Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Boomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest.
Speaker 1: He is Bruce Bartlett. And if you're not familiar with
Speaker 1: h Bruce, you really should be. Uh. He started his
Speaker 1: career UH working for Ron Paul and then Jack Camp.
Speaker 1: He helped to put together what eventually became the Kemp
Speaker 1: Rough tax cuts, which were passed by Ronald Reagan in
Speaker 1: the early eighties. Eventually, due to some of the policies
Speaker 1: of George Bush, he broke with the far right and
Speaker 1: became an independent voice and a critic of the move
Speaker 1: of the GOP away from its traditional roots to areas
Speaker 1: never seen before. I know I'm gonna get all sorts
Speaker 1: of angry emails from people, um, mostly because I agree
Speaker 1: with pretty much everything Bruce says, and some of you
Speaker 1: are going to disagree with everything he says. UM, you
Speaker 1: can send me angry emails at m IB podcast at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot net. I don't know how else to describe
Speaker 1: this other than just a tour to force conversation about
Speaker 1: a from a certain segment of the political firmament, which
Speaker 1: is the conservative Republican never trumpers and Bruce Bartlett is
Speaker 1: a perfect um example of that. Previously, we've had Mike Murphy,
Speaker 1: who was a Jeb Bush's campaign manager, who gave a
Speaker 1: slightly different perspective. UH, And we try and bring all
Speaker 1: sorts of of perspectives onto the show to discuss these things.
Speaker 1: I found it really fascinating and I expect you will too. So,
Speaker 1: with no further ado my conversation with Bruce Bartlett, I
Speaker 1: have an extra special guest today. His name is Bruce Bartlett,
Speaker 1: and he has a storied career in politics in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. He has held senior policy roles in both
Speaker 1: the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administration. He started
Speaker 1: in in DC working with Congressman Ron Paul on the
Speaker 1: Banking Committee. He has also worked with Jack Kemp. He
Speaker 1: was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. UH.
Speaker 1: He's written for various publications, including The New York Times,
Speaker 1: Economics Blog, for The Washington Post, and other fine publications.
Speaker 1: He is the author of multiple best selling books, including Reaganomics,
Speaker 1: Supply Side Economics and Action, and Impostor, How George W.
Speaker 1: Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Most recently,
Speaker 1: he wrote the book The Truth Matters, a citizens Guide
Speaker 1: to separating facts from lies and stopping fake news in
Speaker 1: its tracks. Bruce Bartlett, Welcome to Bloomberg. Happy to be here.
Speaker 1: So that's quite the CV. Let's let's let's begin by
Speaker 1: going to your political beginnings. You, in nineteen seventy six
Speaker 1: began working for a then unknown congressman named Ron Paul
Speaker 1: out of Texas. Uh. What did you do for him?
Speaker 1: And how did you guys ultimately find each other? Well,
Speaker 1: at that time, Texas was a very solidly democratic state. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, the old story down there is the Democrats
Speaker 1: were yellow dog Democrats. They'd vote for a yellow dog
Speaker 1: if it was running as a Democrat. And there was
Speaker 1: only two other Republicans in the Republican House delegation, and
Speaker 1: one of the Democrats, Uh, resigned because he got a
Speaker 1: higher level appointment of some kind, and so they had
Speaker 1: to have a special election in April nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: And I saw a brief story, uh in the Washington
Speaker 1: Post in which this this fellow Ron Paul, whom of
Speaker 1: course I'd never heard of, Uh, was elected Republican to
Speaker 1: a Democratic seat, and he was quoted in the article
Speaker 1: saying he was to the right of very goldwater Well,
Speaker 1: which is hard to imagine. Well, at the time, that
Speaker 1: sounded like a good idea to me. I was very
Speaker 1: conservative at that time, libertarian and uh so and I
Speaker 1: was I was just finishing up some work at graduate
Speaker 1: school and was looking around for a real job. Saw
Speaker 1: out of the blue, I just sent him a letter
Speaker 1: and uh some things I published and uh A few
Speaker 1: days later, I get a call from his secretary and
Speaker 1: I interviewed with him. And I remember when I entered
Speaker 1: his office, he had a bookcase, and in the bookcase
Speaker 1: was every book published by the Foundation for Economic Education,
Speaker 1: which is still around in a robust website. That's right,
Speaker 1: and but at the and but at the time it
Speaker 1: was was the most well known, well established free market
Speaker 1: oriented think tank in the United States. And I had
Speaker 1: already published a couple of articles in its little journal,
Speaker 1: which was called The Freeman. And so I think that's
Speaker 1: probably what caught his attention. And when I saw all
Speaker 1: these books, I knew I was in pretty good shape.
Speaker 1: So what was it like working with him? He that
Speaker 1: was he was on the banking committee. Uh. I don't
Speaker 1: think people had any idea of how his politics would
Speaker 1: evolve to really full blown libertarianism. Uh. Nor did people
Speaker 1: understand that he would one day mount a fairly um
Speaker 1: significant run for the presidents, multiple runs for the president,
Speaker 1: and that his son would become a United States Senator. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean at the time, we thought what we were
Speaker 1: doing was very quicksodic and uh and I think we're
Speaker 1: just trying to make a point. And in order to
Speaker 1: do so. Uh, you know, Ron like to to do
Speaker 1: things in a very outrage just manner. For example, one
Speaker 1: of his things he most enjoyed was being the only
Speaker 1: no vote against some piece of legislation that passed would
Speaker 1: otherwise have passed unanimously. And since he was a medical doctor,
Speaker 1: he got people would call him doctor No and he
Speaker 1: he very much enjoyed that. How did you move from
Speaker 1: run poland Texas to Jack Kemp up in upstate New York. Well,
Speaker 1: the problem was that Iran was elected in a special
Speaker 1: election in April of nineteen seventy six and therefore had
Speaker 1: to run for election for for a full seat that
Speaker 1: very same year, and unfortunately he was defeated in his
Speaker 1: first bid for h I guess he was his first
Speaker 1: effort at re election and uh, and so he was defeated,
Speaker 1: and Uh, I was looking around for a job, and
Speaker 1: uh one of the women in the office that she
Speaker 1: had heard that Jack Kemp, who I really only knew
Speaker 1: about as a football player. I remember watching him in
Speaker 1: the nineteen AFL Championship game. He when he was playing
Speaker 1: for the Buffalo Bills, and he had been elected to
Speaker 1: Congress in nineteen seventy and he always said that the
Speaker 1: reason he was elected because he threatened to come and
Speaker 1: come back and play for the Bills another year if
Speaker 1: he lost. And that's very funny. So you leave Ron
Speaker 1: Paul after he was defeated in what was that seventies
Speaker 1: eight or and you join um Jack Kemp's office. Kemp
Speaker 1: was tapped by Reagan to help push forward a very
Speaker 1: big set of tax cuts. Tell us, well, that was
Speaker 1: much later. So I went to work with Kemp, and
Speaker 1: he was very interested in tax policy, and he had
Speaker 1: come under the influence of a guy named Jude Winnisky,
Speaker 1: who in turn had come under the influence of too economists,
Speaker 1: one named Robert Mundell, who later won the Nobel Prize,
Speaker 1: and Arthur Laugher, who was still out there and very
Speaker 1: active in in in tax affairs. One of the things
Speaker 1: that Jack was very interested in was the Kennedy tax
Speaker 1: cut of the nineteen sixties, which he felt had done
Speaker 1: a lot to invigorate the economy. And remember, in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven, inflation was the overwhelmingly large problem, and this
Speaker 1: tended to make it very hard to do any kind
Speaker 1: of fiscal policy because anything that would increase the deficit
Speaker 1: was considered per se inflationary. But what Jack argued, uh
Speaker 1: really based on Mundel's theories, was that if you enacted
Speaker 1: some kind of policy that increased the production of goods
Speaker 1: and services, then this would be anti inflationary, you see.
Speaker 1: And so that meaning you would have more supply and
Speaker 1: it should not see runaway prices. The additional supplies should
Speaker 1: actually keep a cap on prices. Well well, yeah, if
Speaker 1: you could just hold the line on the money supply
Speaker 1: and and then do something that would raise supply, then
Speaker 1: you should get a diminishing diminishment of of inflation. At
Speaker 1: least that was our theory and our argument. And uh so,
Speaker 1: you know, one day, I remember he uh you know,
Speaker 1: just said to me, Bruce, why don't we instead of
Speaker 1: just talking about the Kennedy tax cut, why don't we
Speaker 1: just do it and just reintroduce the same legislation. Well,
Speaker 1: obviously you couldn't literally do that because the Kennedy tax
Speaker 1: cut was already in effect, So we had to find
Speaker 1: something that replicated it in in my in current terms,
Speaker 1: remind us, how what were the top rates like under Kennedy.
