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U.S. Economy Adds 390,000 Jobs in May, Unemployment Stable at 3.6 Percent; January 6 Committee Announces First Public Hearing to Be Thursday in Primetime; President Biden Speaks About May Jobs Report. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired June 03, 2022 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:30:00]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: But with this inflationary environment, there are questions about that. Is there anything in the jobs report that you think should give Americans comfort about the very high inflation, very high prices?

MARTY WALSH, LABOR SECRETARY: Well, I think the fact that we're able to add 390,000 jobs, I think that should make people happy. We've added about 400,000 per month for the last three months. The economy is still going steady and strong as far as the job growth is happening in the country. There's room for more job growth. We're seeing areas potentially in leisure and hospitality and government hiring and in other places that there're opportunities for people for employment. So, even with inflationary pressures that we're seeing out there, people still need jobs, they need good paying jobs. So, we need to continue to create those pathways into good paying jobs.

On the other side of the coin, we have to make sure we continue to battle down inflation. The president is clear and laser-focused on this. He came up the other day and talked about how the Federal Reserve is an independent agency and allowing the Federal Reserve to do what they do, as well as working across the government to bring the costs down at the kitchen table.

HARLOW: So, Secretary Walsh, you hit on an important point there that The New York Times pointed out well this morning when they wrote, bigger job gains, faster wage growth, more consumer spending are all, in normal times, signs of a healthy economy, but these are not normal times. It's a fact, is it not, that we actually need this job market to cool off to bring down inflation?

WALSH: I don't know if we necessarily need to cool off. I think that a lot of people have different opinions. Economists are -- have different philosophies on what we need to do here. And I think what we need to do, quite honestly, is if we can -- my job is to continue to try to create better pathways into good paying jobs for people in America. At the end of the day, people want to enter into the middle class.

We have to -- I'm not saying we ignore the inflation. We have to continue to tackle the inflation issues. We also have to continue to push to get people into good paying jobs as we move forward here as an economy.

HARLOW: Okay. I would just say we'll move on, most economists would agree, you do need cooling off in the labor market to tackle 8 percent plus.

But let me ask you something that's key right now, and Jim and I were chatting about it this morning, is teachers. You've got a lot of hiring, but you have got a major issue nationwide with teachers leaving their jobs. I mean, just looking at Houston, an independent school district says 800 teachers won't be returning to the classroom next year. That's 1 in 12 teachers. Axios reports more than 500 teachers resigning from the Des Moines metro schools. What is the administration doing to address this? Do you think it's a big problem?

WALSH: Well, I'll tell you, it's teachers and nurses, quite honestly, and both of those industries have been hit really hard by the pandemic, both the stresses, the illnesses, and just what teachers have had to put up with over the last two years with teaching remotely, the stress of it.

So, the Department of Labor, we're working with the teachers unions, we're working with states and local governments to really think about how do we fill those gaps. I mean, this isn't going to be just a -- this isn't a federal government resolution. This is going to be a local government resolution as well. We need to pay a lot of attention to this space when it comes to teachers and nurses, quite, honestly.

HARLOW: Okay. It sounds like you are concerned.

This week, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said this. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMIE DIMON, CEO, JPMORGAN CHASE: Right now, it's kind of sunny, things are going fine, everyone thinks the Fed can handle this. That hurricane is right out there, down the road, coming our way. We just don't know if it's a minor one or a Super Stormy Sandy or -- yes, Sandy or Andrew or something like that. And you better brace yourself.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Does the administration agree with Dimon, that an economic hurricane of some magnitude is coming?

WALSH: Well, certainly, we can't predict the future, but I think we're all watching and the policies that the president is putting out there and that we're all working on, whether it's the creation of jobs or whether it's dealing with inflation, certainly, this has been a very challenging time for us in this economy over the last 18 months here.

Certainly, I'm not going to blame the pandemic and everything else going on, but we have to continue to move forward a step at a time here to prevent that, quite honestly, hurricane that Jamie is talking about from hitting us directly.

HARLOW: So, you don't necessarily -- you're not saying Jamie Dimon is wrong. I hear you saying he might be right.

WALSH: No. What I heard Jamie Dimon just say was that we were potentially going to get hit with a hurricane. It could be a severe rainstorm or it could be worse than that. And I think that there's no question about that. We can't really predict the future right now. I think it's uncertain how it's going to be in the future.

