Excellent Debate on Stimulus & Economics
Today’s edition of This Week with George Stephenopolis starts with an excellent debate over Obama’s stimulus bill. It’s a sweeping, fantastic 30-minute discussion. I guess I’m posting this excerpt so I don’t forget it.
Jim DeMint, (R-SC)
You can look back through history, and leaving more money in the economy through tax cuts is the way that works… This plan is a spending plan, it’s not a stimulus plan. It’s temporary, and it’s wasteful. And a lot of the spending is going to end up being permenant. We have to decide if we want to be a free market economy, or if we want to be a government directed economy which is where we’re headed with this plan.
Barney Frank, (D-MA)
As far as spending versus tax cuts, I think we need to fix some highways and bridges. I never saw a tax cut fix a bridge. I never saw a tax cut give us more public transportation. The fact is we need a mix. I think we’ve suffered from an extremism in this country in the past of relying only on private sector activity and having too little government. It’s possible to have too much government, no question, but it’s possible to have too little.
Fred Smith, CEO, FedEx
When the [carried] interest is deductible the government is subsidizing speculation and debt, where capital investment is taxed punitively. If there’s one thing in the tax code that could be changed that I’d recommend to Senator DeMint and Chairman Frank it would be to allow industrial companies to write off or expense capital investment and software when the investment is made.
Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
The business community needs action now. There’s a sense that things are getting worse… It’s time for govenment action. There are plenty of cases where directed spending does help things happen more quickly. The stimulus package, most of the money actually goes to reasonably short-term things — education, state relief — various other things that help people in the very short term. Some combination of all that money has got to get out now, to get people going again.
