I really hate to direct your attention to Tweety because I think he’s a pompous peacock, a self delusional liar, and a constantly wrong moron. Still a lot of people are talking about this and eyes are getting opened about Obama’s policies and actions.
Duh.
You already know this of course, and it’s mostly an indicator that the message is finally beginning to sink in among the dim witted Beltway Bootlickers.
An official MSNBC transcript below.
Bruce Bartlett says plenty, who’s former deputy assistant treasury secretary under the first George Bush and was a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan.
Let me ask you about this whole thing. Bottom line, we’re looking at, let’s look at the numbers right now. We’ve got a chart coming up. This chart shows the Bush tax cuts were responsible for increasing the debt of the United States by about $3 trillion over the last decade.
Now, we have about a $14 trillion debt right now. Half of it came out since the turn of the century, since Bush came into office, and almost 40 – or more than 40 percent of that’s from taxes, from tax cuts.
BRUCE BARTLETT, GEORGE H.W. BUSH DPTY. ASST. TREASURY SECY.: That’s right. When Bush took office, we had a debt of about $6 trillion. And the projections from the CBO were that we were going to run a $6 trillion surplus. So by this point, if we had done nothing, we would have had-we would have paid off the dead debt. But we added to that about $3 trillion of tax cuts. We lost about $3 trillion of revenue because of the slower economy. And then we added about $6 trillion of spending, largely due to two unfunded wars and a Medicare drug benefit and a lot of other things.
And so instead of getting-paying off the debt, we ended up with about a $12 trillion debt at the end of the administration.
MATTHEWS: Well, these people, some of them clowns, not all of them, running around saying Barack Obama is a socialist, Barack Obama drove up the national debt to $14 trillion, and then they dance around in a circle about that and congratulate each other. That’s not true.
BARTLETT: No, I think the dirty secret is actually that Obama is a moderate conservative. And if I were a liberal Democrat, I would be pretty upset.
MATTHEWS: Well, the point is-it gets back to the numbers. A $14 trillion debt, half of it is from Bush, and almost half of that is from the tax cut. Another portion is from the prescription drug bill. And the whole rest of that really is from a lousy economy under Bush and these two wars he came up with.
BARTLETT: Well, that’s right. We-the Republicans keep saying that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. Well, the 2000s is evidence that that is not true. And also we raised taxes in 1982. They said it would be a recession. We raised taxes again in 1993. They said it would be a recession. We had booming economies in the 1980s and ’90s. I think if we went back to the taxes we had the ’80s and ’90s, we would be a lot better off.
MATTHEWS: What is the argument against the kind of tax policy-well, let’s just say it again. It seems to me we had a heck of a great economy in the ’90s, with a tax rate for people in the higher brackets of about 39.6, as opposed to 35, right?
BARTLETT: Right.
MATTHEWS: And that’s the ones that the rich bitch about, to use a crude term. And yet that didn’t hurt the economy and it helped balance the budget.
BARTLETT: Well, that’s right. And don’t forget also that Ronald Reagan raised the capital gains tax rate to 28 percent in 1986. And now it’s only 15 percent, and, of course, the wealthier you are, the more of your income comes from capital gains.
MATTHEWS: Yes. Last night, we showed the 400 richest people in the country, whose average income is $270 million a year, pay about the same as a poor person pays. They pay about 18 percent.
BARTLETT: That’s right, of income taxes, that’s right.
MATTHEWS: Whereas the middle class and the upper middle class, who think they are the majority of the country, and they actually are, they’re paying a higher rate.
BARTLETT: That’s right. I don’t see there is any question that we would have positive economic effects if we went back to the Clinton era tax rates.
MATTHEWS: Why don’t economists say this that you’re just saying? How come I need to drag you on the show? Well, we read your column. But the fact is, just as simple math, to reiterate, we have a $14 trillion debt right now. Half of it came from the Bush era. Almost half of that came from the tax cuts Bush pushed through in a partisan way. And the rest came from his prescription drug bill, which wasn’t funded, and with a terrible economy and the two wars that he promulgated. That’s simple math there.
(CROSSTALK)
BARTLETT: That’s right. But in the Republican playbook, of course, the deficit is never caused by tax cuts.
MATTHEWS: Or wars.
BARTLETT: Or wars. As you know, they go around saying the Bush tax cuts did not lose any revenue. A number of prominent officials, Mitch McConnell included, have said this. And it’s just mathematically ridiculous.
MATTHEWS: And if a Republican gets behind a social program like prescription drugs, it’s not socialism, but if a Democrat says you can’t go into the E.R. anymore for free, you have got to kick in something, which is to me pretty conservative-Bush-the Obama health care basically makes everybody pay something, which sounds pretty Republican in the old days. Republicans call it socialism. They would rather you go to the E.R. and get treated free. Well, that’s what’s going on now.
BARTLETT: Well, as you know the Obama plan, the Affordable Health Care Act, was essentially the same thing as the Republicans themselves had been pushing only a few years earlier.
MATTHEWS: Richard Nixon pushed an employer mandate, not just an individual. He wanted the individual not to have to pay any health care costs. All bosses had to pay all the health care costs. That would have been the Nixon rule.
BARTLETT: Yes. Well, the Heritage Foundation, much more recently than that, proposed an individual mandate. And now all of a sudden that’s —
MATTHEWS: I feel like sanity has just walked into the door here. Bruce Bartlett, it’s so great of you to come on the show. Bottom line, now that I realize you’re smart and you have all the numbers, give me two seconds. Any way to solve this kerfuffle we’re in right now, this debt ceiling thing?
BARTLETT: I think, at this point, there’s nothing that can pass the House of Representatives. I think the Boehner plan-
MATTHEWS: Because it’s too much of a zoo?
BARTLETT: Yes. I think that a good chunk of the Republican Caucus is either stupid, crazy, ignorant, or craven cowards that are desperately afraid of the Tea Party people, and rightly so.
MATTHEWS: I love it. Thank you. I can’t add to that, Bruce Bartlett. But you use tougher words than I usually use. I just say a zoo.
(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: Up next: The Republican leadership has turned to a movie about violent bank robbers-actually a good movie, “The Town”-to help rally the rank and file for John Boehner’s debt plan. Let’s find out what Ben Affleck thinks of his movie being used this way next in the “Sideshow.”
You’re watching HARDBALL on MSNBC.
1 comments
Author