There isn’t a ton that special about this interview other than Boehner vowing to fight…again. I was glad to hear Lauer read off some of what the Tea Party and Michele Bachmann have been saying regarding his lackluster record already. He did manage to get a swipe in at the Tea Party though with ‘surrerderist’.
But what I wanted to highlight was a dishonest question by Lauer, that if Boehner had used it as a point of challenge would have made this tons better and more educational for the public.
LAUER: Why not use an increase in revenues, tax hikes to help with the debt problem? What’s the evidence you can present that the tax cuts of the Bush era have accomplished their goals?
BOHNER: What some are suggesting is we take the money from people who would invest in our economy and create jobs and give it to the government. The fact is you can’t tax the people we expect to invest in the economy and create jobs. Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem. Washington has a spending problem.
LAUER: But when you talk about creating jobs – when the Bush era tax cuts were passed in 2001, unemployment was 4.5%. Today it’s at 9%, just down from 10%. So why are the bush era tax cuts creating jobs?
BOEHNER: They created about 8 million jobs over the first 10 year that they were in existence. We’ve lost about 5 million of those jobs during this recession. You can’t raise taxes. We could take all of the money from the wealthy and guess what? We’d hardly make a dent in the annual deficit and do nothing about the 14.3 trillion dollars worth of debt.
Boehner’s problem is he speaks in Washington speak too much, although I thought he did better with the second answer.
But what bugged me was the premise of Lauer’s questioning. With all that’s happened from 2001 until now, he tries to make a correlation between the Bush tax cuts and the huge unemployment rate that we have now as if to say the Bush tax cuts are responsible for all this job loss. That’s a ridiculous assumption on multiple levels. Here is a host that is so intellectually dishonest that he’s willing to forget all of the horrible policies of the Obama administration, all the spending and debt he’s accrued, and foist our current unemployment woes back on Bush.
Boehner missed a great opportunity to challenge that very premise of Lauer’s dishonest question with a “have you been asleep the past 10 years Matt?” kinda answer. If he’d done that and then explained why our unemployment rate is really so high, I think it would have connected with viewers and he would have gained credibility for himself and for the party.
Ah well, here’s the interview.
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