America's Talking - Episode 70: Congressional Republicans Build Lead Over Democrats Heading Into Midterm Elections

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Join The Center Square's Executive Editor Dan McCaleb & D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper as they discuss: Congressional Republicans Build Lead Over Democrats Heading Into Midterm Elections. GDP bounces back with 2.6% growth after decline earlier this year. ‘Declining ever since’: Home prices continue to fall since spring. 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.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the America in Focus podcast, powered by the Center Square. America in Focus is a production of America's Talking Network. I'm Dan McAulip, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. To support great podcasts like this one, please donate by clicking the link in the show description. Joining me again today is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, BC Bureau Chief. How are you today, Casey? Doing good, Dan. How are you? Doing well, thank you.

We're recording this podcast on Friday, October 20, 28th, Casey, we are now less than two weeks away from the very important November 8 midterms, in addition to dozens of governors' races across the country. At stake is control of Congress, both the U.S. House and Senate. Democrats currently hold a slim majority in the House that is that Senate is divided 50-50 with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote. Republicans seem to have a slight advantage in the House heading into the midterms, but the Senate picture is a bit murkier. One of the key races in determining who controls the Senate is in Pennsylvania,

where Lieutenant Governor John Federman participated in the debate this week with Dr. Mamet Oz, the famous TV doctor. Federman is coming off of a stroke, still recovering, and it showed Tuesday night in his debate with Dr. Oz. What were your impressions, Casey? Yeah, you're right. All eyes were on this debate and mine were there as well. I think this is partially because of, you know, Dr. Ross's nationwide name recognition,

partially because of all the viral clips of Federman kind of fumbling. And also because Pennsylvania has just become such a focal state in national politics. You know, we saw with the contested, you know, presidential election, how this all eyes were on the state and the courts there, you know, and how they were reviewing different things. And so, you know, I think in a lot of ways, Pennsylvania has become, what Florida was in 2000. You know, it's one of the big states to watch. Of course, Florida is still watched closely.

But Pennsylvania has really risen in that regard. And so I was watching this debate. You know, I think what stood out to me is what stood out to everyone, which is we can just start with the obvious. But just Federman clearly has a lot of trouble hearing and communicating well right now. And that's a very common stroke symptom. It has been a while since he had a stroke. and so much of the debate has revolved around his health now.

And I think this is good and bad for both sides in a way. Of course, the obvious thing is to say, oh, Fetterman's done because he did so poorly. A lot of, you know, people after the debate who were asked, they did surveys after the debate who won. It was something like 85 percent, you know, said Dr. Oswin. And so I think, you know, that is like the takeaway headline that was very viral online on Twitter and a lot of talking hands here in D.C. are talking about it. I think it's a little more complicated than that because, you know, there's a little bit of sympathy for Federman. And I think Dr. Oz has to be really careful about not coming across as a bully to someone who's struggling. I think Republicans

already kind of have to, you know, slouch off that accusation already because of Trump and just the way they're perceived. So he doesn't want to come across as a bully. And the other risk that Oz is taking here is that we're all talking about Federman and not Oz. and not the economy. So conventional political wisdom right now is to keep your name out there as a Republican and to talk about economic issues. And I think we learned from the Trump election that the danger of always criticizing one candidate is that you might just elevate them right into the seat that you would criticize them for. So it could be that this debate was fatal for Fetterman because he did struggle so much just to articulate what he thought. There was some really

painful moments where he clearly just was like belaboring just to get out some simple sentences. But, you know, there's still some time to go before November. And so I think it's still, this is not, this debate did not steal anyone's fate in my mind. I agree with you there. Although I'm not a voter in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania. I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, that's since relocated to Illinois. It was, it was painful to watch at some point, at some point. though John Fenron clearly is not 100%. As you mentioned, has a hard time processing. The spoken word has a hard time speaking. And the question I think Pennsylvania voters need to ask is, if they do elect him to the U.S. Senate, how is he going to be able to represent them in the U.S.

Senate? When there's debates on the Senate floor and committees, is he going to be able to represent Pennsylvania to represent their interests, to communicate what has been the best interests of Pennsylvania voters when he's there. So it's definitely a tough call. You mentioned Dr. Oz and the quote-unquote bully angle. He did not mention Federman's health during the debate at all, but he did go on the attack on calling Federman extreme in his policy positions on things like abortion, on things like energy, and whatnot. So, you know, and if I remember correctly, something like 600,000 Pennsylvania voters had already voted. So they'd already made up their mind prior to that debate. What those millions of Pennsylvania voters who hadn't voted yet, whether that's going to affect their decisions, I don't know.

