speakers include senator michael bennet and former vice president joe biden and senator cory booker, mayor pete buttigieg, ,nd representative john delaney senator kamala harris, representative beto o'rourke, senator bernie sanders, senator elizabeth warren and andrew yang. then at 8:00 p.m. on c-span two, the president holds a campaign rally with supporters in mississippi. watch the campaign 20 tony -- 2020 coverage live today on c-span and at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. watch anytime on c-span.org and listen on the go with a free c-span radio app. >> we are joined next by philip klein, discussing his new book on millenials and what may be

ahead both economically and more for that generation. let's start with the news of the voteith the election, the yesterday in the u.s. house to proceed with the impeachment investigation, and you read the interview that your reporters had with the president late yesterday what do think republican strategy, their strategy from here will be? >> 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 trop from day one, and they are going to use whatever they can to get at him. first it was sort of the russia

collusion thing, and when that failed, they moved on to ukraine. it is pretty obvious that they wanted to do that. some of our reporters visited with president trump in the white house and he was sort of very defiant, and even talked about how he might want to have a fireside chat where he reads the transcript, and so with the vote yesterday, it is clear that the battle lines have been drawn. there is no backing off, and democrats are sort of dug into that position. i think particularly some of the swing states and districts, republicans feel that they might be able to impress and push back against this idea that this is sort of a partisan effort to oust trump. host: and your reporters from that interview, and we mentioned this, the president says the impeachment will backfire on the democrats and we will get a first take of that tonight when the president campaigns in tupelo, mississippi. is there a downside, though, 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, if you will? guest: obviously as a journalist i am always for more transparency. if president trump feels like he has done nothing wrong, i feel like more testimony on that would be helpful, and more documents, and illuminating into what this is. yesterday we had testimony from tim morrison, who worked at the national security council, and it was sort of an interesting testimony because it would spawn sort of both sides kind of felt like it proved their point. because basically previously we 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 talked about how the trump 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 taylor's testimony. on the key points, he did say that ambassador gordon sondland

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. and so i think that clearly hurts trump's case because now you have multiple people saying that this was conveyed to the ukrainians, this 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 doesn't 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 -- politically, it is a tough move 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. impeachable, i think that a lot of republicans in this state and 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 don't think it bears removing somebody who has been elected from office. host: philip klein is our guest, the executive editor of "the washington examiner," here to talk about politics, but mainly here to talk about his new book, "fear the future: how it is stacked against millennials and why socialism would make it worse. " why did you write the book? guest: this is something that i wanted to write for a long time. i think millenials as a generation -- and we are talking about basically people born in the early 1980's to the mid to late 1990's, 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

or profligate or eating avocado toast and so forth, and a lot of their economics concerns do not -- they have been sneered at. 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, since the early 1970's, median income has gone up for the 25 to 34-year-old age group about 4.5%. but the median price of a home has gone up nine times the range that same period. rent has, over the past same decades, has nearly doubled. health care has gone up 10 times. college has gone up 200% to 300%. so during the baby boomers, first of all there were more jobs available for people who did not have college degrees. secondarily, if 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, given the massive runaway costs. so we do see a number of data points in the book that millenials are purchasing houses later than early generations. there are studies linking them to high student debt among other factors. host: millenials were obviously very affected by the 2008 2008 financial crisis. many of them coming in, graduating at college at about that age. were there similar headwinds facing baby boomers at about the same age? guest: it is sort of different. it depends, if the baby boomers we are talking about those born between 1946 and 1964, certainly the 1960's was a time of a large economic expansion and very low

unemployment. so the baby boomers took advantage of a long period of sustained postwar expansion. obviously if somebody graduated in the late 1970's 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. host: our guest is philip klein, talking about his new book, "fear the future." we welcome your calls. democrats, 202-748-8000. republicans, 202-748-8001. for independents and others, 202-748-8002. one of the charts in your book, looking at social security and

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? guest: 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 people 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 less retirees, but now the baby boomers are a massive retirement generation. the life expectancy is longer, so they are living longer. and there are relatively fewer 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: let me take a look at some of the current statistics on student debt -- excuse me, consumer debt. this is consumer debt. mortgages at $9.5 trillion. student loans, $1.6 trillion. credit 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 was done about americans views of socialism. 36%, according to the poll, have

a favorable view of socialism. 49% of millenials have a favorable view of socialism. 50% of millenials are somewhat likely to vote for it. 20% extremely likely to vote for a socialist candidate. what do you find among the 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, 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 failed 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. which they view as an example of the failures and excesses of capitalism. on top of that, you have all of 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 health-care proposal, $34 trillion price tag, going

