This is Bloomberg Law with June Brusso from Bloomberg Radio. Alan Weiselberg, the former CFO of the Trump organization, is going back to jail. The seventy six year old pleaded guilty to felony perjury charges, just the latest twist in his legal saga, one where he's always remained loyal to Trump. Manhattan prosecutors have given him a deal for lying on the stand at Trump's civil fraud trial and for lying
in deposition testimony. Weiselberg was facing five counts of first degree perjury, a felony punishable by as many as seven years in prison, but under the plea deal, he'll be sentenced to five months in jail and doesn't have to cooperate with prosecutors against his former boss. Joining me is Bloomberg Legal reporter Patricia Hurtado. Why are they giving Weiselberg
a deal? He perjured himself several times day depositions and on the stand, and he's not testifying against Trump in the hush money case.
Well, the prosecutors said yesterday in court they were giving him credit.
For basically his age.
He's going to be seventy seven. He's seventy six, right, Now, the fact that he'd already done prison time once before, as well as this willingness to plead guilty and admit responsibility, was a reason to give him credit. So they basically gave him a discount. He had faced five felony counts of a perjury and they gave him credit, and they only made him plead guilty to two.
Yeah, So why he's never fully cooperated with prosecutors against Trump and with this perjury at the trial. He's also violated his probation after serving time for another deal he'd made with prosecutors over dodging taxes. So why give him another deal when he's not giving them anything.
It's hard to divine why they decided to give him a break. Possibly is because of the fact that you know he is going to be seventy seven years old when he goes to serve five months in prison. Now, maybe they've decided they've got to cut their losses and go on and prosecute other people related to the Trump organization like Donald Trump. I was also advised, sources tell me neither side intends to use him as a witness,
and his plea deal was very specific about that. It didn't make any mention as it did last time he pled guilty that he was not going to be expected to testify as part of the terms of his plea deal, and his lawyer basically said, he looks forward to moving on with.
His life and he's not going to testify. Even though Michael Cohen says that he was a part of that hush money scheme.
Well, you could understand why the prosecutors wouldn't want to call him at all, because, I mean, what kind of credibility does a guy have that has pled guilty and admitted to not only tax fraud chargers. I think it was fifteen counts of tax fraud that he played guilty to in twenty twenty two, and now he faces two more felony counts, so that's like seventeen felonies he pled
guilty to, including two perjury counts. I think what's good about this guilty plea from the prosecutor's perspective is if the defense tries to attack or assailed Michael Cohen's credibility as a twice convicted perjurer, as they have been alleging and confronting him with whenever he's shown up as he did when he testified at the state Attorney General's trial as a witness. They can turn around and used Ellen Weisselberg's admissions of he also committed fraud on Donald Trump's behalf.
Well, I suppose jurors have believe cooperators with worst records tell us what Weiselberg lied about under oath.
Well, there were five counts of perjury that he admitted to committing, and he pled guilty and took responsibility for two of those. So the Pejoria's statements include the fact that he lied when questioned under oath and depositions on three occasions with the New York Attorney General Leticia James's office, and I believe Leticia James was also one of the people questioning him those days and lied about the size
of Donald Trump's triplex apartment at Trump Tower. Alan Weiselberg claimed that it was thirty thousand square feet instead of the actual one third, which is just over ten thousand
square feet. He also lied repeatedly in other depositions about what statements of financial condition claimed on the size of Trump Tower triplex, as well as other assets and the processes and what they told Forest Magazine or didn't tell Forbes magazine, and he also lied when he testified on behalf of Donald Trump in October of last year at the trial.
Whenever it's between the law and Trump, he chooses Trump. And I wonder how much of this has to do with his two million dollars severance package and are they still paying his legal bills?
I understood. I did a story last March in which his former lawyers were forced to get off the case unless they were going to deflect any prosecution or any problems for Trump. So they were viewed as disloyal his prior to criminal defense lawyers, and they were forced off the case because the Trump Organization and the Trump family wasn't going to pay his legal bills any longer. Now regarding he did get a two million dollar severance package from the Trump org. And some people have said that's
two million reasons to protect Donald Trump. In this case, it came out that he only got paid a million because it was being paid in tranches by the Trump organization, So he had only been paid a one million dollars as of October of last year when he testified, and he was also going to cough up a million dollars in fines as part of the New York ag verdict that the judge imposed in February.
