The "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie grilled House Speaker Paul Ryan on the GOP's tax bill, expected to be enacted on Wednesday.
- The "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie grilled House Speaker Paul Ryan on the GOP's tax bill, expected to be enacted as soon as Wednesday.
- She challenged Ryan's arguments that the bill's tax cuts will encourage business investment and won't explode the federal budget deficit.
- Independent analyses that have found that the cuts will largely benefit corporations and wealthy Americans.
- "Are you living in a fantasy world?" Guthrie asked.
The "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie didn't mince words Wednesday in challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan's arguments that the GOP tax bill will spur enough economic growth to make up for an explosion in the federal budget deficit.
Guthrie told Ryan that many CEOs have said they won't use the money they save in tax cuts to reinvest in their businesses, create jobs, and raise workers' wages, contrary to what the GOP has touted as effects of the bill. Instead, she said, they'll "do stock buybacks" and "line the pockets of shareholders."
Guthrie quoted Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former New York City mayor who wrote in an op-ed last week that it was "pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth."
She then asked Ryan: "Are you living in a fantasy world?"
Ryan, who has long advocated deep cuts to taxes and government spending, responded by citing surveys of business owners — the vast majority of whom, he argued, would do "just what we say: reinvest in their workers, reinvest in their factories, pay people more money, higher wages."
The "data is really clear," Ryan said, adding that "it's not a question of if, it's a question of how much" workers will benefit from the bill's dramatic corporate tax cuts.
Guthrie moved next to a clip of Gary Cohn, the National Economic Council director and former Goldman Sachs executive, and a room full of CEOs who were asked whether they'd increase investments in their businesses as a result of the GOP tax cuts.
Just a smattering of the CEOs hands went up, leaving Cohn awkwardly asking, "Why aren't the other hands up?"
"The fact is, corporations are already sitting on a ton of cash, they have record profits," Guthrie told Ryan. "Why aren't they raising wages and creating jobs now?"
Ryan responded that much of this cash is currently "trapped overseas and cannot come back into our economy to be reinvested because of our tax laws."
"We know that if we fix these tax laws we will get reinvestment back in this economy," he said. "Every study under the sun shows us, you lower the tax rates, make us more competitive, you will see faster economic growth in America."
Guthrie brought up the national deficit, challenging Ryan, a longtime deficit hawk, to defend the nearly $1.5 trillion the GOP tax cuts would add to the deficit over the next decade. But when Guthrie asked whether the economic growth the GOP argues will be created by tax cuts will make up for the loss in the government's tax revenue, Ryan said that was impossible to predict.
"Nobody knows the answer to that question because that's in the future," Ryan said, "but what we do know is that this will increase economic growth."
Democrats and other critics of the tax bill argue that Republicans are grossly overstating both the potential economic boost from the tax cuts and the increases in investment by businesses. All independent analyses have estimated that the final version of the bill will add $448 billion to over $1 trillion to the federal deficit over 10 years, rejecting GOP claims that the legislation would pay for itself.
Watch the full interview:
Bob Bryan contributed to this report.