America's Talking - Episode 48: The Aftermath of the Uvalde School Shooting

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Join The Center Square's Executive Editor Dan McCaleb and D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper as they discuss: Victims of Uvalde mass shooting include cousins, best friends, honor roll students. O’Rourke interrupts Texas school shooting news conference, confronts Gov. Abbott. Texas shooting reignites debate over gun control. CBO: Debt to surpass GDP at record level over next decade. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to American Focus. I'm Cole McNeely, general manager of America's Talking Network. This week, instead of doing the music and the 10-second clip at the beginning, I wanted to take a 10-second moment of silence and remembrance of the 21 victims of the tragic shooting in Texas. Thank you. Now here's your host, Dan McAleb. Thank you, Cole, and welcome to the America in Focus podcast, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAleap, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. America in Focus is a production of America's Talking Network. You can find all of the Center Square's great podcasts at America's Talking.com. Joining me today is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, we are recording us on Friday, May 27th.

It's been a sobering week, Casey, with a tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old entered the local elementary school and shot and killed 19 children and two adults. So much has already been said and written about this. tragic mass shooting and we are learning pretty much learning new details regularly about the timeline of the events about how law enforcement handled the situation in the moment what can be done to prevent these times of massacres from happening again Casey how know what are your thoughts yeah I mean it as you said it's really tragic these have become a little too familiar uh when you hear about these you know I remember when I first saw the initial news come in it's like

Oh, man, you know, you kind of brace yourself because of, you know, things we have in our history and just where we know this can go. And the more details that come out, just the more sad, more tragic it is. And now we're kind of seeing the personal stories of kids giving their experiences of, you know, parents sharing what happened that day. And, you know, there's a lot of just the more details you get the sadder it is. And so our hearts go out to them. Our prayers are, you know, for them right now. And nobody is really unimaginable we're going through. So they're definitely in our thoughts.

We're going to, you know, this story is not going to go away, you know, overnight. It's going to be more coverage. And yeah, I mean, there are things we can talk about about police response and things like that. And, you know, some of the politics behind it later on. But first and foremost, they're in our prayers. And my heart to go out to them. Why don't we just spend just a minute?

just talking about some of the victims here. Got to receive the story from our Texas correspondent, Bethany Blankley, yesterday, just naming, telling us a little bit about who some of these victims are. You know, I love my job as a journalist when we're holding government officials accountable, talking about how they're spending our tax dollars, things like this. But this is the worst time to be a journalist when you're learning about details. like something as tragic as this. Just reading from her story briefly,

so we have some other things to talk about. Eva Morales, I remember as a loving mother and wife. Her daughter said, I have never imagined this would happen, especially to loved ones. All we can do is pray hard for our country, state schools, and especially the families of all. Another teacher, the second teacher who shot Irma Garcia,

of four. She was described by her nephew, a sweet, kind, loving, fun with the greatest personality. She sacrificed herself, protecting the kids in her classroom. She was a hero. She was loved by many and will be truly missed. Tragically, Irma's husband died two days later of a heart attack, likely heartbroken. Of course, there's 19 other children who are victims in this, and I don't have the heart to go through anymore then. So what's obviously when these kinds of situations happen, talk turns to what to gun violence and whether anything should be done about our gun laws, Casey, what's going, what are you hearing, what's taking place in Congress? Yeah, I mean, you're right. There's this kind of predictable cycle of outrage and calls for action.

you see a lot of anger, especially from those on the left to, you know, about against the Second Amendment, against supporters of gun rights. And, you know, and I was monitoring this pretty closely just from the perspective of, you know, Second Amendment rights. And, you know, I saw, for the most part, first day or two, you know, Republicans and Second Amendment supporters were mostly quiet. And I think they're just being respectful, you know, giving some space. to the issue. But as the days went on, you saw this debate start to more unfold in Congress, you know, online and the flurry of opinion pieces come out. Twitter explodes, you know. And so this kind of predictable cycle of, you know, pain, outrage, moral, moralism, calling, calling for changes. You know, the video went viral of Beto overwork, really, you know, showing up.

