up monday, deb fischer debates heard democratic rival. the debate happened at the nebraska's tape fair, monday morning at 10:00 eastern on c-span. fair, monday morning at 10:00 eastern on c-span. r. if you have questions about the federal budgeting process, now would be a good time to call in in the segment of the washington journal. an overview of how the budgeting process is supposed to work over the course of a fiscal year. way it is supposed to work and the way that congress set up to work is that every year in february the president is supposed to put out his imprint of how things are supposed to work.

and april the congress is supposed to have their budget resolutions and by the early summer congress and the house in the senate are supposed to be working on their appropriations bills which is all supposed to be wrapped up by september 30 for october 1. the way to supposed to work ideally. host: we are in late summer now. are we working that way this year? guest: congress is working that way a little better than it usually does. towardste is moving some spending bills being done. congress usually doesn't get the work done. there has only been four fiscal years where they have actually got it all done in time for the end of the fiscal year. host: in how long? guest: over 20 years. when you hear people talk about , what really is regular order when you have only done it regularly four times.

host: was the biggest hold up to the process? not designedss was to be things that move quickly. the founders did not give us a system that was designed to move things in an expeditious way. you have a lot of contentious points along the way. people elected from all over the country and have different constituencies, a republican from alabama is not the same as a republican from california. how do you expect them to come together and say this is all of our priorities as one. that's a very difficult thing. people talk about the kitchen .able analogy americans need to sit down at their kitchen tables and work out a budget so congress should do that as well. we know from divorce rates in this country and just from our natural trying to do a budget at home, it's difficult to sit down with two people and do a budget at home. expect congress to get it done we are expecting a lot.

where are we for folks who have been watching the floor? how many spending bills have been approved? which one still need to be approved? this month the senate is laborg done defense and health and education. right now. they've gotten ahead of the house i believe at this point. labor rates still need to be done in the house. and it's all going to come down to in september during an omnibus bill done. it is hard to guess where they are going to get it done in time for theof her 30th or elections. we will definitely see. host: what is an omnibus? >> that is when they package bills together as one bill. there are normally 12 appropriations bills. when congress has trouble

getting things passed individually they will package them together. when you have more than one they will usually call it an omnibus bill. sometimes it is all of them put together. is 4, 2. it host: what is usually the easiest of those 12 to pass and what is the hardest? guest: historically they seem to be ok with doing things like it usedor the veterans to be also that homeland security was pretty easy and now that has gotten more contentious. defense was always pretty easy and now that has gotten more contentious because it is a huge spending bill. it does vary depending on the political nature of things. what is actually easiest to get done is all relative. aaronwe are talking with jones of the wilson center about the federal budgeting process. getting your comments and questions. as we do that. republicans (202) 748-8001, democrats (202) 748-8000,

independents (202) 748-8002 >. remind us what the wilson center is. guest: it was set up to be the memorial to woodrow wilson. he was our only resident to hold a phd. when congress was looking to create a memorial for him rather than creating a statue or a stone obelisk somewhere they wanted to create a living memorial. we are primarily focused on foreign affairs and looking at the way the world views washington. cleverhave experts that -- cover the globe to some of the best expertise on russia and latin america and europe and asia that you can find. host: how long did you work on budgeting issues in congress? >> i used to work for hal rogers for eight years. always an interesting thing to run through each year of the appropriations process.

host: how much is the person at the head of those committees responsible for the passage of one of these spending packages or are they just at the mercy of the rest of the members of congress? can a strong personality push through a budget package and spending bill? yes.: to a certain degree you do see a lot of strong personalities on the hill of course. when you work for the chairman of the appropriations committee you see how much people do like to work together on the appropriations committee. it really is a largely bipartisan endeavor. the personalities that run that committee do take a lot of pride in being able to work across the aisle. yeare clock runs out every a lot of times you will see the leadership of the house or the senate take over the appropriations process. which is in very good for the committee structure as a whole. if you watch and a

lot of viewers will watch the hearings on c-span you may have noticed that this year especially even in the senate the interior bill was passed unanimously in the senate at the committee level and there's a lot of bipartisanship work that goes on. host: why don't the committees just get their work done earlier if they don't want leadership to step in at the end? guest: there's always the problem of getting time on the floor. senate has to do with a supreme court nomination or something like that. just's other things that happened to come along and take up time on the floor. all of the committees can work at once. but the floor can only handle one thing at a time. ift really slows things down something is taking up the oxygen. host: what is your prediction for the next six weeks? guest: i hate to be asked to do protections because you can always be wrong. i think congress wants to get things done so that they can get back home and get to their

campaigns. they will come back in september ready to work on appropriations. if they can't get something done on single bills i think we will throughmnibus or to get the election. host: aaron jones of the wilson center taking your calls about the budgeting process. we can certainly talk about that. with us for about the next 15 minutes this morning. one question i did want to ask center'slson suggestions for fixing this process. it has only happened four times in 20 years. how do you up the percentage? guest: one of the things the wilson center is really good at is providing an education to understanding how these issues work together. one of the things we had at the wilson center that we went in with the brookings institution

and the peterson foundation is a game. we call it serious games. we have a game called fiscal ship. it is a budget game where you go in and set priorities. you try to bring the federal budget timeline. you're going to see the debt to gdp ratio. you're going to try to bring that down while meeting your policy goals. there's a lot of things out there where they say why don't we just police levers and we will be all right with the federal budget. this game really shows you there are choices you have to make and if you are a politician who has campaigned on certain issues and you have set i wanted be a ieward of the environment or want to fix entitlements. these are actually trade-offs that you have to have. host: can you win the game?

