Last night, NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff spoke with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) about the upcoming elections and key issues affecting voters. Not surprisingly, tax cuts were at the forefront of the discussing. Speaker Pelosi indicated that she was amenable to considering cutting corporate tax rates:
We’re all for putting everything on the table, talking about simplification, talking about fairness, or perhaps lowering the corporate rate if we close loopholes, and some of the things that we have done have very good for small businesses. We’ve probably passed 16 tax considerations favorable to small businesses.
She went on to say, regarding the extension of the Bush tax cuts:
But the decision here and the distinction here is do you want to give a tax cut to all Americans which creates jobs, or do you want to hold that tax cut hostage in giving an extra tax cut to the high end which will take us $700 billion into debt? We’re not going to do that.
When asked whether there would be a tax cut for taxpayer investments, Speaker Pelosi again said that tax cuts should be aimed at all Americans. Pelosi claimed that the tax cuts at the top during the Bush era were restricted to the very wealthiest of taxpayers, saying that the $250,000 threshold doesn’t represent most Americans and that the majority of the cuts are targeted to those making even more:
80% of it goes to people making over a million dollars a year as joint filers.
You can watch the entire interview here (it’s just over 10 minutes):
At the end of the interview, NewsHour noted that it has requested an interview with Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH).
“an extra tax cut to the high end which will take us $700 billion into debt? ”
Does anyone else feel like politicans make up numbers? Do people just call up Pelosi and provide those numbers?