And the severanceage requires him not to cooperate with any law enforcement investigation unless legally required to. And Judge and Goren wrote, the Trump organization keeps him on a short leash, and it shows. Did the judge completely discredit Weiselberg's testimony at the civil fraud trial.
He did in his opinion in his verdict that he issued that basically anything that Alan Weiselberg said, and he testified on the stand for several hours on behalf of Donald Trump as a star defense witness, that he was not credible and should be discounted.
Did he even testify against Trump in the criminal tax fraud trial against the Trump Organization?
And he didn't actually testify against Donald Trump in the tax fraud case before Judge Mershawn, who's now presiding over Donald Trump's criminal case. The agreement he had was not a cooperation agreement. It was just that he agreed to testify,
but he had to testify truthfully. He basically was very careful in his testimony, and Mershawn later said to him when he sentenced him in January twenty twenty three that he was very concerned with some of Weiselberg's testimony, and if he'd known how he was going to behave and what he was going to testify to on the stand at the tax fraud trial, he would have not agreed to give him that break which the judge had agreed to of five months in prison, which ended up being a very minimal sentence.
Let's talk a little bit about the hush money case that's coming up. That's coming up pretty quickly.
Well.
The case that the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has made is that Trump did what was called a catch and kill scheme engaged in just as he was running for president in twenty sixteen, there were stories out there, including salacious stories that he'd had sex with the Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, and he wanted to kill the story, so he basically broke her to deal through intermediaries like his lawyer, his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to buy the
story from being published from any national inquirer or any publication that would write about these salacious allegations and bury the news so that wouldn't come out and it would help his chances of getting elected. Alan Bragg is now calling it not a hush money case but actually an election interference case.
I know, I noticed that difference, and is the point to make the case seem more important because the case has been put down as the worst of the criminal case is against Trump. So is he trying to make it something different.
I mean, some people say it's so taundry the allegations involve a porn star. There are also other allegations that Alvin Bragg wants to include in the evidence, which are two other instances prior to the election, maybe years before, including that he had had sex with a playboy model Karen McDougall, and also that he had bought catch and kill story and buried involving a Trump doorman who had
some salacious allegations against Trump. So Alvin Bragg is fending his case that it's a valid case that nobody is
above the law, including Donald Trump. I mean, the allegations are pretty serious, including that there were checks cut and written to Michael Cohen to reimburse Michael Cohen for making these payments, and that you know, Trump did them while he was in the White House, so that these canceled checks include Donald Trump at the White House writing out checks, fabricating a protectual reason of why the checks were reading signed that it wasn't hush money, it was for legal expenses.
So there goes the allegation that Trump was on falsifying business records. So it sounds like, you know, it's a business crime. Everybody gets accused. Other people who commit these crimes get prosecuted, So why should Donald Trump be different.
I understand that the defense is arguing that Bragg shouldn't be allowed to argue election interference. Is the judge decided.
Now, there's many many things that judges being asked to decide, including you know, limiting what kind of evidence gets before the jury. The DA is arguing that Trump should be basically gagged from speaking about the jurors and mention them by name. I understand that there's no proviso under New
York state law for jurors to be anonymous. And the federal cases that were the Egen Carroll defamation case and sexual assault case, the to federal trials that we just had last year and then in January, both juries were anonymous. But there's no provision for that under state law. And the DA has argued and worried allowed that some people or some Trump followers could get the names of these
potential jurors and then release them to the world. And then how could these people operate in kind of secrecy of doing their job as jurors.
It's really reminiscent of a mob trial because you don't hear the these kinds of concerns from prosecutors in any other cases. So jury selection starts March twenty fifth. Any idea how long it might take to get a jury.
I've heard estimations of at least two weeks and maybe longer. And if we had a controversial case with a high profile defendant, and there was Harvey Weinstein who lived in Manhattan and he was the Hollywood mogul accused of sexually assaulting these women and that trial, I went back and looked, and it was ten days of jury selection.
Because the lawyers in New York get to ask questions. It's not like the federal system where the judge asked the questions and it moves along quicker.
Yeah, and there's some discussion, and I don't know if it's been decided yet. There was some requests by the DA to have people fill in a jury questionnaire, and it sounded like the judge was shining away from actually agreeing to that. So the jury questionnaire would sort of
pre screen people ahead of time. And I think what the judge basically told the lawyers the other day was he would do what Judge cap And did in federal court in the Egene Carroll trial and basically have people raise their hands and say, anyone here feel they can't be fair and impartial to Donald Trump, And if they raise their hands, he would get excused.
