proposals. but what do they do with carly fiorina who defended her lack of a plan on meet the press. how often do politicians put on the detailed plans? how often do they get enacted? never. that s the problem, politicians put out detailed plans for all kinds of things that never happens. mike, welcome to meet the press daily. thanks for having me, chuck. answer me that first question. how are you able to critique carly fiorina who hasn t put anything on paper? i think carly s said a number of things to taxes that give us a lot of confidence. she said she d lower every rate and close every loophole. she said importantly she s not going to get caught up on the idea of revenue neutrality and that returning money to the american people is a good thing. all that said, i disagree with what she said on her show on sunday. politicians should put out plans. voters have more leverage before
knowing that they don t begrudge the upper income people. it s sort of a the class warfare doesn t necessarily play. i think the big problem with it to me is i haven t heard how he s going to pay for all of this. he s going to cut taxes a lot. there s dynamic scoring going on on his side but he s also responsible for the deficit side. that s another piece of this that has to be talked about long term. what bowles/simpson said is tough take something off the table. they don t have to run for the presidency. i support that plan and i think the president is serious about tax reform will do exactly that, try to aim for a revenue neutral tax reform. you could always add on revenue in the end but you want to aim for revenue neutrality which was in the commission report in which obama never touched.
seems to be engaged is basically his view trading off the reduction in social security, the more means testing of medicare for getting rid of some of these loopholes and deductions in a way that would increase revenue. that s the key. this is the second pass at getting the revenue the white house wants to take at this year. to me this looks like this is falling back on the same basic fault line that s driven politics nor the last generation, which is the republican position has been let s talk about deductions, talk act loopholes, but anything we eliminate there, anything we cut out there, we want to make up for by lowering the rates overall. the key for republicans is revenue neutral. the key for obama and democrats is increasing revenue. is that an accurate take on where you stand? you can t get more revenue from tax reform? sure. revenue neutrality is a republican ideal but not a republican idea. 19 l 86, there was bipartisan agreement that tomorrow needed to be revenue neutral an
if you lower rates and get revenue because of some magic asterisk, it s not there. what you end up with are bigger budget deficits. he tipped his hat to that idea, but he stressed the need for closing loopholes and broadening the tax base. secondly, he s not talking about revenue neutrality. he s talking about new revenues, and he referenced a deal with the president where they had $800 billion in new revenue on the table. third and this part goes against the election outcome, he reiterate z his no on increased tax rates. those are the three points that came across to me. he said twice he didn t want to box himself in. one of the questions to him after this election was why do you think you have any leverage moving forward? but he came back with saying they still have the house majority.
welcome back to morning joe at 46 past the hour. joining us now for the must-read opinion pages, msnbc political analyst and visiting professor at nyu, former democratic congressman, harold ford jr. the great harold ford. welcome to the show. thank you, sir. we have two for you guys this morning. the first is the new york times, it could be his party. what romney did was clarify, elevate and translate. he clarified what kind of tax reformer he would be, by promising that revenue neutrality would take priority over sweeping cuts for the rich, a premise that plenty of republicans are already happy to accept. he elevated an argument that s increasingly popular among conservative wonks, that dodd-frank financial reform perpetuates too big to fail and use it had to make a populist case against the president. and he translated the basic free market vision to a nun ideological audience by talking more about decent jobs than heroic job creators and more about the struggling middl