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Sometimes when you watch a politician being interviewed on TV, you just want to ask them point blank if they’re living in a fantasy world. It’s rare that the anchor themselves follows through on that urge, but that’s basically what Today anchor Savannah Guthrie did when interviewing Speaker Paul Ryan about the GOP’s controversial tax bill.
During the Wednesday morning interview, Guthrie asked if Ryan was “living in a fantasy world” wherein the Republican tax bill would actually help workers.
Guthrie started by quoting an op-ed from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who wrote, “CEOs aren’t waiting on a tax cut to ‘jump-start the economy’-a favorite phrase of politicians who have never run a company-or to hand out raises. It’s pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth.”
Going off of Bloomberg’s phrasing, Guthrie followed up that quote with a question that got right to the point: “I’ll ask you plainly, are you living in a fantasy world?”
Ryan had a comeback, saying he would “compare that anecdote to just the surveys of businesses like the National Association of Business Manufacturers. Surveys would show the vast majority of businesses are going to do just what we say: reinvest in their workers, reinvest in their factories, pay people more money, higher wages.”
Guthrie quickly chimed in, saying she wanted to “jump in” on that point: “The Wall Street Journal recently had a conference of CEO and Gary Cohn, the White House economic adviser, asked them, ‘Are you going to reinvest this money if tax reform passes.'” Guthrie then played a clip from that conference, where the CEOs were asked to raise their hands if they promised to reinvest the money. The vast majority, seemingly all but a few, did not raise their hands. Cohn had to ask, “Why aren’t the other hands up?”
“The fact of the matter is,” Guthrie followed up, “corporations are already sitting on a ton of cash, they have record profits, $2.3 trillion dollars. Why aren’t they raising wages and creating jobs now?”
Ryan said that “$3 trillion of those dollars are trapped overseas and cannot come back into our economy to be reinvested because of our tax laws,” and said that removing the “barriers” to those investments is what this tax bill does. Except, you know, all those CEOs said they weren’t going to reinvest that money if this barrier-busting tax reform bill passes so…
The Senate passed the final version of the tax bill earlier this morning, and the House will vote on the bill for a second time today.
(via MSN)
