Welcome to the stage, former Vice President joe biden. Hello, sir. Nice to see you. Welcome. Hi, folks. Reporting for duty, sir. Weve got a lot of questions from the audience. I just want to start out. The president just today has been acquitted. Youre kidding. Abuse of power and obstruction of justice. Perhaps you heard. Hes already calling it. He said its a victory on the impeachment hoax on twitter. Is this a victory for the president . I cant imagine being president of the United States and having all of one party plus someone from your own party vote to say you should be thrown out of office and view that as a victory. As we stand here tonight, 86 of iowa precincts have finally reported their vote counts. Youre currently in fourth place. Youve called what happened there a gut punch. What happened . Well, i think what happened look, lets put this in perspective. There are a total of, what, 44 delegates are going to come out of that. And it looks like its going to break down somewhere between 7 and 15, among the top four of us. You need 1,900 delegates to become the president of the United States or become the nominee. So its a i expect it to do better. And i expect that our organization would perform better. But the fact is, im happy to be here in New Hampshire. All right. I think the crowd is happy to have you here. I want to go to the audience. This is this is douglas f failin, a Family Doctor from concord and hes currently undecided. Hey, doc, how are you . Good, thank you. So the Affordable Care act did a lot of good for patients, but it also had flaws. And that subsequently has been gutted by court decisions, most notably the removal of the individual mandate. How do you plan to lower premium costs in a market that still includes private insurance in a country where the individual mandate is gone and lowrisk healthy patients do not enter the marketplace to help lower premiums . Well, first of all, im going to change number one, im going to restore the cuts that were made by administrative rule by this president of the United States. By the way, i was fascinated to learn hes the reason why we cover preexisting conditions. I heard that in the state of the union. I didnt know that before, doc. But any rate, what im going to do is restore the cuts, number one. Reduce the cost of outofpocket expenses and premiums that need to be paid, subsidizing it more. And im going to add a public option, a medicare option for those who want it. So if you have your own private insurance youve negotiated with your company and you have a good policy and you like it, you get to keep it. If they cancel the policy, you can immediately buy into the what will become the biden plan and or you can, in fact, if you dont have the money and you qualify for medicaid, you will automatically be admitted into the plan. Number two, i think that, also, its important to note that, you know, we made Mental Health priority and priority relating to drug abuse that has to be covered by with parody, just like if you went and broke your arm or someone showed up in your office with another physical break or ailment. In addition to that, we made sure that we made im adding 1 billion in that plan for dealing with drug abuse and opioids. And that, in fact, is really important, because you know whats happening in this state and all across america. I go into opioids later. But my generic point is that it costs 740 billion. Thats a lot of money over ten years. I can pay for it all by making sure that people pay their capital gains, not at 20 , but whatever their tax rate is. That would raise 800 billion and pay for everything. And its not a 35 trillion plan over ten years, which cannot get passed. I want to follow up on that. Senator sanders, you have been, i guess, escalating your pointing out your differences with senator sanders on medicare for all, while youre not supporting that. Youve said that the middle class under senator sanders plan is going to pay a big, big premium. Is senator sanders being honest about his plan . Well, he was, recently. He was on your show or someone elses where he said they asked, how much is it going to cost and he said, nobody knows. Nobody knows. Well, initially he said it was going to cost the middle class to raise their taxes for the middle class. Now hes saying, nobody knows. Now, ive been around a while. Ive gotten a lot of important bills passed through the congress. Can you imagine going to congress, democrats or republicans, and saying, by the way, lets have medicare for all, how much is it going to cost, whos going to pay for it . Well, i dont know, well all find out later. But you have to be realistic. Youve got to level with the american people. Tell them the truth, what you think your plan is going to cost, the estimate of it, how youre going to pay for it and how youre going to get it done. I was able to get with president obama, the obama plan passed. I was on the floor, making sure it got every vote. Ive done it, i know how to get it done and i can get it done right away, not in ten years. I want to introduce you to kenneth berlin, a retired Financial Systems manager, he also serves as the vice chair for the New Hampshire state commission on aging. Hes from manchester and is still undecided. Kenneth . Welcome, mr. Vice president. Thank you. Its an honor. How exactly will you protect Social Security . I tell you exactly how im going to do it. Number one, you know, theres two pieces to the protection. Sorry, i have a little bit ive been talking too much. A little hoarse. Number one, im going to make sure that we, in fact, are able to have Social Security for the students here when their time when Social Security is available. Two, ill make sure were in a position where we can, in fact, see to it that those folks who lost a spouse or Social Security payment was reduced, or theyre out living way beyond their coverage that they, in fact, can have it raised. Well, how you going to do that, biden . Right now, as you know better than most, we pay about 6. 