Speaker 1: What was the actual impact of the cuts that were
Speaker 1: passed in the early sixties. Well, the the you have
Speaker 1: to remember that when Kennedy took office, all the World
Speaker 1: War One to Korea War, tax rates were still in
Speaker 1: effect because Eisenhower refused to cut them on the grounds
Speaker 1: that he wanted to balance the budget. And but Kennedy,
Speaker 1: remember and on saying he wanted to get the economy
Speaker 1: moving again. And so he's at that time the top
Speaker 1: tax rate in the federal marginal statutory income tax rate
Speaker 1: and the bottom rate was I believe, and so he
Speaker 1: cut those from He cut the top right down to
Speaker 1: uh sev and the bottom right down to fourteen percent.
Speaker 1: And that's where those rates were when I started working
Speaker 1: for Jack Kemp. Now, the real problem was remember inflation,
Speaker 1: and everybody was getting pushed up into higher tax brackets. Inflation.
Speaker 1: At the time, tax brackets um were not adjusted for inflation,
Speaker 1: you could just be inflated into a higher bracket, that's right.
Speaker 1: And so workers were getting cost of living adjustments which
Speaker 1: just kept them even, but they were actually were soft
Speaker 1: because they were getting pushed into higher brackets that had
Speaker 1: been originally put in to place the tax people whose
Speaker 1: real incomes were very substantially higher than their's. And actually
Speaker 1: the rich, we're we're in somewhat of a better shape
Speaker 1: because if you're already in the top bracket, you can't
Speaker 1: get pushed any higher. But there were some other problems.
Speaker 1: Capital gains was a very serious problem because a lot
Speaker 1: of the gains that were being realized at that time
Speaker 1: was pure inflation, and so you're you're being it was
Speaker 1: confiscatory taxation. You were paying a tax on on zero
Speaker 1: real gains. So what had Kemp proposed doing based on
Speaker 1: where taxes were in the late He proposed cutting the
Speaker 1: top rate from seventy to fifty and the bottom rate
Speaker 1: from four to and so we just we just asserted
Speaker 1: that this is essentially the Kennedy tax cut, another twenty
Speaker 1: points off the top and a third off the bottom.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so we argued that everybody was getting a
Speaker 1: tax rate cut and all the rates in between were
Speaker 1: cut at about this by the same amount, and so
Speaker 1: we introduced this legislation in the middle of nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, a Senator named Bill Roth from Delaware
Speaker 1: had contacted Kemp saying he really liked what he was
Speaker 1: saying and suggested they worked together, and so we asked
Speaker 1: him if he wanted to be to co sponsor this
Speaker 1: Kennedy tax cut legislation. He was very interested in doing so,
Speaker 1: and that's how it became the Kemp Roth Bill. But
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven there was not much interest in
Speaker 1: this legislation because Republicans were still very wedded to the
Speaker 1: balanced budget idea and they didn't want to cut taxes
Speaker 1: and less they cut spending simultaneously by an equal amount.
Speaker 1: This was the widespread view in the Republican caucus. So
Speaker 1: so we were having trouble getting co sponsors. And of course,
Speaker 1: inflation was a serious problem, and all the conventional administration
Speaker 1: economists said, if you don't act a big tax cut now,
Speaker 1: it'll it'll be massively inflationary, we'll have hyper inflation. So
Speaker 1: we had no support really from anybody except these couple
Speaker 1: of people like Arthur Laugher. And uh, speaking of which
Speaker 1: comes along, Ronald Reagan gets elected in in pretty much
Speaker 1: a landslide, not as big a landslide as eighty four,
Speaker 1: but still substantially trounced the Jimmy Carter. Then what happened?
Speaker 1: How did we get from that too? All those tax
Speaker 1: cut Well, there was something in the middle in between
Speaker 1: happened that's extremely important, which is in eight they passed
Speaker 1: Proposition thirteen in California, and now I remember that's what
Speaker 1: That was a huge cut in the property tax rate.
Speaker 1: And the really important part about this is there were
Speaker 1: no accompanying spending cuts, because everybody just said, there's plenty
Speaker 1: of fat in the government. Let them worry about. It's
Speaker 1: not our problem. We just want to pay less taxes.
Speaker 1: And when this was enacted, it d everybody in the
Speaker 1: United States, everybody in Washington certainly to believe, oh my god,
Speaker 1: there's a tax revolt. We got to do something about this.
Speaker 1: And Kemp's legislation suddenly became the thing that every Republican
Speaker 1: wanted to be the sponsor of. And as you say,
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty, when Ronald Reagan was running for president,
Speaker 1: he he officially endorsed the kemper Off Bill and said,
Speaker 1: this is my legislation, this is what I will send
Speaker 1: to Congress if I'm elected. And he did, and it
Speaker 1: was signed into law in August of And what was
Speaker 1: the impact of those taxes. I think they're grossly exaggerated
Speaker 1: to this day in terms of their economic impact. You
Speaker 1: have to remember the the the the tax cut took
Speaker 1: effect in the middle of a huge recession, and so
Speaker 1: in that sense it was very well timed fiscal stimulus,
Speaker 1: but a lot of other but but of course the
Speaker 1: economy continued downward for well over a year after the
Speaker 1: tax cut took effect. Let's talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: some of the changes that have taken place in politics
Speaker 1: over the past twenty or thirty years that led you
Speaker 1: to really break with your conservative roots. And probably nothing
Speaker 1: epitomizes that more than the book you wrote, How George
Speaker 1: Bush Bankrupted American Betrayed the Rigging Legacy. What led to
Speaker 1: this fairly dramatic pivot from the right to I would
Speaker 1: say the middle, Other people would say the left. What
Speaker 1: what led to this? Oh? I can tell you very
Speaker 1: very specifically, even give you the exact date. Now up
Speaker 1: until two thousand three. I was a very conventional Republican conservative.
Speaker 1: I was very happy in the Republican Party. And then
Speaker 1: on November two thousand three, Uh, you may remember, we
Speaker 1: woke up too, and when we read the newspapers, we
Speaker 1: found out that in the middle of the night, the
Speaker 1: Republican Congress had passed something called the Medicare Part D program,
Speaker 1: and they literally kept the vote open for three hours
Speaker 1: while they twisted arms and did all kinds of things
Speaker 1: to ram this piece of legislation through, which was the
Speaker 1: creation of a new entitlement program for big with big
Speaker 1: giveaways to the industry itself as well. Well, that's right,
Speaker 1: it was. It was a four billion dollar costs, not
Speaker 1: one penny of which was paid for, and they explicitly
Speaker 1: wrote into law that the Medicare program was prohibited from
Speaker 1: negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies in the same way that
Speaker 1: every single private health insurance plan does. So they have
Speaker 1: to pay the list price whatever they charge of dosage,
Speaker 1: the Medicare program has to pay it, and there's nothing
Speaker 1: they can do about it. Was that a stop to
Speaker 1: the industry, It was what was an attempt to bankrupt Medicaid. No,
Speaker 1: I don't think they are consciously trying to bankrupt Medicare.
Speaker 1: What I think is they were trying to throw billions
Speaker 1: and hundreds of billions of dollars at their pals in
Speaker 1: the in the in the in the pharmaceutical industry. I
Speaker 1: think that they were. And the Republicans felt that they
Speaker 1: had to do this because they knew the Democrats would
Speaker 1: the first chance they got, but the Democrats would make
Speaker 1: sure that there were provisions in there to control drug prices,
Speaker 1: and they absolutely did not want that to happen. So
Speaker 1: they had to do take the initiative to pass this
Speaker 1: legislation themselves. And uh, and I was just horrified because
Speaker 1: I thought Republicans existed to cut entitlement programs, reduced spending,
Speaker 1: and creating a new entitlement program was just the opposite
Speaker 1: of what I thought the party existed to do. So
Speaker 1: you sat down and wrote a book called Imposta about
Speaker 1: George Bush. What was the response and you published a
Speaker 1: variety of different columns about it while it was in
Speaker 1: the arks. What was the response from your colleagues on
Speaker 1: the right. Well, first of all, I I started writing
Speaker 1: very very negative columns about George W. Bush, and at
Speaker 1: the time was working for a conservative think tank which
Speaker 1: basically said stop doing this or you're gonna be fired.
