| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | |
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| Welcome back to Washington Journal. | ||
| We're joined by Stephen Moore, founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a senior visiting fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation. | ||
| Steve, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Mimi. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Love C-SPAN. | ||
| Appreciate the opportunity to come on. | ||
| All eyes are on Congress this week as markups go on through several of the committees on the reconciliation bill. | ||
| What are your initial thoughts on that GOP bill? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, first of all, I just want to remind your viewers, because Poll Show, only half of Americans are even aware of this, that there's no room for failure here. | |
| We have to pass this bill. | ||
| It is, if we don't pass this bill by December 31st, on January 1st, the American people are going to get hit with the biggest tax increase probably in American history. | ||
| So virtually all of the Trump tax cuts from 2017, that very successful tax cut that really re-energized the economy, that will mostly expire. | ||
| There are a few provisions that don't, but almost all of them dealing with average Americans and small businesses would expire. | ||
|
unidentified
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And we estimate, Mimi, that the average family in America will see about a $2,500 increase in their tax burden and their tax payments to the IRS next year. | |
| So we got to get that done. | ||
| By the way, almost every small business in America got a tax cut from that bill. | ||
| We know that small businesses are really the spinal cord of the American economy. | ||
| We did a lot of other things in that bill that I think I'm very proud of. | ||
| I helped write the very first version of that bill with Donald Trump back in early 2016. | ||
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unidentified
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So we don't want, I think all Americans agree we don't want that bill to expire. | |
| We want to keep the rates low. | ||
| We want to keep America competitive. | ||
| And so it has to get done. | ||
| This week, as you know, Mimi, as we speak, the House members are trying to put together a bill that they can send over to the Senate, get this thing passed. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't understand, quite frankly, Mimi, why it's taking so long. | |
| We should have gotten this done a month ago because virtually all Americans are in favor of making that tax cut permanent and some of the other things like no tax on tips and other smaller versions of the bill. | ||
| One of the committees, the Energy and Commerce Committee, is actually still meeting as we speak. | ||
| They've been going all night and they're continuing. | ||
| The big fight, of course, is over Medicaid in that in that committee. | ||
| They need to find about $880 billion in savings. | ||
| What are your thoughts on how that's going to happen? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, so the number one thing people have to understand is no one who is eligible for the program will see any of their benefits reduced. | |
| So this idea that eligible women are going to lose their prenatal care if they're pregnant, or I've seen some ads saying that rural hospitals will shut down. | ||
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unidentified
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That's all just a lie. | |
| The truth is that if you look at Medicaid today, and by the way, this isn't me speaking, Mimi. | ||
| This is both Doge and also the government's own auditors have found that there's about $150 billion. | ||
| Let me say that again, $150 billion of fraudsters who are getting Medicaid coverage, free health care coverage, but they're not eligible for the program. | ||
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unidentified
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And that includes illegal immigrants. | |
| That includes a lot of employable adults who are just going on the program so they don't have to pay health care. | ||
| I mean, how is that fair to me, meaning people like you and me and most of the people watching the show who actually do pay for their health care? | ||
| And then we have to pay for the health care of people who are not even eligible for the program. | ||
| So we could, you know, you talked, I think I forget that number that you mentioned, 700 billion or something or something. | ||
| 880 billion. | ||
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unidentified
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880. | |
| So if we were to take out the 150 billion, that would leave us with 730 billion. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no. | |
| So that's 150 billion per year. | ||
| So if we can just get rid of the fraud, we will save $1.5 trillion over 10 years. | ||
| So that would be an enormous savings. | ||
| But also, how about this one? | ||
| And I wonder what people think about it. | ||
