MSNBC "Morning Joe" - Transcript

Interview

MSNBC "Morning Joe" - Transcript

MSNBC "MORNING JOE" INTERVIEW WITH SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER (D-NY)
SUBJECT: ECONOMIC STIMULUS BIL

INTERVIEWERS: JOE SCARBOROUGH, MIKA BRZEZINSKI, DONNY DEUTSCH, DYLAN RATIGAN, PAT BUCHANAN

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MS. BRZEZINSKI: Donny Deutsch is with us as well. He can talk about selling the stimulus plan. Deutsch is the author of The Big Idea: How to Make Your Entrepreneurial Dreams Come True, from the Aha Moment to Your First Million. We all could use a little of that right now.

MR. : Or your first 800 billion (dollars), as it may be. (Laughter.)

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Exactly. First, A-Rod lives in your building?

SEN. SCHUMER: Yes, he does.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: We'll talk about that later too.

Joe Scarborough is hosting this morning from Washington. Joe, we have the good senator here.

You know, he thinks we should stop quibbling over this bill. And that there are some small things in it that we need to move on about and get it through. What do you think?

MR. SCARBOROUGH: Well, Senator, I wanted to ask you, Barack Obama, we played some clips of him playing hardball with the Republicans. He sounded far more partisan than he did on the campaign trail.

And if you take that partisanship and add the big spending, it sounds a lot like the Bush-Cheney White House, eh? I mean, haven't we tried eight years of deficit spending and it's gotten us to this point?

SEN. SCHUMER: Well, no. I think we have not had, given the crisis we have now, the kind of pumping money into the economy and moving it quickly, going to jobs, going to get people going back to the stores.

We've had tax cuts over those years. They were relatively prosperous tax cuts, mainly aimed at the highest-income people. But even conservative economists like Martin Feldstein say that's not the way to go for this crisis.

As for bipartisanship, you know, we're trying. And here's something forgotten: the two biggest amendments in the Senate, one totally $70 billion, one totally $30 billion, were offered by Republicans and accepted by Democrats. We voted for them. That's $100 billion.

Senator Grassley offered one; Senator Isakson offered the other, and they voted against the bill. I mean, what do you want us to do?

We've had an open process. We've accepted a good amount of their amendments and they're still voting no. The only thing --

MR. DEUTSCH: Joe, it's --

(Cross talk.)

SEN. SCHUMER: Donny, the only thing I'd say here is it's going to take awhile. There's a lot of mistrust, frankly, on both sides of the aisle. There's been huge partisanship.

Obama, we in the Senate, we're going to keep reaching out to our colleagues. And I think they're going to learn over the next several months, if not immediately, we're for real.

We want to work with them --

MR. SCARBOROUGH: Well, Senator, though, I don't think, though, the problem has been in the United States Senate. I think it's actually been from Nancy Pelosi's House.

I want to go back, though, to the Bush years for a second, because --

SEN. SCHUMER: I don't.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: -- they gave us tax cuts. Talking about stimulus, they gave us tax cuts, two wars, the largest entitlement spending program ever -- $7 trillion, the largest expansion of domestic spending since the Great Society.

They did everything humanly possible to stimulate the economy, and we find ourselves in a disastrous place today. Isn't this more of the same?

SEN. SCHUMER: No, I don't think so. You have to -- first, you have to look at where the tax cuts and where the spending went. Spending on an Iraq war, tax cuts to the highest income allow investments and things, but they don't get people into the stores.

We're trying to refocus all of this on the middle class, which is where the spending is. And that's where it goes.--

And by the way, there's a pretty broad consensus among economists -- Democrat, Republican, left, right -- that this is the right package. Should all the porky stuff been taken out? Yes. Now we in the Senate have taken most of it out, and let's focus on what the package does.

The alternative, the John McCain package -- half the size, mainly tax cuts for the rich -- that's sort of reminiscent of Herbert Hoover. It's sort of do-nothing, when we have a big problem.

Now, just one other point -- I'm sorry -- here.

We're on the edge of getting into a depression. We have a serious recession, and if you go a few steps downward -- it's not a likelihood, but it's too real a possibility -- you get into a deflationary spiral downward. No one knows how to deal with that.

For 10 years the Great Depression was that. To a somewhat lesser extent, 10 years, Japan was that. The --

Martin Feldstein, Zandi, Republican -- one's McCain's economist, one was Reagan's -- said the danger here is doing too little, not too much.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: All right, but at the same time what we don't want to see again -- I want get to Donny in just a second -- fear pushing last-minute, quick decisions, which hasn't worked in the past, on both sides.