HARLOW: Okay. I want to talk about some possible solutions. I thought it was interesting that Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna wrote in The New York Times yesterday in an op-ed, there is way more Biden can do to lower prices and this is what he wrote.

[10:35:02]

Mr. Biden should convene an emergency task force empowered to lower prices and address shortages. We need an all-out mobilization, not just a few ad hoc initiatives reacting to headlines.

That's not criticism from, you know, a Republican. This is from a fellow Democrat who says the administration could do more than it's doing. What do you think?

WALSH: Well, I wouldn't say the president is responding to headlines, first and foremost. I think that the president has been talking about inflationary pressures from the end of last year and how to deal with those. And the administration has been working collectively if you go back to December when inflation was being talked about and began to start to rise, we were having challenges, of course, with our supply chain.

The president put together a task force, we said we're working on bring down those costs. The next thing, we had Putin's war in Ukraine and we saw problems with gas, as the president released some reserves that we had to tackle those issues. Clearly, we need to do more there as a country to bring those gas prices down.

So, I wouldn't say the president is responding to those headlines. The president laid out a very clear plan the other day when he talked about bringing down the prices and the costs at the kitchen table for food and gas and oil for families, the struggles that they have, allowing the Federal Reserve not to be micromanaged by past administrations, allowing the Federal Reserve to do their job.

And we're going to continue to see now the path as we move forward here, seeing these prices come down. We're living in a once-in-a- lifetime kind of situation here with the pandemic and the war in Ukraine and other challenges that we're having in this country. So, I don't think we can measure this to anything that we've seen in the past, even when you talk about Jamie Dimon earlier, he didn't really -- Jamie Dimon can't even point this to any other period in the history of our country because we've never seen anything like this.

HARLOW: Let us hope it is once in a lifetime or beyond. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, thanks, feel better soon.

WALSH: Thank you. HARLOW: Jim?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Coming up next, former Attorney General Bill Barr will go on the record with the January 6th select committee. But who does the committee want to testify, when those hearings go public, including in primetime?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:40:00]

HARLOW: The committee investigating the January 6th insurrection says it has previously unseen material that will be revealed during its upcoming public hearings, the first one, I should note, in the evening, in primetime, expecting a lot of eyeballs for that. Yet the panel still has not announced which witnesses will testify.

SCIUTTO: The committee has interviewed dozens of witnesses behind closed doors so far, including the former attorney general, William Barr, who sources say, met with House investigators for more than two hours yesterday.

Joining us now to discuss what this all means, CNN Senior Legal Analyst, former Federal Prosecutor Laura Coates. Laura, great to have you.

I mean, it strikes me, there are two different standard to be aware of as we approach these hearings. One is the legal standard for possible criminal referral to the Justice Department and the other is the political one, what will actually damage Trump and Republicans, if anything, as a result of these hearings. And I just wonder, in your view, what do you need to see and hear in each of those categories to make a difference?

LAURA COATES, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Well, what's so important here is the timing is everything. The decision to put this in primetime really puts on full display, Jim, the idea they want as many eyeballs on this as possible because it's the court of public opinion. It's not a criminal trial. The legislative branch is not going to put any of these people on trial. They may refer others for criminal prosecution but they have a legislative function in trying codify and deter and prevent.

Remember, one of the people that might be testifying is a former federal judge who armed Vice President Mike Pence with the tools constitutionally to discuss why he could not try to follow the big lie strategy of overturning the election that was fair and free.

And so looking at this from that perspective, you have the two categories you laid out. On the one hand you have the politics, the idea of how do you prevent that from being a dry run for the 2024 presidential election. Even though we don't yet know who the Republican candidate will be, if 2020 was a dry run for 2024, they have got to do something to prevent the idea of the will of the people being overturned. They have that directive. On the notion of the court of public opinion, so to speak, and the legality issues of it, they are the ones to right the law. So, if there are shortcomings, if there are loopholes, if there are unclear or ambiguous statutes that will lend themselves to being, you know, misconstrued, they have got to sort of reconcile that now. That's the function of this particular panel.

HARLOW: It's interesting, we don't know who will testify, but we know some of the folks who have been called to testify. You've got Pence's former general counsel, Greg Jacob. You've got a conservative, notably, former federal judge, Michael Luttig, who was key in putting out those tweets to really discount his former Law Clerk John Eastman's outlandish theory to try to overturn the election. You have got former Pence Chief of Staff Marc Short, who was with Pence on January 6th. I wonder what that strategy signals to you.

