Clinton praised Obama’s American Jobs Act during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, arguing that Republican opposition to letting the plan add to the federal deficit is hypocritical, given the unchecked war spending of the last decade. If Republicans don’t want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for the payroll tax cut Obama proposed, Clinton said, then Congress should declare the current economic climate an “emergency” and cut the payroll tax without paying for it. “If you look at the independent economic analysis of the program the president outlined, a broad range of economists have said that, if it’s adopted, in 2012 GDP growth would be between 1.5 percent and 2 percent higher,” Clinton said as he echoed Obama’s calls for Congress to “pass this plan.”
Clinton also said that taxing the rich to close the deficit “does the least harm” to the economy compared to other options like spending cuts, though he pointed out that, in the long term, the various bipartisan commissions on the debt “all say you’re going to have to have spending cuts and tax increases and economic growth -- you have to have all three of them.”
Click for Full Text!