You'll have to tell us, Patty, how much raising of hands there is at that point. Thanks so much. That's Bloomberg Legal reporter Patricia Hurtado. Up next, Sam Bankman Freed's sentencing is coming up. I'm June Gross. When you're listening to Bloomberg, Sam Bankman Freed remember him. His spectacular fall from grace and trial for masterminding a multi billion dollar
fraud kept him in the headlines for months. But since his conviction last November, things have been quiet for SBF, at least in the media, but behind the scenes, he's been preparing for his sentencing and appeal, most notably by changing lawyers. His family and friends have flooded the judge who will sentence him next month with please for leniency, arguing that his public image as a quote freak with
evil intentions was dead wrong. His lawyers are asking he'd be given no more than six and a half years in prison, quite a contrast to the one hundred years the Probation Department has suggested. Joining me is Bloomberg Legal reporter chryst O Mesh, what is the maximum he's facing? How long could the judge sentence him too?
So obviously there are a lot of factors that play here, given the seriousness of his conduct and the number of charneys he was convicted of. But I talked to a lot of defense attorneys about this, and they he's going to get probably at least a decade in prison, which is, you know, a lot of time for a person of his age. But it's kind of reasonable given what the sentencing guidelines paul for him to sturb, which is a lot of time, which is a life sentence essentially, given
the size of the loss in the case. But you know, anybody who follows the criminal justice system America, and especially the federal system, knows that white collar sentences, which are driven by monetary losses are often the proposed sentences under the guidelines are really they're draconian. This the work, so it's very unlikely he would serve you know, twenty five years is probably a little bit on the higher end. See what the government says when they submit their commission
later this month. But the judge himself in this case, rush Kaplan has issued skepticism about the guidelines in the past, especially in white collar cases where the lost amount is very high. And if you look back at some of the cases that he sends, he doesn't tend to throw
the book at people. He's obviously a tough judge. You know, he gave the SDS defense team a hard time during the trial, but he seems to see sympathetic to the argument at very least that throwing him in prison for the rest of his life is really not going to do society or him any justice.
So the Probation office recommended a sentence of one one hundred years. What did they base that on?
So the majority of that is based on the Montsterori laws, which is, you know, the estimates very but it's probably at least eight billions, probably upwards of ten FBF attorneys argue that really the victims here are going to made hole by the bankruptcy case, and that they're not really going to be victims, and that he shouldn't really have
to pay resolutions. They made a kind of similar argument in the Trevor Milton case with the Nicola founder who was convicted a fraud in his fencing, saying that Nicola paid a lot of money to the SEC and the Centtal shareholder lawsuits to resolve a case.
He's gotten a new attorney, Mark mccazy.
Yes, Mark mccasey, very well known in the Southern District of New York, is father's former attorney. He's a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District. He's represented many a white collar criminalities, well known to the bar.
So his lawyers are arguing that he should serve no more than six and a half years in is. And that's on the very very low end, isn't it.
Yes, they couldn't have really logically argued for less. Probably practically that really probably wouldn't have worked with this judge. So they're going to take their shots where they can
on the lower end. And you know, their arguments are kind of similar to what a lot of people are saying, is that throwing him in prison for the rest of his life doesn't really serve the purposes of justice, especially for somebody who, you know, despite the fact that junto to tell him arguably has a lot to give in terms of, you know, his contributes to society, and Marky Casey and others have made this comparison to Michael Milkin, who you know, is very young when he was convicted
and managed to build up a life of philanthropy, which is really what FBS and that's what they talk about in these letters that he has devoted to plan that's the whole driving force of his life is.
Yeah. The quote that you talked about is the genius of both both men is undeniable. Their contributions were vast, their wealth and fame were unplanned, their means and methods were questioned by prosecutors, and their downfall was swift and tragic.
Sounds a little poetic, yeah, I mean that's mark me Casey. His submissions are pretty poetic, I would say, and are passionate. He's the passionate advocate for his clients, and that's what kind of a hallmark of his sentencing submissions now.
Are they saying that SBF is autistic?
He has medication. There's a lot of letters that were submitted along with this. It doesn't seem to really directly say that he is autistic, but you know, it implies that.
There were letters about his social awkwardness and inability to read social cues, and that that might have led to see his responses after the implosion of FTX as uncaring and dispassionate. And they're also saying that prison will be especially harmful for him because of that.