| You know, if you don't have kids and you're an employable adult and you're not working, this bill would basically say, hey, if you're going to get free health care from the taxpayer, just like if you're going to get free food from food stamps, you're going to have to either have a job or you're going to have to be looking for a job. | ||
| I think Americans are tired of people sitting on their couch watching TV and getting free health care and free food. | ||
| So I think most people would agree that we should have work requirements for all these programs. | ||
| We want to help people, Mimi, who want to help themselves. | ||
| And regarding work requirements, the critics of that say that the state of Georgia did try that and ended up just eligible people not being on the rolls and it didn't really improve employment. | ||
| What are your thoughts on that? | ||
| And do you know the details of that program in Georgia? | ||
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unidentified
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Mimi, I'm not familiar with that. | |
| That's the first time I've heard of this. | ||
| I'll have to look into that. | ||
| But I do know this. | ||
| You know, I've been in Washington and doing policy work for a long time. | ||
| So I was there in the mid-1990s when Bill Clinton was president, a Democrat, and Newt Gingrich, a Republican, was running the House of Representatives. | ||
| We passed one of the best welfare reform bills in the history of the country, where we basically had work requirements for welfare benefits, and they were very strict requirements. | ||
| And what we found was that so many people who had been on welfare went into the workforce, they got a job. | ||
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unidentified
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We know that the amount of money we had to spend on these programs was radically reduced. | |
| But also what we found was work requirements actually were beneficial to the people who had been on these programs. | ||
| We gave them training, we got them into jobs. | ||
| Look, you can't get rich. | ||
| You can't have a nice lifestyle in this country if you're on welfare. | ||
| You got to get a job. | ||
| You got to climb that ladder. | ||
| That's what we need to do with people on Medicaid, food stamps is we look, we don't want people to go hungry in this country and we don't want people to go without health care, but we do want people working. | ||
| And the idea that, you know, those of us who are working 40, 50 hours a week should have to pay taxes for people who won't even help themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now, look, I'm talking about, by the way, I want to be clear on this. | |
| If you're disabled or you have some reason why you can't work, that wouldn't apply to them. | ||
| But if you're talking about single women or single males with no kids in the home and they're not working, I think everybody would agree they should have to get a job. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation with Stephen Moore, you can do so. | ||
| He'll be with us for about 20 minutes. | ||
| You can call us on our lines by party. | ||
| So Democrats are on 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Steve, I want to ask you about the cap on salt. | ||
| So this is a contentious issue that stands for state and local tax deductions. | ||
| First, explain the issue and the disagreement and where you stand on it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, it's a good question, Mimi. | |
| And I have to say that, you know, when I helped write the original tax bill that we passed in 2017, I was the loudest voice for getting rid of the state and local tax deduction. | ||
| I want to make sure everybody knows I was listening to your conversation with the congressman earlier about raising tax on the rich. | ||
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unidentified
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Well, one good way of doing that is to get rid of all these loopholes in the tax system. | |
| And so let me put it very simply: there's no reason why somebody living in a high-tax state like California or New York or New Jersey or my home state of Illinois should get a bigger tax cut than somebody who lives in Florida and Texas. | ||
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unidentified
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Look, if you want to live in New York, it's a free country. | |
| You can live wherever you want. | ||
| But if you vote for policies that have very high state and local taxes, why should people in other states have to bear the burden of that? | ||
| And so what we're doing in this, what we did in this bill was we said we're going to give you a $10,000, you can deduct up to $10,000 of your state and local taxes. | ||
| For people in most states, that's no burden at all because state and local taxes are pretty reasonable. | ||
| If you live in those really high-tax blue states, your taxes are probably a lot higher. | ||
| If you have a problem with that, take it up in Albany, New York, or Springfield, Illinois, or Sacramento, and get those politicians lower your taxes. | ||