SEN. SCHUMER: Correct.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: What about the fact that in these plans there are programs and money put toward things that you would characterize potentially in a negative way as welfare, and not stimulus.

Like tens of billions of dollars to people who don't pay income tax. Things that just don't seem to do the job. How, then, can you criticize the Republicans for saying, you know what, I'm not on board.

SEN. SCHUMER: Well, let's talk about that.

Those people are people -- not the poorest people; they're people making 40 (thousand dollars), $50,000 a year. They're the lifeblood of our economy. They don't pay an income tax, that's true, but they pay a large payroll tax.

And in fact their overall percentage of federal taxes, given the payroll tax and the Medicare and all of that, is higher than someone very wealthy.

So if you're going to do an income tax cut, which is how we're cutting taxes, it leaves them out. Why shouldn't we give them some benefit too? And it's not very -- you know, it's 3 (hundred dollars), 4 (hundred dollars), $500.

And the other thing about that, Mika, the person making 40,000 bucks?

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

SEN. SCHUMER: If he gets 3 (hundred dollars) or $400 in his pocket, whether it's from the government or off your taxes, is far more likely to spend it than the person making 3 (hundred thousand dollars), $400,000.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Okay, but Joe, this is something that we've been talking about. Go ahead.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: Yup. And I wanted to ask Donny Deutsch --

MR. DEUTSCH: Hey, Joe.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: Hey, Donny. Let's forget ideology, let's forget economics, let's just look at PR.

For some reason, the first two weeks of the Obama White House, the Obama administration, went a bit more -- let's just say it was rougher than two years of the campaign.

What happened to that message? How did it get out in front of them?

MR. DEUTSCH: A few things happened. Once -- we lionized this guy. From where we carried him into office, there is nothing this man could do that would not have disappointed on some level. So that's number one.

Number two, you've got two weeks of the Republicans out there pounding. And something you said earlier, Joe, that I want to kind of call you on a little bit -- it's more of the same, it's partisanship.

At some point, he's still the chief executive. And having run a business, if everything is done consensus purely, at the end of the day nothing will get done. So no matter what this man does, at some point he's got to tuck the ball over, dive over the goal line, wrong or right. But he is the chief executive. At some point, he's going to make that call.

But I think what we're seeing right now is what I call the Obamarang effect, that -- he had nowhere to go sideways. And also, finally, he's going to kind of get out there today.

All of the imagery we saw of Obama all along was him with crowds, him standing on the pulpit. Now, this was what we loved.

Now you've been seeing him, I think, almost too overexposed on a daily basis, in these kind of mini-ad hoc press conferences. I think he should kind of step back a little bit so that when he does speak, like tonight, it means something.

I think he's overexposed himself a little bit.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Interesting.

MR. : You're right.

(Cross talk.)

MR. SCARBOROUGH: But you know, though, Donny, the thing is, though, over the past six, seven years -- again, going back to the mistakes of the Bush administration, the ramp-up to the Iraq War, the Bush administration pushed away Democrats, pushed away a lot of people that --

(Cross talk.)

MR. DEUTSCH: But if it was the right call, he would have been a hero. That's it. It was a bad call.

At some point, you're going to make the call. He made a bad call.

SEN. SCHUMER: And a lot more Democrats voted for the war, Joe. (Cross talk.) Joe, lot more Democrats voted for the war than Republicans are voting for this stimulus package. I was one of them, unfortunately.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: Oh, no doubt about that. But at the same time, Democrats complained about being excluded throughout the process on intelligence.

SEN. SCHUMER: Well, so were Republicans.

MR. SCARBOROUGH: So isn't there possibly the same mistake being made here?

SEN. SCHUMER: Let me just say this, Joe. One interesting thing, if you look at the poll numbers, the end of this week Obama's numbers were higher than at the beginning. And you know, sometimes the pundits miss it all.

The Daschle problems -- and I feel for Tom. He's a friend of mine -- but the problems were the whole thing.

You know what the public regarded as more important than Daschle's problems? The fact that he went on TV and said, I messed up.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Right.

SEN. SCHUMER: And they're so used to politicians. They know. The public has wisdom. They know no one's perfect. They know there are going to be mistakes.

But what they hate is when you don't own up to it and move on. And when he did, his numbers went up from 65 to 70 (percent).

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. I think that was very symbolic, for sure. (Cross talk.) And I think there are other symbolic moves he's made, Dylan, that have helped try and begin the process of restoring confidence.

