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00:00Give us the sense from inside the Biden campaign of what the issues are. They think they have to occupy the high ground they have to occupy and defend. Well the most important issue in America right now is the Corona virus pandemic which is you know killing a thousand Americans a day. That's keeping a lot of people locked up. It's depressing our economy dramatically . Before we turn to the economy we really have to address this pandemic. As Kevin said the two issues are inextricably bound up. And Vice President Biden has put out a detailed plan for how we would not only deal with the pandemic generally but he just this week put out a plan for how we would deal with reopening schools safely. You know Trump beats the drum endlessly. Open open open. But he never uses the words safely because he has no plan for keeping workplaces safe keeping schools safe keeping business to safe. That really needs to be our focus as a society right now. And that's where Joe Biden is focused. Do you believe it's as urgent in people's eyes right now. Because you know it's flared up slowly in New York. New Jersey went down and flared up in California. Texas went down . We're seeing some in the Midwest now. And we do see jobs starting to come back. We had jobless numbers today that were better than expected. They're certainly down under a million for the first time. We'll see tomorrow what happens. Are things getting better already . Well I don't think they are. And I want to push back a little bit on those unemployment claims number that came back today . They actually the actual numbers went up a little bit. It was only in the seasonal adjusting that the Labor Department does that the numbers went down below a million . We have twenty nine point two million Americans currently receiving unemployment benefits. One in five American workers is right now receiving unemployment benefits. And that's because there are no jobs in the economy . That is a consequence of the pandemic and really grotesque negligence malign negligence by the Trump administration here . He apparently threw his hands up in the air a few months ago and said well I can't fix this thing by snapping my fingers. So I give up. So he's got no plan for the pandemic. No plan for the economy no plan for reopening schools. On the other hand Vice President Biden has put out detailed plans for all of those things. And he's going to bring us together to try and come up with a common solution . That's really what we need in the United States right now. Well specifically on the economic plans because you're right certainly I've read them votes for Vice President Biden has very specific plans but they've got some big price tags attached to them. They're going to requires taxes or barring something like that. And right now we're seeing the deficit go past 100 percent of GDP for the first time since World War Two. Should we be concerned about that . I think we should be concerned that we're seeing some gigantic deficits and yet we're seeing no benefit to the American economy of smart deficit spending. A big part of the deficit problem that we're experiencing right now is because of the massive tax cut for the wealthy and for wealthy corporations that Donald Trump helped to drive through Congress. You know working people got a small tax cut but people on Wall Street who are now feeding at the trough that the Federal Reserve has provided to them. Those people did extraordinarily well . So what Joe Biden's strategy is is to ask the people who are doing the best in our economy to pay a little bit more so that we can afford an aggressive effort to fix American infrastructure to invest in American manufacturing to invest in the American care economy and education to begin the process of fighting back climate change so that we can turn our economy into a green economy with a smaller carbon footprint with that kind of spending makes sense and will help our economy to grow and that will in turn reduce deficits. Let me also say in a crisis you have to run a deficit particularly when interest rates are as low as they are right now. It costs us very little to do that. But if you go into debt in order to give money to rich people you're just helping to weaken our economy. You mentioned specific investing in manufacturing and I think at least some people think in 2016 one the things that helped President Trump win the Electoral College was appealing to some of the manufacturing base and things like my home state of Michigan. He's in with Brad Stone Mines in Kenosha Wisconsin today where they lost of course a big AMC plant. So the diminishment of manufacturing what can a Biden administration do to address that issue or is that a larger really long term trend in the country . Well we have seen a long term trend and a diminishment of manufacturing. But but that isn't independent of public policy . That is directly related to public policy. It's partly because we haven't been aggressive enough in trade. And Vice President Biden has talked about fighting for every American job in our trade in our dealings with China in our dealings with other countries using the power of the federal government which spends immense amounts of money about 400 billion dollars a year focusing that on products that are made in America. You know Trump has promised that he has failed. Plants are closing all across our country because he has failed . Biden will harness the power of the. Federal government as a purchaser of goods and services and use that to put Americans back to work and then encourage the private sector to do the same thing. The other thing that he's very focused on is bringing supply chains home particularly pharmaceutical supply chains that are so critical in this pandemic environment. But other critical supply chains so that Americans are creating the supplies are making the supplies that we need in order to keep our economy going in difficult times. So that's a big part of the strategy for the president. Let me just for the vice president. Let me just say one other thing. It's important to create jobs but it's important to create good quality jobs jobs that pay enough to support a family that provide retirement savings health insurance that give people the middle class lifestyle that Joe Biden is dedicated to rebuilding in the United States. That means unions. It means you're giving workers the opportunity to choice choose to organize a union or bargain collectively with their employers. It also means labor standards like a 15 dollar minimum wage strong prevailing wages for construction workers. We need good quality jobs. That's not what we've gotten under Donald Trump. It says I'm going to go back just one half step to taxes. And the reason I'm doing who a viewer actually is watching and ask a question. And I think it bears answering. When you talk about taxing people who can afford it can we really pay for the substantial programs that Vice President Biden is proposing without taxing the middle class. Because most analysis I've seen says you know you can't get that much out of the very wealthiest and the corporations . We're not. Joe Biden is not going to raise taxes on anybody who earns under four hundred thousand dollars a year. The focus is going to be on taking back the money that was given away in the Trump tax cuts to the wealthiest 1 percent and point one percent in the United States. Also tremendous giveaways to wealthy corporations on our country. He's going to raise that marginal tax rate on corporations. He's going to restore the top tax rate for the wealthiest people in our country. Also he's going to incentivize bringing jobs back to the United States. Donald Trump's tax cut bill actually subsidized American corporations moving their jobs overseas. Joe Biden is going to reverse that and use the tax code in order to force those companies to bring their jobs back to the United States so that Americans can can have those jobs .

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Biden Will Focus First on Pandemic, Then Economy, Says Advisor

Seth Harris, a former deputy U.S. Secretary of Labor and a current strategic advisor to the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign, says Biden will first focus on the coronavirus pandemic if elected. He speaks on "Balance of Power." (Source: Bloomberg)

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