| But here's the thing: the most important thing I want people to understand. | ||
| If we bring back the salt deduction, Mimi, that would be the biggest tax cut for millionaires and billionaires in American history. | ||
| Because today, because of our tax cut in 2017, 91% of Americans don't itemize their deductions. | ||
| They don't take the salt deduction because they just check the box and they take the standard deduction. | ||
| The people who do itemize their deductions today, there's some exceptions, but overall, most of the people are taking itemized deductions are millionaires and billionaires. | ||
| And so my point would say, hey, let's just get rid of it. | ||
| You want to make the tax system fairer? | ||
| Let's get rid of all the deductions. | ||
| That's not going to affect the middle class much at all, but it will force higher income people to pay their fair share of taxes. | ||
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unidentified
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And then we could actually lower the rates some more. | |
| But there's no reason for the salt deduction to be raised. | ||
| But the reality is that because you've got about five or six Republicans who want the salt deduction raised, they're probably going to have to make some accommodation. | ||
| I think they probably will double the salt deduction from $10,000 to $20,000. | ||
| And Steve, you co-authored a book last year called The Trump Economic Miracle. | ||
| Briefly, can you explain what you consider to be President Trump's economic quote miracle? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, so in the first term, the Trump economic plan was a spectacular success. | |
| People forget that if it had not been for COVID, Trump probably won a 40-state reelection landslide in 2020. | ||
| Of course, COVID came and that changed everything. | ||
| We made the greatest mistake in American history when we shut down our economy, shut down our businesses, our schools, our churches. | ||
| And God forbid that we ever, hopefully, we've learned the lesson that we should never, never do that again. | ||
| That was one of the greatest abuses of power in American history. | ||
| But from 2017 through the beginning of COVID, the U.S. economy was absolutely booming on every statistic. | ||
| We had a booming stock market. | ||
| We had a huge reduction in poverty rates in the United States. | ||
| The average American family had gained $6,000 in income thanks to the Trump policies. | ||
| That was just short of a miracle. | ||
| I think Trump can do it again. | ||
| It's been some rough waters for sure, Mimi, in the last few months with these tariff turbulence. | ||
| I'm not a big fan of the terrorists, but I have to say things look a lot better today in the economy than they did a month ago. | ||
| And if Trump can pull this off and get better deals for America, I think you're going to see another Trump boom like we saw in his first term. | ||
| All right, let's talk to callers and go to Sean first in Georgia, Independent Line. | ||
| Sean, you're on with Steve Moore. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Steve, I just want to point out to everybody that I feel like you're kind of lying a little bit. | ||
| The tax cuts that you're mentioning that are going to be implemented in December, if they do come to pass, if this bill doesn't pass, are actually sunsets from the previous bill that Trump passed in 2017, which you were a part of. | ||
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unidentified
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So it feels as though you're misleading people by saying, oh, no, well, for some reason, taxes are going to go are going to go up, but you guys said that. | |
| And it's mainly for the middle and lower class that those tax increases or cuts are going to be on the lower and middle class. | ||
| Secondly, if you're worried about government health care and overabuse on government health care, why don't you talk about Walmart and McDonald's that are the biggest users of government health care because they do not pay for their employees to get health care? | ||
| Well, look, I can't. | ||
| I don't know about McDonald's and Walmart. | ||
| Those are mostly kind of starter jobs for people, and I guess they don't provide health care. | ||
| But I will say this. | ||
| This is a really important point, Mimi. | ||
| The Trump tax cut is set to expire. | ||
| This gentleman is right at the end of this year. | ||
| And nobody wants that to happen. | ||
| I mean, polls show overwhelmingly about 70% of Americans don't want that tax cut to expire. | ||
| I don't know, sir, if you do, but most Americans can't afford to pay $2,500 or $3,000 more in taxes, especially after the big inflation that we had under Biden. | ||
|
unidentified
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So we've got to do this, in my opinion. | |
| I think it would just wreck the economy if we didn't get this extended. | ||
| And I think most Americans are behind me on that. | ||
| Let's go to John in Massillian, Ohio, Republican. | ||
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unidentified
