Speaking by phone on the Monday broadcast of “Morning Joe,” MSNBC Joe Scarborough declared that whatever comes of today’s and future fiscal cliff negotiations, the outcome will be “woefully insufficient.”
“[W]e’ve talked about this for years now — that Washington just is incapable of doing the things required to take care of long-term debt,” Scarborough said. “They want to re-inflate the bubble. In this case, whatever, whatever deal is struck is going to be woefully insufficient. We need entitlement cuts. We need defense cuts. We need to reform taxes. They’ve walked away from entitlement cuts and the Social Security adjustments.”
“We’re now hearing they’re going to walk away from defense cuts after this is done,” he continued. “There’s nothing coming out of this that will do anything but make our 16 trillion dollars national debt much, much larger over the next decade. So why would I, as a conservative Republican, vote to raise taxes for the first time in 25 years if there are no cuts on the other side? And why would you want a bill to be pushed through if some of these tax cuts are just going to explode the debt over the next decade?”
Later in the segment, Scarborough pointed out other inconsistencies including Obama’s insistence on the expiration or rollback of the Bush tax cuts, which was only a small portion of those actual cuts. He also took issue with congressional Republicans for not applying any sort of spending cuts when those tax cuts were extended after the 2010 midterm.
“As you know, the president is talking about these Bush tax cuts that were supposed to be so devastating to the economy and was going to cause, you know, deficits to explode for decades to come,” Scarborough said. “The president has endorsed 98, 99 percent of those tax cuts. So it can’t even be that. This goes back, though — let’s think back when we talked about this in real-time in 2010, Republicans won midterms. And so the president and the Republicans came together. They decided they were going to extend the Bush tax cuts for two more years, extend unemployment benefits. They had no offsets. They had no cuts. So in the same week Simpson-Bowles came out talking about saving 4 to 5 trillion dollars over the next decade, you had Congress coming back in a lame-duck session, adding an additional 1 trillion dollars in a week.”