Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters

the early eighties. Eventually, due to some of the policies of George Bush, he broke with the far right and became an independent voice and a critic of the move of the GOP away from its traditional roots to areas never seen before. I know I'm gonna get all sorts of angry emails from people, um, mostly because I agree with pretty much everything Bruce says, and some of you are going to disagree with everything he says. UM, you can send me angry emails at m IB podcast at

Bloomberg dot net. I don't know how else to describe this other than just a tour to force conversation about a from a certain segment of the political firmament, which is the conservative Republican never trumpers and Bruce Bartlett is a perfect um example of that. Previously, we've had Mike Murphy, who was a Jeb Bush's campaign manager, who gave a slightly different perspective. UH, And we try and bring all sorts of of perspectives onto the show to discuss these things.

I found it really fascinating and I expect you will too. So, with no further ado my conversation with Bruce Bartlett, I have an extra special guest today. His name is Bruce Bartlett, and he has a storied career in politics in Washington, d C. He has held senior policy roles in both the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administration. He started in in DC working with Congressman Ron Paul on the Banking Committee. He has also worked with Jack Kemp. He

was executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. UH. He's written for various publications, including The New York Times, Economics Blog, for The Washington Post, and other fine publications. He is the author of multiple best selling books, including Reaganomics, Supply Side Economics and Action, and Impostor, How George W.

Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Most recently, he wrote the book The Truth Matters, a citizens Guide to separating facts from lies and stopping fake news in its tracks. Bruce Bartlett, Welcome to Bloomberg. Happy to be here. So that's quite the CV. Let's let's let's begin by going to your political beginnings. You, in nineteen seventy six began working for a then unknown congressman named Ron Paul out of Texas. Uh. What did you do for him?

And how did you guys ultimately find each other? Well, at that time, Texas was a very solidly democratic state. Uh. You know, the old story down there is the Democrats were yellow dog Democrats. They'd vote for a yellow dog

if it was running as a Democrat. And there was only two other Republicans in the Republican House delegation, and one of the Democrats, Uh, resigned because he got a higher level appointment of some kind, and so they had to have a special election in April nineteen seventy six, And I saw a brief story, uh in the Washington Post in which this this fellow Ron Paul, whom of course I'd never heard of, Uh, was elected Republican to a Democratic seat, and he was quoted in the article

saying he was to the right of very goldwater Well, which is hard to imagine. Well, at the time, that sounded like a good idea to me. I was very conservative at that time, libertarian and uh so and I was I was just finishing up some work at graduate school and was looking around for a real job. Saw out of the blue, I just sent him a letter and uh some things I published and uh A few days later, I get a call from his secretary and

I interviewed with him. And I remember when I entered his office, he had a bookcase, and in the bookcase was every book published by the Foundation for Economic Education, which is still around in a robust website. That's right, and but at the and but at the time it was was the most well known, well established free market oriented think tank in the United States. And I had already published a couple of articles in its little journal, which was called The Freeman. And so I think that's

probably what caught his attention. And when I saw all these books, I knew I was in pretty good shape. So what was it like working with him? He that was he was on the banking committee. Uh. I don't think people had any idea of how his politics would evolve to really full blown libertarianism. Uh. Nor did people understand that he would one day mount a fairly um significant run for the presidents, multiple runs for the president, and that his son would become a United States Senator. Yeah.

I mean at the time, we thought what we were doing was very quicksodic and uh and I think we're just trying to make a point. And in order to do so. Uh, you know, Ron like to to do things in a very outrage just manner. For example, one of his things he most enjoyed was being the only no vote against some piece of legislation that passed would otherwise have passed unanimously. And since he was a medical doctor, he got people would call him doctor No and he

he very much enjoyed that. How did you move from

run poland Texas to Jack Kemp up in upstate New York. Well, the problem was that Iran was elected in a special election in April of nineteen seventy six and therefore had to run for election for for a full seat that very same year, and unfortunately he was defeated in his first bid for h I guess he was his first effort at re election and uh, and so he was defeated, and Uh, I was looking around for a job, and uh one of the women in the office that she

had heard that Jack Kemp, who I really only knew about as a football player. I remember watching him in the nineteen AFL Championship game. He when he was playing for the Buffalo Bills, and he had been elected to Congress in nineteen seventy and he always said that the reason he was elected because he threatened to come and come back and play for the Bills another year if he lost. And that's very funny. So you leave Ron Paul after he was defeated in what was that seventies

eight or and you join um Jack Kemp's office. Kemp was tapped by Reagan to help push forward a very big set of tax cuts. Tell us, well, that was much later. So I went to work with Kemp, and he was very interested in tax policy, and he had come under the influence of a guy named Jude Winnisky, who in turn had come under the influence of too economists, one named Robert Mundell, who later won the Nobel Prize, and Arthur Laugher, who was still out there and very

active in in in tax affairs. One of the things that Jack was very interested in was the Kennedy tax cut of the nineteen sixties, which he felt had done a lot to invigorate the economy. And remember, in nineteen seventy seven, inflation was the overwhelmingly large problem, and this tended to make it very hard to do any kind of fiscal policy because anything that would increase the deficit

was considered per se inflationary. But what Jack argued, uh really based on Mundel's theories, was that if you enacted some kind of policy that increased the production of goods and services, then this would be anti inflationary, you see. And so that meaning you would have more supply and it should not see runaway prices. The additional supplies should

actually keep a cap on prices. Well well, yeah, if you could just hold the line on the money supply and and then do something that would raise supply, then you should get a diminishing diminishment of of inflation. At least that was our theory and our argument. And uh so, you know, one day, I remember he uh you know, just said to me, Bruce, why don't we instead of just talking about the Kennedy tax cut, why don't we

just do it and just reintroduce the same legislation. Well, obviously you couldn't literally do that because the Kennedy tax cut was already in effect, So we had to find something that replicated it in in my in current terms, remind us, how what were the top rates like under Kennedy. What was the actual impact of the cuts that were

passed in the early sixties. Well, the the you have to remember that when Kennedy took office, all the World War One to Korea War, tax rates were still in effect because Eisenhower refused to cut them on the grounds that he wanted to balance the budget. And but Kennedy, remember and on saying he wanted to get the economy

moving again. And so he's at that time the top tax rate in the federal marginal statutory income tax rate and the bottom rate was I believe, and so he cut those from He cut the top right down to uh sev and the bottom right down to fourteen percent. And that's where those rates were when I started working for Jack Kemp. Now, the real problem was remember inflation, and everybody was getting pushed up into higher tax brackets. Inflation.

