Former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was a lesson in how to reject the proposed Trump tax cuts.
Appearing on Your World last week, Dukakis refused to concede to host Neil Cavuto that tax cuts helped the economy in the past. Dukakis held his ground that tax cuts would not help now.
DUKAKIS: How many times are we going to do this, Neil? We did it under Reagan. It didn’t work. He had to raise taxes 13 times over the course of his eight years as president.
CAVUTO: But they were still a lot lower when he left office, Governor, right, than when he came in?
DUKAKIS: Not a lot lower.
[…]
CAVUTO: So you’re against a tax cut right now?
DUKAKIS: It doesn’t make sense to me when you’ve got a budget deficit of close to a half a trillion dollars, not at all. … It’s not going to work again, I can tell you. … When are we going to learn? I just don’t understand this. We tried it twice under two Republican presidents, it didn’t work. It created serious problems, especially under Bush 2. And Remember, Bill Clinton left a surplus of a quarter of a trillion dollars and a plan to reduce and eliminate the national debt in 10-12 years.
Cavuto asked, “Would you argue that tax cuts are stimulative?”
“They certainly didn’t produce the kind of stimulus that their proponents were arguing for,” Dukakis shot back.
Watch the exchange below, from the April 25, 2017 Your World.
It’s shameful that Cavuto is the only TV interview he’s been invited to do in the last year or so. His dry, scornful wit and now craggy old face is good TV, so I can’t understand why the bookers for all these shows on CNN and MSNBC continue to forget about him.
