spanish] whatever committees i get, i will serve on. i'm an electrical engineer. i'm an m.i.t. grad and i definitely have interest in transportation and infrastructure issues, science issues, environmental and climate change just because of my science background. [indiscernible] >> are there any other caucuses you will join? >> so far that's it. i haven't made any >> live now in ma thousands,

brazil with, president joe biden on his way to the gage 20 summit in rio de janiero. this is the first ever visit by a u.s. president to the amazon region. it should be getting underway shortly. live coverage here on c-span. >> welcome back. we're joined by the founder and chief economist at american compass. welcome to washington journal.

host: where would you say that your group sits in terms of ideology in politics as well as economics? guest: we're on the right of center. we're clearly island as a very conservative group but at the same time we spend most of our

time on arguments within the right of center. working on a lot of fights going on amongst conservatives about how to move forward. obviously the republican party today is not the same one of john mccain and paul ryan. we work a lot with now vice president j.d. vance. future secretary of state marco rubio. >> frump kind of gets a second charges at doing a first term.

typically when a new president is coming in, they've just spent all this time campaigning, making promises to supporters. and all of a sudden now all those donors, they're trying to get your support. i think it's a place where we typically see a lot of administrations really struggle. the voters look around and say wait a minute, this isn't what we were expecting at all and typically in the next mid-term election you see the president's party get wiped out. part of the piece that i-wrote and what is so important right now is to see can mr. trump remember why he was actually elected, what he's going to have to do to be a successful president or does all the

attention focus on what people are talking about at mar-a-lago? host: when it comes to trump's first administration, how close do you think he got to some hof these pro-worker economic policies that a lot of you support? guest: his first term was a really interesting situation. i like the metaphor of the dog that caught the car. obviously people were very surprised lad he won and it was a situation where there hadn't been a lot of work done to develop the policy ideas, to develop the bench of talents that you could bring into an administration that was going to do that kind of work. in his first term, he gets to the white house, who's in congress? mall ryan is the speaker of the house so what are the big legislative priorities? it was a big corporate tax cut and it was trying to repeal obamacare and i think those

probably weren't the right places to focus. on the other hand in places where a lot of thinking and work already had been done in terms of stronger immigration enforcement, much stronger trade policy and confronting china, that's where you saw him get more done. especially on trade. the ambassador lighthouser, who was u.s. trade representative who is a candidate for the administration now. i think we've made a tremendous amount of progress on the trade issue with china. host: i want to play a portion of j.d. vance's speech accepting the vice presidential nomination in july. >> never in my wildest imagination could i have believed that had i'd be standing here tonight. i grew up in middletown, ohio. a small town where people smoke

their minds, built with their hands and loved their god, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts but it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by america's ruling class in washington. when i was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of joe biden supported nafta, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jocks to mexico. when i was a sophomore in high school, that same career politician named joe biden gave china a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good american middle class manufacturing jocks. when i was a senior in high school, that same joe biden supported the disastrous invasion of iraq and at each step of the way, in small towns like mine in ohio or next door in pennsylvania or michigan, in states all across our country,

jocks were sent overseas and our children were sent to war. host: what is your assessment thus far of president-elect trump's pick for his cabinet as well as what you're hoping to see from vice president-elect j.d. vance on economic policy? guest: i think something really interesting that you notice in that clip from j.d. vance is he's pairing together two different issues where the republican party has really shifted. on free trade and economic policy the republican participant and for that matter, the democratic party as he noted with joe biden was overwhelming focused on embracing free trade and ignoring places like huer that were going to be hurt by it and also then on foreign policy, it was sort of a parallel process. you had both democrats and republicans just kind of going around looking for wars to start and not thinking about the

people who were going to have to fight in those wars and so what i think what you see with trump and vance and in the picks they've started to make is obviously a different way of thinking about that. so far the picks have been more on the foreign policy and military side so i think somebody like senator rubio at the state department is a really comment public. he has been really at the forefront over the last decade of making the case that we need to rethink all of this. we need to recognize that our main adversary is china, that our economic and foreign policies are entangled. what we do on economics has a huge effect on what we can do in foreign policy, what it m our ni think he's going to bring much-needed change and leadership to the state department. on the economic side, it's interesting to see those are the picks that haven't really been made yet. there's still a debate about

treasury secretary. who's going to be somebody who actually will carry forward president trump's vision ask not just be another wall street banker, which we tend so see and likewise, picks like commerce, labor, these are now the issues that are at the heart of our economic policy and i think as someone like j.d. vance has spoken about a lot, having a labor policy that is much more focused on the interests of workers. having a commerce department, for instance in charge of the chips act, which can will bring semiconductor manufacturing back to this country. things we're still waiting to see on but hopefully that we get right. host: we'll be taking your calls with questions for mr. cass. democrats, 202-48468000.