Yeah, one hundred percent. They definitely argue that some of the social awkwardness that he has and some of the social cues he misses leads people to believe that he's not emotional or not caring, and that instead that's just the way he deals with, you know, his social environment.
I know he's had. There's more than a two dozen letters here from friends, family, his mom and dad, but also from people who don't even know him, you know, concerned that throwing him in prison kind of ignores the challenges for people like him.
And also a fellow inmate submitted a letter.
Yes, fellow inmate, a former New York City police officer, who said he had a bunk right next to him and said, you know, they became pretty good friends, and that he believed that dam is just the kind of person that should not be in prison and would not turn any purpose at all.
And his mom wrote, was his mom's letter the most emotional of them.
I would definitely say so. His father's letter was pretty much to the point and very direct. It was only a couple of pages. His mother's letter it was about six pages long and was very passionate, even being a law professor and attorney herself, you know, addressed the judges. As his mother. She took aim at the media, for sure. She said that really he's a very misunderstood person. He was empathetic from the time he was a young child,
almost to his own detriment. And what a lot of the letters talked about, which I found interesting, is his vegetarianism, which he loved steak and fries, his mother said, and his brother, but he gave them up at an early age out of an ethical responsibility to animals. He wasn't some animal lover, they said, this was just something he felt he needed to do, and they felt that that demonstrated the kind of devotion to plan for being ethical causes that he kind of hat in his life.
His lawyers recommended this surprise me, that he not the order to pay restitution or forfeit any assets. Why so.
Yeah, So they're basically saying that the victims of this from the FBX investors will be made Hults Bank CONCEI, and that there's no real actual losses to them. It's a pretty interesting argument. And like I said, they kind of made this argument in the Trevor Milton case as well, that Nicola paid a lot of money to settle those cases and to resolve, you know, with the sec some of the allegations. So was the heart of that case.
So therefore he shouldn't be on the holtress. What they say, same here with sambank Free.
And sam Bgminfried. He was involved in charitable endeavors, wasn't he.
Yes?
Indeed, I mean that's definitely a hallmark of his life. And I mean that's part of also the the gates is that you know, he would funnel at THEX customer funds into political donations and the charitable donations and the speculative investments. So it was all kind of mixed up in the same bucket.
I'm curious as to whether the lawyers that you spoke to thought that, you know, as you mentioned, there was this, I don't know if we could say antagonistic relationship between Judge Caplan and bankman Freed, where bankment Freed disobeyed his orders and so he ordered him to go to jail before trial despite this enormous bail package, and then he made him testify for three hours outside the presence of
the jury, before he could testify. I mean, does any of that end up finding its way into a sentence, Well, it definitely could.
He definitely could find that he pursioned himself on the spand during this testimony which he implied that you know, happened and that he stroll We would take that into account. I mean, look, they brought it new council, so you can read into that what you will. I'm supposed to say. You know, sometimes that's just a good thing to have, like a fresh spot of eyes. He has another lawyer who is also working with me, Casey's gonna work on the appeal, So they definitely use the sentencing to kind
of turning eye towards the appeal. And you know the implication that there wasn't really a lot of intent here to do bold. So it's hard to say whether or not the antagonistic relationship between the judge an SBS former legal team will come into play in the sentencing, but there's certainly one of the reasons you get a new set of lawyers for that part of the see and.
Where does the appeal stand.
We don't really know that, and I have to have the sentencing first, which is about March twenty eighth, and then they would proceed once the judgment is issued. There's another question involved as to whether or not he would get a discount of any sort for his time spent in the Metropolitan Stations Center in Brooklyn, which is a notoriously bleak jail no more spentologists so certainly get unserved to some story, whether or not the judge's are that's
the weight hard to tell. And it's also hard to tell whether or not the judge would order him immediately to go to prison, you know, like designate him to a prison and have him go there while the appeal is pending, or whether he has him sit in Brooklyn. I mean, these are all questions that have to be answered as the sentencing is it the.
Judge or the prison system that decides whether he's placed in a medium or a high security prison or low security.
It's entirely up to the Bureau of Prisons as to where he goes and where he serves this, but the judge should make a recommendation and almost we'll certainly do so on the recommendations of Castle. I would guess probably somewhere in California, but that's all up to the Bureau of Prisons. And like I said, the judge would have to order him into custody of the Bureau of Prisons after the sentencing proceeding. I mean, he is already in
custody technically because he's in jail. But there's a matter of a bureaucracy and how do.
Federal prison sentences work. As far as getting any credits for time served or good behavior.