guest: you can. it shows the trade-offs. this is something that can happen in a vacuum. there are things that you are going to have to push and pull with. host: pat is in florida. on the line for republicans. appreciate the i span. i watch you constantly. it's a problem. go ahead. >> i would like to explain how i have worked in numerous countries. china, japan, indonesia, korea. is the issue that i have mainly when you deal with these other countries you have to have a lot of trust in my dealings in china was that you couldn't trust them very much at all. in dealing with them to do work. i have a question whether we are

able to trust these people that we are making these deals with. and we are spending a lot of money to do that. we are sending a lot of people over there. and discussing these meetings. in my experience they would sit across the table from you and smile and say we're going to give you this and they never did. host: aaron jones. foreign spending certainly of the part of the federal process. and spending guest: it is, but not as big as others. there is a conception that we are spending a lot of money on foreign aid and foreign things but really in the total budgeted amounts to less than 1%. host: what would be your suggestion on the trust issue? guest: it's a bit outside of the budget stuff. i'm not a china expert or a trade expert. host: what about getting members

to trust each other in this process? is something that people talk about a lot of times. congress is broken. i think when you see the bipartisanship that is on the appropriations committee which i don't think a lot of people really take notice of. really is a lot of working across the aisle and a lot of trust. i think members themselves will take notice of what the appropriations committee is working on and how much bipartisanship and i think that might spread out. host: south carolina is next. ben. republicans are good morning. caller: good morning. i'm enjoying his comments and putting down his thing about if a couple can't balance a budget over the kitchen table and how can we expect 300 or 400 guys in congress to get together. that's really a good one. i just -- i don't know why. we do need to do something to force them to balance the budget. like maybe if they don't balance

it by a certain date than their pay gets cut 10%. and that they don't balance by another date, 10 more percent. something that would force them. what do you think? guest: it is something that has come up many times. they had the no budget no pay act a few years ago to try to force congress to do exactly what you are talking about. i think when you talk about a balanced budget sometimes people don't really realize all the things that go into a budget. we always like to talk about weapons of being the discretionary things which are transportation, funding for roads, education funding things like that. we have a huge side of the budget which are the entitlements. that's almost $3 trillion a year. to getvery difficult people to talk about that side of the budget when that's really where most of the spending is.

last time wes the had a balanced budget? guest: in the 90's. host: why were we able to do it back then? tesco it took a couple major shutdowns. congress was able to work with the president and there was a motivation politically for it. there were some pretty painful shutdowns that i remember to this day from the mid-90's. .ost: greg is an independent good morning. caller: good morning. thank you c-span. thank you wilson center. you do great work there. i recently read that earmarks actually never really added to the budget but rather were contained in the budget. so i think the bumper sticker earmark -- i'm curious about your take on that. and also are they coming back? you listen to appropriators in their markups

you can see that they do like earmarks. it did help people to move things along. i don't know if they are coming back. congress when they were last doing earmarks i guess in 2009, 2010. they were doing them in a very transparent way and they still got rid of them. logically people thought, i don't want to do earmarks. does seem like there's a lot of appetite in congress in members are the congress are the ones that know their districts the best. in leaving this spending that would go directly to people in their district to the executive branch is something that they're not that comfortable with giving to the executive branch. host: do you buy the argument that it creates more -- more bipartisanship?

does to a certain degree give some skin in the game and let everybody know that there is something in this for you. i doubt not that it necessarily makes people vote for a bill that they naturally wouldn't vote for. if you are in the minority and you are a senior member of the appropriations committee and ugandan earmark in the appropriations bill are you then going to vote yes on the majority's appropriations bill? it's not likely that that's going to happen. behind the scenes you may not because in a lot of trouble to stop it. in st. joseph, minnesota. republican. good morning. caller: i believe the president when he did all the deregulating. he pulled out all of these different things that were basically strangling everybody and costing a lot of money along the process. the other thing is on the terrace. a good way to explain the tariffs to a lot of people that don't understand them is it's

like when you discipline a child you have someone in forcing him being the disciplinarian. if you have too many people doing that you don't get the same result good i think people need to see that we need to wait seettle bit of time here to the products of how this all will work out good and i think he's absolutely on the right path. i just wish so vehemently that these people would quit obstructing in congress. would get out of the way and let our progress continue on. because there are many beautiful things happening with as president. tariffs think with there certainly is a way that people look at terrorists and think we need to punish things. to do this for national security. it's really not a way to get revenue. we only get about $21 billion in a $4 trillion budget from tariffs.