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Hey, I'm just asking how to report somebody that does collect all them benefits and shuttings. | |
| John? | ||
| I think we lost you. | ||
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unidentified
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I couldn't hear him. | |
| You're trying to report somebody that's collecting benefits? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, how do you do that? | |
| And they're capable of work and they're healthy and they should be working. | ||
| If the question is, you know, how do we find the fraudsters that are just ripping off Americans to the tune of half a trillion dollars a year? | ||
| We have to have people monitoring these programs. | ||
| We have to have people who are stealing the money from these programs should be put in jail, in my opinion. | ||
| I mean, we have rampant fraud. | ||
| Nobody in Washington, and I blame Republicans and Democrats, Mimi, for this, to allow this to happen. | ||
| A half a trillion dollars a year. | ||
| Some of these people, by the way, don't even live in the United States, for goodness sakes. | ||
| They're getting Social Security checks. | ||
| They're getting Medicare payments. | ||
| They're getting food stamps. | ||
| And many of them aren't even in the country. | ||
| So we need to make it a top priority for the country to make sure that only the people who are eligible for the programs are getting the money. | ||
| This was true of the PPP program under COVID. | ||
| This is true of food stamps. | ||
| It's true of unemployment benefits. | ||
| Nobody is minding the store and making sure that only the people who are eligible for it get it. | ||
| And look, if somebody is stealing money through these programs, it would be like, you know, if I walked down the street and put a gun to somebody's head and said, give me $100 and stole it from their wallet. | ||
| That's what's happening day after day after day. | ||
| And Trump is saying no more. | ||
| We're going to do something about this and hunt these people down and get the money back. | ||
| Steve, your thoughts on President Trump's tariffs plan so far, you called it tariff turbulence. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Maybe it should be turmoil. | ||
| Listen, I'm a much more of a free trade guy than Donald Trump. | ||
| And you know, he and I, he knows how I feel about that. | ||
| And uh, but I also believe that because we all, everyone benefits from trade. | ||
| By the way, trade is the essence of what economics is about. | ||
| If I trade with you, Mimi, and you have something I want, and I have something that you want, and we freely trade, by definition, we're both better off. | ||
| And that's what makes economics important. | ||
| It's what raises the living standards of all Americans. | ||
| And so we have benefited from trade. | ||
| The fact that we can get low-priced things from Vietnam and we can sell them things. | ||
| Or my favorite example is: you know, we import a lot of coffee beans from Colombia and Brazil because they make great coffee beans. | ||
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unidentified
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And then we sell them, you know, our computers because we make great computers. | |
| So this is called the law of comparative advantage. | ||
| It goes back to Adam Smith, and it is so important for our economy. | ||
| We can compete in the world economy. | ||
| But Trump is right that the United States, we have the lowest tariffs in the world, virtually, of all the major trading partners. | ||
| And what Trump is saying, just so people understand, is if we're our tariff is at, say, 10%, and you know, Canada or Korea or Japan at 30 or 40%, in some cases, in China, that's over 100%. | ||
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unidentified
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That's not fair. | |
| And we're going to force those countries to bring their tariffs down, Mimi. | ||
| And this is what's working so far. | ||
| We've got two big deals in the works with the UK and with China. | ||
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unidentified
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We're saying to China, either you reduce your tariffs on us or we're going to impose high tariffs on you. | |
| And so far, at least, it looks like Trump is prevailing on that because China, if China can't trade with the United States, they're going to go into a Great Depression. | ||
| They have to trade with us. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons I think they blinked here and why we're going to get a pretty good trade deal with China. | ||
| On the line for Democrats in Lake Worth, Florida, Elizabeth, you're on with Stephen Moore. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning, Stephen. | |
| I don't believe a single word you say. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| And you are saying some very nasty things about me. | ||
| And I'm taking it personally. | ||
| I'm 61 years old. | ||
| I lost my job in September. | ||
| It wasn't my fault. | ||
| I'm looking for jobs. | ||
| I've applied for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of jobs. | ||
