The Daily Signal - TOP NEWS | Rep. Kevin McCarthy Elected Speaker of the House , Russia Tried to Hack U.S., Gov. Ron DeSantis v. Disney World | Jan. 6

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

On today’s Daily Signal Top News, we break down: Update: Rep. Kevin McCarthy has been elected as speaker of the House In a wild turn of events, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy inches closer to the House speaker’s gavel.  The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 3.5% in December.  It has been confirmed that America faced Russian hacking attempts this past summer.  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has some big plans for Disney World. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, Samantha Escheris here. Now, we recorded this episode earlier, but we just wanted to let you know that we have a new Speaker of the House. Representative Kevin McCarthy has been elected as Speaker of the House after a historic 15 rounds of voting over four days. McCarthy, who previously served as the House Minority Leader, won the speakership position with 216 votes. Republicans Andy Biggs of Arizona, Lauren Bobert of Colorado. Elie Crane of Arizona, Matt Gates of Florida, and Bob Good of Virginia, as well as Matt Rosendale of Montana, all voted present. House Democrats nominated Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York for the Speaker of the House position in every round. He won 212 votes in the 15th round. I'm Samantha Sherris.

I'm Virginia Allen. And this is the Daily Signal top news for Friday, January 6th. Here are today's headlines. In a wild turn of events, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy is inching closer to the Speaker's gavel. At least 15 Republicans suddenly changed their votes on Friday in the 12th and 13th rounds of voting in favor of the California Republican. They include Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, Chip Royal. of Texas, Victoria Sparts of Indiana, Byron Donalds of Florida, Josh Burkine of Oklahoma, Keith Self of Texas, Michael Cloud of Texas, Mary Miller of Illinois, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Paul

Goser of Arizona, and Andy Harris of Maryland who flipped his vote in favor of McCarthy in the 13th round. In an emailed statement to the Daily Signal, Burkine said, my vote that was cast today is pending the approval of the agreement that has been negotiated in good faith. After days of intense deliberations, I cast my vote today for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker after he agreed to conservative reforms to how the House of Representatives operates. Donald, who had been nominated for the Speaker position a number of times in the last few days, tweeted, over the past several days, I've worked alongside Speaker-designate Kevin McCarthy and several of my colleagues in good faith to ensure accountability,

representation, and commitments from House leadership in the 118th Congress. The progress we've made is significant. Some of the holdouts include Republicans Lauren Bobert of Colorado, Matt Gates of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Eli Crane of Arizona, Bob Good of Virginia, and Matt Rosendale of Montana. Gates nominated Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, and Bobert nominated Representative Kevin Hearn of Oklahoma in the 12th round of voting. Only McCarthy and Democrat Hakeem Jeffries were nominated in the 13th round of voting.

The House has adjourned until 10 p.m. Friday evening. America's unemployment rate fell to 3.5% in December. That's the same unemployment rate as America saw in February of 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic led to mass job. loss. And America also added 223,000 jobs in December. This is according to the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Heritage Foundation's Senior Research Fellow in Economics, Budget and Entitlements, Rachel Gressler, joins us now to explain the significance of these numbers. Rachel, thanks so much for being here. Thank you, Virginia.

Rachel, you wrote in a Heritage Foundation press release today that despite these gains, 2.8 million fewer people are working today than we're working at pre-pandemic rates. Can you just explain what is going on here? I mean, if unemployment is the same as it was right before the pandemic, why are there 2.8 million fewer people working today than there were pre-pandemic? Yes, 3.5% unemployment is great. It's basically a half-century low, and we typically look at the unemployment rate. It's kind of the main measure of the health of the labor market.

But unfortunately, we can't do that today because even as unemployment is low, the number of people who are working is also very low. And so that's making the unemployment rate look much lower than it would be if we actually had what I estimate to be 2.8 million missing workers back in that labor force. And what I've been doing is just every month tracking the data here and comparing the employment to population ratio that existed prior to pandemic in February of 2020. to where we are today. And we just continue to have multi-million shortages of workers. And the most troubling component is that it seems to be the younger workers. At the start, you know, it made sense that older workers might not be working any longer. They might have retired earlier.

They would have concerns. But it's the young workers, 20 to 24-year-olds. And these are the people who should be out there starting their first jobs, gaining in education and experience. And yet they're not. Well, that certainly helps to explain all of those help-wanted signs that we are seeing everywhere. But Rachel, if you would just explain a little bit about what we're seeing regarding inflation and how inflation plays a role in this conversation of talking about the economy and the jobs market right now.