is not that much revenue coming from tariffs. host: where does the money go that we taken from tariffs? guest: it comes in as revenue. congress can decide whether it can go to deficit reduction or appropriated fund. host: wilmington, delaware. democrat. good morning. i think that both parties don't really care as much about deficit reduction as we think and the reason for that is because i feel like if we truly took steps to reduce the deficit not of these people would be reelected because the steps we would have to take would be so widely unpopular. we have to significantly increase taxes. we would have to dramatically reduce military spending. we would have to raise the age probably on social security and medicare and yet the politicians say we need to reduce the deficit so we will reduce things like the national endowment for

the arts. which are less than .1% of the budget. deficit thing going to actually get solved? guest: great question. it comes through education. need to ben public educated on where the money is actually going and understand the process of how congress appropriates. well made but in a $4 trillion budget if you're going to try to cut $10 million it's not a drop in the bucket. that's not even a missed over the bucket. it got to really make some hard choices. peoplely helps to show the trade-off. it may seem unpalatable. but i do think that what happened to greece and some folks in europe a few years ago is unpalatable, too. us to bet does behoove good stewards of the money we

have. host: daniel is in texas on the republican line. go ahead. caller: i have been hearing this for 30 years. forced to do it. this all boils down to trade. you can't run massive trade deficit. we built china. to our peril. now we are going to have to build our military up to undo what we have built. it don't make any sense. we spend all this money on so-called free trade and it's not free. you destroyed the middle class in america. your tax base. tax enough rich people because you took everything they had. host: aaron jones on the trade issue. guest: i don't think there is needy much -- i think we

to be careful when we are about trade and how much money we're spending on it. that definitely talks about economic growth and how much people have jobs and things like that. the money that congress appropriates should be the revenue that is generated from taxes and tariffs and things like that. we are trillion dollar deficits more outlaysve than we have in coming. and if you look at the budget and was laid out about a third of that is in discretionary and 2/3 is in mandatory spending. we are spending a lot more on entitlement programs and we do spend a lot of on defense. about half of our discretionary is in defense. certainly we want to look at trade and make sure we are generating revenue from economic growth. we also have to look at the way we are spending as well. host: is any deficit bad? guest: that's for an economist.

that is something economists have argued about for years. i'm more on the process. i don't want to pretend to be an economist. in kentucky.dent good morning. caller: good morning. to answer your question i will say deficits are probably generally bad but i'm not an economist nor pretending to be one. mr. jones, are you from the fifth district? guest: unfortunately not. kentucky and i went to school at morgan state university. caller: ok. that's where i'm calling from. is there a pension process that is being not addressed at all in that very soon a majority of states will reach a point where they don't have the money to continue paying pensions and continue current payroll?

and justn the horizon not being talked about? can you address that to some extent? guest: states are having the same problems. states also have obligations. and they have health care obligations, pension obligations in addition to doing their own work on roads and education. states are really feeling the squeeze as well. you talk about tensions there are several states that have had some pension issues. kentucky is bond that recently had some headlines on that. the state.on there are some states that have worked well on that and others that have had some issues. obligations are something states are particularly worried about and there is at the federal level the pension benefit guaranty that has a backstop to some of that.

i do think at the state level there's a lot of concern about pensions. host: randy is in iowa. democrat. good morning. caller: good morning. i have several short points. my senator, the one that's pushing for the supreme court he went to the senate there was nearly zero debt. with the laste two republican presidents. toh, it took him 18 months froms in deficit spending a that was in the green. and it took donald trump 11 months to turn around the austerity that the republicans had on president obama. which he had the debt down i believe to 600 billion a year. and was paying things responsibly to the tax cuts in 11 months for donald trump. and he grew the debt to a

trillion dollars a year. so the point is that conservatives aren't conservatives. and republican congress are the ones who grow the dead. and historically they never hold themselves response all. host: we will let aaron jones take the point. guest: i think there are some good points made there. i don't think it is just republicans are just democrats are guilty of this. at trillion dollar deficits and think about what that actually means, that means you could get rid of all discretionary spending and just pay for entitlements and mandatory spelling and you would still be in deficit. host: the current debt right now , 21,000,000,000,408 billion 536 million and counting. according to the u.s. debt clock there. one question i asked you earlier

about your projection for what happens later this year with the budgeting and the spending process. does that change if there is a government shutdown? talk of aard potential shutdown if the president doesn't get his border wall funding. guest: it does factor in. is always some gamesmanship when you start talking about a shutdown. especially in the summer. people want to get to the end game. the president talked about wanting to have, he would be ok with a shutdown if he didn't get his border wall. the response from congress on that was pretty surprised. they continue to work. having the senate work in august on appropriations is actually pretty remarkable. host: aaron

a reporter morning, looks at the impact of the education department's plan to for-profitn rules on universities. also candidates running in the 2018 midterm elections. contributor discusses a piece about the failure of congress and what is argued as their weakness. journal," live at 7:00 on saturday morning. join the discussion. >> the democratic national committee holds its meeting in chicago this weekend. c-span's