There's no parole, but you can get cramp for good behavior basically, so I think it's one year for every ten years or so. I don't know if that's exact, but you know, if he would get say a twenty five years seventy less than twenty one good behavior.
That is a lot of time. He does have time, though he is only thirty one years old. Thanks so much, Chris. That's Bloomberg Legal reporter Chris Domesh coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show. How the anti tax movement hijacked America. It originated as a fringe movement but evolved into a mainstream political force. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg. How much do you know about the anti tax movement
in America? It originated as a fringe movement and developed into a mainstream police fource that's growing strong and growing the national debt. Columbia Law School's Michael Grtz has written about it in his new book entitled The Power to Destroy How the Antijax Movement Hijacked America, And he joins me, Now, we've all heard about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, not so much the anti tax movement. So how would you describe it?
Well, on the first page of my book, I describe the anti tax movement as the most important, successful, and overlooked social and political movement of the past half century. Like you, When I asked people to name the most important social and political movements of the time, they answer the civil rights movement, the women's movement, sometimes the LGBTQ movement, the Christian evangelical movement, and recently the MAGA movement. But no one has ever mentioned the anti tax movement.
Why do you think that is?
Well, you know, it's about taxes, and people all like to talk about taxes, and they all like to think about taxes, and it's managed to be done largely with support from elites, but also a lot of popular support. I remember when I looked at polling data about the repeal of the estate tax in two thousand and one, forty percent of the people who answered the questions said that they expected to be in the top one percent when they died. And sixty percent of the people repeal
of the tax suppose the tax. That's hardly surprising. I suppose if you ask American public if they'd like to repeal any tax, if you get about sixty percent who would say yes, if not more.
In resistance to taxes. Can we go back to the Boston Tea Party? I don't know. You start in your book in nineteen seventy eight with California's Prop thirteen. Tell us how that got the ball rolling?
Well, I think the seventies were the prime time for an anti government, anti tax movement. We had experienced a very rapid inflation along with high unemployment, something that Kynesy and economics had said could not happen together. They were
known as stagflation. At the time, the Civil rights movement was very much on people's mind, particularly in California, where the Supreme Court in California had said that property tax differences in school finance could not be more than one hundred dollars per student and that they needed to be made much more equal. So the public in California thought they were paying property taxes for other people's children to
go to school. And many of those other people were not only black, but also Latino because of immigration into California at that time from the southern border. So you had a perfect storm for an anti tax movement. It was led by a very interesting fellow. I mean, one of the things that I really do spend time in my book honor small biographies, if you will, of people who were crucial in moving the anti tax movement forward.
And here Howard Jarvis, who had been a Republican operative and had unsuccessfully supported other tax limitation movements in California before this, including one a few years earlier that had been pushed by Ronald Reagan to limit the income tax. Howard Jarvis became the face of the Proposition thirteen movement, and he really emphasized that we should not be paying taxes for things for quote them, and he made it
clear by them. He met welfare and other expenditures for African Americans and Latinos particularly, But he was very successful, and the anti tax movement, like all social movements, was motivated by a combination of ideology and self interest. And in California, housing prices had really begun to inflate dramatically, and the rise in housing prices wasn't producing any nicer housing for anybody. All it was doing was producing greater property taxes. And there had been a lot of corruption.
There were three property tax assessors who had actually been convicted of crimes in California shortly before the proposition passed, And so you had corrupt property tax assessors, and you had people, particularly the elderly, who were finding themselves reasoning a cash crunch to pay their property tax bills. And so self interest was an important component Proposition thirteen. But
it took on a new life of its own. And recently California just rejected an increase in property taxes on commercial property, which also benefited from the Proposition thirteen tax cuts benefited greatly.
I should add, how did Christian evangelicals become part of the anti tax movement?
Well, this is a really important and interesting and really largely unknown story. In nineteen seventy one, the IRS was confronted with a case that had been brought in Mississippi that said that it was a violation of the law to provide tax exempt status and allowed charitable contribution deductions for private segregated schools. The ruling applied only to Mississippi, but the IRS was in what the Commissioner called a pickle because they didn't want to have one rule for
Mississippi and a different rule for everybody else. And until that point they had allowed tax exemptions and charitable deductions for segregated schools. But the Commissioner, with the support of President Nixon, ultimately issued a rule that said that if you were a segregated private school, you were no longer eligible for these tax benefits, which had been the lifeblood actually along with some grants from the states of private
segregation academies, as they were called. These private schools were limited to whites, and they had arisen in response to around the Board of Education, which was accompanied by massive
resistance to desegregation in the South. A couple of Republican operatives, Paul Weirich and Richard Vigery, both of whom were anti tax Catholics but important in the Republican Party, and the two of them convinced Jerry Folwell Senior, an important evangelical minister from North Carolina, to create what he then named
the Moral Majority. And the impetus for that was a nineteen seventy eight ruling by Jimmy Carter's Commissioner of Internal Revenue that basically said that not only did you have to say that you were not a segregated school, but you actually had to have minority students. And that created a major outcry among the Christian evangelicals and produce an antiros element in the anti tax movement.