Speaker 1: So so that was what led me to decide to
Speaker 1: write the book, which I had originally thought I might
Speaker 1: have to do uh anonymously. But anyway, I wrote this
Speaker 1: book during UH two thousand five, and UH, to my surprise,
Speaker 1: there was interest in the publishing industry about it, and
Speaker 1: UH it came out in in early two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: a Reagan advisor with strong right wing conservative credentials writes
Speaker 1: a book calling George Bush the person who's bankrupting American
Speaker 1: be trading the Reagan legacy. Was it any surprise at
Speaker 1: a conservative think tank said you're out? Uh? In retrospect,
Speaker 1: I was rather naive about all of this, But I see,
Speaker 1: I thought that I had written a book, and if
Speaker 1: you read it, it's it reads like an academic book.
Speaker 1: It's very, very heavily referenced. And not only that, virtually
Speaker 1: every person in the entire book who's cited or quoted
Speaker 1: is a good solid conservative. Because I was, in a
Speaker 1: way distilling what a lot of conservatives were saying. And
Speaker 1: I thought of people simply read the book, they'd be
Speaker 1: UH persuaded by it. They'd agree with me. Isn't it
Speaker 1: shocking you could go through this whole process of putting
Speaker 1: all these facts on paper, and yet still the same
Speaker 1: myths and misunderstandings persist. People don't want to believe that
Speaker 1: which they don't want to believe. That's right, And uh,
Speaker 1: it was really my first experience with this whole phenomenon.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure quite sure what we call it now,
Speaker 1: where confirmation by a selective perception. But there's another quote
Speaker 1: of yours I have to mention because at this point
Speaker 1: I think you're just trying to get your concern OVD
Speaker 1: of Allies and Friends angry. You wrote, no one has
Speaker 1: been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the
Speaker 1: economy's problems than Paul Krugman, a prominent Kingsie economist. He
Speaker 1: is the boogeyman for the far right, and yet you're
Speaker 1: saying this guy has been more right than anyone else.
Speaker 1: I don't remember exactly when I said that, but I
Speaker 1: do remember saying it, and and I agree with that.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about your most recent book,
Speaker 1: The Truth Matters, A citizens Guide to separating facts and
Speaker 1: lies and stopping fake news in its tracks. First question
Speaker 1: is the truth matters. Isn't that self evident? Don't we
Speaker 1: don't we all believe the truth matters? One would think so.
Speaker 1: But there's obviously a great deal of evidence to the contrary,
Speaker 1: at least as far as Donald Trump is concerned. I mean,
Speaker 1: you've probably read this recent story where he continues to
Speaker 1: insist that he owns a ren Wi, an original ren Wi.
Speaker 1: Now has he actually said that, because the Chicago Art
Speaker 1: Institute recently came out and said, the renoir pictured in
Speaker 1: Trump's apartment, the original is here. We have the providence,
Speaker 1: we could trade trace it back from when it was
Speaker 1: painted to who it was sold to. We know exactly
Speaker 1: who and who and where it is. How can Trump
Speaker 1: really believe that that's an original? He simply continues to
Speaker 1: assert it, just as he asserts so many other things
Speaker 1: that are simply lies. Now, the reason I wrote the book,
Speaker 1: it's because I was horrified by the election results. Were
Speaker 1: you surprised by them? Yes? I was on election night.
Speaker 1: I mean it was quite early in the evening when
Speaker 1: I saw the handwriting on the wall, when I saw
Speaker 1: the Hillary was was not hadn't yet been called in
Speaker 1: states that I was quite certain she was going to
Speaker 1: I knew that was a very bad sign. And uh,
Speaker 1: and and I didn't stay up to watch the final
Speaker 1: results of No. I just couldn't handle it. And in fact,
Speaker 1: I refused to read any of the news for about
Speaker 1: two months after the election. I was just sick to
Speaker 1: my stomach. Oh you miss them, fascinating thing. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: imagine I did. But but as I you know, got
Speaker 1: out of my stupor or whatever and began to think
Speaker 1: about what was going on, the thing that struck me
Speaker 1: was the problems of the media, because it seemed to
Speaker 1: me that that the media that had existed throughout most
Speaker 1: of our lifetimes, you know, when you had three major
Speaker 1: news broadcasts in the evening, you didn't have cable. Everybody
Speaker 1: got a newspaper delivered to their house that were responsible
Speaker 1: newspapers that had a great deal of power and authority.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't have allowed any of this to happen. And
Speaker 1: so I felt that the weakness of the media, certain
Speaker 1: things that were going on in the nature and the
Speaker 1: structure of the media. Uh, we're very much to blame
Speaker 1: for the Trump phenomenon. So let's unpack that a little bit,
Speaker 1: because we have we have a couple of things driving that,
Speaker 1: you have the overall move to digital, which hurt newspaper classify.
Speaker 1: Everything from Craigslist to Amazon to Google have all taken
Speaker 1: a big chunk of the traditional media's revenue stream. And
Speaker 1: so we've seen big cutbacks and newsrooms. We've seen consolidation.
Speaker 1: We've seen a lot of newspapers closing. And that's before
Speaker 1: we get to the rise of Facebook and fake news.
Speaker 1: These are all related phenomenon. Obviously, the media don't have
Speaker 1: the economic strength to oppose a pop you know, somebody,
Speaker 1: I won't say Trump is popular in the conventional sense,
Speaker 1: but he's obviously newsworthy and and people paid in an
Speaker 1: ordinate amount of tension. Whenever there was a story about him,
Speaker 1: it got lots of clicks. Somebody said that the media
Speaker 1: gave him and I'm I know, I'm mangling this number
Speaker 1: two billion, eight billion dollars at the free coverage. And
Speaker 1: and that's why he ran a fairly shoe string campaign,
Speaker 1: not a big budget. That's exactly correct. And and but worse,
Speaker 1: what they did is they tended inadvertently, perhaps to normalize him.
Speaker 1: They share they shaved off the rough edges and didn't
Speaker 1: make him seem like the total clown that he in
Speaker 1: fact is and always has been. They felt like, how
Speaker 1: can we justify spending so much time covering this this
Speaker 1: this clown. We have to elevate him up so that
Speaker 1: he seems important enough to justify us giving him so
Speaker 1: much airspace, so many column inches of coverage. So now
Speaker 1: it's funny you say that, because I'm a lifelong New Yorker,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna oversimplify this. But most New Yorkers know who
Speaker 1: Donald Trump was before he ran for office, and he
Speaker 1: was kind of looked at as, yeah, the guy inherited
Speaker 1: a bunch of money and he's kind of a a goofball,
Speaker 1: but nobody really took him seriously. Some people thought he
Speaker 1: was a grifter. I know other people who talked about
Speaker 1: him not paying contractors and all the lawsuits and all
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff. But I think the average New
Speaker 1: york had kind of looked at him and said, yeah,
Speaker 1: this guy is in a serious candidate. It was shocking
Speaker 1: to those of us here that the rest of the
Speaker 1: country he found such a robust resonance with Well, I
Speaker 1: suppose you have to give the devil his due and
Speaker 1: say that. However, instinctively he figured this out. He did
Speaker 1: tap into a very deep strain of political and cultural
Speaker 1: trends that were really invisible frankly to even two polsters.
Speaker 1: Let's focus on on the media itself and what you
Speaker 1: think they're doing wrong and what do they have to
Speaker 1: do to fix the problem they have with not being
Speaker 1: perceived as truthful or reliable. Well, I felt when I
Speaker 1: when I conceived this book that given the nature of
Speaker 1: the media environment, people needed to know more about the
Speaker 1: nuts and bolts of how the news is created, how
Speaker 1: it's produced, how it's distributed. Uh. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: if you had a situation, perhaps not unlike someplace in Cuba,
Speaker 1: where you couldn't have a car unless you knew how
Speaker 1: to repair it yourself and maybe even build it from scratch.
Speaker 1: And so as as the the the infrastructure of the
Speaker 1: media has started to sort of collapse, people are going
Speaker 1: to have to create their own uh media for themselves.
Speaker 1: They have to curate their own news feed and rely
Speaker 1: on whatever they They can't rely on just reading a
Speaker 1: decent daily newspaper every day and field that they knew
Speaker 1: know whatever they needed to know that day. Uh. Many
Speaker 1: of the cable channels are ranked uh propaganda. The Fox
Speaker 1: News channel is just literally a subsidiary of the Republican
Speaker 1: National Committee. And when you when you say that, I
Speaker 1: don't just necessarily disagree. But when I say that to
Speaker 1: Republican friends, the answer I usually get is, well, the
Speaker 1: entire media landscape is completely liberal. Well, that's a why
Speaker 1: they tell themselves to justify watching a media source that
Speaker 1: just lies continuously. But I will concede, and I say
Speaker 1: in the book, there was a time, uh when I
Speaker 1: think the vast bulk of the mainstream media did tilt
Speaker 1: to the left, perhaps not nearly as much as as
Speaker 1: conservatives thought they did, but there's no question that if
Speaker 1: you interviewed or talked to the typical New York Times
Speaker 1: Washington Post reporter circle of the nineteen seventies, they were
Speaker 1: clearly to the left of center. The data shows that
Speaker 1: reporters tended to be educated and younger that will skewed
Speaker 1: to the left. Their editors tended to be also educated
Speaker 1: in urban but higher earning and older that skewed them
Speaker 1: a little more to the right. The theory was they
Speaker 1: would kind of balance each other out. Has the liberal
Speaker 1: media trope? Has that been wildly overstated or is it is? It?