Yeah, I do. I think there was a moment where Oz said something like he couldn't even get the words out. Like he didn't say it quite that strongly, but there was a moment where he drew attention to, I think to Federman's inability just to, like, to answer his question. Now, that's pretty common in debate, so he's not answering the question, but there was kind of a layer of, look, you can't even talk to it. I think that's what I was referring to. But, yeah, so far, I don't think he's crossed that line, but it'll be interesting to see, like, how much the attack ads focus on that, you know,

in the next few weeks. I think it came from Chris Christie. I've heard of him saying it. I don't know if he came up with it, but he said when you're a political opponent is committing suicide, don't commit murder, right? And so there's something, some truth in that here. When there's viral clips of your opponent fumbling their words online, to what degree do you do you pounce? And to what degree do you just let this take its course? Thank you for your insight there, Casey. But let's move on. One of the issues heading into the

election that could be on some voters' minds is the COVID-Arab policies of former President Trump and current President Biden, but also across the states, schools were shut down for months at a time, depending on what state you lived in. Some schools and some states were closed for over a year. They diverted to remote learning. Just this week, the Department of Education released its nation's report card, and it showed the true impacts of what remote learning had on kids. Tell us about this. Yeah, this is a really sad, troubling story. I think there's a lot of lessons that we can learn from it. I guess pun intended.

I don't know. So the Department of Education does this National Report Card where they look at math and reading scores in particular. And they've been tracking these since the early 90s. And they want to see how we're doing, how are states doing individually. And on math in particular, we have seen steady progress since the early 90s where students have gotten more and more proficient, gradually, incrementally year by year, which is really encouraging, which is really great. You build up, you slightly increase the workload and the expectations every year. And I think anecdotally, I've experienced this just with kids that I know today, I see their math homework. I don't

know if you've had this experience. We see a kid's bathroom work. And you're like, wow, I don't think I was doing this in the fifth grade. I didn't, you know, there's actually some real proof, real proof to that. We've been making math harder for kids. I think it's a good thing. Reading has remained about, hasn't seen that same increase, but it's remained steady, maybe increased a little bit. But the COVID really toppled that tower. We've been building for a couple of decades now. So this national report card found that, as I said, you know, since 1990, fourth grade mass scores, for instance, have increased by 28 points. But since 2019, they dip down five points, which is, you know, several years, taking scores back to the early 2000s levels.

So because of COVID shutdowns, because kids were, you know, on their laptops, working remote, we all know just it doesn't take a rock scientist to know that a kid on his laptop is going to be really distracted, especially a fourth grader and unable to really keep up in the same way as being in the same room with the teacher. Because of that, we lost, you know, basically two decades of progress on fourth grade mass scores. And so this is consistent across different things. Eighth grade math scores decreased by even more eight points compared to 2019, which of course is before the pandemic. That's taken us back to the 2003 levels.

And again, reading scores also decreased. So those decreased by three points. So I think, you know, we can talk about, you know, of course states had different levels of seriousness about this. But you can't really totally one-to-one compare this state shut down. Therefore, they should have worse policies because the demographics of states are so different. Some states have a lot more low-income kids than others. And low-income kids are going to be more susceptible to learning loss when shutdowns because they're not going to, they're less likely, for example, to have a parent at home

to make sure that they're actually doing their work. I think a lot of kids in the pandemic were home alone for large hours a day and just they were told to, you know, go to school on their laptop. And so unsupervised with the laptop didn't really yield the results. And I think it's just one of the big takeaways that shows that there is a cost, there is a real cost to shutting down schools. It's not a no-cost, no-cost policy. Right.

And you wrote a national story off of the nation's report card this week, Casey. But at thecenterSquare.com, we cover all 50 states. And we wrote some state-specific stories off of this. And this is reverberating. And within the states, one of the things that the Center Squares Illinois team noticed from the report card is that chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed. The 30 percent of students in Illinois, for example, were chronically absent last year. They reverted to remote learning at the beginning of the pandemic, of course, for months. months in Illinois. Chicago schools were closed at the beginning of the 2021, 2021 school year, for example.