2 out of your salary, up to roughly 130,000. Ive been proposing for some time that we do the same thing for everybody making over 400,000. So, for example, you, in fact, make 60 grand, you get 6. 2 taken out of your salary. If you make 130,000, you get 2. 6. If you make a million, you pay the exact same amount as someone maki making 130. By moving to keep the tax at 6. 2 for everyone making every dollar over 400,000, we can pay for everything im talking about and you know we can make it solvent for all of these kids here. Thats why its important. Thats what i do. I want to follow up. Senator sanders has taken issue with your record on Social Security. Hedefender, his words, of the program. How do you convince voters that you are . Look at the facts. A paul krugman, new york times, said, its a lie. Hes simply dead wrong. Look at what politifact has said. Theyve misrepresented my position on Social Security. Whether he did it or not, his supporters put out a clip that took out a contest of what i said. Folks, ive been a strong supporter of Social Security. My whole career. And the fact of the matter is, one has a concrete plan on how to make it work, and i think i can get it done. I want you to meet trevor mccayden, an independent from rollingsford, whos a student here. Hes currently undecided. Trevor . Hi, trevor. Vice president biden, you suggest that american fossil fuel workers learn how to code. What do you say to many of baby boomer generation who are too young to retire, but feel that they are too old to embrace drastic Career Change at this stage in their life . What i say that were going to provide significant opportunities. Were going to create 6 million new jobs. For example, the ibw just endorsed me today. The International Brotherhood of electric workers. Theyre going to be affected by moving in the direction of getting to net zero emissions. But every new, every new plan we have for infrastructure has to be green. For example, were going to be able to place 500,000 charging stations along every new highway we build. We can afford to do that and its easy. Were going to own the electric vehicle market. Were going to create millions of jobs, millions of jobs. Were going to invest, for example, we have a circumstance where we invest more money in new technologies that, in fact, will get us to net zero emissions than we spent sending the man to the moon. We should become the net exporters of this technology. In addition, the next president of the United States not only had to deal with whether or not youre going to get to net zero and have a plan, we make up 15 of the worlds problems, and we have to demonstrate, we are part of the solution. A significant part. But 85 of the pollution that we deal with comes from the rest of the world. And so i was part of putting together the paris climate accord. I would immediately rejoin it. And i would immediately bring in the singlebiggest polluters in the first hundred days to the United States and say, we have to up the ante in how we move forward. And well create significant jobs, a transition will be made for people who are in fact in the business now and fossil fuel businesses as well, to be able to move to other incomes that can make a significant amount of money that theyre making, but it takes some retraining. Its going to have to happen. Mr. Vice president , this is martha dickerson, shes a Library Assistant here. Hello, martha, how are you . Hello, Vice President biden. We hear about the plight of the middle class a lot. How come theres so little mention of the working poor. People have two or three jobs cobbled together, none of them with benefits. Theyre too exhausted to spend time with their kids. How would you go about raising wages . Well, i would do it three ways. First of all win talk about the working poor all the time. I know they call me middle class joe, because they think im middle class joe because im concerned about the middle class and the reason im concerned about the middle class is to define an avenue to get to the middle class, to be able to stay in the middle class, and when the middle class does well, everybody has a shot. People have a why up and in fact the wealthy do very well. The way i do it, first of all, no one should be working in the United States of america, 40 hours a week, and living in poverty. And thats why we have to raise, nationally, the standard of 15 an hour for every worker in america, number one. Number two, we have to be in a position where we provide for the opportunities at the early stages, and youre a library, how many of the folks, when you werent a library at a college, how many folks do you know who come into the library and, in fact, dont have any idea how to proceed . Well, i propose that we, for example, triple the amount of money we spend for title 1 schools. That is disadvantaged schools economically. They dont have the wherewithal to invest the money in their schools. Right now title i schools, and there are many here in New Hampshire and all across america, they