Speaker 1: Is there still truth to it or is it just
Speaker 1: a little bit of truth and it's exaggerated for effects. Well,
Speaker 1: what I think happened is that beginning I'm not sure
Speaker 1: precisely when, but let's say the nineteen mid nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: or so, I think the the mainstream media tried to
Speaker 1: tilt itself more towards the center. That is, they moved
Speaker 1: to the right from where they were, but they moved
Speaker 1: to the center, and I think they're by and large
Speaker 1: they stayed there. Now, what happened with Foxes, I think
Speaker 1: they originally started more or less in the center. I
Speaker 1: think they were pretty sent trusts, but they were to
Speaker 1: the right of their competitors, so they weren't really to
Speaker 1: the objective right. They were right relative about what happens
Speaker 1: when the rest of the media moved to the center,
Speaker 1: they then moved very far to the right, and I
Speaker 1: think especially nine eleven had a great deal to do.
Speaker 1: That's when they went full on off the reds and
Speaker 1: became so so that this is a good time to ask,
Speaker 1: what is the Overton window. You discussed this in the
Speaker 1: book and it's fascinating. Well, we're basically talking about it
Speaker 1: right now. Is the window is what you can see
Speaker 1: out of an ordinary window. You can see, let's say,
Speaker 1: a parade going by, but you can only see that
Speaker 1: little section of what might be a long parade that
Speaker 1: is right in front of your window. You can't see
Speaker 1: what's the left, you can't see what's the right. But
Speaker 1: if the window itself moves to the right, you may
Speaker 1: think you're still seeing the same part of the parade,
Speaker 1: but you're not. You're now seeing the right part of
Speaker 1: the parade, and so your perspective is distorted. And we
Speaker 1: were just talking about this. The mainstream media moved to
Speaker 1: the right and ended up in the center, and the
Speaker 1: Fox and the right wing media moved much further to
Speaker 1: the right. But because the mainstream media is relatively still
Speaker 1: on the left, this allows those on the right to
Speaker 1: claim falsely that the media is left wing, and this
Speaker 1: justifies there being very very right wing, which they claim, well,
Speaker 1: we're simply off setting what they're doing, but in fact,
Speaker 1: what they're doing is lying, doing propaganda and distortion, whereas
Speaker 1: the mainstream media is still stuck trying to tell the truth. Bruce,
Speaker 1: you don't mince words. Can you stick around a little bit?
Speaker 1: I have a lot more questions for you. We have
Speaker 1: been speaking with Bruce Bartlett, former Reagan policy advisor, on
Speaker 1: taxes and economics. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure
Speaker 1: and check out the podcast. Extra is Will we keep
Speaker 1: the tape running and continue to talk about all things policy,
Speaker 1: media and tax based. Be sure and check out my
Speaker 1: daily column. You can find that on Bloomberg View dot com.
Speaker 1: Follow me on Twitter at rid Holts. We love your comments, feedback,
Speaker 1: end suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're listening to Masters
Speaker 1: in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast. Thank
Speaker 1: you Bruce for doing this. I've been looking forward to
Speaker 1: having this conversation because I know you don't mince words,
Speaker 1: you say it as you see it, and you have
Speaker 1: been on both sides of the political spectrum. I know
Speaker 1: no one better situated to observe the current political media
Speaker 1: whatever situation than you. There's there's a few people who
Speaker 1: have done the sorts of things that you've done well.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you when I first broke with the GOP
Speaker 1: over the Medicare Part D legislation, I thought I didn't
Speaker 1: really break with the GPA. What I did is I
Speaker 1: broke with the elected Republicans who were not I was
Speaker 1: breaking with Bush more than anything else, and I thought
Speaker 1: I was helping my party. I still consider myself to
Speaker 1: be a Republican. And what I was afraid of is
Speaker 1: that bushes and competence and screw ups, we're just teeing
Speaker 1: the ball up for the Democrats to win in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight. And what I thought, remember my book
Speaker 1: came out in two thousand six, as I thought, if
Speaker 1: we had a debate about why Bush was a failure,
Speaker 1: maybe we could nominate somebody who would have a chance
Speaker 1: of winning in two thousand eight. And everybody thought I
Speaker 1: was being a trader for even raising doubts about the
Speaker 1: possibility that that the next Republican wouldn't just win in
Speaker 1: a heartbeat. And I didn't know anything about Obama. He
Speaker 1: wasn't even on my radar screen. I just knew that
Speaker 1: from from long history that two terms of one presidency
Speaker 1: one party, you know, you tend to get the next one.
Speaker 1: And I thought there was a very very small chance.
Speaker 1: But I thought, you know, purging bush Ism was was
Speaker 1: part of what needed to be done. And this is
Speaker 1: what everybody got upset about me about I think it
Speaker 1: was the the old you know, the little kids saying
Speaker 1: the Emperor's not wearing any clothes. Phenomenon is you just
Speaker 1: not allowed to say certain things in the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: And we've seen this now just the last few days
Speaker 1: with Senators Corker and Flake, where they're just being savaged
Speaker 1: by their own party for saying simply for saying out
Speaker 1: loud what they have said. We've been talking about this
Speaker 1: behind closed doors with other members of the Republicans in
Speaker 1: the Senate for months and months, and we can't take
Speaker 1: it anymore. We're going public and and everybody's just shocked,
Speaker 1: and they're afraid they're gonna get primaried from the right
Speaker 1: and they will. Uh. You have this absolute lunatic named
Speaker 1: Steve Bannon, whom I actually know slightly. I was in
Speaker 1: a movie that he directed called Generation Zero. You can
Speaker 1: go to IMDb, i amdb dot com and find that
Speaker 1: the entire movie is available on YouTube. And I know
Speaker 1: a few other people who had lots of people were
Speaker 1: in that movie and worry. Okay, Well, I actually got
Speaker 1: to go to a party at the bright Bart Mansion
Speaker 1: on Capitol Hill and I met Steve Bannon and I
Speaker 1: don't remember too much about the nature of our conversation,
Speaker 1: but at least I did meet him long before. This
Speaker 1: is ten years ago or so, right after the financial
Speaker 1: crisis exact, that's right, that's right round two thousand nine
Speaker 1: or ten thereabouts, but I think it was before the
Speaker 1: big Republican victory in the elections that year, so so
Speaker 1: there were still sort of on the outs, but now,
Speaker 1: of course they're very much on the inside. So here's
Speaker 1: here's the issue that um. I don't even know if
Speaker 1: this is pushed back to you, but people always seem
Speaker 1: to be surprised when I say I was a Jacob
Speaker 1: Javits Republican. Just I have a libertarian streak. I don't
Speaker 1: think the government should tell people who could get elected
Speaker 1: what they can smoke and consume, whether or not they
Speaker 1: can have an abortion, and all those sort of things
Speaker 1: are very paternalistic overreach from government. So I tended to
Speaker 1: affiliate and believe more, um with the libertarian Republican side,
Speaker 1: and Jacob Javits was the traditional moderate Northeastern Republican. And
Speaker 1: what's astonishing is the party from that era sixties, seventies,
Speaker 1: even early eighties, the modern Republican party does not remotely
Speaker 1: resemble that previous Republican party. So when people were pushing
Speaker 1: back at you saying, hey, this is not what we
Speaker 1: stand for. Really, the party was moving elsewhere and you
Speaker 1: weren't keeping up. Is that a fair assessment? You leave
Speaker 1: the party so much as it it left the part
Speaker 1: of the political spectrum where you were residing. Well, the
Speaker 1: the deep historical trend that explains what you're talking about is,
Speaker 1: of course what goes by the Southern strategy. That is,
Speaker 1: you had, for for a hundred years or more after
Speaker 1: the Civil War, a weird situation in which you had
Speaker 1: very conservative politically, culturally, economically, and so on, a group
Speaker 1: of people in the South who, for purely historical reasons,
Speaker 1: associated with the Liberal Party, and there were too many
Speaker 1: of them to be pushed out, so they had to
Speaker 1: be accommodated, meaning meaning Republicans or whoever was in the
Speaker 1: Deep South didn't feel comfortable voting for the Party of
Speaker 1: Lincoln because of the vestiges of of the was simply
Speaker 1: a waste of time. You couldn't win uh and uh in.
