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Economy

Meet The Press Host Challenges Boehner On GOP Tax Myths

By Jeff Spross on Mar 3, 2013 at 12:22 pm

One of the most persistent myths amongst Republicans and conservatives is the notion that lower income tax rates, especially on the wealthy, are the key to restoring the economy. This morning on Meet the Press, when House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) once again trotted out this claim, host David Gregory quite rightly responded that “there’s no iron-clad evidence that lowering marginal tax rates is going to lead to economic growth.”

Strikingly, the exchange began with Boehner making the very uncharacteristic — but entirely correct — point that “we can’t cut our way to prosperity,” and that we have to restore economic growth. As a way to do that, he cited the Republican plan to cut loopholes out of the tax code, and then use the extra fiscal room created by eliminating those deductions to lower tax rates. Gregory responded by pointing out that tax rate hikes under Presidents Reagan and Clinton corresponded with economic booms:

JOHN BOEHNER: We’ve got to find a way through our tax code to promote more economic growth in our country. We can do this by closing loopholes, bringing the rates down for all Americans, making the tax code fairer — it will promote more economic growth.

DAVID GREGORY: But there’s no iron-clad evidence that lowering marginal tax rates is going to lead to economic growth.

BOEHNER: Oh yes there is. There’s mountains…

GREGORY: Bill Clinton raised taxes. President Reagan raised taxes.

BOEHNER: There’s mountains of evidence that if we bring tax rates down, we will help spur economic growth in our country.

GREGORY: That hasn’t been tried before?

BOEHNER: Uh, yeah. Ronald Reagan. 1981. […]

GREGORY: But he raised taxes as well, and it didn’t hurt the economy, did it?

BOEHNER: Listen, he lowered taxes twice. Both in 1981 and again in the 1986 tax reform. When they lowered rates for all Americans, we had this boom in economic growth. Why? Because we got rid of a lot of the silly deductions, brought the rates down, and it helped promote more economic growth in our country.

Watch it:

In general, periods of high economic growth in America over the 20th Century actually occurred alongside much higher top marginal rates than we have now.

Gregory is even more correct than he realizes. One fact neither man brought up is that the 1981 tax cut occurred in conjunction with one of the biggest single cuts in interest rates the Federal Reserve has ever carried out.

By 1980, inflation had risen to nearly 15 percent. In response, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker raised the Federal Funds rate — which in turn drives interest rates throughout the economy — to an historic high of almost 20 percent. The gambit worked. Inflation has been at near-historic lows ever since, and Volcker cut interest rates back down to under 10 percent. Any economist worth their salt would agree that an interest rate hike of that magnitude will bring on a recession, and that a compoarable cut in interest rates will be a big boost to economic growth.
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Politics

GOP House Leader Makes A Compelling Case For The DREAM Act In 160 Seconds

By Sy Mukherjee on Feb 10, 2013 at 12:05 pm

During an appearance on Meet the Press Sunday morning, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) reiterated his new found openness to providing a pathway to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants who were brought into this country as children.

When host David Gregory asked Cantor point blank whether or not he supported the DREAM Act — which “would offer a pathway to citizenship for undocumented young people who attend college or serve in the military” — Cantor avoided giving a direct answer. But he did make a compelling case for extending citizenship to DREAMers:

CANTOR: I have put out a proposal. I don’t know what the DREAM Act at this point is. What I say is, we’ve got a place, I think, all of us can come together, and that is for the kids.

GREGORY: Can you bring conservatives looking to supporting a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are here without having to first leave the country?

CANTOR: There is a lot of movement right now in the House and the Senate, both sides of the aisle, with folks having a lot of different ideas. I think –

GREGORY: Yes or no to that question? You could really do it. If you went all in, you could bring along the right in the House, couldn’t you?

CANTOR: I think a good place to start is with children. Here’s the difficulty in this issue, I think. And it is because we’ve got families who are here that have become part of the fabric of our country. And we want to make sure that we’re compassionate and sensitive to their plight. These kids know no other place as home. On the other hand, we are a country of laws. We have a situation of border security that we have to get straight. We have to secure our borders. There is a balance that needs to take place. But the best place to begin, I think, is with the children. Let’s go ahead and get that under our belt. Put a win on the board. And so we can promise a better life for those kids who are here due to no fault of their own.

Watch it:

A string of high-profile GOP leaders — including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — have come out in favor of immigration reform after President Obama carried a whopping 70 percent of the Latino vote in his decisive re-election. But there is still a fair amount of resistance on the issue within the GOP, with some even dismissing a pathway to citizenship as “naive.”