At the time, tax brackets um were not adjusted for inflation, you could just be inflated into a higher bracket, that's right. And so workers were getting cost of living adjustments which just kept them even, but they were actually were soft because they were getting pushed into higher brackets that had been originally put in to place the tax people whose

real incomes were very substantially higher than their's. And actually the rich, we're we're in somewhat of a better shape because if you're already in the top bracket, you can't get pushed any higher. But there were some other problems. Capital gains was a very serious problem because a lot of the gains that were being realized at that time was pure inflation, and so you're you're being it was confiscatory taxation. You were paying a tax on on zero

real gains. So what had Kemp proposed doing based on where taxes were in the late He proposed cutting the top rate from seventy to fifty and the bottom rate from four to and so we just we just asserted that this is essentially the Kennedy tax cut, another twenty points off the top and a third off the bottom.

And yeah, so we argued that everybody was getting a tax rate cut and all the rates in between were cut at about this by the same amount, and so we introduced this legislation in the middle of nineteen seventy seven. In the meantime, a Senator named Bill Roth from Delaware had contacted Kemp saying he really liked what he was saying and suggested they worked together, and so we asked him if he wanted to be to co sponsor this Kennedy tax cut legislation. He was very interested in doing so,

and that's how it became the Kemp Roth Bill. But in nineteen seventy seven there was not much interest in this legislation because Republicans were still very wedded to the balanced budget idea and they didn't want to cut taxes and less they cut spending simultaneously by an equal amount. This was the widespread view in the Republican caucus. So

so we were having trouble getting co sponsors. And of course, inflation was a serious problem, and all the conventional administration economists said, if you don't act a big tax cut now, it'll it'll be massively inflationary, we'll have hyper inflation. So we had no support really from anybody except these couple of people like Arthur Laugher. And uh, speaking of which comes along, Ronald Reagan gets elected in in pretty much a landslide, not as big a landslide as eighty four,

but still substantially trounced the Jimmy Carter. Then what happened? How did we get from that too? All those tax cut Well, there was something in the middle in between happened that's extremely important, which is in eight they passed Proposition thirteen in California, and now I remember that's what That was a huge cut in the property tax rate. And the really important part about this is there were no accompanying spending cuts, because everybody just said, there's plenty

of fat in the government. Let them worry about. It's not our problem. We just want to pay less taxes. And when this was enacted, it d everybody in the United States, everybody in Washington certainly to believe, oh my god, there's a tax revolt. We got to do something about this. And Kemp's legislation suddenly became the thing that every Republican

wanted to be the sponsor of. And as you say, in nineteen eighty, when Ronald Reagan was running for president, he he officially endorsed the kemper Off Bill and said, this is my legislation, this is what I will send to Congress if I'm elected. And he did, and it was signed into law in August of And what was the impact of those taxes. I think they're grossly exaggerated

to this day in terms of their economic impact. You have to remember the the the the tax cut took effect in the middle of a huge recession, and so in that sense it was very well timed fiscal stimulus, but a lot of other but but of course the economy continued downward for well over a year after the tax cut took effect. Let's talk a little bit about some of the changes that have taken place in politics over the past twenty or thirty years that led you

to really break with your conservative roots. And probably nothing epitomizes that more than the book you wrote, How George Bush Bankrupted American Betrayed the Rigging Legacy. What led to this fairly dramatic pivot from the right to I would say the middle, Other people would say the left. What what led to this? Oh? I can tell you very very specifically, even give you the exact date. Now up until two thousand three. I was a very conventional Republican conservative.

I was very happy in the Republican Party. And then on November two thousand three, Uh, you may remember, we woke up too, and when we read the newspapers, we found out that in the middle of the night, the Republican Congress had passed something called the Medicare Part D program, and they literally kept the vote open for three hours while they twisted arms and did all kinds of things to ram this piece of legislation through, which was the creation of a new entitlement program for big with big

giveaways to the industry itself as well. Well, that's right, it was. It was a four billion dollar costs, not one penny of which was paid for, and they explicitly wrote into law that the Medicare program was prohibited from negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies in the same way that every single private health insurance plan does. So they have to pay the list price whatever they charge of dosage, the Medicare program has to pay it, and there's nothing

they can do about it. Was that a stop to the industry, It was what was an attempt to bankrupt Medicaid. No, I don't think they are consciously trying to bankrupt Medicare. What I think is they were trying to throw billions and hundreds of billions of dollars at their pals in the in the in the in the pharmaceutical industry. I

think that they were. And the Republicans felt that they had to do this because they knew the Democrats would the first chance they got, but the Democrats would make sure that there were provisions in there to control drug prices, and they absolutely did not want that to happen. So they had to do take the initiative to pass this

legislation themselves. And uh, and I was just horrified because I thought Republicans existed to cut entitlement programs, reduced spending, and creating a new entitlement program was just the opposite of what I thought the party existed to do. So you sat down and wrote a book called Imposta about George Bush. What was the response and you published a variety of different columns about it while it was in the arks. What was the response from your colleagues on

the right. Well, first of all, I I started writing very very negative columns about George W. Bush, and at the time was working for a conservative think tank which basically said stop doing this or you're gonna be fired. So so that was what led me to decide to write the book, which I had originally thought I might

have to do uh anonymously. But anyway, I wrote this book during UH two thousand five, and UH, to my surprise, there was interest in the publishing industry about it, and UH it came out in in early two thousand and six, a Reagan advisor with strong right wing conservative credentials writes a book calling George Bush the person who's bankrupting American be trading the Reagan legacy. Was it any surprise at

a conservative think tank said you're out? Uh? In retrospect, I was rather naive about all of this, But I see, I thought that I had written a book, and if you read it, it's it reads like an academic book. It's very, very heavily referenced. And not only that, virtually every person in the entire book who's cited or quoted is a good solid conservative. Because I was, in a way distilling what a lot of conservatives were saying. And I thought of people simply read the book, they'd be