And they've lost track of a lot of these kids who weren't going to school or supposed to be remote learning. As I mentioned, more than 30% of students in Illinois were chronically absent last year. Chronically absent is defined as missed 10% or more of the school year, which is a minimum of 17 days. The rates of chronic absentee, were even higher for black students at 48 percent. Hispanic students, 36 percent, low-income students, 43 percent, English learners, 35 percent. So those school shutdowns had a dramatic impact on students in Illinois in Michigan this week. In incumbent governor, Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, debated a Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon. Whitmer was infamously said

schools were shut down for just three months in Michigan. That was not true for the fact checkers caught that on it. Some schools, Detroit schools, Flint schools were closed for more than a year. So that very well could impact the election here. So it's going to have some wide, wide ranging impacts perhaps on the election. Yeah, definitely has electoral implications. And I think that this is really a driving issue. We've seen the last two years that education has been thrust to the forefront as a top issue.

And it's because of things like this. And parents were really vilified during the pandemic, you know, and afterwards for how they behaved at school board meetings. You know, they've been really vocal protesting upset about, you know, some sexual and transgender, gender identity, LGBT, all that kind of curriculum and books in the libraries. They've been upset about vaccine mandates and different things. DC implemented a vaccine mandate for students, even if you're, you know, 13 years old, you don't get the vaccine. There's been, of course, there were the mask requirements for students. And then the shutdowns, which are really hard if you don't.

I mean, I grew up with, you know, a single mom and I can't, you know, imagine what does a single mom do? Do you stay home with your kid or do you go to work? I mean, you're going to leave your kid home alone. So these have real world implications for students and for parents. And parents really spoke up about it. And I think they were vilified in a lot of ways by the media. They were brushed aside as crazy as, you know, COVID deniers or whatever. But I think they're been vindicated in some sense by some of this data, which has showed that kids are paying a really high price.

And, you know, 30% of kids, I mean, that statistic you laid out, that's crazy. I mean, are those kids ever going to get back? That's thousands of kids. And also, we know it's going to have, of course, long-term implications for their lives, but societal implications as well. I mean, one of the best predictors of future crime rates are literacy rates. If you look at third grade literacy rates, please, please do this. They look at third grade literacy rates to help predict how big the prisons need to be when they're building in the future.

And if literacy rates are low, then they are going to, you know, provide for more beds in the prison. So this is like a real issue. Parents are really upset about it. And I think the data is starting to support some of their concerns now. Scary stuff, Casey. But let's move on. You wrote last week, late last week, about new budgetary data that was released.

U.S. government ran up a $1.4 trillion deficit in the fiscal year that just ended. Federal debt has surpassed $31 trillion. Give us your thoughts here. Yeah, I got kind of fired up about this story, Dan. I think this is an example of the center square.com covering something in a way that the media is not and how our coverage is kind of unique because, you know, Biden did, you know, President Joe Biden did a big announcement, a big celebration, really spiked the football on the fact that he, you know, cut the deficit in half. And of course, you know, we have it, we care about the taxpayer angle. We don't want, you know, rampant dead. The debt is, federal debt is out of control. It surpassed 30 trillion earlier this year and then surpassed 31 trillion later this year. So we've had it, you know, surpassed, you know, surpassed. 31 trillion after just hitting the 30 trillion benchmark in the same year. So the debt is out of

control. But I looked closer into the numbers and just kind of talked to some experts, saw what they're saying. And I think it was kind of misleading what was happening here. And when you look at the media coverage, the media coverage was just in lockstep with what Biden was saying is what a big deal it was that we cut the deficit in half. So I just looked at the numbers. And, you know, it is true that the deficit was cut by $1.4 trillion from last year and it's currently a $1.4 trillion deficit. But the deficit, that was mainly almost entirely because the Congress during COVID just passed this, you know, trillions of dollars in federal stimulus and COVID relief spending. Right. So Congress went out of its way to spend far more money than it normally does. does during COVID. And then they stopped because COVID ended. And then they take they're taking

credit for cutting the deficit by returning, you know, spending to pre-COVID levels, right? And saying that they've done this great thing just because they're kind of the spending spree is over. It'd be like if you, you know, your kid took the credit card in September and went and spent, you know, $5,000 on shoes and stuff at the mall. And then in October, the credit card is taken away from them. they didn't spend any money. And then in November, they said, wow, look, I cut, you know, I cut my spending by 100% the last month. It's like, yeah, because you went out of spending spree and now you stopped it.

So you might say, okay, well, at least we came back to pre-COVID levels, but that's not actually true at all. We are still higher than 2019. So in 2019, before COVID started, the federal deficit was less than a trillion dollars. And now in 2022, the federal deficit is $1.4 trillion. after being $2.8 trillion during COVID. So we have even improved to pre-COVID levels. This big, you know, supposedly impressive cut to the deficit is still 50% higher than the deficit was in 2019.