MR. RATIGAN: Well, and the thing is the reality -- and I think the senator will agree with me on this -- that nobody really knows exactly what the right thing to do is.

SEN. SCHUMER: That is true.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Right.

MR. RATIGAN: However, we can easily agree that there are methods of doing things that are better than other methods of doing things. And so for those who argue for some more incrementalism, that we shouldn't just go 800 billion (dollars) in a single shot, that -- there's a list of things that you can talk, just on methodology.

SEN. SCHUMER: Yes.

MR. RATIGAN: I'm curious how you respond to the complaints that Joe, Mika, myself, Pat Buchanan, this morning -- what are they doing? Why the -- what's the hurry for a trillion dollars?

How do you respond to those who call for somewhat more of a deliberate and incremental approach or targeted approach?

SEN. SCHUMER: Here's the response: the response is that it takes a long time to get money into the economy.

In other words, if we were to have these wonderful projects that make all the sense in the world in the long term -- IT for health care, change the power grid -- you wouldn't employ a person for six months to a year.

If you waited to employ people for six months to a year, you could get into that deflationary spiral.

You know what I think the bottom line is? The actual policymakers who are looking at the economy -- not the politicians -- think it's a lot worse than the public is. And then they want to talk about it, because they don't want to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So the number one word that sometimes Larry Summers uses, and some of the other economists, even conservative, is speed. Get the money into the economy quickly.

(Cross talk.)

SEN. SCHUMER: When you do -- and that's the difficult needle to thread. If you wait -- if we waited too long and we are in a depression, you can be sure, on this show and the historians would say what did they dither for? Why quibble over 200 million --

MS. BRZEZINSKI: But we're talking about a week or a month. I mean, we've got years ahead of us.

SEN. SCHUMER: So it's hard. It's hard.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Donny Deutsch, how would you -- you're the president, dealing with folks in Indiana, in Florida, you're addressing the nation tonight. What does he need to do to sell this thing?

MR. DEUTSCH: It's very simple. He needs to say we've got to get people back to work. That's the hot button he's going to push right now, that basically he can employ possibly 4 million people with this program.

He's got to talk to the everyman. He's got to take it out of Washington, bring it to the streets. He's (bought ?) the right constituency; he's going to the right place -- Elkhart, Indiana. He's going to get it done tonight.

MR. RATIGAN: AMT? AMT?

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Oh, AMT. We'll get to that.

SEN. SCHUMER: Well, the AMT is in there. It's very important. It may not be the thing that has to be done now, but again, if our Republican colleagues want it in there for their votes, we sort of don't have much choice, do we?

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Pat Buchanan, looking ahead to the president's remarks to the nation tonight, as well as dealing with people one-on- one in several states that are really suffering, what does he need to do?

MR. BUCHANAN: The president? I think, well, I think basically -- I don't know that what he's doing out there in Indiana or in Florida is really relevant.

I think this is an inside game. It's in the Senate now. When it passes, it goes to conference and it'll be decided.

What I'd like to ask Chuck Schumer is this: Senator, how do we pay for this? America's got no savings whatsoever, so we either borrow it from the Chinese and Japanese, who have enormous reserves, or the Fed prints money, I suppose.

Don't both of those courses represent a real risk?

SEN. SCHUMER: Yes. No question about it, Pat. Here's the dilemma:

In the past when we've had recessions, the obvious antidote was lower interest rates, which didn't cost any money out of the Treasury. Unfortunately, and this would be my view, that the Bush administration didn't handle the economy very well. We had low -- too-low interest rates during the prosperity, led to the bubble. And now we can't do that.

So there are two choices: Do nothing, really, basically, and hope and pray we get out of this, and then we'll be in better fiscal shape. Or pump some money into the economy now.

And if all the economists are right, it'll certainly mean we'll get out of this sooner, then revenues will start flowing. Because the number one way to balance the budget, number one, is not government policies or spending or cutting, unless it's massive. It's getting that economy moving.

When that economy goes up a trillion dollars, that brings in more revenues than any single government policy.

MR. DEUTSCH: You got my vote, Senator.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Oh!

SEN. SCHUMER: Thank you, Donny. (Laughter.) We're homeboys.

(Cross talk.)

MR. DEUTSCH: Well, Queens, Brooklyn, we've got a whole thing going on.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: Was that good advertising?

MR. DEUTSCH: That was -- you know what? This is why this man is where he is.

SEN. SCHUMER: Father's from Sheepshead Bay, so was my father. Homeboys.

MS. BRZEZINSKI: All right. Oh, there you go.

Senator Schumer, thank you so much.

END.

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