UH persuaded by it. They'd agree with me. Isn't it shocking you could go through this whole process of putting all these facts on paper, and yet still the same myths and misunderstandings persist. People don't want to believe that which they don't want to believe. That's right, And uh, it was really my first experience with this whole phenomenon. I'm not sure quite sure what we call it now,

where confirmation by a selective perception. But there's another quote of yours I have to mention because at this point I think you're just trying to get your concern OVD of Allies and Friends angry. You wrote, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy's problems than Paul Krugman, a prominent Kingsie economist. He is the boogeyman for the far right, and yet you're saying this guy has been more right than anyone else.

I don't remember exactly when I said that, but I do remember saying it, and and I agree with that. Let's talk a little bit about your most recent book, The Truth Matters, A citizens Guide to separating facts and lies and stopping fake news in its tracks. First question is the truth matters. Isn't that self evident? Don't we don't we all believe the truth matters? One would think so. But there's obviously a great deal of evidence to the contrary,

at least as far as Donald Trump is concerned. I mean, you've probably read this recent story where he continues to insist that he owns a ren Wi, an original ren Wi. Now has he actually said that, because the Chicago Art Institute recently came out and said, the renoir pictured in Trump's apartment, the original is here. We have the providence, we could trade trace it back from when it was painted to who it was sold to. We know exactly who and who and where it is. How can Trump

really believe that that's an original? He simply continues to assert it, just as he asserts so many other things that are simply lies. Now, the reason I wrote the book, it's because I was horrified by the election results. Were you surprised by them? Yes? I was on election night. I mean it was quite early in the evening when I saw the handwriting on the wall, when I saw the Hillary was was not hadn't yet been called in states that I was quite certain she was going to

I knew that was a very bad sign. And uh, and and I didn't stay up to watch the final results of No. I just couldn't handle it. And in fact, I refused to read any of the news for about two months after the election. I was just sick to my stomach. Oh you miss them, fascinating thing. Yeah, I

imagine I did. But but as I you know, got out of my stupor or whatever and began to think about what was going on, the thing that struck me was the problems of the media, because it seemed to me that that the media that had existed throughout most of our lifetimes, you know, when you had three major news broadcasts in the evening, you didn't have cable. Everybody got a newspaper delivered to their house that were responsible newspapers that had a great deal of power and authority.

They wouldn't have allowed any of this to happen. And so I felt that the weakness of the media, certain things that were going on in the nature and the structure of the media. Uh, we're very much to blame for the Trump phenomenon. So let's unpack that a little bit, because we have we have a couple of things driving that, you have the overall move to digital, which hurt newspaper classify. Everything from Craigslist to Amazon to Google have all taken

a big chunk of the traditional media's revenue stream. And so we've seen big cutbacks and newsrooms. We've seen consolidation. We've seen a lot of newspapers closing. And that's before we get to the rise of Facebook and fake news. These are all related phenomenon. Obviously, the media don't have the economic strength to oppose a pop you know, somebody, I won't say Trump is popular in the conventional sense, but he's obviously newsworthy and and people paid in an

ordinate amount of tension. Whenever there was a story about him, it got lots of clicks. Somebody said that the media gave him and I'm I know, I'm mangling this number two billion, eight billion dollars at the free coverage. And and that's why he ran a fairly shoe string campaign, not a big budget. That's exactly correct. And and but worse, what they did is they tended inadvertently, perhaps to normalize him.

They share they shaved off the rough edges and didn't make him seem like the total clown that he in fact is and always has been. They felt like, how can we justify spending so much time covering this this this clown. We have to elevate him up so that he seems important enough to justify us giving him so much airspace, so many column inches of coverage. So now it's funny you say that, because I'm a lifelong New Yorker,

I'm gonna oversimplify this. But most New Yorkers know who Donald Trump was before he ran for office, and he was kind of looked at as, yeah, the guy inherited a bunch of money and he's kind of a a goofball, but nobody really took him seriously. Some people thought he was a grifter. I know other people who talked about him not paying contractors and all the lawsuits and all that sort of stuff. But I think the average New york had kind of looked at him and said, yeah,

this guy is in a serious candidate. It was shocking to those of us here that the rest of the country he found such a robust resonance with Well, I suppose you have to give the devil his due and say that. However, instinctively he figured this out. He did tap into a very deep strain of political and cultural trends that were really invisible frankly to even two polsters.

Let's focus on on the media itself and what you think they're doing wrong and what do they have to do to fix the problem they have with not being perceived as truthful or reliable. Well, I felt when I when I conceived this book that given the nature of the media environment, people needed to know more about the nuts and bolts of how the news is created, how

it's produced, how it's distributed. Uh. It's sort of like if you had a situation, perhaps not unlike someplace in Cuba, where you couldn't have a car unless you knew how to repair it yourself and maybe even build it from scratch. And so as as the the the infrastructure of the media has started to sort of collapse, people are going to have to create their own uh media for themselves.