I mean it seems like that continues even today.
Yeah, I mean we've seen Congressional Republicans, for example, basically saying they want to repeal the funding that was voted for in twenty twenty two. To allow the IRS to enforce the existing tax law, even though the IRS claims that for every dollar of additional funding it will get twelve dollars additional revenue and has committed itself not to increase audits some people, except those above four hundred thousand dollars of income. But none of that seems to matter.
That is, anti IRS movement and the anti tax movement are bound together, and as a result of the denial of these tax deductions, the Christian evangelicals entered politics in an anti IRS fashion, anti tax fashion, and became a very important part of Ronald Reagan's efforts to become president
and have been part of that sense. Reagan basically said that he was going to overrule the IRS and withdraw the denial of tax exemptions for Christian evangelical schools, but ultimately the Supreme Court had to hear a case and they ruled that allowing those deductions and exemptions was illegal. Who violated the tax law?
The national debt is over thirty four trillion dollars. So how do we lose our sense of fiscal responsibility in favor of tax cuts and more tax cuts.
Well, I think that that happened after the Reagan administration. Ronald Reagan. This is a very little known fact, but Ronald Reagan essentially tripled the federal debt. It went from under the trillion dollars when he became president to two point seven trillion when he left office, and therefore he created more federal debt during his time in office than
all of the presidents before him. This was due not only to the tax cuts, but also to increases in spending, particularly defense spending, which he was very much in favor of, and that meant that his successor, George Herbert Walker Bush, who faced a piece of legislation that we've now all forgotten, known as Graham Rudman Hollings, which required automatic cuts in
spending that would produce a balanced budget. When George Herbert Walker Bush came into office, those cuts were going to be huge, and they were unacceptable to both Republicans and Democrats. And the first president Bush had said when he accepted the nomination for president, read my lips, no new taxes.
And then in nineteen ninety he agreed to a budget deal that raised taxes, and many people have claimed that was at least partially responsible for him losing the election of nineteen ninety two to Bill Clinton and then Dell Clinton, who had run for office on a tax cut platform, decided that because of deficits, he had to raise taxes. And what happened is that there was a result of these two pieces of legislation and very robust economic growth
in the latter part of the nineteen nineties. When George W. Bush came into office in two thousand and one, the budget deficits had disappeared. We were in surplus, and the Congressional Budget Office was promising that we would have surpluses for at least a decade and perhaps longer, and began to pay off the federal debt. And George W. Bush proposed a massive tax cut in two thousand and one, and it was enacted faster than Reagan got his tax cuts.
And then nine to eleven happened, and we entered into a war on terror that cost well over six trillion dollars, and George W. Bush also added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, and the War on Terror was the first war in American history that was not paid for with taxes,
at least in part. And the prescription drug benefit was the first new entitlement that was not paid for by any new or dedicated taxes, and as a result, we started accumulating very large deficits and the debt started growing. And the Republicans, i think, having seen what happened to George Herbert Walker Bush, were not going to raise taxes, and the Democrats abetted the Republicans in two thousand and
one in reducing taxes. And then when Obama became president, he essentially extended ninety percent of Bush's tax cuts, and then he agreed that he would only raise taxes on people over four hundred thousand dollars of income, which, as you know, became Joe Biden's electoral promise and the promise that he is stuck to. So I think it's the twenty first century story where both the Republicans and the
Democrats have decided they don't want to raise taxes. The Republicans don't want to raise taxes on anyone, and the Democrats refuse to raise taxes on anyone but the top two percent, so they don't want to raise taxes on ninety eight percent of anyone. And in my view, this is not a way that you can sustain a government.
Thanks for joining me. That's Columbia Law School's Michael Gratz. His book is entitled The Power to Destroy. How the Anti Tax Movement Hijacked America. And that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show. I'm June Grosso. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now