spoke earlier to ari fleischer former bush white house press secretary and fox news contributor from new york. ari fleischer, welcome. thank you, howard. howie: one thing that reporters love to cover as you know is the legislative sausage making but an area that has gotten extraordinarily little media scrutiny president biden proposing to spend $6 trillion on a vast a ray of programs and no one in the press seems to care about the exploding deficit and debt. why do they not care about that. they not only care, reporters tell people that don t worry about the debt and deficits because interest rates are low. i have seen many reporters tell people on cnn the deficit don t matter any longer. both parties walked away from a commitment to deficit reduction. howie: precisely. picking up that reflection, not banging them over it but the other thing, howard, that they re doing, many in the press
the bush tax cuts did the same thing, they supposedly would expire after nine years. what we tell folks is this. if it s good policy, it will become permanent. if it s bad policy, it will become temporary. that s just the way it is. so this is done more to force and shoe horn the bill into the rules because we think it s good policy. isn t that an admission that it s a gimmick? you re saying it s a $1.5 trillion tax cut, the impact on the deficit but in fact according to most analyses $2.2 trillion. not to most analyses. i think one analyses i ve seen that number. the fact is that you re squeezing it into these rules, but you really do intend for it to be extended down the road, which will explode the deficit even farther. we ll come back to your first point about the $1.5 trillion. that s the cbo, the nonpartisan cbo score. congressional budget office score. but everybody knows it s 100% static. it doesn t consider the possible impacts on the economy of lowering taxes. it s so
networks you may understand who they are, they accuse us of raising taxes on the rich. so i think it sort of depends on how you look at it. we re not taking a political point of view here, we are actually going by nonpartisan groups like the committee for a responsible federal budget, all the impact on the exploding deficit, which will impact future generations. i do want to ask you, though, because the president has refused to talk about roy moore since he s back from his trip. and the white house is saying that he said on air force one he would talk about roy moore in alabama. you were a member of congress. this debate over sexual harassment has spread to politics as well as to every industry, starting with harvey weinstein. let s talk about roy moore and whether or not he should be the republican nominee and whether he should be seated if he s elected. i do think the president has talked about roy moore. i think he said that he thinks that the voters of alabama should decide. i
do is they take attention, if we don t handle the environment correctly, if we don t have the rules correctly, because tax reform clearly is going to affect the country. it s going to affect our economic future. looking at the way that the tax bill has been reported, i can understand people s concern about it. but when you look at the real tax bill, both house and senate, i think it s designed to do two things. one is to create immediately more take-home pay for hard-working families, and the second thing at the other end of the scale, do whatever we can to be sure there are better jobs in the future for those very same families. we ve had eight years of economic stagnation for hard-working families and this tax bill i think creates the opportunity to move dramatically beyond that. there s plenty of evidence from republicans as well as democrats that, first of all, the corporate taxes are permanent. the individual taxes expire in about a decade. it blows a hole in the deficit
got this sexual harassment on both sides, not equivalent, but roy moore front and center, robert costa. roy moore is front and center, and republicans are worried that he could lose that race or win that race, it s a problem for them. on taxes, though, i don t buy the confidence yet based on my reporting. you ve got senator ron johnson of wisconsin they think they ve got him. they think they have a fix for him on small businesses. but you talk about trickle-down economics, that still remains the core of the republican party that reagan orthodoxy, but this is a change party. look at the discussions in the senate. they re concerned about how this bill adds to the deficit, they re concerned as being too pro wall street heading into 2018. mcconnell still has some work to do. not only that, it has also become a proxy health care fight again, because you again have republicans talking about cutting medicare, cutting medicaid. this would trigger sequestration. you have republicans e