They have to curate their own news feed and rely on whatever they They can't rely on just reading a decent daily newspaper every day and field that they knew know whatever they needed to know that day. Uh. Many of the cable channels are ranked uh propaganda. The Fox News channel is just literally a subsidiary of the Republican National Committee. And when you when you say that, I don't just necessarily disagree. But when I say that to Republican friends, the answer I usually get is, well, the

entire media landscape is completely liberal. Well, that's a why they tell themselves to justify watching a media source that

just lies continuously. But I will concede, and I say in the book, there was a time, uh when I think the vast bulk of the mainstream media did tilt to the left, perhaps not nearly as much as as conservatives thought they did, but there's no question that if you interviewed or talked to the typical New York Times Washington Post reporter circle of the nineteen seventies, they were clearly to the left of center. The data shows that reporters tended to be educated and younger that will skewed

to the left. Their editors tended to be also educated in urban but higher earning and older that skewed them a little more to the right. The theory was they would kind of balance each other out. Has the liberal media trope? Has that been wildly overstated or is it is? It? Is there still truth to it or is it just

a little bit of truth and it's exaggerated for effects. Well, what I think happened is that beginning I'm not sure precisely when, but let's say the nineteen mid nineteen nineties or so, I think the the mainstream media tried to tilt itself more towards the center. That is, they moved to the right from where they were, but they moved to the center, and I think they're by and large they stayed there. Now, what happened with Foxes, I think

they originally started more or less in the center. I think they were pretty sent trusts, but they were to the right of their competitors, so they weren't really to the objective right. They were right relative about what happens when the rest of the media moved to the center, they then moved very far to the right, and I think especially nine eleven had a great deal to do. That's when they went full on off the reds and became so so that this is a good time to ask,

what is the Overton window. You discussed this in the book and it's fascinating. Well, we're basically talking about it right now. Is the window is what you can see out of an ordinary window. You can see, let's say, a parade going by, but you can only see that little section of what might be a long parade that is right in front of your window. You can't see

what's the left, you can't see what's the right. But if the window itself moves to the right, you may think you're still seeing the same part of the parade, but you're not. You're now seeing the right part of the parade, and so your perspective is distorted. And we were just talking about this. The mainstream media moved to the right and ended up in the center, and the Fox and the right wing media moved much further to

the right. But because the mainstream media is relatively still on the left, this allows those on the right to claim falsely that the media is left wing, and this justifies there being very very right wing, which they claim, well, we're simply off setting what they're doing, but in fact, what they're doing is lying, doing propaganda and distortion, whereas the mainstream media is still stuck trying to tell the truth. Bruce, you don't mince words. Can you stick around a little bit?

I have a lot more questions for you. We have been speaking with Bruce Bartlett, former Reagan policy advisor, on taxes and economics. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out the podcast. Extra is Will we keep the tape running and continue to talk about all things policy, media and tax based. Be sure and check out my daily column. You can find that on Bloomberg View dot com.

Follow me on Twitter at rid Holts. We love your comments, feedback, end suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I'm Barry Ridholts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you Bruce for doing this. I've been looking forward to having this conversation because I know you don't mince words, you say it as you see it, and you have

been on both sides of the political spectrum. I know no one better situated to observe the current political media whatever situation than you. There's there's a few people who have done the sorts of things that you've done well. I'll tell you when I first broke with the GOP over the Medicare Part D legislation, I thought I didn't really break with the GPA. What I did is I broke with the elected Republicans who were not I was breaking with Bush more than anything else, and I thought

I was helping my party. I still consider myself to be a Republican. And what I was afraid of is that bushes and competence and screw ups, we're just teeing the ball up for the Democrats to win in two thousand and eight. And what I thought, remember my book came out in two thousand six, as I thought, if we had a debate about why Bush was a failure, maybe we could nominate somebody who would have a chance

of winning in two thousand eight. And everybody thought I was being a trader for even raising doubts about the possibility that that the next Republican wouldn't just win in a heartbeat. And I didn't know anything about Obama. He wasn't even on my radar screen. I just knew that from from long history that two terms of one presidency one party, you know, you tend to get the next one. And I thought there was a very very small chance. But I thought, you know, purging bush Ism was was

part of what needed to be done. And this is what everybody got upset about me about I think it was the the old you know, the little kids saying the Emperor's not wearing any clothes. Phenomenon is you just not allowed to say certain things in the Republican Party. And we've seen this now just the last few days with Senators Corker and Flake, where they're just being savaged by their own party for saying simply for saying out

loud what they have said. We've been talking about this behind closed doors with other members of the Republicans in the Senate for months and months, and we can't take it anymore. We're going public and and everybody's just shocked, and they're afraid they're gonna get primaried from the right and they will. Uh. You have this absolute lunatic named Steve Bannon, whom I actually know slightly. I was in

a movie that he directed called Generation Zero. You can go to IMDb, i amdb dot com and find that the entire movie is available on YouTube. And I know a few other people who had lots of people were in that movie and worry. Okay, Well, I actually got to go to a party at the bright Bart Mansion on Capitol Hill and I met Steve Bannon and I don't remember too much about the nature of our conversation,

but at least I did meet him long before. This is ten years ago or so, right after the financial crisis exact, that's right, that's right round two thousand nine or ten thereabouts, but I think it was before the big Republican victory in the elections that year, so so there were still sort of on the outs, but now, of course they're very much on the inside. So here's

here's the issue that um. I don't even know if this is pushed back to you, but people always seem to be surprised when I say I was a Jacob Javits Republican. Just I have a libertarian streak. I don't think the government should tell people who could get elected what they can smoke and consume, whether or not they can have an abortion, and all those sort of things are very paternalistic overreach from government. So I tended to affiliate and believe more, um with the libertarian Republican side,

and Jacob Javits was the traditional moderate Northeastern Republican. And what's astonishing is the party from that era sixties, seventies, even early eighties, the modern Republican party does not remotely resemble that previous Republican party. So when people were pushing back at you saying, hey, this is not what we stand for. Really, the party was moving elsewhere and you weren't keeping up. Is that a fair assessment? You leave the party so much as it it left the part

of the political spectrum where you were residing. Well, the the deep historical trend that explains what you're talking about is,

of course what goes by the Southern strategy. That is, you had, for for a hundred years or more after the Civil War, a weird situation in which you had very conservative politically, culturally, economically, and so on, a group of people in the South who, for purely historical reasons, associated with the Liberal Party, and there were too many of them to be pushed out, so they had to be accommodated, meaning meaning Republicans or whoever was in the