| I have a master's degree and I don't have a job. | ||
| I am not sitting home getting insurance for free. | ||
| So for you to say something like that, and there's many people out there like me, nobody wants to sit home and network. | ||
| I can't imagine a single person that wants to sit home and network and not be able to pay bills. | ||
| It's stressful not having a job. | ||
| So I hope that you change your tone about people like me who ought to work and can't find a job. | ||
| Steve, go ahead. | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I'll just say, first of all, I'm sorry for your plight. | |
| Nobody, I've been unemployed before, and it's a scary situation. | ||
| And so I hope you do find a job as soon as possible and a good paying one at that. | ||
| I mean, the most important thing we can do for someone like you is to improve the economy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, the Biden years were a tough period. | |
| We had very high raising prices. | ||
| The American people spoke out and said this didn't work. | ||
| And so we're going to try to bring those jobs back so that everybody has the opportunities because we want every American who wants a job to have one. | ||
| But, you know, if you're unemployed for a long time and you have the kind of skills, there are jobs out there. | ||
| I mean, there are 7 million job openings in America today. | ||
| We've got to make sure that the people who are unemployed are filling those jobs. | ||
| It might not be exactly the job that you want, but we want to make sure that we get people back into the workforce. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I hope you find a job as quickly as possible. | |
| I guarantee you, with Trump's economics, those jobs are going to come back. | ||
| Peter is a Republican in New York. | ||
| Good morning, Peter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Hey, Steve. | ||
| I agree with you that they need to eliminate these tax loopholes. | ||
| For years, we've heard that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. | ||
| But there is a loophole in the law where he only took a million dollar salary and the rest of it was stock options, which he only paid capital gains tax on. | ||
| And also that carried interest provision that Trump originally wanted to get rid of, but even Republicans in Congress blocked him from doing that. | ||
| Also, corporations that own subsidiaries, if their subsidiaries lose money, they get to deduct those losses on their tax bill. | ||
| And that's the reason why they pay no taxes. | ||
| But even small businesses take advantage of that. | ||
| One of the things with this new tax bill, unfortunately, from what I heard is that the provisions for the work provision don't kick in until 2029. | ||
| And Senator Ron Johnson has been also complaining that they're not really making any cuts. | ||
| What I believe President Trump is trying to do is he is trying to increase business in the United States with these agreements, bring more revenue in so that we could pay for these things because he understands that even Republicans are reluctant to make cuts. | ||
| And that seems to be the plan. | ||
| And I hope he succeeds at doing that. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, let me just respond to that very quickly because I was listening to your show earlier, Mimi, and we've had a couple of calls on this already. | ||
| There's this mythology that's been going around. | ||
| And it's not surprising that people are falling for this because the media keeps saying it over and over again, that the Trump tax cut was a tax cut for the rich and that the rich are not paying their fair share. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I just want, because these numbers just came out a couple of months ago, Mimi, these are the official government statistics from the IRS, which collects the taxes. | |
| Today in America, the top 1% of Americans, those at the very top of the income scale, pay a higher share of the income tax than any other time in the history of the United States. | ||
| So the top 1% pay about 44% of all income taxes. | ||
|
unidentified
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One out of 100 people pay almost half of the income tax. | |
| And that went up after the Trump tax cut. | ||
| So it was at 40%. | ||
| In other words, the top 1% were paying 40% of the income tax before the Trump tax cuts. | ||
| Now they pay 44%. | ||
| The top 10% pay 90% of the income tax. | ||
| So the idea that the rich are not paying their fair share. | ||
| Now, look, there are some people who scamming the system for sure. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons I'd love to see a flat tax where you get rid of all the deductions, all the loopholes, all the special interest lobbyist provisions that helped some people avoid taxes. | ||
| But my God, I mean, Warren Buffett has paid billions and billions and billions of dollars of taxes through the companies he owns and through his individual tax. | ||
| The idea that his secretary pays lower taxes than him is ridiculous. | ||
| It is simply not true, especially when you take into account all of the taxes paid by the businesses that you own. |