YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce Bartlett

lines on the record: 91
first: 2018-01-03
most recent: 2018-01-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A lot of people were in that movie. And were you? Yeah. Okay. Well, I actually got to go to a party at the Breitbart mansion. On Capitol Hill, and I met Steve Bannon, and I don't remember too much about the nature of our conversation, but at least I did meet him long before. This is 10 years ago or so.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they will. You have this absolute lunatic named Steve Bannon, whom I actually know slightly. I was in a movie. That he directed called Generation Zero. You can go to imdb com and find it. The entire movie is available on YouTube.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From long history, two terms of one party, you tend to get the next one. And I thought there was a very, very small chance, but I thought purging Bushism was part of what needed to be done. And this is what everybody got upset about me about. I think it was the old kid saying the emperor's not wearing any clothes phenomenon, is you're just not allowed to say certain things in the Republican Party. And we've seen this now just the last few days with Senators Corker and Flake, where they're just being savaged by their own party for simply for saying out loud what they have said. We've been talking about this behind closed doors with other members of the Republicans in the Senate for months and months, and we can't take it anymore. We're going public. Everybody's just shocked and upset.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who were not honoring with Bush more than anything else? And I thought I was helping my party. I still consider myself to be a Republican. And what I was afraid of is that Bush's incompetence and screw-ups were just teeing the ball up for the Democrats to win in 2008. And what I thought, remember my book came out in 2006, is I thought if we had a debate about why Bush was a failure, maybe we could nominate somebody who would have a chance of winning in 2008. And everybody thought I was being a traitor. For even raising doubts about the possibility that the next Republican wouldn't just win in a heartbeat. And I didn't know anything about Obama. He wasn't even on my radar screen. I just knew that”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I tell you, when I first broke with the GOP over the Medicare Part D legislation, I thought Didn't really break with the GOP. What I did is I broke with the elected.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You may think you're still seeing the same part of the parade, but you're not. You're now seeing the right part of the parade. And so your perspective is distorted. And we were just talking about this. The mainstream media moved to the right and ended up in the center. And the fox and the right-wing media moved much further to the right. But because the mainstream media is relatively still on the left, this allows those on the right to claim falsely that the media is left wing. And this justifies there being very, very right-wing, which they claim, well, we're simply offsetting what they're doing, but in fact what they're doing is lying doing propaganda and distortion, whereas the mainstream media is still stuck trying to tell the truth.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're basically talking about it right now is the window is what you can see, an ordinary window. You can see, let's say, a parade going by, but you can only see that little section of what might be a long parade that is right in front of your window. You can't see what's the left. You can't see what's the right. But if the window itself moves,”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they were to the right of their competitors. So they weren't really to the objective, right? They were right relative. But what happened is when the rest of the media moved to the center, they then moved very far to the right. And I think especially 9-11 had a great deal to do with that.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I think happened is that beginning, I'm not sure precisely when, but let's say the 19 mid-1990s or so, I think the mainstream media tried to tilt itself more towards the center. That is, they move to the right from where they were, but they move to the center. And I think, by and large, they stayed there. Now, what happened with Fox is I think they originally started more or less in the center. I think they were a pretty centrist operation. But not”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a lie they tell themselves to justify watching a media source that just lies continuously. But I will concede, and I say in the book, there was a time when I think the vast bulk of the mainstream media did tilt to the left, perhaps not nearly as much as conservatives thought they did, but there's no question that if you interviewed or talked to the typical New York Times Washington Post reporter circa the 1970s, they were clearly to the left of center.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can't rely on just reading a decent daily newspaper every day and feel that they knew, know whatever they needed to know that day. Many of the cable channels are rank propaganda. The Fox News channel is just literally a subsidiary of the Republican National Committee.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt when I conceived this book that given the nature of the media environment, people needed to know more about the nuts and bolts of how the news is created, how it's produced, how it's distributed. It's sort of like if you had a situation perhaps not unlike some place in Cuba where you couldn't have a car unless you knew how to repair it yourself and maybe even Build it from scratch. And so as the infrastructure of the media has started to sort of collapse, people are going to have to create their own media for themselves.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose you have to give the devil his due and say that however instinctively he figured this out, he did tap into a very deep strain of political and cultural trends that were really invisible, frankly, even to pollsters.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly correct. But worse, what they did is they tended inadvertently, perhaps, to normalize him. They shaved off the rough edges. and didn't make him seem like the total clown that he in fact is and always has been. They felt like how can we justify spending so much time covering this clown? We have to elevate him up so that he seems important enough to justify us giving him so much airspace, so many column inches of coverage.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are all related phenomena, obviously. The media don't have the economic strength to oppose, you know, somebody, I won't say Trump is popular in the conventional sense, but he's obviously newsworthy and people paid in an inordinate amount of attention whenever there was a story about him. It got lots of clicks.