Speaker 1: The one group of people who you could have gotten
Speaker 1: support from were, of course African Americans, who were widely
Speaker 1: you know, had their votes suppressed, So there was simply there.
Speaker 1: You simply couldn't win. So if you wanted a career
Speaker 1: in politics, you had no choice but to be a Democrat.
Speaker 1: And now let's let's talk about the modern era. You
Speaker 1: go from Bushism to eight years of um Obama. I
Speaker 1: argued in OH eight, in the middle of the financial crisis,
Speaker 1: it didn't matter who the Republicans put up, they were
Speaker 1: going to lose because the financial crisis was Hey, first,
Speaker 1: non eleven. Now this happened on your watch. We're we're
Speaker 1: tapping at We're done. Um. I get that sense, whether
Speaker 1: it was subconscious or or verbalized, that's what the middle
Speaker 1: was thinking. And you could arguably say nine eleven was
Speaker 1: something that could either it couldn't have been stopped or
Speaker 1: we just didn't understand how how significant the threat was.
Speaker 1: But the financial crisis, hey, it's coming in the last
Speaker 1: year of eight. It's very hard to pass the buck
Speaker 1: on that, even though there were forces that were ten
Speaker 1: twenty thirty years in the making that led to it.
Speaker 1: So I thought the Republicans were destined to lose an
Speaker 1: OH eight. I didn't feel that either party was a
Speaker 1: sure fire victor in what what do we take away
Speaker 1: from the election in Well, it's lots of people have
Speaker 1: dissected that election, will continue to do so. And it's
Speaker 1: pretty clear that Hillary Clinton had deep, deep flaws as
Speaker 1: a candidate, and and everybody knew that. But she, but
Speaker 1: so did he, so did Donald Trump. Neither of them
Speaker 1: were good candidates. No, I agree, but I thought Hillary
Speaker 1: was gonna win. But then again, I always assumed that
Speaker 1: she was doing competent polling in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota,
Speaker 1: and knew what her situation was and could put resources
Speaker 1: into these places rather than just pretend to thinking, Oh,
Speaker 1: they're in the bag. I don't need to waste my
Speaker 1: time there. I'm gonna have a big rally the night
Speaker 1: before the election in Philadelphia. You know my pals, you know,
Speaker 1: Beyonce and Jay z or whoever you No, Pennsylvania, for
Speaker 1: sure was an issue, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina. There was
Speaker 1: a big article recently that some of the voters suppression
Speaker 1: rules in Wisconsin may have thrown that state. So I'll
Speaker 1: give her the benefit of the doubt with one state,
Speaker 1: but the rest, there's no other way to say it.
Speaker 1: She blew it. But look if she had won, she
Speaker 1: wuld have won by the skin of her teeth. And
Speaker 1: you can imagine what the Republicans would be doing to
Speaker 1: savage her. I mean, she'd have already been impeached by now,
Speaker 1: so I she would have been impeached already. Quite possibly.
Speaker 1: They just started a new investigation of Hillary's involvement some
Speaker 1: uranium sale. You know, they never you know, you do
Speaker 1: think about Niger, but we're still talking about Benghazi. I mean, Republicans.
Speaker 1: What you can always say of them is they never
Speaker 1: learn and they never forget, and so they will be
Speaker 1: dredging up these things for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1: Which raises which raises a question, because I don't think,
Speaker 1: you know, I never want to draw a false equivalences
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. Hypothetically the Congress is retaken by the Democrats,
Speaker 1: are we going to see impeachment proceedings against President uh Trump?
Speaker 1: Quite possibly depends. I think that the Democrats have a
Speaker 1: better chance of retaking the House than the Senate. I
Speaker 1: think it's going to be tough in the Senate, sent
Speaker 1: us a real long shot houses probably with your better
Speaker 1: it's it's within uh striking distance. But the point is
Speaker 1: I was getting at is. Even if they win, they're
Speaker 1: not going to have an overwhelming majority. It's not gonna
Speaker 1: be like ninety four, where you know, a huge Democratic
Speaker 1: majority comes in. And so I think that there and
Speaker 1: they'll have their hands full just trying to stop some
Speaker 1: of the Trump initiatives that more than likely will still
Speaker 1: be I think we'll still be talking about tax reform
Speaker 1: in I don't believe that they have the competence or
Speaker 1: the wherewithal to pass anything. Uh certainly not this year,
Speaker 1: and I don't think next year either. So let me
Speaker 1: ask you another question. And I've shared this with some
Speaker 1: of my Democratic friends. Um, Trump is makes a lot
Speaker 1: of noise and and maybe he bothers you on Twitter,
Speaker 1: and maybe he's a little bit of an harassman internationally,
Speaker 1: but he's not competent. He's never run a real organization,
Speaker 1: he's never run a large business. He certainly has never
Speaker 1: run a state or a city. He's gonna get nothing done,
Speaker 1: and he's just gonna piss everybody off. On the other hands,
Speaker 1: if you wish him gone, well say what you will
Speaker 1: about Vice President Pence. He was a fairly competent governor
Speaker 1: of a fairly substantial size state, and he knows how
Speaker 1: to do politics. Pence will get a lot more legislation
Speaker 1: through than Trump ever could. So be careful what you
Speaker 1: wish for. If Trump is gone, now you're dealing with
Speaker 1: a competent even further right individual, What what are your
Speaker 1: thoughts on that? Well, I think Pence is nominally more competent,
Speaker 1: but that's damning him with the faintest possible But he's
Speaker 1: but he's such a religious fanatic. I think it would
Speaker 1: be like having Jeff's sessions really as president. And and
Speaker 1: and I wouldn't under estimate Trump's ability to get things
Speaker 1: done because he has absolutely no consistency. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: willing to just flip under nati degrees from what he
Speaker 1: said yesterday. And what he really cares about is the
Speaker 1: art of the deal he wanting. He wants something in
Speaker 1: the wind column. He doesn't care what it is. That's
Speaker 1: precisely right. So that sort of flexibility should have led
Speaker 1: him to get some sort of repeal and replace through.
Speaker 1: Why couldn't he get that that that issue is still
Speaker 1: open as you know, Uh, there there are people in
Speaker 1: the Congress so working on an Obamacare fix that he
Speaker 1: has on various days said he supports or opposes, and
Speaker 1: I think I think there's still something that at the
Speaker 1: end of the day could get across the finish line
Speaker 1: there and he'll stand up there and pretend he never
Speaker 1: said anything negative about any of this stuff. That's that's
Speaker 1: his strength. It's of course it's a weakness as well,
Speaker 1: but let's not underestimate the strength part. Let's call it
Speaker 1: an intellectual flexibility. Well, that's one way putting it. So
Speaker 1: we were talking before about the media moving, the mainstream
Speaker 1: media moving from somewhat left of center to center, and
Speaker 1: that just your your description in The Truth Matters reminded
Speaker 1: me of Stephen Colbert, who when he was uh doing
Speaker 1: the Colbert ra poor, one of his first things to
Speaker 1: go viral was liberal reality has a well known liberal bias.
Speaker 1: Is that is that any truth to that? Or? I
Speaker 1: think that's absolutely true. I think part of the problem
Speaker 1: with those on the right is many of them are
Speaker 1: are very religious, and they are very accustomed to taking
Speaker 1: things on faith. It could be ideology, it could be
Speaker 1: belief sys and I think it's very easy for them
Speaker 1: to just kind of just gloss over the fact that
Speaker 1: facts don't fit their worldview and and create an alternative
Speaker 1: universe in which they do when cognitive dissonance written large,
Speaker 1: that's one way of putting it. So, so how do
Speaker 1: they rationalize when the Pope comes out and says, hey,
Speaker 1: climate change is real and and we were given the
Speaker 1: earth and you therefore should be working to protect it,
Speaker 1: not despoiling it. How do the conservatives rationalize, Well, he's
Speaker 1: just the Pope. Well, as far as I can see,
Speaker 1: even Catholics have pretty much or I should say Republican
Speaker 1: Catholics pretty much ignore what the Pope said. I mean,
Speaker 1: look at the fact that we are ambassador to the
Speaker 1: Vatican is a woman who's an admitted adulterer. Okay, that's right,
Speaker 1: It's yeah, they had It's well known that she had
Speaker 1: an affair with new while he was still married. And
Speaker 1: and and he of course he's been married three times.
Speaker 1: I doubt that he had his marriage as annulled and
Speaker 1: so the legitimately so. And these are paragons of Catholicism, now,
Speaker 1: isn't that? Isn't that Trump just kind of tweaking the
Speaker 1: Pope because the Pope has said not nice things about him.