Deep South didn't feel comfortable voting for the Party of Lincoln because of the vestiges of of the was simply a waste of time. You couldn't win uh and uh in. The one group of people who you could have gotten support from were, of course African Americans, who were widely you know, had their votes suppressed, So there was simply there. You simply couldn't win. So if you wanted a career in politics, you had no choice but to be a Democrat. And now let's let's talk about the modern era. You

go from Bushism to eight years of um Obama. I argued in OH eight, in the middle of the financial crisis, it didn't matter who the Republicans put up, they were going to lose because the financial crisis was Hey, first, non eleven. Now this happened on your watch. We're we're tapping at We're done. Um. I get that sense, whether it was subconscious or or verbalized, that's what the middle

was thinking. And you could arguably say nine eleven was something that could either it couldn't have been stopped or we just didn't understand how how significant the threat was. But the financial crisis, hey, it's coming in the last year of eight. It's very hard to pass the buck on that, even though there were forces that were ten twenty thirty years in the making that led to it. So I thought the Republicans were destined to lose an

OH eight. I didn't feel that either party was a sure fire victor in what what do we take away from the election in Well, it's lots of people have dissected that election, will continue to do so. And it's pretty clear that Hillary Clinton had deep, deep flaws as a candidate, and and everybody knew that. But she, but so did he, so did Donald Trump. Neither of them were good candidates. No, I agree, but I thought Hillary

was gonna win. But then again, I always assumed that she was doing competent polling in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and knew what her situation was and could put resources into these places rather than just pretend to thinking, Oh, they're in the bag. I don't need to waste my time there. I'm gonna have a big rally the night before the election in Philadelphia. You know my pals, you know, Beyonce and Jay z or whoever you No, Pennsylvania, for

sure was an issue, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina. There was a big article recently that some of the voters suppression rules in Wisconsin may have thrown that state. So I'll give her the benefit of the doubt with one state, but the rest, there's no other way to say it. She blew it. But look if she had won, she wuld have won by the skin of her teeth. And you can imagine what the Republicans would be doing to savage her. I mean, she'd have already been impeached by now,

so I she would have been impeached already. Quite possibly. They just started a new investigation of Hillary's involvement some uranium sale. You know, they never you know, you do think about Niger, but we're still talking about Benghazi. I mean, Republicans. What you can always say of them is they never learn and they never forget, and so they will be dredging up these things for the rest of our lives.

Which raises which raises a question, because I don't think, you know, I never want to draw a false equivalences twenty eighteen. Hypothetically the Congress is retaken by the Democrats, are we going to see impeachment proceedings against President uh Trump? Quite possibly depends. I think that the Democrats have a better chance of retaking the House than the Senate. I think it's going to be tough in the Senate, sent us a real long shot houses probably with your better

it's it's within uh striking distance. But the point is I was getting at is. Even if they win, they're not going to have an overwhelming majority. It's not gonna be like ninety four, where you know, a huge Democratic majority comes in. And so I think that there and they'll have their hands full just trying to stop some of the Trump initiatives that more than likely will still be I think we'll still be talking about tax reform in I don't believe that they have the competence or

the wherewithal to pass anything. Uh certainly not this year, and I don't think next year either. So let me ask you another question. And I've shared this with some of my Democratic friends. Um, Trump is makes a lot of noise and and maybe he bothers you on Twitter, and maybe he's a little bit of an harassman internationally, but he's not competent. He's never run a real organization, he's never run a large business. He certainly has never run a state or a city. He's gonna get nothing done,

and he's just gonna piss everybody off. On the other hands, if you wish him gone, well say what you will about Vice President Pence. He was a fairly competent governor of a fairly substantial size state, and he knows how to do politics. Pence will get a lot more legislation through than Trump ever could. So be careful what you wish for. If Trump is gone, now you're dealing with a competent even further right individual, What what are your

thoughts on that? Well, I think Pence is nominally more competent, but that's damning him with the faintest possible But he's but he's such a religious fanatic. I think it would be like having Jeff's sessions really as president. And and and I wouldn't under estimate Trump's ability to get things done because he has absolutely no consistency. I mean, he's willing to just flip under nati degrees from what he said yesterday. And what he really cares about is the

art of the deal he wanting. He wants something in the wind column. He doesn't care what it is. That's precisely right. So that sort of flexibility should have led him to get some sort of repeal and replace through.

Why couldn't he get that that that issue is still open as you know, Uh, there there are people in the Congress so working on an Obamacare fix that he has on various days said he supports or opposes, and I think I think there's still something that at the end of the day could get across the finish line there and he'll stand up there and pretend he never said anything negative about any of this stuff. That's that's his strength. It's of course it's a weakness as well,

but let's not underestimate the strength part. Let's call it an intellectual flexibility. Well, that's one way putting it. So we were talking before about the media moving, the mainstream media moving from somewhat left of center to center, and that just your your description in The Truth Matters reminded me of Stephen Colbert, who when he was uh doing the Colbert ra poor, one of his first things to go viral was liberal reality has a well known liberal bias.

Is that is that any truth to that? Or? I think that's absolutely true. I think part of the problem with those on the right is many of them are are very religious, and they are very accustomed to taking things on faith. It could be ideology, it could be belief sys and I think it's very easy for them to just kind of just gloss over the fact that facts don't fit their worldview and and create an alternative universe in which they do when cognitive dissonance written large,

that's one way of putting it. So, so how do they rationalize when the Pope comes out and says, hey, climate change is real and and we were given the earth and you therefore should be working to protect it, not despoiling it. How do the conservatives rationalize, Well, he's just the Pope. Well, as far as I can see, even Catholics have pretty much or I should say Republican Catholics pretty much ignore what the Pope said. I mean, look at the fact that we are ambassador to the

Vatican is a woman who's an admitted adulterer. Okay, that's right, It's yeah, they had It's well known that she had an affair with new while he was still married. And and and he of course he's been married three times. I doubt that he had his marriage as annulled and so the legitimately so. And these are paragons of Catholicism, now, isn't that? Isn't that Trump just kind of tweaking the Pope because the Pope has said not nice things about him.

