robots in fast enough to make people more productive and boost their wages. in the future, will robots replace people? i cannot prove it will not. if it ever happens, i think we will have to have that conversation. i think using it as a pretext, using the future fear of robots as a pretext for demanding a change in policy now is a little bit backward. what we should be talking about now is how to make the jobs that are available and that robots

could help people do more productively, how to connect people to those jobs so they can earn living wages. host: to don in north carolina. good morning. ahead.h carolina, go caller: good morning, gentlemen. i've a question relative to the policies at c-span. i have watched c-span for years and it is very evenhanded. i am concerned in the last few years that what is the policy you people have and where can i find it relative to your selection, evenhandedly, there are a lot more organizations, professors, who are now supported by libertarian funds than there are by progressive funds or people in the middle. if there is 1000 organizations for you to choose people to come

to your program and talk to us, how you work it out? host: that is one of the toughest things we do, try to find a wide range of opinions to bring to you. every day, we have those discussions of who we should be bringing in. there are a lot of groups in washington, d.c., that talk to policymakers and lawmakers that influence their opinions. that is why we have the d.c. focus. if they're the ones making the laws, we want you to hear from those people as well. it is certainly one of the toughest parts of this job to try to make sure we bring in opinions from all sides. caller: do you have your criteria written anywhere on your website? host: we have plenty of information about this program and how we go about this program. it is probably better than chatting with me about it. we have a whole q&a there for you to look at about the "washington journal" at

c-span.org. now to mr. cass. i have a question to you. you seem to not agree with the people from oxford, which is fine. i would like to know why you seem to be on somewhat of a narrow tunnel vision and it is a short tunnel. you are saying i am dealing with these problems, and you're doing a good job talking to people, i have to say that. in the long range in terms of , people, if automation continues, and i do not agree with you that automation takes care -- one person can take it of two jobs because of automation. look at amazon and their supply chain. it does not work that way.

in the long run, since you have people and you can produce more with one person and automation than with 100 people someday, but you need the 100 people to buy the products. where are we going? does your organization look at that long-range or do you keep it what you might call politically -- a political horizon of one or two election cycles? host: thank you for the question. guest: i think the wrong range is incredible -- i think the long range is incredibly important and you are asking the right question. the best way to understand the long run is to look at the evidence we have from what is happening now and to look at the evidence we have from what is happening in the past. you can go back 100 years or 200 years and imagine having the same discussions and people did have the same discussions.

what are we going to do when we do not need everybody to farm anymore? what are we going to do when we do not need everyone to work in the factories anymore? as automation and other technologies and more productive processes allowed us to produce all of the food we needed with fewer people and produce all of the material goods we needed with fewer people, what the economy has always done is generated new opportunities for people to work and produce and serve each other in productive ways. the question is, is there any reason we should expect the future to be different? i think the burden has to be on someone who will say there is something different about this wave of technology. let's remember robots are cool, artificial intelligence is cool, but so is the computer, so is electricity so is basic , machinery. we have gone through extraordinary revolutions of technology over time and the result has always been more

prosperity, more jobs higher , wages across society. i think our baseline assumption has to be that that can continue if we have a policy framework in place that values work and says our priority will be an economy not where we mail checks to everybody, but one where we actually help connect people to work and make sure people have those opportunities and that people building the businesses want to use workers and that relationship is at the foundation of what makes our society work in a lot of ways. host: less than 10 minutes left with oren cass who is with the manhattan institute and the -- sanders: good afternoon. vice president mike pence at the request of president trump will participate in an honorable carry ceremony at joint base pearl harbor. thad