[10:45:00]

COATES: I think it signals the idea that, for many people, look at the timing of it again. We're more than a year away from what happened on January 6th and we can't pretend that the American public or appetite and patience and attention span is infinite. And so they have to really envelope the public to make them understand why this is still relevant.

And so by bringing in people who were across the ideological spectrum, they're also trying to undercut the notion that this is somehow a witch hunt, that all too common phrase that was used for the better part of four years during Trump's administration, a notion that everything that involves a Democrat pursuing an objective must necessarily be a witch hunt against a Republican and have a target in mind of Trump. They have to expand that notion by having this broad spectrum of people in to say, this is about a legislative and oversight function and what happened on January 6th and beyond.

SCIUTTO: Yes, and it doesn't move the dial, right? We saw similar effort for the impeachment post-January 6th, that did not move it significantly enough, we'll see if it happens here. Laura Coates, thanks so much.

In our next year, one of the members of the January 6th select committee, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, will be on to talk more about the upcoming public hearings, also weigh in on the gun control debate in Congress. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:50:00]

SCIUTTO: Live pictures here, President Biden addressing the nation on new job numbers from his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach. Let's have a listen.

JOE BIDEN, U.S. PRESIDENT: -- to lower the cost for American families. I know that even with today's good news, a lot of Americans remain anxious and I understand the feeling. I grew up in a family about 100 miles from here that if the price of gas went up, you felt it. It was a discussion at the kitchen table. And there's no denying high prices around gasoline and food are a real problem for people.

But there's every reason for the American people to feel confident that we'll meet these challenges because of the enormous progress we've made on the economy, the Americans can tackle inflation from a position of strength, still a problem, we can tackle it from a position of strength. The purpose that we've set out to accomplish and the progress we've made, I think, is critical.

At the time I took office about 16 months ago, the economy had stalled and COVID was out of control. Today, thanks to the economic plan and the vaccination plan that my administration put in action, America has achieved the most robust recovery in modern history.

[10:50:06]

Just two years removed from the worst economic crisis since the great depression. The job market is the strongest it has been since just after World War II. We've got more evidence of that today. We learned in that in May, the economy -- new jobs, bringing the total since I took office to 8.7 million jobs, an all-time record. We learned that more Americans entered the labor force in May. In fact, working age people have come back into the workforce at a faster rate in this recovery than at any point in the last 40 years. That means that unemployment rate is near historic lows and the number of Americans on unemployment benefits has gone from record highs to record lows.

With millions of Americans moving up to better jobs, with better pay, and American manufacturing is booming, 600,000 new manufacturing jobs created since I took office. But it isn't only about jobs. Since I took office, families are carrying less debt. Their average savings are up. The recent survey from the Federal Reserve found that more Americans feel financially comfortable than any time since the survey began in 2013. That confidence and comfortability is part of the reason why Americans applied to start more new small businesses last year than ever before in American history.

And because of our historically strong growth, we have strength in Medicare and social security programs that millions of families rely on. Yesterday, I learned that social security and Medicare trust funds will be able to pay benefits for longer than previously projected before we passed the American rescue plan. The reason, a faster than expected recovery in jobs, earnings, economic growth, it's all strength in the financial prospects for these bedrock programs.

In fact, America is stronger in an economic position than just about any other country in the world. Independent experts have projected that U.S. economy could grow faster than China's economy this year. That hasn't happened since 1976, nearly one half century ago.

The point is this. We've laid an economic foundation that's historically strong. And now we're moving forward to a new moment where we can build on that foundation, build a future of stable, steady growth so we can bring down inflation without sacrificing all the historic gains we've made. And that's what we're beginning to see in today's job report.

With today's numbers, the jobs over the last three months have averaged about 400,000 jobs per month. That's historically robust and a sign we're beginning to shift to steady growth after rapidly recovering 600,000 jobs a month over the prior six months.

And as we move to a new period of stable, steady growth, we should expect to see more moderation. We aren't likely to see the kind of blockbuster job reports month after month, like we had over this past year, but that's a good thing. That's a sign of a healthy economy, with steady growth, rising wages for working families, everyday costs easing up, and shrinking the deficit. That stability puts us in a strong position to tackle what is clearly a problem, inflation.

I've been very clear that fighting inflation is my top economic priority. On Tuesday, I spoke about one element of my inflation plan, giving the Federal Reserve the space they need to operate. Today, I would like to address the two additional elements of my plan to tackle inflation. One, bringing down the cost of everyday goods for families, and, two, bringing down the federal deficit at the same time.