And maybe you might want to talk about that more than a minute, Dan, but Bado Ork showing up at that press conference. But what we're seeing is that the familiar battle lines in Congress of whether there should be more background checks. I'll say even with all the tragedy and the pain around this right and out, I don't see much changing in the near term on this issue. That's just my kind of prediction and forecast based on what I've seen. If anything would change, it would be more background checks. I think that is kind of the agreed upon next step. it's definitely nothing close to what some of the more on the left want,

which would be sweeping new rules and regulations. The hard thing is it's often, you know, when these shootings happen, there's a call for certain kinds of new laws, but those laws wouldn't have prevented that said shooting, right? And it doesn't mean they're bad ideas or good ideas, but that's kind of one of the first things that is pointed out is this law wouldn't have prevented the shooting. And even then, does the kind of person who's willing to shoot up a school really care if it's illegal to purchase the weapon, right? I mean, that's the other, that's the

second argument. So these things are playing out. I think the final thing to keep an eye on as far as Congress is there's been a lot of pressure in particular on Senator Joe Manchin to eliminate the filibuster to pass through some kind of gun legislation. So that's something to keep an eye on. you know, they're, what we're seeing politically as Democrats trying to use this issue to mobilize effort and maybe even, you know, circumvent the filibuster to get something done. But right now, I don't think any sweeping changes are on the horizon. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Beto O'Rourke. I forgot about that. That was only, we were recording this, of course, on Friday.

That was only on Wednesday, but so much has happened since Wednesday that I forgot about that incident. I was watching the shooting, of course, happened on Tuesday, on Wednesday. Governor Greg Abbott and law enforcement officials were holding a news conference to provide updates. I was watching it live on the Internet, as was our Texas correspondent. And while I was watching it, I saw a man get up and go up and start yelling at Governor Abbott, making a causing a scene in the middle of it. I did not immediately know it was Beto O'Rourke, who is running,

the Democrat, excuse me, running against Governor Abbott for governor in this year's election. I didn't immediately know it was Beto O'Rourke, and I was like, what a clown? What is this guy doing? Get him out of there. My text,

our Texas correspondent, Bethany, she texts me. Did you see what Beto O'Rourke just did? And I was like, that was Beto O'Rourke? Are you kidding me? He's got the nerve to make a political statement in the middle of this tragic news conference where families of the victims are attending. I try to keep my opinion out of this, but I was outraged at that.

Yeah. Anyway, so, I mean, what are the next steps, Casey? I know there will be discussions. There'll be debates. It's probably, I like you, don't see, see. anything meaningful coming out of it. Any insight under that? Yeah, I mean, there's a few.

I believe we were one of the first, if not the first, to have that Beto's story up by the Soonersquare.com, which is a great job by Bethany and you for being on top of that. But the, you know, there's going to go a few ways. One, you know, nothing could happen, which I think there's a real chance of nothing happening.

You know, there'll be political use of this. There'll be campaign ads about this. But as far as like actual tangible policy change at the federal level, I think there's a good chance. Nothing really happens. Just a lot of debate things. There's a very small chance that there could be kind of sweeping changes. But I don't think that's likely, as you said. And then, you know, this is kind of the most D.C. political response ever.

But there's also a chance that there could be some kind of gun control measure that allows Democrats to have some kind of moral victory, but doesn't actually really do much. And we've seen this in the past. I think a good example is when bump stocks were banned. You know, I mean, you know, it's kind of a, it's just, you know, it does give kind of a sense of a victory that something was banned and it did upset, you know, a lot of gun owners and gun rights people. But overall, like banning bump stocks doesn't make a, you know, isn't going to prevent any kind of shooting.

It's just, you know, an addition to a firearm you can add on. So I think that, you know, there could be a chance there's some kind of symbolic legislation that does it. And I think that's probably the only hope that Democrats have. There's bills, you know, Marco Rubio has a bill that creates, you know, more systematic guidance and federal help on all these local schools on how to be safe on things they can do. One thing that's really been pointed out in this since the shooting is that the debate always goes towards mental health. are towards gun control, but most of the mental health things have been ignored at the federal level. There's a lot that can be done on mental health. It does seem like, you know, most, if not all these shooters have some kind of mental health issues, like at a pretty significant,

disturbing level. And so much of the mental health legislation has just stalled. And so I don't know if we're going to see it kind of a pivot away from the gun control. I think, you know, Republicans always point towards the mental health. And I think a lot of Democrats say that that is just them dodging the gun rights issue, and maybe it is. But at the same time, I do think there, you know, a lot of mental health advocates are saying there is real work that can be done in guidance and funding that can be done for mental health policies in place for recognizing people who have mental health issues, what to do, making it more like across the board the same policies versus it just being different based

on every school. So, you know, I don't know if something like that will happen. I honestly don't think so. but that would be one of the options that Congress could do if they do do something. Well, I guess final, just one final thought on this, our hearts and prayers do go out to the victims and their families and their friends. And, you know, we'll continue reporting on the situation at the center square.com. Let's move on, though, Casey. The Congressional Budget Office this week released its economic outlook for the next decade.

And the news wasn't all that great. No, no. Yeah, not a great week of news, but this is in a different form. So the Congressional Budget Office, for those who don't know, they do release these economic outlooks where they project, you know, the economy, the budget, what that's going to look like, even the GDP and inflation. They're most famous for scoring bills. So when, you know, lawmakers put together these giant, you know, mammoth bills,

they're the ones who have to go comb through it and say, this is how much this is going to cost. and it's purported to be a nonpartisan estimate that's like this is the actual cost of the bill, not just what the writer says it costs. And so that's what the CBO is. That's what the CBO does. And they release their economic projection for basically the next decade. And there are several really interesting things in it.