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I imagine I did, but as I got out of my stupor or whatever and began to think about what was going on, the thing that struck me was the problems. Because it seemed to me that the media that it existed throughout most of our lifetimes, when you had three major news broadcasts in the evening, you didn't have cable. Everybody got a newspaper delivered to their house. There were responsible newspapers that had a great deal of power and authority. They wouldn't have allowed any of this to happen. And so I felt that the weakness of the media, certain... Things that were going on in the nature and the structure of the media were very much to blame for the Trump phenomenon.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew that was a very bad sign. And I didn't stay up to watch the final results. No, I just couldn't handle it. And in fact, I refused to read any of the news for about two months after the election. I was just sick to my stomach.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was. On election night, I mean, it was quite early in the evening when I saw the handwriting on the wall, when I saw the Hillary hadn't yet been called in states that I was quite certain she was going to win.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He simply continues to assert it, just as he asserts so many other things that are simply lies. Now, the reason I wrote the book is because I was horrified by the election results.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One would think so, but there's obviously a great deal of evidence to the contrary, at least as far as Donald Trump is concerned. I mean, you've probably read this recent story where he continues to insist that he owns a real, an original renois.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And it was really my first experience with this whole phenomenon. I'm not quite sure what we call it now where”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In retrospect, I was rather naive about all of this. But see, I thought that I had written a book. And if you read it, it reads like an academic book. It's very, very... Heavily referenced. And not only that, virtually every person in the entire book who's cited or quoted is a good solid conservative because I was in a way distilling what a lot of conservatives were saying. And I thought of people simply read the book, they'd be persuaded by it. They'd agree with me”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I started writing very, very negative columns about George W. Bush, and at the time was working for a conservative think tank, which basically said stop doing this or you're going to be fired. So that was what led me to decide to write the book, which I had originally thought I might have to do anonymously. But anyway, I wrote this book during 2005 to my surprise, there was interest in the publishing industry about it. And it came out in early 2006.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or soft of the industry No, I don't think they were consciously trying to bankrupt Medicare. What I think is they were trying to throw billions and hundreds of billions of dollars at their pals in the pharmaceutical industry. I think that they were, and the Republicans felt that they had to do this because they knew the Democrats would the first chance they got. But the Democrats would make sure that there were provisions to control drug prices, and they absolutely did not want that to happen. So they had to take the initiative to pass this legislation themselves. And I was just horrified. Because I thought Republicans existed to cut entitlement programs, reduce spending, and creating a new entitlement program was just the opposite of what I thought the party existed to do.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. It was a $400 billion cost, not one penny of which was paid for. And they explicitly wrote into law that the Medicare program was prohibited from negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies in the same way that every single private health insurance plan does. So they have to pay the list price, whatever they charge, $10,000 a dosage.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I can tell you very, very specifically, even give you the exact date. Now, up until 2003, I was a very conventional Republican, conservative. I was very happy in the Republican Party. And then on November 22nd, 2003, you may remember we woke up to, and when we read the newspapers, we found out that in the middle of the night, Republican Congress had passed something called the Medicare Part D program. And they literally kept the vote open for three hours while they twisted arms and did all kinds of things to ram this piece of legislation through, which was the creation of a new entitlement program.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they are grossly exaggerated to this day in terms of their economic impact. You have to remember the tax cut took effect in the middle of a huge recession. And so, in that sense, it was very well timed fiscal stimulus, but a lot of other, but of course the economy continued downward for well over a year after the tax cut took effect.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was something in between happened that's extremely important, which is in 1978, they passed Proposition 13 in California. Now remember that was a huge cut in the property tax rate and the really important part about this is there were no accompanying spending cuts because everybody just said there's plenty of fat in the government let them worry about it's not our problem we just want to pay less taxes and when this was enacted it led everybody in the United States everybody in Washington certainly to believe oh my God there's a tax revolt we got to do something about this and Kemp's legislation suddenly became the thing that every Republican wanted to be the sponsor of and as you say in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was running for president he officially endorsed the Kemperoth bill and said this is my legislation this is what I will send to Congress if I'm elected and he did and it was signed into law in August of 1981”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conventional administration economists said if you enact a big tax cut now, it'll be massively inflationary. We'll have hyperinflation. So we had no support really from anybody except these couple of people like Arthur Laffer.