And while some Republicans have changed their tune on immigration reform in recent months, there is still considerable daylight between the rhetoric and the reality. Cantor helped torpedo the very DREAM Act that would provide millions of undocumented children a pathway to citizenship — a measure he now supposedly supports. Former House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) went as far as to call such efforts “amnesty.”

Security

David Gregory Sits Idly By As Santorum Absurdly Claims That Obama Hasn’t Condemned ‘Radical Islam’

By Zack Beauchamp on Dec 9, 2012 at 12:50 pm

NBC host David Gregory allowed former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) to get away with making false and misleading claims about Sharia law and President Obama’s stance on radical Islam. Speaking on Meet The Press’ web supplement Press Pass, Santorum claimed that the President has never condemned “radical Islam,” an assertion that Gregory simply lets stand without challenge:

Sharia law means women have to have head coverings, have no rights — and you don’t hear the President say a word about Sharia. You haven’t heard him condemn Sharia law or radical Islam.

Watch it:

The notion that Obama hasn’t condemned radical Islam is absurd: the President told a Muslim audience in Cairo that “the first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms” and that “among some Muslims, there’s a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of somebody else’s faith,” among many other instances. He also has a particularly aggressive record of taking military action against Islamic extremists.

Obama hasn’t aggressively attacked “Sharia law” because, in the most basic sense, Sharia is the code of conduct that defines how Muslims ought to live, somethign reasonably similar to the same religious ethical codes that people of all faiths hold to. It doesn’t say that women “have no rights.” Hyperbolic rhetoric about the dangers of Sharia law is commonly employed by an Islamophobic activist network that has pushed through discriminatory anti-Sharia legislation in several states.

Security

NBC’s David Gregory Misquotes Obama, Falsely Claims President Said ‘Al Qaeda Has Been Defeated’

By Judd Legum on Sep 30, 2012 at 12:11 pm

This morning on Meet The Press, David Gregory twice asserted that, in May, President Obama declared that “al Qaeda has been defeated.” Gregory used that claim to advance a theory that Obama was simply not concerned enough about al Qaeda in advance of the attack on the American embassy in Libya. Here’s the transcript:

GREGORY: The President has said as recently as May of this year that al Qaeda has not had a chance to rebuild, that al Qaeda has been defeated. There is an election on, as we’ve been talking about, and the President’s challenger said plain and simple, the President failed to level with the American people and call this a terrorist attack, because you had to be concerned about another terrorist attack from al Qaeda in the Middle East after the President said that al Qaeda had been defeated. 

Watch it:

That is not, however, what Obama said in May. Gregory was apparently referring to an address that Obama delivered from Afghanistan in May on the one year anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Here is what Obama said:

And one year ago, from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set — to defeat al Qaeda and deny it a chance to rebuild — is now within our reach.

Still, there will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over.

So, the truth is that Obama did not say al Qaeda had already been defeated and specifically acknowledged that there were “difficult days” and “enormous sacrifices” yet to come.

Media

NBC’s David Gregory To Headline Conference For Major Republican Advocacy Group

By Josh Israel on May 12, 2012 at 3:00 pm

David Gregory

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which calls itself “the voice of small business,” is one of the Republican party’s strongest allies. The group spent over $1 million on outside ads in the 2010 campaign — all of it backing Republican House and Senate candidates (and, Bloomberg News reported last month, “another $1.5 million that it kept hidden and said was exempt” from disclosure requirements). The group is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Obamacare law and bankrolled state governments’ challenges to the law. The NFIB has also taken stances against allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, opposing regulations on businesses, and supporting curtailing union rights.

Given the group’s obvious Republican alliance, it comes as little surprise that the NFIB’s three-day 2012 Small Business Summit, which begins Monday, will feature headliners Karl Rove and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

But the first name and photo on the invitation for the $150-per-person event — Tuesday’s “keynote address” speaker — is NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory. He is marketed by NBC as an anchor and “trusted journalist.”

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states:

Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.

Regardless of whether Gregory is being paid for this event and of what he says in his keynote, allowing the NFIB to raise money for its political mission using his name, reputation, and celebrity appears to be at odds with journalistic ethics.

Gregory did not to respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.

Update

TVNewser reports an NBC spokeswoman defended Gregory’s appearance, claiming “David finds it constructive to speak to and take questions from a variety of audiences. He was not compensated.” According to Gregory’s speakers bureau, his typical fee for appearances is over $40,000.

Economy

GOP, NBC Agree: Obama Wants To Wage ‘Class Warfare’

By Brad Johnson on Jan 22, 2012 at 9:52 pm

Battered by growing scrutiny over how he acquired his massive wealth, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney fed concerns of South Carolina’s Republican primary voters when he refused to immediately release his tax returns. Instead, Romney accused President Barack Obama and his Republican opponents of engaging in “class warfare” and attacks against “success.”

