MSNBC "The Ed Show" - Transcript

Interview

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SCHULTZ: Welcome back to THE ED SHOW. Finally tonight, let"s talk about shared sacrifice. All these politicians twisting themselves into knots over deficit and over how much they should cut in federal spending. But no tax hikes? Is that correct? No tax hikes. Not one.

But it"s worse than that. There are giant corporations paying basically no taxes.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Independent, is asking these questions when no one else holding office seems to be willing to do so. Good evening, senator. Good to have you with us.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: Good to be with you.

SCHULTZ: You talked about shared sacrifice, but let"s talk about the numbers. Staggering profits and some of these corporations paying zero tax. How do we change that?

SANDERS: Well, we change that by saying that at a time when this country has a 14 trillion dollar national debt, it is insane for Wall Street companies like Bank of America, Citigroup, bailed out by the taxpayers of this country, making huge profits--and it"s not only that they don"t pay anything in taxes, they got a tax rebate.

The major oil companies, Exxon, Chevron, Valoro, huge profits, no taxes, get a rebate. General Electric, 26 billion dollars in profits in the last five years, zero taxes, four billion dollar rebate.

Meanwhile, what our Republican friends are doing is saying, oh, we have this huge deficit. We"re going to have to balance the budget. How do we do it?

Well, we cut Headstart. We cut the Social Security Administration. We cut Pell Grants for college students. We slash the environmental protection. We cut nutrition programs for low-income pregnant women.

The issue here is shared sacrifice. The rich get richer. Corporate profits are soaring. It is absurd that the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations in this country do not play a role in deficit reduction, and that we simply move toward a balanced budget on the backs of the weak and most vulnerable people in this country.

That is morally wrong and bad economic policy as well.

SCHULTZ: For full disclosure, you mentioned General Electric. I want to point out General Electric owns 49 percent of our parent company of NBC Universal.

But I do want to point out--and I think this--cuts right to the law. None of these companies are breaking the law. It is the tax laws that they"re working from within. And the Republicans don"t seem to have any kind of appetite to change those laws. Where does that leave the American taxpayer?

SANDERS: Well, it leaves the American taxpayer on the hook. It says that the average working stiff in this country--the average person is making 40,000 or 50,000 dollars a year in income, is paying more in taxes than a giant corporation like General Electric or Citigroup or Exxon Mobil.

That is totally absurd. So we need to focus on eliminating all of these loopholes that allow these very, very profitable corporations to not contribute to the Treasury at all.

SCHULTZ: What would it do if they were paying, say, one or two or three percent? What would it do? Have you run the numbers on this? On just what kind of an impact and how it would affect--because right now, what we"re having in this country, on a state level--and, of course, just in the last segment of the show on the federal level--we"re going through some cuts that we"ve never seen before, because we have not a tax problem. We have a revenue problem.

If we were to fix the tax code, all of that would change.

SANDERS: Absolutely. Look, you know, as Bob Reich just mentioned a moment ago, it is insane to be extending tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. It is equally insane that large profitable corporations not only pay no taxes, but get a rebate from the IRS.

If you address those problems, you don"t have to cut Headstart or nutrition programs for low-income people, or the Social Security Administration. The issue here is, yes, we have a deficit problem. Yes, we have to address it.

But you don"t address it just by doing it on the backs of the weak, the sick, the elderly, and the poor. You need the wealthy and large corporations also to play a role.

Now, the issue, Ed, as you well know, is working folks don"t have a lot of power on Capitol Hill. It"s the big lobbyists representing these corporations who write the tax laws that these companies take advantage of. That has got to change. The American people have got to say, enough is enough.

SCHULTZ: Senator, good to have you with us tonight. Thanks so much for speaking out.

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