Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio knows what happens to a community when a major manufacturer shuts down a local plant. It happened to his constituents when General Motors closed the doors at its plant in Lordstown, Ohio earlier this year.
That's why Ryan told Cheddar that he's so focused on making sure American workers are prepared for the future of manufacturing and wants to drive investment in the electric vehicle market.
"How do we work with the private sector to dominate the electric vehicle market?" he said Wednesday. "There's going to be 10 million electric vehicles made in the next 10 years. I want half of those made in the United States. [You've] got to have an agenda, someone engineering how we are going to do that."
On the debate stage Tuesday night, Ryan unleashed his plan to create a new Cabinet role in the White House: Chief Manufacturing Officer.
He later told Cheddar the role would "help us organize how we dominate sectors in the economy," through industries like wind, solar, and electric vehicles. It would all be incorporated to reverse climate change, he said.
"I don't like the fact that this system is so screwed up, that General Motors cuts workers, closes plants, and their stock price goes up," Ryan said. "That's a busted system that we need to fix."
Ryan's district is far from the only American town that has faced hardship from closed plants and massive layoffs. This week GM is shutting the doors at a transmission plant in Warren, Michigan, a short drive away from the Democratic primary debate stage in Detroit.
Nevertheless, the 1,300 jobs that will be cut at the Warren plant did not dominate the discussion at the presidential debate in the Motor City.
Rather, it was health care, and 2020 dems were widely split on their plan for Americans. Senators Sanders and Warren pushed their progressive plan to take away private insurance and implement a single-payer Medicare-for-All plan.
Ryan is concerned that that abolishing the private option will hurt the union workers he has fought for as a U.S. Congressman in a struggling auto manufacturing district.
In fact, during the debate, CNN moderator Jake Tapper told Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that more than 6,000 union members in Michigan would have to give up their private insurance plan if his plan to abolish private insurance went through. Sanders responded that his plan would be "better."
Ryan quickly interrupted, saying, "You don't know that."
Even ahead of this week's debate, labor unions have been weighing in on the issue of health care.
In a statement to ThinkProgress, UAW spokesman Brian Rothenberg said, "The UAW is focused on the millions of American's [sic] that face peril over anti-worker court challenges to the ACA that can negatively impact the economy and jobs."
Rothenberg added, "Regardless of how this sorts out, the ACA is an important first step, and the UAW has a historic role in working toward health care as a right and not a privilege for all Americans."
To Cheddar, Ryan said of Sanders' plan, these sorts of ideas are "dangerous." He went on to say, "Our focus needs to be on helping working class people make ends meet."
As the U.S. comes up on the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.,A.C. Thompson, investigative reporter at ProPublica, joined Cheddar's Baker Machado to discuss updates to American Insurrection by FRONTLINE, ProPublica and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. The documentary investigates the attack on the Capitol touched off by the lie that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump but with new information gleaned since the event including interviews with lawmakers and law enforcement and the evolution of groups like the Boogaloo Boys and the Proud Boys behind the attack. "In some ways those groups that were kind of the vanguard of January 6 are maybe no longer relevant because their message is everywhere," he said.
A new report from ProPublica and the Washington Post found that Facebook Groups played a major role in the spread of misinformation linked to the January 6 insurrection with more than 650,000 posts claiming that Joe Biden's election victory was illegitimate.
Millions of Americans with young children have relied on the child tax credit since the federal government began issuing checks in July 2021. The last round of payments was sent out just before the Christmas holiday — at the same time as the omicron variant surged. Leah Hamilton, associate professor of social work at Appalachian State University, joined Cheddar to discuss what the end to the tax credit means as the U.S. sees the end of many relief programs and its highest number of COVID cases since the start of the pandemic. "It'll become harder for families to meet their basic needs, increasing national childhood poverty rates and the proportion of families who have difficulty putting food on the table, maintaining stable housing, and paying their bills," Hamilton said. She also pointed to research that the credit as a long-term investment in children offsets claims that it contributes to macroeconomic impacts like inflation.
U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over the week-end, just days after he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The call comes as Washington prepares to meet with Moscow on January 10, as tensions mount over Russia's military build up near its border with Ukraine. Cheddar News speaks with Mustafa Tameez, a former advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, about the issue.
Several Silicon Valley insiders are being accused of contorting a 1990s-era tax break to avoid taxes on millions of dollars of investment profits. The tax break is known as the qualified small business stock exemption, and it allows early investors in certain companies to avoid half of the taxes on up to $10 million in capital gains. A piece recently published in the New York Times says venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz replicated the tax exemption by giving shares of companies to friends and family, who would otherwise face a 23.8% capital gains bill. The CEO of Roblox is also accused of replicating the tax break for his family members at least 12 times. Although the loophole known as 'stacking' is considered to be legal, the Times piece implies that the exemption has been manipulated for the ultra-wealthy to become more wealthy. Greycroft co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Alan Patricof joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Chris Sommerfeldt, City Hall reporter for the New York Daily News, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he discusses both the wins and losses of Bill de Blasio's eight years as New York City Mayor.
The push to regulate the gig worker economy is gaining steam as the share of workers who participate in freelancing through businesses like Uber and Lyft have also exponentially grown during the pandemic. Employment attorney Mark Kluger, founding partner at Kluger Healey, LLC, joined Cheddar to break down how the battle to reclassify gig workers will continue in the new year, and why the issue continues to generate conflict. "More and more workers are using gig work as their primary source of income and as a result of that they are not like employees in the sense that they don't have benefits like health insurance," Kluger noted.