The “class warfare” accusation has become so commonplace among the Republican field that now NBC’s David Gregory, the host of Meet the Press, believes that President Obama “wants to play” the “class warfare argument,” as this ThinkProgress compilation shows:

GREGORY: Can you have a Republican nominee who can play into the class warfare argument that the president wants to play in general?

ROMNEY: Our president has divided the nation, engaged in class warfare and attacked a free enterprise system that has made America the economic envy of the world. We cannot defeat that president with a candidate who has joined in that very assault on free enterprise. When my opponents attack success and free enterprise, they’re not only attacking me, they’re attacking every person who dreams of a better future, he’s attacking you.

GINGRICH: We are for helping the people who want to create jobs. He wants to wage class warfare against the people who create jobs.

CAIN: I don’t think he needs to release his tax returns and here is why: it gives liberals another arguing point for class warfare. Class warfare divides this country, just like when they bring up the race card, it divides us.

Watch it:

As former candidate and Romney endorser Herman Cain succinctly described, Republicans don’t want Americans to know the facts about Mitt Romney’s extraordinary wealth, because then this country might think about the growing economic class divide in the nation. The U.S. has a higher level of income inequality than Europe, Canada, Australia, or South Korea. Multi-millionaires like Romney and billionaires like the funders of the SuperPACs dominating this campaign season have been getting lower tax rates even as their wealth grows.

Yglesias

Tax Policy With Media Celebrities

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 1, 2009 at 12:42 pm

180px_dartmouth_college_campus___democratic_presidential_candidates_debate_45___david_gregory.jpg

Barack Obama has proposed a budget that, among other things, would reduce taxes on over 90 percent of the population and increase taxes on around 2 percent of the population. Flipping through the Sunday talk shows, it’s striking to see how uniformly wealthy media celebrities think it makes sense to characterize this is a “tax increase” or “raising taxes” and to leap immediately to a discussion of what the impact of these “higher taxes” will be. I think that the majority of people whose taxes are set to go down might be more interested in learning about the impact of lower taxes.

But I suppose this is how the world really looks from David Gregory’s chair. A rich person is somewhat like Jeffrey Immelt who earns tens of millions of dollars in salary and bonuses during good years, and in bad years he waives some of what he’s owed, accepting mere millions in new salary, and gets hailed for his generosity. One assumes that with this multi-million dollar annual salary, he also has investment income. The lower classes in this universe are like Chris Matthews and David Shuster and need to host cable shows. And a David Gregory or a Brian Williams—hosting a network television show, to be sure, but not owning the network—becomes a typical middle-class American.

Related Posts

Media

You, Me, and David Gregory

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 23, 2009 at 8:44 am

180px_dartmouth_college_campus___democratic_presidential_candidates_debate_45___david_gregory.jpg

I think everyone understands the human phenomenon whereby we mistaken deem our own personal experiences to be more typical than they are. People who attended selective colleges tend to talk as if they don’t realize that the majority of the minority of Americans who go to college at all go to unselective institutions. People who earn a lot of money overestimate the number of people who earn that much money. And poor people tend to underestimate how rich the really rich people are. It’s easy to see how this happens and totally forgivable.

But part of what being a journalist is about—especially a journalist who covers public affairs in the United States—is to operate on the basis of actual factual information about the country. Thus, it’s been striking to watch press coverage of the Santelli mishigos and see how many wealthy media celebrities believe that the experience of a wealthy commodities trader is typical of the country. This was on egregious display yesterday during the Sunday shows, and it wasn’t the end of it. At one point, for example, David Gregory was making some point about the stock market and said something about how “it isn’t just the fat cats, it’s you and me” as if he, David Gregory, is a typical workaday American.

In reality, the median household income in the United States was $50,233 in 2007. That’s non-trivially less than I earn. And though I like to think that my blog is pretty neat, I’m pretty sure that being the host of Meet The Press puts Gregory well above me in the media totem pole. Meanwhile, Gregory’s wife Beth Wilkinson served for two and a half years as executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of Fannie May until she resigned in September 2008 following the federal takeover. After this setback she became a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, a firm where first-year associates earn more than triple the national household median income.

And good for them. I think Gregory’s takeover of Meet the Press has been change for the better and some of my best friends work for high-paying law firms, and Wilkinson had a substantial career in public service before getting her payday. But the fact of the matter is that these are the fat cats—they host major network television shows, they’re partners at prestigious law firms, and their experience of the economy is quite a bit different than that of a typical American.

Update

As detailed here, my facts are a bit off as college attendance rates. Only a minority of Americans acquire a bachelor’s degree, but when you throw in two-year schools and dropouts, about 57 percent of the population attends college at some point.

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