Speaker 1: Perhaps I think he mostly just doesn't care. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: Nuke called him up and said, my wife is a
Speaker 1: big Catholic. She really wants to be ambassador of the
Speaker 1: UH to the Vatican. When he said, my wife is
Speaker 1: a big Catholic. Hold that whole adultery thing aside. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm just hypothesizing how this came about. Nude asked for
Speaker 1: a favor, and Trump said, sure, why not? You want
Speaker 1: to be ambassador? You want to? I don't care. And
Speaker 1: because he clearly has shown absolutely no interest in the
Speaker 1: highest level appointments in his administration. I mean, it's quite
Speaker 1: clear that the Secretary of State hates him. And uh,
Speaker 1: this I don't know. I mean, who knows what Kelly
Speaker 1: is going through Kelly's mind these days when he's forced
Speaker 1: to stand up there and tell rank lies about to
Speaker 1: what this woman, this congresswoman said at an event they
Speaker 1: had video tape of, and he and he and he
Speaker 1: he won't say, he okay, I'm sorry, I made a mistake.
Speaker 1: I misremembered. He stands up there and says, I stand
Speaker 1: by the lie that I said the other day, and
Speaker 1: I'm not changing. Who are you gonna believe me or
Speaker 1: you lying? That's one of those jokes. It's you know,
Speaker 1: someone had said that nobody comes out of the Bush
Speaker 1: administration with their reputation intact, which really wasn't true because
Speaker 1: there were a handful of people on the economic side.
Speaker 1: Greg man q is back at at Harvard teaching, and
Speaker 1: Richard Clarida is at PIMCO. And Jose are just too
Speaker 1: off the top of my head. Although certainly some people
Speaker 1: suffered some reputational damage, the neo cons and a bunch
Speaker 1: of other people involved in the Iraq War, I get
Speaker 1: the sense that this administration is just a reputation devouring machine.
Speaker 1: Is anybody going to come out of this administration reputation?
Speaker 1: And one reason I think that you haven't seen more
Speaker 1: people leave is because there's no place for them to go. Stuck.
Speaker 1: They're stuck, I mean to literally have a paycheck coming in. Uh,
Speaker 1: they have to stay there and maybe hope for the best.
Speaker 1: Aren't most of many of them wealthy and or billionaires?
Speaker 1: Oh not Well, if you're talking about the cabinet, sure,
Speaker 1: guys like Steve Manuchin and Rex Tiller's fabulously wealthy. But
Speaker 1: I mean they're there the people who do the real work,
Speaker 1: you know, the the assistant secretaries and the people of
Speaker 1: that sort, the White House staff, they're just paid whatever
Speaker 1: they get paid fifty or a hundred thousand dollars a
Speaker 1: year and now and many of them now have to
Speaker 1: hire private lawyers because they were involved in the campaign.
Speaker 1: And you saw the other day Trump was offering to
Speaker 1: pay some of their legal expenses. Uh and uh, I
Speaker 1: think some of these people are are really really hurting that.
Speaker 1: That's interesting. My pet theory about why so many political
Speaker 1: appointed positions are unfilled is Trump didn't expect to win,
Speaker 1: didn't want to win. Everybody else has a list of
Speaker 1: here the three thousand people we're gonna bring with us.
Speaker 1: He was scrambling on November ten, too, all Right, who
Speaker 1: are we gonna name? Secretary of state? Who we can
Speaker 1: It seemed like they were wholly unprepared for the requirements
Speaker 1: of office because they It's even worse than that, because
Speaker 1: they apparently did absolutely nothing between election day in jan
Speaker 1: He was just as unprepared the day he took the
Speaker 1: oath of office as he was the day he won
Speaker 1: the election. Did not hit the ground running, not exactly. No,
Speaker 1: So let's let's talk a little bit about some of
Speaker 1: the other items in the Truth Matters, And I also
Speaker 1: want to talk about Reaganomics supply side economics in action.
Speaker 1: There's a line that you said, and I'm gonna say
Speaker 1: two things, and they're a little contradictory. Um, but I think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think they are are somewhat consistent. First, you you
Speaker 1: wrote to Washington Post column headlines, I helped to create
Speaker 1: the GP tax myth Trump is wrong. Tax cuts don't
Speaker 1: equal growth. So the first question is what are the
Speaker 1: benefits of tax cuts and and or fiscal stimulus. Well,
Speaker 1: I think you have to look at it from at
Speaker 1: least from the theory of what the supplies of what
Speaker 1: the Republicans say happens when you cut taxes. They believe,
Speaker 1: basically in the and Randy and great Man theory, that
Speaker 1: the wealthy carry the rest of us on their backs,
Speaker 1: and their incentives count for everything. The average guy contributes nothing.
Speaker 1: It's the it's the wealthy who do everything. Are you
Speaker 1: overstating that or do you know? I think that this
Speaker 1: is what they believe in their heart of hearts, and
Speaker 1: so that's why they're obsessed with the top rate of
Speaker 1: taxation and why they're obsessed with getting it down no
Speaker 1: matter what the problem is. They also want to be
Speaker 1: able to say that tax cuts benefit the average person.
Speaker 1: The problem is, you can't help the average person with
Speaker 1: federal income tax cuts because they basically don't pay any
Speaker 1: They pay a lot of payroll taxes, yes, but they pay.
Speaker 1: The families with incomes below the median are paying virtually
Speaker 1: nothing in terms of income median being around fifty three
Speaker 1: thousand or something like that. I think in the aggregate,
Speaker 1: no family with an income above forty pays any federal
Speaker 1: or below pays any federal income taxes at all. So
Speaker 1: so they have to make up some way of claiming
Speaker 1: that these people will benefit. And that's why they've come
Speaker 1: up with this crackpot theory that wages will rise by
Speaker 1: at least four thousand dollars and maybe as much as
Speaker 1: nine thousand dollars if you pass this big cut in
Speaker 1: the corporate income tax rate. There's no credible think tank economist,
Speaker 1: anybody who's looked at the numbers. It's just holly fabricated
Speaker 1: out of whole cluse. It's just complete nonsense. So so
Speaker 1: let me throw another quote you. I can't. I just
Speaker 1: say one more thing about this. If you go, it's
Speaker 1: very easy to go to BLS dot gov and look
Speaker 1: up the data for wages. Real wages start in Night six.
Speaker 1: And look at what happened to average real median wages.
Speaker 1: And you'll see that after the six Act, which lowered
Speaker 1: the top personal income tax rate from fifty to twenty
Speaker 1: eight percent, which is much lower, and they lowered the
Speaker 1: corporate tax rate from forty to thirty. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is like, you know, the best tax reform imaginable. And
Speaker 1: what happened to wages is they fell for ten solid
Speaker 1: years after the Act. It was only after the ninety
Speaker 1: three tax increase that wages started to rise again. So
Speaker 1: you don't believe is it safe to say that? Well,
Speaker 1: let me let me let me re say state that
Speaker 1: another quote of yours, supply side economics was appropriate for
Speaker 1: the seventies and eighties. Supply side arguments do not fit
Speaker 1: contemporary conditions. So explain what is so different today versus
Speaker 1: five and thirty years ago that makes supply side arguments
Speaker 1: just not work here? Well, look, we in the early eighties,
Speaker 1: in the late seventies, early eighties, the biggest problem was
Speaker 1: we had too much demand not enough supply. And the
Speaker 1: proof of that is we had inflation. That is per
Speaker 1: se evidence of that being the case. We always used
Speaker 1: to say inflation is too much money chasing too few goods.
Speaker 1: So you could argue that we did need to do
Speaker 1: things to help uh encourage the creation the production of
Speaker 1: more goods and services. And that's what the supply side
Speaker 1: theory was about. Today, we have a persistent problem of deflation,
Speaker 1: and the proof of that is the current level of
Speaker 1: and trust rates, which are ridiculously low ten years into
Speaker 1: an economic expansion. It's absurd. Now this is per se evidence.
Speaker 1: I think that we have a lack of aggregate demand.
Speaker 1: We have the reverse problem. So we don't need a
Speaker 1: supply side solution. We need a demand side solution. And
Speaker 1: my own preferred solution would be something that Trump allegedly
Speaker 1: is in favor, which is a big infrastructure program that
Speaker 1: would be the medicine the economy needs, which raises the
Speaker 1: obvious point why you would think that is the easiest
Speaker 1: thing for any president to get through this support on
Speaker 1: the left, this support and the right. Everybody gets a little,
Speaker 1: a little gravy to spread around their own district because
Speaker 1: it's going to be a national spend. Whether it's highways
Speaker 1: or rails, or electrical grid reports or fill in the blank,
Speaker 1: there's a ton of infrastructure needed. Why wasn't that the
Speaker 1: first thing that was done? Why wasn't something past You
Speaker 1: would think that's a no brainer to get. If you
Speaker 1: want to chuck up a victory, what at ends? You
Speaker 1: could even tie it to a little bit of overseas
Speaker 1: profit repatriation, which people both hate a special Some people
Speaker 1: hate a special one time tax cut, but not as
Speaker 1: much as they hate all these these billions of dollars overseas.