They said inflation is likely to continue through the rest of this year, that it's hopefully going to get better in 2023. That sounds like good news. So I will say that the Treasury has been. I don't, we've heard that story before from the federal government. So I'm a little wary of it. The Treasury said that inflation was transitory and would be gone by now and here we are. You know, so a little uncertain about on that. But the CBO also projected essentially that the federal debt level is going to continue to soar.

It really, I think, dangerous rates. And it's going to be, I think, 110% of GDP. GDP is like the way of measuring the size of the American economy. And so what they call the debt to GDP ratio, it's like how much debt we have versus how big our economy actually is, is going to be at record levels, record high levels in the worst sense. So the debt is going to outpace the size of our economy at the highest level ever. So this is troubling.

I think it raises a lot of question about federal spending. we've had a lot of spending around COVID that was going to justify because it was a pandemic, but that has made inflation worse and it's raised the debt even more. The debt passed $30 trillion this year. So it's really the elephant in the room in American politics right now. And I think it has been for several years. And no one wants to be the politician who comes along and says, hey, we need to cut every government program regardless of if you support it.

on both pet projects of Republicans and Democrats, because it's probably going to take something like that to really get spending under your control. Yeah, you mentioned reference the debt surpassing $30 trillion, trillion with a T. It's actually, I'm looking at the U.S. national debt clock right now. It's actually almost at $30.5 trillion. And growing, I know. debt expert but it's looking like it could be you get to 31 trillion dollars before the year is up you just got to wonder how we can continue spending at the space at the pace that we're spending right and

you know i think uh especially maybe a younger listener might think that this is normal because it feels like we've always had this debt but that's not the case at all um in the 2000s the debt was like five trillion and so it's hard to have since then to 30 trillion uh you know the the u.s had a balance budget at one point. And so the country has not held this kind of debt for its whole history. This is really a new phenomenon in the last two decades. It was really accelerated by the Iraq war. But then that just opened the floodgates and both Republican and Democratic presidents have, whether it was, you know, Obama's stimulus or whatever it was. Every administration has just increased the spending. And here we are. So, yeah, you're right. I mean, you don't have to be a

debt expert to know that 30 trillion in counting, you know, it hit 30 trillion in February. And you see, you know, it's at 30 and a half now. And it's May. So that tells you, that's a good way just to give you the pace, which this is growing. And it's not good. Let's talk a little bit about inflation, Casey. Memorial Day weekend approaching. And we'll talk a little bit about that Memorial Day weekend at the end.

that marks the beginning of summer, summer travel season, et cetera. But because of inflation, we're hearing that many American families are changing their plans. What can you tell us about this? Yeah, of course, you know, that federal debt has the kind of scary economy collapsing, you know, fear around it. But we're already feeling real world impacts now because that federal debt spending, you know, the way, a big way that that is paid for. is you print more money. And we've had an incredible amount of U.S. dollars added to the money supply

since Biden took office. And we're seeing a lot of that effects now. And so the price of everything is going up. Energy is the leading thing that's gone up the most. Food is almost 10% more expensive in the last 12 months. But really, almost anything across the board. I mean, if you're trying to buy a used car right now, you know what that's like, although there are some shortage things aggravating that. But this poll from Echelon, Insist, found that 75% of parents say they're concerned about the rising costs of everyday purchases like food or gas. So, you know, most parents are concerned about this.

And so the survey asked them, you know, with summer around the corner Memorial Day, like you said, has recent inflation, you know, increases in the price of gas, groceries, et cetera, cause you to change any of your plans for what your children will do this summer. And 57% of parents said yes. And this is this summer, American family. you know, well over half of them saying they've had to change what their kids are going to do. So, you know, over half of them said that they've changed or canceled plans for a family trip. So summer vacation is quite literally canceled or maybe instead of, you know, taking a trip overseas or something,

you're just going to drive to the nearest beach. You know, you're going to do that with my, there's a big difference. I think we all know the difference between the big vacation and the budget vacation growing up. I had both as a kid. And there's definitely years where we just drove to the, the, the nearest vacation. speech and pack sandwiches. You know, it's fine, but it's great. But this is a, this inflation issue is not ethereal. It's not just some ideological debate. It's not what will happen if the debt surpasses GDP at too high level. It is, hey, this summer your kids don't get the vacation. Another 26% said they won't be able to stay home with their kids because they need to work more. Also, you know, a lot of parents were saying that they're not able to send their kids to summer camp.