republicans, 202-484-68001. republicans have also gained control of congress and a big thing on their agenda when they come into office is going to be taxes with the eggs persuasion of some provisions of the 2017 tax cuts and jobs act and you actually have something on your sub stack about this. the coming tax fight will not be what you're expecting. what do you think most people are expecting and what should we expect instead? >> i wrote about in in a subtext called understanding america. really trying toe understand what's going on that a lot of times i think is different from what people are expecting. this tax fight is a great example. if you think back to 2017, the republicans pushed very hard on a large tax cut that wasn't paid

for at all. it just went straight into a bigger deficit and the argument was somehow -- you've heard the phrase that it will pay for itself somehow and the reality is that it didn't. i think there isn't any dispute at this point that it added instantly to our deficit as did certainly many things on the spending side that the biden administration has since done so now we have a much worse fiscal picture. deficits of almost $2 trillion a year. even just the interest payments on our debt at this point, we're spending more on interest payments than we spend on our till military and that just can't go on. people have been predicting a fiscal crisis for a long time. we're now in the fiscal crisis and the interesting thing is that a lot of reasonableness know this, especially in the house of representatives, there are a lot of republicans who have already said, if anything, we actually need to be raising

some more revenue to order our deaf september problem so the idea that even with republican control we're just going to take the tax cuts from 2017 and extend them all. i think that is totally unrealistic and doesn't have the votes that it would need. frankly that's a good thing. it means there's going to be a much more serious look about what can we afford, how do we pay for it? as a result there's going to have to a of be a bigger fight about which part of the tax cuts were very good and we want to keep them? there were some very good things in there. the child tax care crept. encouraging businesses to invest more. so there's a lot to keep but a lot more work and fighting to go what in looks like going forward.

not just a blank check to spend the money and not worry about the deficit. host: president-elect trump has suggested tariffs as one way to raise revenue. what do you think of this? maybe 60% on goods from china, 20% across the board? guest: this is a very good policy, one we do a lot of work on at american compass. we started looking at what does pro american policy look like? create growth for good jobs in america for american workers and doesn't just promise everybody cheap stuff that everyone else will pay for and in reality put it on the national credit card. i think that kind of policy is very much needed, especially with china. the fight we're going to have goes all the way back to a fight we had in 2000 and you heard j.d. vance mention this that

speech at the convention, there was that huge fight over should we essentially rent free trade to china and all of the economists said yes, absolutely, this is going to be great and are us and great for china and obviously it has been a disaster for us. so what people are now finally starting to think about -- it was a bipartisan recommendation of the house of representatives' china committee. it's in the republican national platform is saying no. we are not going to have normal trade relation relations with china. we are going to treat them like the adversary and the bad actor and the economic system that they are and if china is trying to send a lot of cheap stuff -- in some cases using slave labor with heavy subsidies from the chinese communist party, there are going to be high tariffs on

that. it's not something we want to be buying and certainly not something we want to be dependent on. tariffs also generate revenue so as we're thinking about how do we pay for the kinds of tax cuts that we want to have that do benefit families and encourage economic growth, tariffs help do that. host: let's go to your calls starting with richard in augusta, georgia, on our line for democrats.

caller: the deficits came down with biden. how can you continue to believe that trump is going to provide a good cost of living wages for the american people -- support a good cost of living wages and now you guys want to go back to the doom and gloom of tariffs that stop -- from selling their products to china which would have given them more money such as the pork prices and soy beans and corn and other agricultural products and then you want to eliminate the people who picks the fruits and vegetables for this country who keeps this prices down -- 1 guest: i'll let oren respond. riched is talking about immigration, retall torrey

tariffs, lots of things. host: it's certainly not the case that the deficit went up under trump and down under biden. it wasn't up under both. it's been an entirely bipartisan problem that we certainly need to address and on the flip side it's important to say that at this point the tariff policy is a bipartisan one. as much as people explained requested trump put china tariffs into effect, the biden administration essentially kept all of those and put on even more in some cases. president trump has been proved entirely correct and people are in general very encouraged by and supportive of what he did there. on the question of what it means on the immigration front, i think it's a really interesting topic. as the questioner put it, we have