So another way to look at it is we're celebrating the fact that we've raised the federal deficit by 50% since 2019. So let's kind of look behind the numbers. I think, you know, of course it's good that we cut it by $1.4 trillion. But I don't think it's the thing to celebrate. that the media has kind of made it out to be. And the federal deficit, well, the federal government definitely has a spending problem, has had a spending problem for decades, does not wisely spend taxpayer dollars.

But this is another issue that could reverberate in the states. States were the beneficiaries of some of that trillions of dollars in COVID stimulus money that the federal government gave to them. That's coming to an end, too. many states spent the money poorly rather than spending it on one-time costs, many states just added programs that are going to have recurring costs. What's the impact going to be on these states when that federal stimulus money goes away? What are they going to do? Are they going to have to make tough decisions about either cutting spending, cutting programs, or raising taxes? And certainly

taxpayers don't want to hear that. Right. I mean, the bill is coming due. It'll be interesting to see, you know, I think these states will cry out and help and say, oh, no, what's happened to us? You know, we're victims of this. And then maybe the federal government will run to their aid. I think, you know, that really could happen. But you're right. The bill is coming due. Some of these states took this opportunity to put in place new entitlements and long-term spending programs that they absolutely cannot pay for in the next, you know, next few years, let alone five or ten years. So I don't know, it's not a good situation. We'll have to keep an eye on that. After two straight quarters of negative GDP, which signaled that we might be in a recession,

we got some news this week that in the third quarter of 2022, there was actually GDP growth. Tell us about this one. Yeah, this is interesting. The GDP, as you said, decreased the first six months of this year, a pretty notable way. This wasn't just like a 0.01% decrease. It was shrunk by 1.6% in the first quarter. and then 0.6% in the second quarter. And so this kicked off a whole debate about whether we're in a recession or what's going on.

And we wrote about that a lot. And the standard definition for a recession is two consecutive quarters of GDP decline. So, you know, the Biden administration and some experts tried to say this was in a recession. And then the critics would say, well, it's literally the definition of a recession. So now you might say, well, GDP increased 2.6% in the third quarter. I guess the recession is over. Maybe it wasn't a recession after all. And I think whether it's truly going to be a recession as we like to think about it remains to be seen.

But of course, 2.6% growth is good and much better than a decrease. But a lot of the analysis that I read and people, you know, different statements that were sent out and just, experts that I've looked at have said that this is actually not totally what it seems. And there was a narrowing of the trade deficit, which I'm not going to get into because it's kind of complicated. And the GDP is a weird thing where it calculates the size of the economy. But because that's so hard to do, the number in some ways is kind of a guess or an analysis that can be easily impacted by things that don't seem like they have to do anything to do

with the size of the economy. a significant change in the trade deficit gave a one-time bump to GDP, but that is a one-time thing. So if you didn't have that trade deficit bump, the GDP increase would actually be much smaller and a lot closer to zero. And so I think this is kind of an anomaly. Of course, it's good. And, of course, you know, it's much better than to have a decrease. But I think this fourth quarter will really be the deciding vote on whether we're in a recession or we've,

somehow managed to to avoid one because of this one-time trade deficit thing has kind of skewed the numbers and given a false impression. And anyone you talk to is saying that they're saying, hey, this is great, but let's not get our hopes too up because this trade deficit bump is not going to be around in the fourth quarter. So we'll be closely watching these fourth quarter numbers to see which way is it going to fall. Is it going to fall to negative growth? Is it going to fall to positive growth. And I think it's like it's really possible that it'll be something like 0.3% growth, which is technically not a negative growth, but the GDP is supposed to grow at a, you know, 2, 3%. I mean, in Trump years, it grew much more than that. So even just remaining around

zero is really not good. The economy is expected to grow at a significant notable clip every year. So like I said, I think those fourth quarter numbers will really be the deciding factor. give us a lot better idea about this recession. Yeah, and if you look what's going on across the country, it's a major businesses who are preparing for layoffs because of fears of a recession, whether it be now or sometime in 2023, there are major business owners and economists who are preparing themselves for a recession. So we're looking at those fourth quarter numbers, as you said,

is going to be interesting to watch. Casey, appreciate your insights again this week, but that's all the time we have. A reminder to our listeners, you can find all of the CenterSquares podcast at a mark America's Talking.com. Take a look. Please subscribe.

There is no cost. This has been the America In Focus podcast for Casey Harper. I'm Dan McHaleb. We'll talk to you next week.