Speaker 1: Why could not that have have been done first and
Speaker 1: been passed? And here's the wind, you know, chalk this
Speaker 1: up for your wind column. I don't know for sure,
Speaker 1: but what I think happened is Trump was simply misled
Speaker 1: by congressional Republicans. They lied to him, well, one of
Speaker 1: the things they lied to I mean, Trump is on
Speaker 1: record as saying he thought an Obamacare repeal bill was
Speaker 1: going to be on his desk the first time he
Speaker 1: walked into the oval office after taking the oath of office,
Speaker 1: because remember the Congress was gonna had been in session
Speaker 1: for three weeks before he took the oath of office,
Speaker 1: and so but he also said, I have a plan
Speaker 1: right here, and it's gonna cover everybody. And but but
Speaker 1: I think he did think that Republicans in Congress had
Speaker 1: been working since two thousand nine on a replacement for Obamacare,
Speaker 1: because that's what they've been saying they've been and nobody
Speaker 1: had done any thought. He thought there was a bill
Speaker 1: that somebody had written and was was ready to go. Wait,
Speaker 1: So the whole time we've had what fifty three votes
Speaker 1: to repeal Obamacare, nobody on the Republican party ever actually
Speaker 1: drafted a here's a legitimate repeal and replace bill. There
Speaker 1: was nothing, nothing, because you see, the Republican plan was
Speaker 1: simply to abolish Obamacare. They never intended to replace it
Speaker 1: with anything. Once you give thirty or forty million people
Speaker 1: health insurance, you can't just yank that away. That what
Speaker 1: you suddenly you've created a giant health crisis. Well, they
Speaker 1: didn't see it that way. I don't know why. I
Speaker 1: don't really understand how they think about these things anymore,
Speaker 1: but it's clear that that's what what they were trying
Speaker 1: to do. And Trump the problem was Trump believe them.
Speaker 1: And remember he screwed everything up by saying, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're not going to just repeal Obamacare. We're gonna have
Speaker 1: repeal and replace. So it was really a Trump who
Speaker 1: upset the apple cart by insisting that there be a replacement.
Speaker 1: He didn't have one, but he a sessional. If you
Speaker 1: think about it, you know, once you give somebody an entitlement,
Speaker 1: it's all but impossible to remove it. So the thought
Speaker 1: process was, for whatever reasons, we don't like romney Care,
Speaker 1: which eventually became Trump Obamacare, but that traces its roots
Speaker 1: to the Heritage Foundation and a fairly right wing free
Speaker 1: market um roots. The idea of replacing it with something
Speaker 1: sounded great on the campaign trail. Nobody had done any
Speaker 1: of the heavy lifting. I'm still apparently has no staff
Speaker 1: people to have picked up the phone and called Paul
Speaker 1: Ryan and said, could you please send us over you
Speaker 1: know HR sixty three or whatever it is your legislation is,
Speaker 1: so that we can take a look at it for
Speaker 1: your Obamacare. There was nothing. There was nothing there. And
Speaker 1: I think this was true of so many other things.
Speaker 1: I think he thought that the Republicans had a fully
Speaker 1: developed tax reform plan and all he had to do
Speaker 1: was endorse it. There was nothing there. There was nothing.
Speaker 1: What have these guys been doing for eight years other
Speaker 1: than that's it. That's it. That's all they did. I
Speaker 1: mean you've argued that the Republicans are better as the
Speaker 1: out of party rangers, out of power ragers than actually
Speaker 1: having to run government. Yes, that's quite clear. But I
Speaker 1: want I'm not going to let the Democrats entirely off
Speaker 1: the hook here. They don't deserve to be left. Why
Speaker 1: couldn't they have drafted an infrastructure plan? Why couldn't they?
Speaker 1: You know, a couple of weeks ago, we had a
Speaker 1: big debate in the Senate and the House about we're
Speaker 1: gonna allow we're gonna put one point five trillion dollars
Speaker 1: of increase in the national debt into the budget to
Speaker 1: accommodate the revenue loss from the tax plan we're going
Speaker 1: to pass. Why didn't some Democrat offer as a substitute
Speaker 1: a one point five trillion dollar infrastructure plan. See, they
Speaker 1: don't have the sense to do that. You're absolutely right
Speaker 1: on that, because given the lack of staff and the
Speaker 1: lack of anyone willing to roll up their sleeves and
Speaker 1: the Trump administration and do the heavy lifting, why haven't
Speaker 1: Schumer and company said, Hey, you wanted a profit repatriation
Speaker 1: and an infrastructure bill here, you don't even have to
Speaker 1: put our names on it. Slap your name on it
Speaker 1: and work with this. I think the problem is the
Speaker 1: Democrats have internalized the basic Republican view of the world. Okay,
Speaker 1: they argue within parameters that are established by the Republicans.
Speaker 1: So Republicans come out and say we're going to have
Speaker 1: a tax cut. The Democrat reaction instinctively say say, well,
Speaker 1: we don't want to cut it for the for the rich.
Speaker 1: We need to tilt us more towards the middle class.
Speaker 1: But we're still but we still agree with the principle
Speaker 1: that we need a huge tax cut. We just want
Speaker 1: to reoriented towards our an on whatever. The Republicans so
Speaker 1: so they don't seem to have the guts or the
Speaker 1: intelligence to say we don't need a goddamn tax cut.
Speaker 1: What we need is all this other stuff. We've got
Speaker 1: problems with climate change. We have one hurricane after another.
Speaker 1: We need to be building sea walls across you know,
Speaker 1: the the entire southern part of the United States. Look
Speaker 1: at Puerto Rico. I mean this, and and and why
Speaker 1: Democrats are afraid to talk about the seventy five million
Speaker 1: dollars that Donald Trump has spent so far just golfing. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, if it was the Republicans would be screaming it,
Speaker 1: but they did. They did scream about it. It's very
Speaker 1: easy to find Trump's tweets about it. So so there's
Speaker 1: two things I have to remind you, Bruce, and these
Speaker 1: are these are very very important. One is the United
Speaker 1: States is the most heavily text country in the world.
Speaker 1: And second, climate change is the Chinese hoax. We know
Speaker 1: both of those from from some of the tweets from
Speaker 1: the President. So why should we worry about either of
Speaker 1: those things? Well, because the truth matters and those are lies.
Speaker 1: Thank you for the nicely. So before I get to
Speaker 1: my favorite questions, there's one last question I have to
Speaker 1: ask you on the issue of the truth matters. So
Speaker 1: you you followed a fairly standard DC career arc You
Speaker 1: worked in Congress, then you worked in the White House,
Speaker 1: and then you left to write some books and worked
Speaker 1: with some think tanks. You were at both CATO and
Speaker 1: the National Center for Policy Analysis, Theritage at the Harris Foundation.
Speaker 1: But and I used to read a lot of these
Speaker 1: white papers that came out of the think tanks decades ago.
Speaker 1: But my understanding of these think tanks are they are
Speaker 1: no longer objective pursuers of the truth starting from a
Speaker 1: certain fundamental ideological perspective. Now it's what's they're just shills
Speaker 1: for higher what sort of stuff can we crank out
Speaker 1: to pursue what this industry wants or or that association wants.
Speaker 1: Have think tanks lost their ability to objectively think pretty much.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're talking about Washington think tanks, I
Speaker 1: think the most part. Uh. There may be still some
Speaker 1: affiliated with universities and such that are worth paying attention to.
Speaker 1: But in a way, the the Internet made the think
Speaker 1: tank as it was originally created superfluous, because what think
Speaker 1: tanks did is they're the intermediaries between the policy people
Speaker 1: and the academics who theoretically were the the sources of
Speaker 1: of original uh deep thinking. And so the idea, at
Speaker 1: least when I was a Heritage Foundation in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: is okay, you know, we'll talk to Milton Friedman. He'll
Speaker 1: give us his ideas. You write them up in a
Speaker 1: way that a policymaker can understand, will pump this stuff
Speaker 1: out onto Capitol Hill. Because there's the pre Internet era,
Speaker 1: you had to have a printed documentation that was written
Speaker 1: in a short way easily understandable, and that was what
Speaker 1: our job was, to be the middleman. But let's let's
Speaker 1: get to some of um our favorite questions. These are
Speaker 1: what I ask all of our guests. Let's let's start
Speaker 1: with UM, your background. Tell us the most important thing
Speaker 1: that people don't know about your background? Well these days
Speaker 1: would probably be that I was a senior fellow at
Speaker 1: the Heritage Foundation for two years, or that my boss
Speaker 1: in the White House was a guy named Gary Bauer,
Speaker 1: who is one of the uh epitomes of of UH
Speaker 1: Evangelical Christianity. UM, tell us about some of your early mentors.