Perhaps I think he mostly just doesn't care. Uh, you know, Nuke called him up and said, my wife is a big Catholic. She really wants to be ambassador of the UH to the Vatican. When he said, my wife is a big Catholic. Hold that whole adultery thing aside. Well, I'm just hypothesizing how this came about. Nude asked for a favor, and Trump said, sure, why not? You want to be ambassador? You want to? I don't care. And because he clearly has shown absolutely no interest in the

highest level appointments in his administration. I mean, it's quite clear that the Secretary of State hates him. And uh, this I don't know. I mean, who knows what Kelly is going through Kelly's mind these days when he's forced to stand up there and tell rank lies about to what this woman, this congresswoman said at an event they had video tape of, and he and he and he he won't say, he okay, I'm sorry, I made a mistake.

I misremembered. He stands up there and says, I stand by the lie that I said the other day, and I'm not changing. Who are you gonna believe me or you lying? That's one of those jokes. It's you know, someone had said that nobody comes out of the Bush administration with their reputation intact, which really wasn't true because there were a handful of people on the economic side. Greg man q is back at at Harvard teaching, and Richard Clarida is at PIMCO. And Jose are just too

off the top of my head. Although certainly some people suffered some reputational damage, the neo cons and a bunch of other people involved in the Iraq War, I get the sense that this administration is just a reputation devouring machine. Is anybody going to come out of this administration reputation? And one reason I think that you haven't seen more people leave is because there's no place for them to go. Stuck.

They're stuck, I mean to literally have a paycheck coming in. Uh, they have to stay there and maybe hope for the best. Aren't most of many of them wealthy and or billionaires? Oh not Well, if you're talking about the cabinet, sure,

guys like Steve Manuchin and Rex Tiller's fabulously wealthy. But I mean they're there the people who do the real work, you know, the the assistant secretaries and the people of that sort, the White House staff, they're just paid whatever they get paid fifty or a hundred thousand dollars a year and now and many of them now have to hire private lawyers because they were involved in the campaign. And you saw the other day Trump was offering to

pay some of their legal expenses. Uh and uh, I think some of these people are are really really hurting that. That's interesting. My pet theory about why so many political appointed positions are unfilled is Trump didn't expect to win, didn't want to win. Everybody else has a list of here the three thousand people we're gonna bring with us. He was scrambling on November ten, too, all Right, who

are we gonna name? Secretary of state? Who we can It seemed like they were wholly unprepared for the requirements of office because they It's even worse than that, because they apparently did absolutely nothing between election day in jan He was just as unprepared the day he took the oath of office as he was the day he won

the election. Did not hit the ground running, not exactly. No, So let's let's talk a little bit about some of the other items in the Truth Matters, And I also want to talk about Reaganomics supply side economics in action. There's a line that you said, and I'm gonna say two things, and they're a little contradictory. Um, but I think, uh, I think they are are somewhat consistent. First, you you wrote to Washington Post column headlines, I helped to create

the GP tax myth Trump is wrong. Tax cuts don't equal growth. So the first question is what are the benefits of tax cuts and and or fiscal stimulus. Well, I think you have to look at it from at least from the theory of what the supplies of what the Republicans say happens when you cut taxes. They believe, basically in the and Randy and great Man theory, that the wealthy carry the rest of us on their backs, and their incentives count for everything. The average guy contributes nothing.

It's the it's the wealthy who do everything. Are you overstating that or do you know? I think that this is what they believe in their heart of hearts, and so that's why they're obsessed with the top rate of taxation and why they're obsessed with getting it down no matter what the problem is. They also want to be able to say that tax cuts benefit the average person.

The problem is, you can't help the average person with federal income tax cuts because they basically don't pay any They pay a lot of payroll taxes, yes, but they pay. The families with incomes below the median are paying virtually nothing in terms of income median being around fifty three thousand or something like that. I think in the aggregate, no family with an income above forty pays any federal or below pays any federal income taxes at all. So so they have to make up some way of claiming

that these people will benefit. And that's why they've come up with this crackpot theory that wages will rise by at least four thousand dollars and maybe as much as nine thousand dollars if you pass this big cut in the corporate income tax rate. There's no credible think tank economist, anybody who's looked at the numbers. It's just holly fabricated out of whole cluse. It's just complete nonsense. So so let me throw another quote you. I can't. I just

say one more thing about this. If you go, it's very easy to go to BLS dot gov and look up the data for wages. Real wages start in Night six. And look at what happened to average real median wages. And you'll see that after the six Act, which lowered the top personal income tax rate from fifty to twenty eight percent, which is much lower, and they lowered the corporate tax rate from forty to thirty. I mean, this

is like, you know, the best tax reform imaginable. And what happened to wages is they fell for ten solid years after the Act. It was only after the ninety three tax increase that wages started to rise again. So you don't believe is it safe to say that? Well, let me let me let me re say state that another quote of yours, supply side economics was appropriate for the seventies and eighties. Supply side arguments do not fit

contemporary conditions. So explain what is so different today versus five and thirty years ago that makes supply side arguments just not work here? Well, look, we in the early eighties, in the late seventies, early eighties, the biggest problem was we had too much demand not enough supply. And the proof of that is we had inflation. That is per se evidence of that being the case. We always used to say inflation is too much money chasing too few goods.

