Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Marco Rubio on The Daily Show

I'm always amazed that liberal leaning Jon Stewart manages to get prominent Republicans on his show to interview. I'm sure there must be some metric that shows his audience buys books, but I think it's also because he can be a pretty decent interviewer. Last night he had Marco Rubio on and the full interview is 30 minutes long. It's actually a conversation about the big differences between the parties. The Daily Show is the only place I see this happen with actual politicians.

It's kind of amazing to me that in part 3 when Rubio describes what's needed he says tax reform with eliminating loopholes and a lower broader rate. That's exactly what Obama wanted for corporate taxes and spoke about in the State of the Union. He says he's still wants clean air and water regulations but they need to be sensible. I think everyone (but maybe Ron Paul) can agree with that, the question is what is reasonable. I wish Stewart was a little more able to keep focus in the conversation but I agree with his conclusion that they have completely different views of reality.

I thought Rubio while sounding reasonable, made some logical errors. I wish Stewart would have said, it's true that raising taxes won't grow the economy, but it's not supposed to, it will help balance the budget. We should stimulate the economy now (borrowing at historic low rates and investing in things that will be useful in the future like infrastructure providing jobs and being the spender of last resort) to grow the economy and then raise tax rates to levels that were sustainable in the 90s to balance the budget. It's true that the biggest driver of the debt is entitlements and therefore we need healthcare reform to control costs. The second biggest driver is defense spending, maybe we should lower that a little.

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