down that path make the first of challenges, which is the unprecedented debt, much worse. there is one chart, one of the first charts which i think -- it it looks at debt going back to 1790. it is from the congressional budget office and they track it as a percentage of the economy. you can compare things fairly. host: we will find that book. our guest is philip klein. welcome your calls and comments, how the deck is stacked against socialism and weiss would make it worse. is this your first book? caller: no. i have written a few of them. host: al on the independent line. caller: good morning. 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. what a bitter pill. second comment is, i am 71. 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 debt-free 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 four-year

colleges in the state university system. now, the reason why they like socialism is because, one, they have never lived under socialism. i have to say this, social 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. one point which is true is that we are in a comparatively strong economy, in relative peace, and

you would expect that the debt would be shrinking, and get it is still going up. why is that? you mentioned taxes. there is no 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 of the story because even after 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. if we were able to keep spending in line with the historical average, there would be plenty of tax revenues coming into be able to stabilize the long-term debt we are experiencing. however, the spending is going out of control.

driven by retirement programs and health care costs. so that is why you see this big debt growing. host: a reminder, we have lines for, if you are a millennial, 202-748-8003. 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. they can google something, and when i was their age, that did not happen. we walked around on a cloud. i want you to talk around your republican god, reagan, who destroyed this nation. it took years for you republicans to do nothing 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. talk about our woeful police 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. >> the defense budget as a share of our economy is actually must .ess than it was in the 1980's during the cold war it was about twice as large as it is now. and has been shrinking to a pretty historically low world were 2 -- post-world war ii rate. however, spinning on social security has gone up considerably. and those two programs now account for 40% of the federal budget.

>> the jobs numbers are out, speaking of the u.s. economy. adding 128,000 jobs in october. the gm strike displaced workers jobless rate taking up to 3.6%. active calls to north carolina. good morning to william. good morning. to the collar in new york i would like to say as far as our budget with the military our last president depleted our military with everything going on in the world. people about all these trying to infiltrate our country is,come in here and as it is, be one of these white trash people from north carolina, want to say, i set i believe in our president. if people want to go down the road to have gas up at four dollars or six dollars a gallon and taxes being raised and homes being took. people need to look at the fact that the tax breaks were bringing companies back, whether

or not you agree with that or not. if we do not give them the tax breaks they're not coming back to america. we are able to if we could work together with the democrats, helping out, i think we could do infrastructure and we could also bring companies back, employ more people, and this far as the education that we keep spending budgeted money and that keeps going down as far as the new statistics that just came in on our millenials, that, you know, all those people are faltering in math, english we are spending money in the wrong places and not getting anything. yet we have a teacher striking and begging for money. big pensions. by the time they leave their tenure at their schools, we have as much money going out in pensions as what they were making in salary. so i mean, you know, at some point we need to all look at every time you go to the gas station, you need to be thinking, donald trump, that two dollars and $.26 per gallon --

$2.26 per gallon on fuel. those who want to complain about fracking, we have created a bunch of jobs paid we still have a lot of initiative in the country that if we just unleash it and allow people to get their thiset in a way that, hey, is one country, one people, come together, and try to build on what we have, the matter how we feel about one another. and i voted for this is one trump. i used to be a lifelong democrat. but i have got to put my faith in him and i know we do not speak a lot to things like we normally would hear from an obama type person, that half of us cannot understand what he was saying to start with. he is trying to speak directly to us. and if we can all, like i said, work together. pelosi's and schumer's and everyone get together, i think we could take this country and far out. but again, i appreciate every thing and hopefully we will keep good numbers coming in and everybody can work together. host: william, thank you.

philip: i think it is important to realize, you mention infrastructure and some other national priorities. i think it is important to realize that we cannot have all of the above per you cannot have low taxes and more military spending and more infrastructure spending and not do anything about our entitlement programs. somethingimes this is that president obama would talk about a lot. why can't we do big things anymore he used to talk about infrastructure a lot. that gets an example invoked is the interstate highway system. when the interstate highway system was built in the 1950's, medicare did not exist. in social security was still its relative youth as a program. there were plenty of people it, relative to the number of retirees. it was easier to invest in an ambitious infra structure program.

now, 40% of the budget is eaten up by social security and medicare before penny goes out to pay for any other national priority. and as long as that is continues to be the case, and it is all worse in the coming decades, it is going to be more and more difficult to address needs such as infrastructure. host: are caller william come a lot of optimism politically. what did you hear from millenials, what is your sense of their optimism for their futures and the country's local future and otherwise? philip: belen neils have a very negative and skeptical -- millenials have a very negative and's capital view of their future. book, poll, part of this book, a poll i cite a poll showing that the younger generation is a lot more fearful than hopeful about the future. i think there is this overriding that our best days

were behind us. and i think that to some extent that could 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, but i do think that there are significant points of data to show that we are in sort of unprecedented territory. piece, new york times headline was " trump's deficits are in existential threat to conservatism." to the point you made earlier 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.

