He destroyed every Republican fiscal talking point in 5 minutes.
He then ended the interview with this when Chris asked him how to end the debt issue.
CM: I feel like sanity has just walked into the door. Bruce, so great, now that I realize you’re smart and have the numbers, give me two seconds. Any way to solve this kerfuffle?
BB: I think at this point, there’s nothing that can pass the House of Representatives.
CM: Because it’s too much of a zoo?
BB: Yeah, i think a good chunk of the Republican caucus is either stupid, crazy, ignorant or craven cowards, who are desperately afraid of the tea party people, and rightly so.
CM: Bruce Bartlett is former Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary under the first George Bush and a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan. Bottom line, let’s look at the numbers right now. We’ve got a chart coming up. This shows the Bush tax cuts were responsible for increasing the debts. Now, we have about a $14 trillion debt right now, half came out since the turn of the century, and more than 40% of that has been from tax cuts.
BB: That’s right. When Bush took office, we had a debt of about $6 trillion. The projections from the CBO were that we were going to run a $6 trillion surplus. By this point, if we had done nothing, we would have paid off the dead debt, but we added about $3 trillion of tax cuts. We lost about $3 trillion of revenue because of the slower economy and added about $6 trillion of spending, largely due to two unfinished wars and a Medicare drug benefits and a lot of other things. So, instead of getting — paying off the debt–we ended up with about a $14 trillion debt.
CM: Some of these clowns, not all of them, running around saying Barack Obama is a Socialist, he drove up the national debt to $14 trillion and dance around in a circle and congratulate each other. That’s not true.
BB: No, i think the dirty secret is that Obama is a moderate conservative. If I were a liberal democrat, I probably would be upset.
CM: The point is a $1 trillion debt, and another poring (?) is from the prescription drug bill. The whole rest of that is from a lousy economy under Bush and these two wars he came up with.
BB: That’s right. The Republicans keep saying the tax cuts are the key to prosperity. The 2000s are evidence that that is not true. We had booming economies in the 1980s and ’90s. If we went back to those taxes, we would be better off.
No comments:
Post a Comment