Zuckerman and Laffer on Economy

RUSH: Here is Mort Zuckerman from Tuesday night on the Kudlow Report. Mort Zuckerman is a liberal, and it’s beginning to dawn on him that this Obama guy is not really about creating jobs.

ZUCKERMAN: I don’t think there is anything here that’s going on that is deliberately going to help this, because I don’t think that’s the philosophy of this administration. I think we’re heading in for a very, very difficult time. And what distresses me is that I don’t get the sense that there’s any planning on the part of the government to do something this time that really does focus on jobs, jobs, jobs; and doesn’t put in a whole melange of Democratic wish list programs, et cetera, et cetera, that is so diluted the original stimulus program. A lot of people — including a lot of people who are favorable to this administration — pointed that out at the very beginning.

RUSH: Well, then why did they vote for this administration? There’s Mort Zuckerman, who owns the New York Daily News and other things, saying they’re not about creating jobs. They’re not about being good for business. Here’s Art Laffer on the same show. ‘What’s the way out, Art?’

LAFFER: Let’s take the total amount they’ve spent over the last 18 months or so, the total amount, maybe three and a half trillion dollars. That’s about a year-and-a-half worth of total tax take from the federal government. Just imagine what would have happened if they said, ‘We’re going to have a federal tax holiday for a year and a half. No income taxes, no payroll taxes, no estate taxes, no capital gains taxes, no excise taxes, no federal taxes for a year and a half.’ The deficit would be no larger — in fact, it would be a heck of a lot smaller — and you’d have huge growth in this US economy. We’d have a 3% unemployment rate, and we’d be sizzling along beautifully. Instead, they’ve just destroyed it.

RUSH: He’s exactly right. Now, I want to explain this, because some people hearing this say, ‘Wait a minute, Rush. How can you just eliminate federal taxes?’ What he’s saying is we have spent or printed the equivalent of a year-and-a-half worth of federal tax revenue that we don’t have. The government doesn’t have it. So instead of printing it and empowering more state government with it, just give it to the people and let the people who make the country work revive the economy. That’s Laffer’s point. This is what I mean by: Anybody with any sanity and any sense of history and understanding and a modicum of education, knows that every aspect of the Obama-Biden economic plan is an utter disaster. It’s a designed disaster. Some people say every airplane landing is a controlled crash? All right. We’re on Obama Airlines, and we’re headed for a controlled crash, folks.