Jeb Bush got caught in a web of lies about his plan to cut taxes for the rich, and a Fox News Sunday interview that was supposed to revive his presidential campaign might have ended it.
Video of the Fox News Sunday interview:
https://youtu.be/asTczDzvtlE
Transcript via Fox News Sunday:
WALLACE: But whether it was Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts or your brother’s tax cuts, they did add greatly to the deficit.
BUSH: That not — they didn’t as greatly as — as the static thinkers on the left think. They created a dynamic effect of high growth. And that’s what we need. If we think that if — if people think 2 percent growth is OK, then we’ll have more people living in poverty and disposable income for the middle class will continue to decline.
We have to jump-start the economy so that people can have more money to make decisions for themselves.
WALLACE: Then there’s another complaint, and that is the issue of who benefits. The Tax Foundation says the middle class would see after-tax income increase 2.9 percent. But the top 1 percent would get a boost of 11.6 percent.
An analysis of your tax returns for the last six years, which you have released to the public, the last six years indicates that you would save, under your tax plan, $3 million.
Does Jeb Bush need a $3 million tax cut?
BUSH: Look, the benefit of this goes disproportionately to the middle class. If you look at what the middle class pays today compared to what they would pay in our tax plan —
WALLACE: But they get a 2.9 percent increase in after tax income —
BUSH: Because higher income people pay more taxes right now and proportionally, everybody will get a benefit. But proportionally, they’ll pay more in with my plan than what they pay today.
WALLACE: Well, I mean forgive me, sir, but — but 2.9 seems like it’s less than 11.6.
BUSH: The simple fact is 1 percent of people pay 40 percent of all the taxes. And so, of course, tax cuts for everybody is going to generate more for people that are paying a lot more. I mean that’s just the way it is.
While trying to dismiss the reality that his tax plan benefits the rich, Bush ended up defending the wealthiest Americans. Fox News was giving Bush the boost up treatment, but the candidate might have sunk his own campaign by claiming that there is a hidden growth effect that comes with tax cuts for the rich that apparently is only visible to Jeb Bush.
Bush lied about the one percent paying forty percent of all taxes. The rich pay the most in federal income taxes, but that is because they make the most money. Jeb Bush’s plan like all of the other Republican plans that cut taxes for the wealthy ignores basic math. If taxes are cut for the people who make the most money, somebody else has to pay more or the deficit increases.
Jeb Bush confirmed that he represented more of the same old failed Republican policies. The man got tied into knots trying to his explain his own tax plan. A Fox News Sunday interview that was obviously intended to reboot Bush’s flatlining campaign might have destroyed it by proving that Jeb Bush is nothing more than Mitt Romney with a more familiar last name.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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