So this is having real world impact. You know, many of our listeners even probably are having to make these tough decisions choosing between summer camps and vacations, especially if you have multiple kids. You know, if you have three kids, you can maybe only afford one when to go to summer camp. How do you make those decisions? Those are the real kitchen table problems that Americans are struggling with right now because the prices of goods and services are rising so fast. Let's talk particularly about the prices of gasoline, Casey. You wrote earlier this week that gas prices hit a new record high every single day for two consecutive weeks. Looking at AAA's gas prices, the cost of a regular gallon of gasoline right now stands at $4.60 a gallon, which is held steady for the past few days as a record high.

you can understand why families are going to be changing their plans when it costs that much just to take your spouse and your kids anywhere. Yeah, and this is one of the leading things that, you know, forcing Americans to make these decisions. If you are going to drive on your vacation, you know, the price of that trip could almost double. And by the way, I hope your car doesn't break down and you need to buy a new one because getting a used vehicle right now, I mean, they're just so much more expensive. you've even been looking. But yeah, like you said, the gas prices hit a new record high every day for almost two weeks, which ended, you know, kind of, it's kind of peaked out right now at $4.60. And so,

you know, we don't know if that's going to go higher or lower, but, you know, I do think it's actually going to go higher from all the experts I've talked to this summer. It's not going to be great for energy costs. But this is, I just want to stress how unusual this is. Usually with these record gas prices, what we see is the gas prices just like they peak one day they have a big high and then they drop back down immediately or they kind of stay there for a little while and drop you know drop down so record gas prices are usually kind of an anomaly that happens one day and then doesn't happen for a while so to see record high gas prices every day for two weeks like this is very unusual it shows this is not just an anomaly this is kind of a new normal even president

chope Biden called this just you know basically a transit that Americans are going to have to get used to, which caused its own controversy. But I think that, you know, politicians on both sides can say this is going to go away. This is temporary. This is Putin's fault. Whatever, whatever they want to say. But the way it hit every day for two weeks like this just shows you that this is a trend. This is not an anomaly.

I do think that this is going to be here to stay for a while. You know, we're going to see these elevated prices through the summer and maybe beyond. So this. trend is sadly here to stay air conditioning, just regular electricity costs. I've written in a different, you know, different story about how that's also expected to rise. And then even the chances of blackouts this summer are higher because of, you know, there's several factors, but drought and different things. So the energy, the energy landscape right now is not pretty. And Americans, as this poll shows, are already, you know, taking that into account and grappling with the consequences

of that. And folks inside the energy industry blame, at least in part, President Biden's policies for the high energy costs and the potential for blackouts or brownouts this summer. Of course, when Biden first took office, he banned new leases on federal lands for oil drilling. He canceled the Keystone pipeline. He put new taxes and other regulations on the oil and gas industry.

Biden and many others, many Democrats, but it crosses both aisles. So you need for new cleaner energy. And, you know, I agree we need to keep developing cleaner energy initiatives. But we're not there yet. And it's not keeping pace with what oil and gas can do in terms of powering our homes and powering our cars and everything else. So it's pretty clear that Biden's policies are, at least in part, driving these record high gas prices. Yeah, and I think he hasn't explicitly admitted this, but this in the tone and the way he said different things.

He, in the fact that he hasn't backed down on some of his policies like with pipeline, development and oil and gas leasing, shows that he basically this is kind of a new normal in his mind and the kind of ideological left's mind that we've got to cut back on consumption we've got to cut back on drilling to make this hard right turn transition into or you could say left turn I guess but transition into renewables but it's a pretty abrupt turn and so I don't know I mean you were feeling the effects of it I think like you said Americans love the idea of renewable energy and they are concerned about climate change and environmental issues when you look at polling.

But the most recent polling shows now that because of these gas prices, Americans are much more concerned about inflation than climate change and other issues. So I think they're willing to maybe pay a little bit or make the transition. But whatever pain threshold they have, I think we've hit it or surpassed it. So, yeah, this is a lot of political weight on Biden to, heading to the midterms. if gas prices are still like this. I mean, it's local politics 101 that when, you know, grocery store and gas stations are not good places to be. The incumbents are in trouble.

Well, thank you, Casey, but that is all the time we have this week. But I want to end on a note. Just reminder that it is Memorial Day weekend. Well, yes, it signifies the beginning of summer. It's also a weekend when we should all spend some time remembering those who gave their lives in defense of our country, whether it's going to a parade or visiting a cemetery or just taking a few moments to think about the sacrifices that these brave men and women in our military, the sacrifices they made. So we can gather around our grills this weekend, enjoy time with our family, you know, even something as simple as recording this podcast. Anyway, enjoy the Memorial Day weekend.

For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McAulb. We'll talk to you next week.