MSNBC "Morning Joe" - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC "Morning Joe" - Transcript

MSNBC "MORNING JOE" INTERVIEW WITH SENATOR JOHN THUNE (R-SD)
SUBJECT: ECONOMIC STIMULUS PACKAGE INTERVIEWERS: JOE SCARBOROUGH, MIKA BRZEZINSKI

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MR. SCARBOROUGH: All right. With us now, Senator John Thune. He's from South Dakota. He's part of a Senate Republican working group that's moving forward with its own stimulus package.

I've got a great idea, Mika --

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: Now, Thune used to play basketball. I always said I'd play basketball in the House gym, but I was actually on the sidelines smoking cigarettes. (Laughter.) I've got an idea, John.

Why don't you challenge Barack Obama one-on-one to a basketball game, and the winner gets to write the bill up? Of course, Thune's like 6'10", so it's rigged.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Oh, perfect.

SEN. THUNE: Yeah, right.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: Hey, tell us your plan. What is -- what's the Republican alternative to this monstrosity that passed out of the House of Representatives?

SEN. THUNE: Well, we think the House plan and the Senate plan that the Democrats put together, Joe, is too much spending and doesn't do enough to create jobs.

So we've come up with an alternative. There are actually going to be a number of Republican alternatives that are offered, but Senator McCain and some others have put together one that focuses the bill appropriately on housing, which we believe is critical in terms of leading us out of the recession, since it helped get us into the recession.

It focuses on tax relief for middle-income families and small businesses, on military spending, a little bit more on infrastructure. And then has some hard triggers in there so that when the economy starts to recover, when you have two consecutive quarters of economic growth, the spending stops.

So it's a fiscally responsible approach, and it comes in at about half the cost of what the Senate Democrat plan comes in at and, I think, will be significantly more effective when it comes to creating jobs.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: But John, there is a concern -- and of course Wesley Clark brought it up right before you came on -- that this crisis is so huge that you don't want to come up short on this package.

Are you confident? Can you tell the American people that spending half of what the Democrats want to spend will get us out of this recession?

SEN. THUNE: Well, I think what you have to remember, Joe, is there's a lot of additional spending coming down the pike. The omnibus appropriation bill this year, for the first time ever, is going to be over a trillion dollars.

There's going to be another request, we think, from Secretary Geithner on financial stabilization money, somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars range, a supplemental appropriation bill. There is a lot of spending coming, and we think that we ought to do this in a responsible way.

And when you start talking about spending a trillion dollars, when you start adding in the interest, that is an enormous amount of money to create 3 million jobs. That's $300,000 a job. The average annual salary in South Dakota is under $30,000. That's a very hard sell.

I think that we can do this in a way that's fiscally responsible but is effective and works when it comes to creating jobs.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Senator, do you think it is important that something is passed this week, or in the near future?

SEN. THUNE: Well, Mika, I think it's more important that we get it right than we do it fast. I know there's a lot of pressure. The Democrats believe there's a sense of urgency here.

But in my view, this is an enormous amount of money that we're borrowing from future generations, which is going to have economic consequences down the road for us. And we need to get this balance in this bill right.

Now, Republicans want to be constructive in this process, but we're not going to be for something that spends enormous sums of money on Washington programs that do very little to create jobs or to stimulate the economy.

So we think there's a right way to do it, and we don't think it ought to be hurried.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: John --

Do you have another question, Mika?

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Well, I'm just wondering why there is such a difference in opinion. When you talk to the Obama administration or a Democrat behind this bill, they'll say this will create and retain 3 (million) to 4 million jobs.

You talk to a Republican, they'll say this creates no jobs. It does nothing for job stimulus.

SEN. THUNE: Well, it does -- I mean, you can talk to different economists; they'll give you different views on that.

But what CBO said was that only 12 percent of this was going to be spent this year and under 50 percent next year, so it doesn't really happen for two years. So the question is, does it really stimulate the economy?

And secondly, it creates a lot of government jobs. You look at some of the places where this money is spent, there are some places in the State Department, for example, where it's going to be over a million dollars per job.

We don't think that government creates jobs. Government can create government jobs, but the way you create jobs in the private sector is to get money back into the economy and the hands of people in small businesses who actually are the job creators.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: Okay, so let me get this straight. So in the State Department, Mika, they're going to get this money and it's going to cost a million dollars per job for, like, these State Department jobs. And yet they're telling people that are running the biggest financial institutions in America they can only make half a million dollars a year. (Laughs.) Ain't government great?

Okay, so in closing --

MS. BRZEZINSKI: You've got to have some strings attached, handing out money.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: In closing, John, you ran against Tom Daschle. You defeated him -- in '04, I think it was?

SEN. THUNE: That's correct. Right.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: 2004. Tell Americans something good about Tom Daschle. Tell them what a good guy he is.

SEN. THUNE: Tom's got a real heart for public service. He served his country with great distinction. And he came to a decision yesterday that all of us respect.

I think he concluded that he had become a distraction to the new administration, decided to step aside. I think that was a stand-up thing to do on his part, but I'm sure it was a very hard decision.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: And the thing is, obviously you agreed with Tom ideologically, as did I when I was in Congress. But certainly nobody ever, ever questioned his integrity, that he was using his position in public service for any other reason than serving the people of South Dakota, right?

SEN. THUNE: That's true, Joe. We had our differences on the issues, but when it came to -- we both had, I think, a desire to serve the public. He had a passion for it. We did it in different ways.

But I don't think anybody -- this doesn't in any way diminish the contributions he made to public life and to his country.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: He's a good man; so are you, John Thune. Try to set up that basketball game.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Thank you, Senator.

SEN. THUNE: Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Mika.

END.

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