So you could argue that we did need to do things to help uh encourage the creation the production of more goods and services. And that's what the supply side theory was about. Today, we have a persistent problem of deflation, and the proof of that is the current level of and trust rates, which are ridiculously low ten years into an economic expansion. It's absurd. Now this is per se evidence. I think that we have a lack of aggregate demand. We have the reverse problem. So we don't need a

supply side solution. We need a demand side solution. And my own preferred solution would be something that Trump allegedly is in favor, which is a big infrastructure program that would be the medicine the economy needs, which raises the obvious point why you would think that is the easiest thing for any president to get through this support on the left, this support and the right. Everybody gets a little, a little gravy to spread around their own district because

it's going to be a national spend. Whether it's highways or rails, or electrical grid reports or fill in the blank, there's a ton of infrastructure needed. Why wasn't that the first thing that was done? Why wasn't something past You would think that's a no brainer to get. If you

want to chuck up a victory, what at ends? You could even tie it to a little bit of overseas profit repatriation, which people both hate a special Some people hate a special one time tax cut, but not as much as they hate all these these billions of dollars overseas. Why could not that have have been done first and been passed? And here's the wind, you know, chalk this up for your wind column. I don't know for sure, but what I think happened is Trump was simply misled

by congressional Republicans. They lied to him, well, one of the things they lied to I mean, Trump is on record as saying he thought an Obamacare repeal bill was going to be on his desk the first time he walked into the oval office after taking the oath of office, because remember the Congress was gonna had been in session for three weeks before he took the oath of office, and so but he also said, I have a plan

right here, and it's gonna cover everybody. And but but I think he did think that Republicans in Congress had been working since two thousand nine on a replacement for Obamacare, because that's what they've been saying they've been and nobody had done any thought. He thought there was a bill that somebody had written and was was ready to go. Wait, So the whole time we've had what fifty three votes to repeal Obamacare, nobody on the Republican party ever actually

drafted a here's a legitimate repeal and replace bill. There was nothing, nothing, because you see, the Republican plan was simply to abolish Obamacare. They never intended to replace it with anything. Once you give thirty or forty million people health insurance, you can't just yank that away. That what you suddenly you've created a giant health crisis. Well, they

didn't see it that way. I don't know why. I don't really understand how they think about these things anymore, but it's clear that that's what what they were trying to do. And Trump the problem was Trump believe them. And remember he screwed everything up by saying, no, no, we're not going to just repeal Obamacare. We're gonna have repeal and replace. So it was really a Trump who upset the apple cart by insisting that there be a replacement.

He didn't have one, but he a sessional. If you think about it, you know, once you give somebody an entitlement, it's all but impossible to remove it. So the thought process was, for whatever reasons, we don't like romney Care, which eventually became Trump Obamacare, but that traces its roots to the Heritage Foundation and a fairly right wing free market um roots. The idea of replacing it with something sounded great on the campaign trail. Nobody had done any

of the heavy lifting. I'm still apparently has no staff people to have picked up the phone and called Paul Ryan and said, could you please send us over you know HR sixty three or whatever it is your legislation is, so that we can take a look at it for your Obamacare. There was nothing. There was nothing there. And I think this was true of so many other things. I think he thought that the Republicans had a fully developed tax reform plan and all he had to do

was endorse it. There was nothing there. There was nothing. What have these guys been doing for eight years other than that's it. That's it. That's all they did. I mean you've argued that the Republicans are better as the out of party rangers, out of power ragers than actually having to run government. Yes, that's quite clear. But I want I'm not going to let the Democrats entirely off the hook here. They don't deserve to be left. Why

couldn't they have drafted an infrastructure plan? Why couldn't they? You know, a couple of weeks ago, we had a big debate in the Senate and the House about we're gonna allow we're gonna put one point five trillion dollars of increase in the national debt into the budget to accommodate the revenue loss from the tax plan we're going to pass. Why didn't some Democrat offer as a substitute a one point five trillion dollar infrastructure plan. See, they

don't have the sense to do that. You're absolutely right on that, because given the lack of staff and the lack of anyone willing to roll up their sleeves and the Trump administration and do the heavy lifting, why haven't Schumer and company said, Hey, you wanted a profit repatriation and an infrastructure bill here, you don't even have to put our names on it. Slap your name on it and work with this. I think the problem is the

Democrats have internalized the basic Republican view of the world. Okay, they argue within parameters that are established by the Republicans. So Republicans come out and say we're going to have a tax cut. The Democrat reaction instinctively say say, well, we don't want to cut it for the for the rich. We need to tilt us more towards the middle class. But we're still but we still agree with the principle that we need a huge tax cut. We just want

to reoriented towards our an on whatever. The Republicans so so they don't seem to have the guts or the intelligence to say we don't need a goddamn tax cut. What we need is all this other stuff. We've got problems with climate change. We have one hurricane after another. We need to be building sea walls across you know, the the entire southern part of the United States. Look at Puerto Rico. I mean this, and and and why Democrats are afraid to talk about the seventy five million

dollars that Donald Trump has spent so far just golfing. Well, you know, if it was the Republicans would be screaming it, but they did. They did scream about it. It's very easy to find Trump's tweets about it. So so there's two things I have to remind you, Bruce, and these are these are very very important. One is the United States is the most heavily text country in the world. And second, climate change is the Chinese hoax. We know both of those from from some of the tweets from

the President. So why should we worry about either of those things? Well, because the truth matters and those are lies. Thank you for the nicely. So before I get to my favorite questions, there's one last question I have to ask you on the issue of the truth matters. So you you followed a fairly standard DC career arc You worked in Congress, then you worked in the White House, and then you left to write some books and worked

with some think tanks. You were at both CATO and the National Center for Policy Analysis, Theritage at the Harris Foundation. But and I used to read a lot of these white papers that came out of the think tanks decades ago. But my understanding of these think tanks are they are no longer objective pursuers of the truth starting from a

certain fundamental ideological perspective. Now it's what's they're just shills for higher what sort of stuff can we crank out to pursue what this industry wants or or that association wants. Have think tanks lost their ability to objectively think pretty much. I mean, if you're talking about Washington think tanks, I think the most part. Uh. There may be still some affiliated with universities and such that are worth paying attention to.