Bringing down the costs, here's where we stand. The two challenges on the minds of most working families are prices at the pump and prices at the grocery store. Both of these challenges have been directly exacerbated by Putin's war in Ukraine. The price of gas is up $1.40 since the beginning of the year when Putin began amassing troops at the Ukrainian border.

This is a Putin price hike. Putin's war has raised the price of food because Ukraine and Russia are two of the world's major breadbaskets for wheat and corn, one of the basic products for so many foods around the world.

Ukraine has 20 million tons of grain in storage right now, and it's been in storage since the last harvest. Normally, that would have already been exported into the world market. But because of Putin's invasion and blockade of a port, which they could take that grain out for the rest of the world, it's not. It's not.

And, look, I understand that families who are struggling probably don't care why the prices are up. They just want them to go down.

[10:55:01]

Joe, what are you going to do to bring them down? But it's important that we understand the root of the problem, so we can take steps to solve it.

I've been upfront with the American people from the outset, that there would be a cost here at home of Putin's decision to brutally and savagely invade a sovereign nation. But as your president, I remain committed to doing everything in my power to blunt the impact on American families. That's exactly what I'm doing. I led the world to coordinate the largest release of global oil reserves in history, 240 million barrels, to boost global supply and keep prices from rising even more. I directed the sale of gasoline using home bio fuels this summer, and I'm working closely with our European partners to get more of the grain locked in Ukraine right now out in the world market, which could help bring down prices. There's ways to do that over land, which we could talk about at another time. But actions have already helped to blunt that what would have been an even larger Putin price hike.

As I said, I'm going to continue to use every tool available to me to further blunt those price hikes as we move forward. But the fact is this, there's more than one way to solve this problem. If food and gas prices are going to be elevated by Putin's price hike, one way we can make things a little better for families is helping them save on other basic items their family needs on a monthly basis, like their utility bills, their internet bills, their prescription drug bills, and other costs like housing.

My goal is to make sure that the end of the month, families have a little more breathing room than they have now. For example, here's something we can do right now. Congress could help ease the cost for families right away by passing my clean energy investment proposal that I proposed that's been sitting there, things like tax credits for businesses to produce clean energy, the tax cuts for families to make their homes more energy efficient. That's what it results in.

I met with nearly a dozen CEOs of America's largest utility companies, such as Southern Company, an American electric power. They told me that if we pass the investments, they will make immediately lower -- they'll immediately lower the average family's energy cost by about $500 a year. That would help a lot. It would make up for a lot. In the long run, it would help families make America truly energy independent. So, in the future American families are no longer subject to the whims of a dictator half a world away controlling oil.

It's not just utility bills though -- lower prescription drug costs by giving Medicare the power to negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies on how much they can charge, just like they do with the veterans' administration. Right now -- more than X amount of dollars for your insulin. Well, they can decide not to sell it at all or they can sell it at the price that the government says they'll pay for, bringing down the average cost of prescription drugs, by capping that cost of insulin, by the way, at no more than $35 a month. It costs them less than $10 to make it. And some families, it means hundreds of dollars a month and sometimes hundreds of dollars a year depending on what ailment they're trying to deal with. Some with diabetes, for example, is hundreds of dollars per year, someone with arthritis, it could be thousands of dollars per year.

I've laid out a plan to lower rent and mortgage costs, the largest costs most families face around a third of a typical family's budget because of a shortage of housing. Building more than a million more housing units and closing the shortfall on affordable housing in this country will do that. I've laid out a plan to lower the cost of high-speed internet by working with the 20 leading internet service providers to cut their prices and raise their speeds. For tens of millions of households, this could lower what they have to pay for high-speed internet by $50 a month or more. And nearly 40 percent of households in America qualify for these savings. And, by the way, you can find out if you would be eligible visiting -- by getinternet.gov, getinternet.gov. I'll say it again, getinternet.gov, to see if you qualify.

I laid out a plan to lower the cost of everyday goods that move through our supply chains to stores and family's doorsteps. For example, at the State of the Union, I called on Congress to crack down on foreign-owned shipping companies that have raised their prices to transport goods by as much as 1,000 percent, 1,000 percent. And that obviously raises the cost of the goods on those ships to consumers.

The Senate has passed legislation, and I'm hopeful the House can do the same, and send me legislation in the coming weeks to crack down on these companies and help lower overall costs.

[11:00:06]

And my plan does all this without raising a penny in taxes.