Certainly. And inflation is kind of in a cycle here with the jobs and people's desire to work because, of course, the two things that lead to people working is that there have to be ample job opportunities. and it has to pay to work, has to be worthwhile. And so throughout the pandemic, we had a situation where people could make more money not working. And so they did. They sat on the sidelines, and that meant that employers had to raise the wages of workers, even though they weren't doing any more than before. They were paying them more for the same thing.

Well, that added to inflation. And that was part of why we saw these record inflation numbers, massive government spending and the federals are printing that money to finance that was the other part of it. But we continue to see that workers are not actually having real wage gains. You know, they have gained about $3,900 in nominal wage gains since 2021. But when you tack on inflation's $7,200 tax, that's a loss of $3,300. And so part of the reason that people aren't coming back is that inflation is still high. But, of course, on the other side, when inflation is high. You need more money to pay for everything. And I think that's why we see that Americans across

the board are struggling to pay for groceries, for gas, you know, rents, everything has gone up in price. It has moderated over the past couple of months, but still at over 7 percent, that's three and a half times where we should be. So it's not necessarily something to celebrate as we have seen the administration talking about inflation going down while it's still extremely high. So do you have any predictions for what we're going to see in the economy in this new year in 2023? Well, we face a lot of headwinds. That's the difficult part. And so the future is definitely uncertain.

The Federal Reserve has a very difficult job in part because of its own doing. But having to try and unwind its way out of just the massive amount of money that is pumped out there and the federal government has spent, we're likely to see pretty low economic growth in part because we have millions of people that aren't working that could be contributing positively to the economy, but instead are either not contributing or even might be taking away from it if they're receiving government welfare benefits. We face the threat of our unsustainable debt and possible short-term fiscal crisis and certainly housing is uncertain, and a lot of people might find themselves underwater again as they did a little over a decade ago. So there are a lot of headwinds out there and there are things that policymakers could be doing to try to change this outlook, especially the employment situation, getting more people back into work.

There are over 10 million job openings out there. The availability is there. We just need more people to be willing to fill them. And unfortunately, every turn, we have seen the Biden administration enacting policies that accomplish the, exact opposite. They are shutting down, flourishing new apprenticeship programs that would give people that experience and the education and pay them to have a, you know, thriving career in the future. They are enacting rules that make it harder to run a small business, harder to work for oneself in a way that's flexible and accommodating to people's needs. And so unfortunately, there's not a lot

of positive momentum going forward. And I think that we could be looking towards a recession and certainly low growth next year. Rachel Gressler, Senior Research Fellow in Economics, Budget and Entitlements here at the Heritage Foundation. Rachel, thanks so much for your time today. Thank you. It has been confirmed that America faced Russian hacking attempts this past summer. Reuters broke the news today that the Russian hacking team, Cold River, targeted five

American cybersecurity experts and three nuclear labs between August and September. This happened during the same time period that, that Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested he would use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Reuters reports that it was not able to determine the intent behind the attempted hacks or if any of the attempted hacks were successful. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appears to have some big plans for Disney World. Disney World is ruled by its own governing body in essentially the same way that a county has elected leaders. This has been the case since Disney World first opened.

The land Disney's Parks Sit On is known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District. But now, DeSantis is taking steps to bring Disney World's special district under the control of the Florida government. So what would this mean for Mickey's House and all the pals at Disney World? It's a potential financial hit to Disney. Because Disney World has control over Reedy Creek, the company has been able to issue. bonds and raise taxes in order to cover Disney's resort expenses. This power would come to an end under DeSantis proposed legislation. DeSantis's communications director Teran Fensky said that under the proposed legislation, Disney will no longer control its own government, will live under the same

laws as everyone else, will be responsible for their outstanding debts, and will pay their fair share of taxes. This is not the first time DeSantis and Disney have butted heads. As many of you may remember, Disney World openly opposed a DeSantis-backed bill last year that prohibited the teaching of gender identity to young children in the classroom. Disney claimed the bill was anti-gay and called it the don't-say-gay bill. Following that conflict, the Florida legislature voted during a special session to dissolve any special district like Reedy Creek in Florida no later than June of this year. One way or another, it looks like some big changes are coming to the mouse's house this year. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to the Daily Signal's top news. If you haven't had the

chance already, be sure to check out our morning show right here in your podcast feed where we interview lawmakers, experts, and leading conservative voices. Join us on Monday morning for the Daily Signal interview edition, I'm going to be sitting down with Pastor Chris Valleton of Bethel Church to discuss his new book, Uprising and the devastating impacts of fatherlessness in America. Also, make sure you subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you get your podcast and help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star rating and review. We read and appreciate all of your feedback. Thanks so much again for joining us today. We hope that you all have a wonderful weekend, and we'll see you right back here on Monday morning.

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