get 15 billion a year. I raised that to 45 billion a year. Which means every single solitary child, age 3, 4, and 5 will be in school, not day care, school. And every university including this great one and others point out that if you do that, you increase exponentially the prospect of that child being able to go all the way through. All the way through high school and go beyond high school. Somewhere between 48 and 54 of the people who go to preschool, and i mean age 3, 4, and 5, not day care, school. You, in fact, wipe out the discrepancies that exist when you come from families that dont have opportunities. Thirdly, i raised teacher salaries, raised teacher salaries in that process. Fourthly, we make sure that we double the number of School Psychologists and school nurses. How many times in this state have you heard, if arall from New Hampshire, where the School District makes a choice between, do we hire two more teachers or a nurse . What do we do . And it provides social workers, because we know an awful lot can be done if i only have 1 to spend, i spend it preschool rather than posthigh school. But we can do both. I can get into that later. But the biggest thing is to provide the opportunity to be able to get these jobs. Equip everybody, everybody, no matter what their zip code is, to have access to a goodpaying job in the middle class that in fact gets to the middle class in the 21st century, no matter what zip code youre born in. Mr. Vice president , yesterday i want to ask you about something that happened at the state of the union. You were awarded the president ial medal of freedom, which is the highest civilian honor by president obama, and im wondering it was obviously a very emotional moment for you. I remember the ceremony. Last night, President Trump awarded the same medal to Rush Limbaugh. Im wondering what you thought when you learned about that. [ laughter and [ applause ] look, Rush Limbaugh will spend his entire time on the air dividing people, belittling people, talking about how talking about blacks in ways, africanamericans in ways that anyway, i do feel badly, i mean this sincerely, that hes suffering from a terminal illness. So he has my empathy and sympathy no matter what his background is. But the idea that he is a state of the union receives a medal that is of the highest honor that can be given to a civilian, i find, um, quite frankly, driven more by trying to maintain your rightwing political credentials than it is anything else. I mean, if you read some of the things that rush has said about people, their backgrounds, their ethnicity, how he speaks to them, i dont think he speaks i dont think he understands the american code of decency and honor. I just really but, look. This is donald trump. I want to take a short break. Were going to be back. Were going to be back more with former Vice President joe biden right after this. If youre 55 and up, tmobile has a plan designed just for you. And, for a limited time only, were making it an even better deal. Now you can get two lines for only 55. That includes unlimited talk, text and data. With no annual service contracts. It also includes talk, text and data when traveling in mexico and canada. So if youre 55 and up, you can now get two lines for only 55. Because at tmobile, we have a plan designed just for you. Uh, fifteen minutes could save you 15 ain . Or more on car insurance. I think were gonna swap over to over seventyfive years of savings and service. 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Live sports with realtime stats and scores. Access to the most 4k content. And your movies and shows to go. The best tv experience is the best tv value. Xfinity x1. Simple. Easy. Awesome. Xfinity. The future of awesome. Welcome back. Were in New Hampshire with former Vice President joe biden for the first of several cnn democratic live town halls. Vice president biden, this is jennifer kuno. She works for a special education nonprofit. Shes from manchester and is currently undecided. Jennifer . Thanks for what you do. Thanks very much, Vice President biden. Many young voters are concerned that youre an establishment candidate. They feel youre out of touch, especially among young female voters. How do we know that youre in tune with the needs, priorities, and philosophies of the Younger Generation . Look at my record. I no ones done more i found as a professor at the university of pennsylvania young people, in fact, are very concerned about guns. I have the most advanced plan for guns, im the only one thats taken on the nra and beaten them. In terms of climate change, one of the great concerns of a generation, of a Younger Generation, and i have laid out clearly a plan that is widely accepted as being very forward leaning. I find that they are considerably concerned about education and how they can pay for their education, get access to it. Thats why i proposed Free Community college and being able to write off your student debt if, in fact, you volunteer and you get involved in an agency working, for example, womens organizations. So i find myself in a position where i think its mainly because ive been out of office for three years that i dont think a lot of the younger people know my record. Im very proud of the record and i think the more they see of it, the more im likely to get the kind of support i get on campuses around the country. Vice president biden, this is George Matthews from nashua. He works in manufacturing and is also currently undecided. Welcome, george. Hey, georg