But in a way, the the Internet made the think tank as it was originally created superfluous, because what think tanks did is they're the intermediaries between the policy people and the academics who theoretically were the the sources of of original uh deep thinking. And so the idea, at least when I was a Heritage Foundation in the nineteen eighties, is okay, you know, we'll talk to Milton Friedman. He'll

give us his ideas. You write them up in a way that a policymaker can understand, will pump this stuff out onto Capitol Hill. Because there's the pre Internet era, you had to have a printed documentation that was written in a short way easily understandable, and that was what our job was, to be the middleman. But let's let's get to some of um our favorite questions. These are what I ask all of our guests. Let's let's start with UM, your background. Tell us the most important thing

that people don't know about your background? Well these days would probably be that I was a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation for two years, or that my boss in the White House was a guy named Gary Bauer, who is one of the uh epitomes of of UH Evangelical Christianity. UM, tell us about some of your early mentors. Who do you think was most influential in shaping your views and career. Oh, Jack Kemp was unquestionably the person who influenced my thinking. I remember when I used to

work for him. I would sometimes think I was wrong and or he was wrong and I was right, And eventually I realized he was right and I was wrong. And I've discovered that about a lot of other people. There was a an economist named herb Stein that I would argue with all the time, and the last and probably the last time forever that I was at the American Enterprise Institute, I confess that in every instance in which her I thought her was wrong and I was right.

It was the other way around. And you know, so I've I've been and you pointed out my comment about Paul Krugman, so I'm trying to make amends. Tell us, um, what other politicians influenced your thinking about out both partisan politics and policy. Well, if you're talking today, I'm still

educating myself. I spend an enormous amount of time reading the literature, especially, and I've learned that I have to study things like psychology and sociology, uh that in political science, that to try to understand why things are so screwy. And the academics are only just barely scratching the surface. But I do believe the psychologists will eventually be the ones who tell us that is that seems to be taking place on on economics and investing for sure. Tell

us about some of your favorite books. Oh, I hate to say this, but I don't actually read very many books because I read all day long on the internet. I'm just kind of a junkie about this sort of stuff.

One of the things I talk about that I'm sure you're familiar with is A is an RSS A reader which I depend on absolutely to keep me up to date on all the stuff that is being published all around the internet, and it it aggregates and brings these specific items from specific websites to me directly, so I don't have to I never go to homepages anymore. I just read what comes to me and my RSS reader,

and I do this all day long. I get thousands and thousands of items that I have to scroll through, and so the last thing I want to do is read for pleasure. And secondarily, when I write things, I like to be able to link to them. I think links are underutilized by readers and your reference that in the book as well, that when you're writing you have to not only source specific details, but source um your

sources via a link. Well, that's right. I think that a lot of writers are lackadaisical about using links, which may explain why readers are lackadaisical. I'll give you an example. I was I used to write for a public a shan and one day I was writing something where I quoted Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, and I quoted her and I provided a link that went to the Department of State website where you could find

the text of the speech that she gave and where. Well, later I was I needed to find that quote again, So I went to my article, clicked on the link. It did not take me to the State Department. It took me to some random article on that organ at that publications website that happened to mention Hillary Clinton in passing. It was not documentation for the statement that I need. It had nothing whatsoever to do with what the editor.

But whoever checks your own links after they're published, You see, I don't know how much of this sort of thing goes on, and it's not the writer's fault, and and and so anyway, I think there's a lot of blame to go around here. But I do think that quite often I'll come across some worry that sounds quite interesting. I'll click on the link and it turns out it's it's it's a secondary source, and I have to click three or four more times to find the original source.

I think writers should do more to try to give credit to the original source that broke a story, or is the primary source. It makes a lot of sense. So we've seen huge changes in politics and policies. What do you think is the single biggest shift that is

affecting the state of modern politics. I think it's that the Overton window, which we discussed earlier, has moved very sharply to the right, so that what used to be considered the center is now the left wing, so to speak of policy debate, and all of the debate takes place between the center and the far far right, and the right is very clever about continuously pushing to the right so that positions outright racism, knee know, Nazism, people

going around carrying flags withou Nazi the Suastika on them is not treated as outrageous or beyond the pale. It's oh, that's what the right is doing today on all sides. This is find people on all sides. It's it's crazy that it's see. I don't see that as a right left thing. I there's a spectrum of right left, and as you describe beyond the pale, that sort of stuff is beyond the pale, and what's disapp that's normal behavior.

I don't understand why there aren't more rational conservatives. And by the way, you can look at National Review screams about this. You can look at American Conservative screaming about this, but you don't quite hear the same sort of pushback from as you mentioned Fox and other places, certainly not to the same degree as n r O has just been all over this. It's amazing. Well, the the facade

is cracking. I mean, I think the Corker flag business is potentially far reaching in its impact because finally there are people articulating uh views that perhaps you and I may have, but they have credibility because they are elected officials in the Republican Party. Corker is still chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He's in a position to actually do something. So let's get to our final question.

Um final two questions. If some millennial recent college grad came to you and said, I'm interested in a career in either politics or policy, what sort of advice would you give them? Well, just as a pure career element, I think the health ish area is going to be a huge continuing growth area. The baby boomers are getting older, gerontology care for my generation. I think this is the way the wealth will be transferred from our generation to

the younger generation. They basically are going to have to take care of us in our old age and that's fine. And then our final question, what is it that you know about politics today? You wish you knew thirty years ago when you were first getting started. Well, you know, that's a continuing problem. I I wish I had understood tribal loyalty and the extent to which people on the right have are not motivated by ideas. They it's just

guts and and it's all about the tribe. And if you're a Republican and you're saying something, and I'm a Republican, I have to support you, have to agree with you. I'm not allowed to independently evaluate what you said because I might discover you're wrong, and if and if I discover you're wrong, that creates a crisis for me. So it's better if I just don't even think about it. I just lock step, say yes, you know Hale, Kyle Hitler,

you know, us versus them. We have been speaking with Bruce Bartlett, author of The Truth Matters UH and former Ronald Reagan and first George Bush administration policy adviser. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look up an inch or down an inch on Apple iTunes, Overcast, SoundCloud, Bloomberg dot com wherever fine podcasts are sold, and you can see any of our previous hundred and sixty or

so such conversations. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be remiss if I did not thank our crack team here who helps put together the podcasts each week. Medina Parwana is my producer and audio engineer. Taylor Riggs is my booker. Michael Batnick is our head of research. I'm Barry Retolts. You've been listening to Matt Staers in Business on Bloomberg Radio. H