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we argued that everybody was getting a tax rate cut and all the rates in between were cut at about by the same amount. And so we introduced this legislation in the middle of 1977. In the meantime, a senator named Bill Roth from Delaware had contacted Kemp saying he really liked what he was saying and suggested they work together. And so we asked him if he wanted to co-sponsor this Kennedy tax cut legislation. He was very interested in doing so, and that's how became the Kemperoth bill. But in 1977, there was not much interest in this legislation because Republicans were still very wedded to the balanced budget idea, and they didn't want to cut taxes unless they cut spending simultaneously by an equal amount. This was the widespread view in the Republican caucus. So we were having trouble getting co-sponsors and, of course, inflation was a serious problem and all the...”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He proposed cutting the top rate from 70% to 50%. and the bottom rate from fourteen percent to ten percent. And so we just asserted that this is essentially the Kennedy tax cut.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, and so workers were getting cost of living adjustments, which just kept them even, but there actually worse off because they were getting pushed into higher brackets that had been originally put into place to tax people whose real incomes were very substantially higher than theirs. And actually, the rich were in somewhat of a better shape because if you're already in the top bracket, you can't get pushed any higher. But there were some other problems. Capital gains was a very serious problem because a lot of the gains that were being realized at that time was pure inflation. And so it was confiscatory taxation. Paying a tax on zero real gains.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to remember that when Kennedy took office, all the World War II Korea War tax rates were still in effect. Because Eisenhower refused to cut them on the grounds that he wanted to balance the budget. But Kennedy ran on saying he wanted to get the economy moving again. And so he's at that time the top tax rate, a federal marginal statutory income tax rate was 91%. And the bottom rate was, I believe, 20%. And so he cut those cut the top right down to 70% and the bottom right down to 14%. And that's where those rates were when I started working for Jack Kemp. Now the real problem was remember inflation and everybody was getting pushed up into higher tax brackets.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if you could just hold the line on the money supply and then do something that would raise supply, then you should get a diminishing of inflation. At least that was our theory and our argument. And so one day I remember he just said to me, Bruce, why don't we, instead of just talking about the Kennedy tax cut, why don't we just do it and just reintroduce the same legislation? Well, obviously you couldn't literally do that because the Kennedy tax cut was already in effect. So we had to find something that replicated it in current terms.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what Jack argued really based on Mundell's theories was that if you enacted some kind of policy that increased the production of goods and services, then this would be anti-inflationary, you see. And so that was...”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was much later. So I went to work with Kemp and he was very interested in tax policy. And he had come under the influence of a guy named Jude Winisky. Sure. Who in turn had come under the influence of two economists, one named Robert Mundell, who later won the Nobel Prize, and Arthur Laffer, who is still out there and very active in tax affairs. One of the things Jack was very interested in was the Kennedy tax cut of the 1960s, which he felt had done a lot to invigorate the economy. And remember, in 1977, inflation was the overwhelmingly large problem. And this tended to make it very hard to do any kind of fiscal policy because anything that would increase the deficit was considered per se inflationary.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the problem was that Iran was elected in a special election in April 1976 and therefore had to run for election for a full seat that very same year. And unfortunately, he was defeated in his first bid for, I guess his first effort at re-election. And so he was defeated. And I was looking around for a job. And one of the women in the office said she had heard that Jack Kemp, who I really only knew about as a football player. I remember watching him in the 1965 AFL championship game when he was playing for the Buffalo Bills. And he had been elected to Congress in 1970, and he always said that the reason he was elected is because he threatened to come back and play for the Bills another year if he lost.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Multiple runs for the president, and that his son would become a United States senator. Yeah, I mean, at the time, we thought what we were doing was very quixotic. And I think we were just trying to make a point. And in order to do so, Ron liked to do things in a very outrageous manner. For example, one of the things he most enjoyed was being the only no vote against some piece of legislation that would otherwise have passed unanimously. And since he was a medical doctor, people would call him Dr. No. And he very much enjoyed that.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But at the time it was the most well-known, well-established free market-oriented think tank in the United States. And I had already published a couple of articles in its little journal, which was called The Freeman. And so I think that's probably what caught his attention. And when I saw all these books, I knew I was in pretty good shape.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at the time, that sounded like a good idea to me. I was very conservative at that time, a libertarian. And I was just finishing up some work at graduate school and was looking around for a real job. So out of the blue, I just sent him a letter. Some things I had published, and a few days later, I get a call from his secretary and I interviewed with him. And I remember when I entered his office, he had a bookcase. And in the bookcase was every book published by the Foundation for Economic Education.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at that time, Texas was a very solidly Democratic state. You know, the old story down there is the Democrats were yellow dog Democrats. They'd vote for a yellow dog if it was running as a Democrat. And there was only two other Republicans in the Republican House delegation. And one of the Democrats resigned because he got a higher level of appointment of some kind. And so they had to have a special election in April 1976. And I saw a brief story in the Washington Post in which this fellow Ron Paul, whom, of course, I'd never heard of, was elected, Republican, to a Democratic seat. And he was quoted in the article saying he was to the right of Barry Goldwater.”
2018-01-03 · Masters in Business · Bruce Bartlett Talks About Why Truth Matters · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source