Speaker 1: Who do you think was most influential in shaping your
Speaker 1: views and career. Oh, Jack Kemp was unquestionably the person
Speaker 1: who influenced my thinking. I remember when I used to
Speaker 1: work for him. I would sometimes think I was wrong
Speaker 1: and or he was wrong and I was right, And
Speaker 1: eventually I realized he was right and I was wrong.
Speaker 1: And I've discovered that about a lot of other people.
Speaker 1: There was a an economist named herb Stein that I
Speaker 1: would argue with all the time, and the last and
Speaker 1: probably the last time forever that I was at the
Speaker 1: American Enterprise Institute, I confess that in every instance in
Speaker 1: which her I thought her was wrong and I was right.
Speaker 1: It was the other way around. And you know, so
Speaker 1: I've I've been and you pointed out my comment about
Speaker 1: Paul Krugman, so I'm trying to make amends. Tell us, um,
Speaker 1: what other politicians influenced your thinking about out both partisan
Speaker 1: politics and policy. Well, if you're talking today, I'm still
Speaker 1: educating myself. I spend an enormous amount of time reading
Speaker 1: the literature, especially, and I've learned that I have to
Speaker 1: study things like psychology and sociology, uh that in political science,
Speaker 1: that to try to understand why things are so screwy.
Speaker 1: And the academics are only just barely scratching the surface.
Speaker 1: But I do believe the psychologists will eventually be the
Speaker 1: ones who tell us that is that seems to be
Speaker 1: taking place on on economics and investing for sure. Tell
Speaker 1: us about some of your favorite books. Oh, I hate
Speaker 1: to say this, but I don't actually read very many
Speaker 1: books because I read all day long on the internet.
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of a junkie about this sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: One of the things I talk about that I'm sure
Speaker 1: you're familiar with is A is an RSS A reader
Speaker 1: which I depend on absolutely to keep me up to
Speaker 1: date on all the stuff that is being published all
Speaker 1: around the internet, and it it aggregates and brings these
Speaker 1: specific items from specific websites to me directly, so I
Speaker 1: don't have to I never go to homepages anymore. I
Speaker 1: just read what comes to me and my RSS reader,
Speaker 1: and I do this all day long. I get thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of items that I have to scroll through,
Speaker 1: and so the last thing I want to do is
Speaker 1: read for pleasure. And secondarily, when I write things, I
Speaker 1: like to be able to link to them. I think
Speaker 1: links are underutilized by readers and your reference that in
Speaker 1: the book as well, that when you're writing you have
Speaker 1: to not only source specific details, but source um your
Speaker 1: sources via a link. Well, that's right. I think that
Speaker 1: a lot of writers are lackadaisical about using links, which
Speaker 1: may explain why readers are lackadaisical. I'll give you an example.
Speaker 1: I was I used to write for a public a
Speaker 1: shan and one day I was writing something where I
Speaker 1: quoted Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, and
Speaker 1: I quoted her and I provided a link that went
Speaker 1: to the Department of State website where you could find
Speaker 1: the text of the speech that she gave and where. Well,
Speaker 1: later I was I needed to find that quote again,
Speaker 1: So I went to my article, clicked on the link.
Speaker 1: It did not take me to the State Department. It
Speaker 1: took me to some random article on that organ at
Speaker 1: that publications website that happened to mention Hillary Clinton in passing.
Speaker 1: It was not documentation for the statement that I need.
Speaker 1: It had nothing whatsoever to do with what the editor.
Speaker 1: But whoever checks your own links after they're published, You see,
Speaker 1: I don't know how much of this sort of thing
Speaker 1: goes on, and it's not the writer's fault, and and
Speaker 1: and so anyway, I think there's a lot of blame
Speaker 1: to go around here. But I do think that quite
Speaker 1: often I'll come across some worry that sounds quite interesting.
Speaker 1: I'll click on the link and it turns out it's
Speaker 1: it's it's a secondary source, and I have to click
Speaker 1: three or four more times to find the original source.
Speaker 1: I think writers should do more to try to give
Speaker 1: credit to the original source that broke a story, or
Speaker 1: is the primary source. It makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: So we've seen huge changes in politics and policies. What
Speaker 1: do you think is the single biggest shift that is
Speaker 1: affecting the state of modern politics. I think it's that
Speaker 1: the Overton window, which we discussed earlier, has moved very
Speaker 1: sharply to the right, so that what used to be
Speaker 1: considered the center is now the left wing, so to
Speaker 1: speak of policy debate, and all of the debate takes
Speaker 1: place between the center and the far far right, and
Speaker 1: the right is very clever about continuously pushing to the
Speaker 1: right so that positions outright racism, knee know, Nazism, people
Speaker 1: going around carrying flags withou Nazi the Suastika on them
Speaker 1: is not treated as outrageous or beyond the pale. It's oh,
Speaker 1: that's what the right is doing today on all sides.
Speaker 1: This is find people on all sides. It's it's crazy
Speaker 1: that it's see. I don't see that as a right
Speaker 1: left thing. I there's a spectrum of right left, and
Speaker 1: as you describe beyond the pale, that sort of stuff
Speaker 1: is beyond the pale, and what's disapp that's normal behavior.
Speaker 1: I don't understand why there aren't more rational conservatives. And
Speaker 1: by the way, you can look at National Review screams
Speaker 1: about this. You can look at American Conservative screaming about this,
Speaker 1: but you don't quite hear the same sort of pushback
Speaker 1: from as you mentioned Fox and other places, certainly not
Speaker 1: to the same degree as n r O has just
Speaker 1: been all over this. It's amazing. Well, the the facade
Speaker 1: is cracking. I mean, I think the Corker flag business
Speaker 1: is potentially far reaching in its impact because finally there
Speaker 1: are people articulating uh views that perhaps you and I
Speaker 1: may have, but they have credibility because they are elected
Speaker 1: officials in the Republican Party. Corker is still chairman of
Speaker 1: the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He's in a position to
Speaker 1: actually do something. So let's get to our final question.
Speaker 1: Um final two questions. If some millennial recent college grad
Speaker 1: came to you and said, I'm interested in a career
Speaker 1: in either politics or policy, what sort of advice would
Speaker 1: you give them? Well, just as a pure career element,
Speaker 1: I think the health ish area is going to be
Speaker 1: a huge continuing growth area. The baby boomers are getting older,
Speaker 1: gerontology care for my generation. I think this is the
Speaker 1: way the wealth will be transferred from our generation to
Speaker 1: the younger generation. They basically are going to have to
Speaker 1: take care of us in our old age and that's fine.
Speaker 1: And then our final question, what is it that you
Speaker 1: know about politics today? You wish you knew thirty years
Speaker 1: ago when you were first getting started. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: that's a continuing problem. I I wish I had understood
Speaker 1: tribal loyalty and the extent to which people on the
Speaker 1: right have are not motivated by ideas. They it's just
Speaker 1: guts and and it's all about the tribe. And if
Speaker 1: you're a Republican and you're saying something, and I'm a Republican,
Speaker 1: I have to support you, have to agree with you.
Speaker 1: I'm not allowed to independently evaluate what you said because
Speaker 1: I might discover you're wrong, and if and if I
Speaker 1: discover you're wrong, that creates a crisis for me. So
Speaker 1: it's better if I just don't even think about it.
Speaker 1: I just lock step, say yes, you know Hale, Kyle Hitler,
Speaker 1: you know, us versus them. We have been speaking with
Speaker 1: Bruce Bartlett, author of The Truth Matters UH and former
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan and first George Bush administration policy adviser. If
Speaker 1: you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look up an
Speaker 1: inch or down an inch on Apple iTunes, Overcast, SoundCloud,
Speaker 1: Bloomberg dot com wherever fine podcasts are sold, and you
Speaker 1: can see any of our previous hundred and sixty or
Speaker 1: so such conversations. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions
Speaker 1: right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: I would be remiss if I did not thank our
Speaker 1: crack team here who helps put together the podcasts each week.
Speaker 1: Medina Parwana is my producer and audio engineer. Taylor Riggs
Speaker 1: is my booker. Michael Batnick is our head of research.
Speaker 1: I'm Barry Retolts. You've been listening to Matt Staers in
Speaker 1: Business on Bloomberg Radio. H