what does that mean for the in practical termswhat does that mean for the millennial , generation? philip: 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. during world war ii you had a 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 reach 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.

so that, to me is a huge worry. , when economists fear is known as a fiscal crisis. 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. if they demand higher interest becauseif they demand higher interest rates your borrowing costs go up and it gets harder to make a dent in the debt and it gets harder to reassure investors. you start to make ugly choices like immediate, massive tax increases, massive severe spending cuts. you have to worry about inflation and it is an ugly place. ugly place. we don't 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) 748-8003. rider from maryland, and a millennial thank you for calling in. caller: thanks for taking my call. 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 will admit that the democratic field is catering to twitter activists, but no person i know has allegiance to socialism, it is about the outcomes. people are mad at the bogeyman 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 don't become a socialist nation but i don't think we will. conservatism has been about "

conservatism has been about " owning the libs." before i was even alive. ragan and gingrich were the ones who destroyed this country and we are just responding to that. i realize i am making an i'd logical case, this is more of a from the field report. guest: thank you. certainly there are people saying that millennials are lazy, that is not the point i make in my book. in my book i talk about how they get a raw deal, how in many ways they have been much more practical than prior generations. things like not playing the lottery as much as prior generations. they are more averse to credit card debt than other generations. i think they are trying to be more responsible than they are given credit for. they are facing a lot of these tremendous costs. my fear is that they are tempted

by the seemingly easy solutions. by the seemingly easy solutions. the health care proposal that elizabeth warren and bernie sanders are endorsing, who collectively have a large contingent of support within the democratic primary field, would be disastrous. $34 trillion is basically more than the combined income tax and 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. in indianapolis. caller: thank you. i'm a first-time collar. i think i'm one of the few millennials that listens to c-span still. our generation is looking at not wanting socialism altogether, we just feel like we are having not 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. thanks. host: thanks, elliott. 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 the largest generation -- largest adult age population in the united states. they are going 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: let's hear from our democrats line. miles from new jersey. caller: first of all we need to stop denigrating each other. you talk about this and that. stop criticizing the other side. when i was growing up we had one parent in the house who went to work and could make enough money to support the whole family. now you have to get two or three jobs just to pay the rent area nobody is home to watch the kids. 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 won't charge them that.

when i was growing up i had a job and i worked 40 hours a week, i got benefits from that. now they only give you 36 hours a week and then you have to get another job and another job after that. just to pay all the rent is going up, clothing is going up, , food goes up. they 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? let's 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. that's what i thought. it keeps going up and going up. but i don't understand that. how are you going to go to school if you can't afford to pay for it? that's why a lot of kids drop out. because i cannot afford it.

host: 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. clearly by objective measures, incomes and unemployment and all of those economic indicators are improved over where they were 10 years ago. but there are a lot of these difficulties in terms of trying to build roots and delay these big life events that prior generations get used to. such as buying a house, getting married, having kids and so

forth. those milestones are being delayed. there is certainly various cultural change factors you can point to 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 on more educational debt, so that is the difficulty they have been falling into. host: let's hear a couple more calls. from maine, joe. caller: thanks for taking my call. this guy is talking crazy mumbo-jumbo.

i lived through the 80's with reagan. reagan, there were companies in my city, u.s. steel, norton company, they hired people. i was 18 years old and i took home a paycheck equal to my friend's father's. you are not even passing a $15 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 companies, 470 times the raise in pay's and the difference between a worker. you can say all your mumbo-jumbo, you can say blame everybody, putting the blame on the democrats? president trump said he is going

to drain the swamp, eliminate, right? don't 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. with the chart here, a growing empire and the royalties. they are an organization that not only relies on membership fees, 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 don't understand. people think of aarp as some club where retirees can get discounts at hotels and so forth. what it is is essentially an insurance business. they take their name and license it out to companies like united

health care to sell supplemental benefits that supplement medicare and have the aarp like a good housekeeping seal of approval on it. they pay for that privilege of licensing it. as i point out in the book, over time, licensing fees have become more and more a source of their income. what aarp does is it consistently uses that income to fight off changes that would reduce spending on these programs and make changes in a way that it will hurt their bottom line. bottom line. host: the book is " fear your future" by philip klein. " how the deck is stacked against millennials and how socialism would make it worse." thanks for being her