McCain Kudlow Interview - Keep Taxes Low Help the Economy

Excerpt from An Interview with Senator McCain by Larry Kudlow

McCain: Well, I try to talk about them more often. A lot of the people that come, frankly, are people that are having trouble staying in their homes, keeping their jobs, etcetera. But I think it goes back to all this business of Sen. Obama’s view of “fairness.” When Charlie Gibson said, why would you want to raise capital-gains taxes when you know it will decrease revenue? And he said in “fairness.” And he told Joe the Plumber — Joe the Plumber got the message through better, what we’ve been trying to do this whole campaign. [Obama] wants to “spread the wealth around.” That takes from the investor class. That takes money from one group of Americans and gives it to another.

Now that signal has been very clear. And I think people ought to pay attention to it, because it’s been tried before in other countries, and policies of other left-liberal administrations. It doesn’t work, and it’s bad for America. We want to encourage the investor class, and that means capital-gains and dividend taxes are low.

Kudlow: You’ve just unveiled a new tax cut on capital gains. Can you tell us about that? Because in some sense, that’s probably the most important investor class tax.

McCain: It’s the most important in many respects, Larry, and we want it low and we want it lowered. Every time — there’s one tax that there’s no argument about, that every time it’s been lowered since Jack Kennedy, we have seen an increase in revenues. Now, why anybody would argue, as Sen. Obama does, that we need to raise it, even if it’s — of course, the amount needed to raise it is varied with whatever poll he’s taken — but the point is that we want to lower it and keep it low and encourage investment, especially now in America in these difficult times.

Kudlow: But senator, what is — the current law rate is 15 percent.

McCain: Yeah, yeah.

Kudlow: You’re taking the cap-gains rate down to what?

McCain: First down to 10 percent, I would like to see it, and gradually even make it lower. Look, why should we tax people’s gains twice? Why should we tax them twice, okay? They make an investment, they should be able to get their returns on their investment. And capital gains is obviously — low capital-gains tax is probably the greatest incentive for investment that we have in America today. And so, look, I’ll be glad to listen to smart people like you, Larry, but the worst thing we can do is tell people we’re going to raise it, and that, obviously, would chill investment in America, right?

Media's Bias At Unprecedented Levels

Diane West of Townhall.com writes in her article Media's O-Colored Glasses Blank Out Leftist Truth about a very disturbing element of this election cycle. The media has abandoned its responsibility to vet candidates, and have instead ignored a myriad of radical associates of Senator Obama's and dubbed them 'off limits' or 'dirty tricks'. The reality is that if an average person had the associations that Senator Obama has they would be classified as a security threat, and likely wouldn't even be able to attend events like the Democratic convention. It has been noted elsewhere that Senator Obama couldn't even be cleared to be his own Secret Service agent because of these associations. However, the media doesn't care, they are campaigning for their favorite candidate and these issues are dubbed off limits by the most biased media coverage in modern US history.

At the beginning of Obama's life, for example, there was "Frank," Obama's boyhood mentor who appears in his 1995 memoir "Dreams from My Father." Accuracy In Media's Cliff Kincaid has identified "Frank" as Frank Marshall Davis, a known Stalinist in a Soviet-sponsored communist network in Hawaii. But Obama obscures Frank's identity in his book, even, as Sean Hannity has reported, going so far as to drop passages about "Frank" from the more recent, recorded version of the book. Why? The media never asked.

Later in Obama's life there was Mike Klonsky, an unreconstructed Marxist and erstwhile leader of an honest-to-goodness Maoist splinter group in the United States. Klonsky, like his buddy, ex-Weatherman William Ayers, spreads Marxism through education "reform." As the National Review Online's Andrew C. McCarthy reported, Obama directed nearly 2 million foundation dollars to fund Klonsky's ideas in the 1990s. More recently, Klonsky wrote a "social justice education" blog on the official Obama campaign Web site -- at least until a blog named Global Labor and Politics pointed this fact out. Klonsky's musings were summarily scrubbed from the campaign Web site in June. Why? The media never asked.

And so it goes. The assorted radicals -- from ACORN to Ayers, from anti-white Jeremiah Wright to Saudi-adviser Khalid al-Mansour to former PLO associate Rashid Khalidi -- who have peopled Obama's ideological passage from rising leftist to post-ideological cipher, have been lost in the blur to a media focused solely on their own prize: Obama in the White House.

Such focus has created a drastically blinkered journalism, particularly in these final weeks. Take the fact that the supposedly "post-racial" Obama once funded Afrocentric, race-focused education programs supported by Jeremiah "G -- - D -- - America" Wright. That was a juicy blend of hypocrisy and extremism (dug up by Stanley Kurtz), but the media just averted their eyes.

Or how about good, ol' William "America Makes Me Want to Puke" Ayers, whose own relationship with Klonsky (the Maoist mentioned above) goes back to the days of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)? Obama worked closely with Ayers to fund radical programs (such as Klonsky's) in Chicago, endorsed Ayers' work, and launched his political career in Ayers' home. This is the ideological and literal bomb-thrower Obama brushed off as just "a guy in my neighborhood." But the media saw nothing to it -- not even a piece of Obama's questionable pattern of collaboration with a series of people best described as unregenerate leftists.

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Media's Bias At Unprecedented Levels

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