哈里斯：40万亿美元美债是国家级安全问题

One of your thesis is that foreign policy begins at home. American power is not just nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers. It rests on the economic, political, and social strength of the US itself. So my question to you, Richard, is how strong are these foundations of American power? In September 2026, short answer scholars. They're not as strong as they were. And the short answer is is not. They're not as strong as they need to be.

People don't have the same confidence. Us. They don't see us the same way politically, whether it's January 6th or other sorts of polarization. Uh, economically, they look at, uh, the scale of our debt and basically say, are you Americans willing and able to deal with your obligations, your responsibilities, because you're not just any other country? We are dependent, uh, upon you. They look at frictions in our society.

So, yeah, I think there's, uh, there's unfortunately real reason to be concerned about, if you will, the state of the country. And it gives it creates a permission structure for other countries to do something similar for other actors to kind of follow in our footsteps. But we're certainly not setting an example a lot of them would want to emulate. That was the whole idea of soft power that people would see the vibrancy of our of our economic system, our political system, our society.

And they'd say, they'd say, hey, we want to be more like them. I don't think a whole lot of other countries are doing that. Plus, we're not leaning on them in the same way. I mean, we're not going to we're not going to push them. So we say to the contrary, you have these elections in Germany the other day, instead of expressing concern about our right wing pro-Russia and sympathetic to the Nazi past party, you have the president and Elon Musk congratulating them.

So, yeah, we're in a very different place. So the president has pulled the U.S. out of all kinds of multilateral organizations and agreements. You've made the argument that this kind of retreat would ultimately make Americans feel less secure and less prosperous. And we see this reflected in lots of consumer sentiment surveys. Explain the connection here. Why should an American who is struggling with housing, with health care, with retirement care, whether Washington continues to underwrite global order?

Because what happens there doesn't stay there. Here we are today, 25 years after 9/11. What was one of the great lessons of 9/11? That stuff happening in places like Afghanistan could travel here. You had sorties getting trained by terrorists, uh, in Afghanistan, coming over here, killing nearly 3000 people in a single day. What does that tell us? The idea of a border. We have to rethink it. When? More recently, Covid.

What began, whether it was in a market or a laboratory in Wuhan, China, again came here and killed so many Americans. Look at trade. The Americans have lost their jobs because of trade or new technology, or in some cases have gotten jobs because of the ability to export to others. So the idea of foreign policy being far, we really need a new template for that. We have to understand that. What happens here? Your first question affects what goes on elsewhere, but also the other way that we're not just near these two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, whatever else they are, they're not moats.

We are affected by what goes on elsewhere. Let's talk about fiscal policy. Because today, you know, collectively we're seeing the bond market. And economists, um, Sending warning signals about the national debt more than $40 trillion. How high does that $40 trillion of national public debt rank as a national security issue? It is a national security issue because the rest of the world loses confidence in our ability to manage our economy.

They'll move away from the dollar. They'll stop financing the debt. We will then have to take all sorts of economic measures, for example, raising rates not to cool and overheating an economy, but simply to attract the financing that we that we want, uh, need. And then we're not going to have that money available for other things, whether it's to build better schools or build bridges, or be nice to have some high speed rail in this, uh, uh, country or and we go down the list, there's a million things we won't be able to do.

We've already kind of gotten close to that point. The service on the debt, essentially paying the interest on our debt is now greater than what we spend on defense. Mhm. That is crazy. This is money going down the drain. We want to spend money, the budget on productive things. We want to invest in ourselves and our future. We don't want to simply pay off our past profligacy and that is what we're doing. Well, it brings to mind this, um, erosion of trust.

And it's not just, uh, foreign countries trust in America. It's also our own trust ourselves. There's a new poll from AP NORC that shows more Americans have stopped believing in the government, uh, public trust in federal government, information about inflation and cost of living is now 18% from 26% in 2024. Trust in, uh, information about the labor market down to 15%. Trust in elections and politics down to 13%. Can government, um or our institutions rebuild or repair that trust?

Richard. First of all, it's really depressing to hear statistics like that. That's kind of what you get when politicians continually tear down the government, raise questions about the legitimacy of our elections. When we looked at who took the 2020 elections, we looked at it. It's 60 court cases. There was nothing there. When you have people talking about the deep state, as though the government, the tens of millions of Americans who work for the government or somehow something else.

No. They're us. There are our wives, our husbands, our children, our neighbors, and we want the best and brightest to go into government. We need to trust our country, our government, because we're so affected by its decisions, what it does and doesn't do. Look, it's going to take a few things. It's going to take leadership that stops tearing us down. Uh, that would help, uh, from the top, but also from the bottom. We need to, for example, have civics taught in our schools.

You should not be able to get a high school or college degree. I would argue without understanding the basics of democracy, the relationships between this country and its individual citizens, your rights, but also your obligations. What do you owe this country? We want more people to do public service. Well, it's military or civilian, international or domestic. We have to rebuild the bonds that made this country so special.

So when de Tocqueville came over here, what, 250 years ago, he looked at America and he said, wow, this is a country that works together. That's unified. Again, here we are, 9/11. What happened after 9/11? Unity. We came together. What did President Bush do? He went to the mosque in Washington and said, we are all Americans, Whatever our religion, however we dress, we have to be there for one another. We need to hear a little bit more of that.

What's your personal strategy for investing? For saving? Look, I'm not smart enough to do market timing, so I tend to invest for the long term. I'm also heavily diversified. Uh, I'm going easy right now. I'm a pessimist by nature, as you know, from having had me on various, uh, shows. And there are times in life, I think, to make money. And there's also times in life not to lose money. So I would think I'm increasingly in the latter camp.

So I'm still pretty invested. I'm also not a kid anymore because of where you are in your investing career or because of where we are geopolitically. The idea that we're going to get through the next couple of years without some type of a crisis, we haven't had a recession in a decade and a half. We talked about the $40 trillion debt. You have to be a real optimist to think that something's not going to happen. Energy inf