Tax reform is dead, but maybe not for the reason you thought it would be. Is it because the consensus is wrong, or is it because Trump is crazy? Or is there something else going on here?
00:05:45.740If mine increase, that's because I do decently well in a city and state with absurd taxation.
00:05:51.860For a long time, California and L.A. have gotten a free pass on federal income taxes while the rest of the country subsidizes their insane tax rates.
00:05:59.720The Republican tax reform realigns those incentives to be both fairer, more federalist, to be more pro-growth.
00:06:07.180So I might pay a bit more, but I'll live.
00:06:09.080And on the whole, this law is great for liberty and for the economy.
00:06:11.920The only people this law is terrible for are Democrat politicians who are doing their best to obstruct a pro-growth, pro-liberty agenda because they know it's going to kill their election chances in 2018 and 2020.
00:06:23.440Lindsey Graham laid it out pretty frankly.
00:06:27.800If Republicans cannot come together and unite on reforming the tax code, lowering rates and reforming the code, they might as well fold up as a party, which does make some sense.
00:06:37.920If you can't convince a bunch of Republicans to cut taxes, there isn't a Republican party anymore.
00:07:25.960People are going to try to convince you that it doesn't matter because some gigantic companies keep a lot of cash overseas and they pay very little in taxes.
00:07:33.460But a lot of businesses in this country do pay taxes, especially in sectors like energy, finance, retail.
00:07:39.540Home Depot pays a very high effective tax rate.
00:07:42.240Cable companies, waste management, fast food.
00:07:44.480There are a lot of areas of American industry that do pay taxes.
00:07:59.560But this bill repeals the Obamacare mandate, the federal penalty that requires Americans, for the first time ever, to purchase a good from a private company.
00:08:08.320Totally antithetical to American liberty.
00:08:10.120Now that it's passed the difficult hurdle, which is the Senate, it seems likely to end up in the final bill.
00:09:39.880And they live next to somebody who doesn't work at all.
00:09:42.160And the person who's not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that's working his and her ass off.
00:10:19.500By welfare reform, Trump, he isn't just talking about Obamacare, Obamaphones or whatever.
00:10:24.440You know, they, very often they would say Trump isn't going to deal with entitlements.
00:10:31.500But what he's doing, he's so brilliant, he's tying entitlement reform, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, which are the main drivers of our national debt and deficits.
00:11:48.220I won't cut them for current retirees?
00:11:50.780Nobody would suggest cutting Social Security benefits for current retirees.
00:11:56.560But I think doing what President Reagan did in 1983, gradually reducing the future benefits, spread out over a number of years and after a long delay, but gradually reducing it by changing the age of retirement.
00:12:15.620Now, Feldstein makes a great point here.
00:12:18.820Everyone's saying he won't touch entitlements, he won't touch entitlements.
00:12:24.720That's the wiggle room that he's given himself.
00:12:26.560Gerald F. Sieb observed in the Wall Street Journal today, quote,
00:12:29.940It's clear that Mr. Trump's barbs directed at senior members of his own party, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Paul Ryan, they don't get in the way of the GOP uniting for something really important.
00:12:42.640The idea that Republicans can repeat that feat in 2018 on health and infrastructure doesn't seem so far-fetched.
00:12:48.600If the past is any indication, I am not so sure that he'll never touch entitlements.
00:13:18.020What is the final bill going to look like?
00:13:20.260Well, as you alluded to, they have to go to conference.
00:13:23.640And so that's something that they're hoping to wrap up by the end of the year.
00:13:27.540And it looks like they are going to be able to do that.
00:13:29.760You know, in the House and Senate bill, there were some compromises worked out in order to get people like Susan Collins and others on.
00:13:37.820Collins wanted to see the compromise that was in the House bill when it came to SALT, the state and local tax deductions included in the Senate.
00:13:46.600So you're going to be seeing them work things out like that when it goes to conference.
00:13:51.960But honestly, I don't really see anything stopping it at this point.
00:13:56.200It's unbelievable because if you'd asked me, I don't, by the way, I don't mean to harp on the consensus view and say they're all idiots and I knew better.
00:14:03.600I didn't make predictions that were really different than all of this.
00:14:05.860I just withheld my immediate judgment because this was a guarantee just a month or two ago that we could never get tax reform, even more recently than that.
00:14:14.780And then it happens now to get even more excited, to really gear the covfefe meter up to 11.
00:14:21.160Amanda, is there any shot that we get entitlement reform?
00:15:13.780He zigzags so you can't really pin him down.
00:15:16.700He puts out – this is the covfefe, by the way.
00:15:18.780He puts out so much covfefe all the time that by the time you catch up to the one crazy thing he's doing over here, he's on to something else.
00:15:26.140And this isn't just the personal stuff and the language or whatever.
00:15:30.400Even though he does throw salty language in, even in the pitch for entitlement reform in Missouri that we just watched, he throws in bad words and things.
00:15:38.860But by the time he's over here, then he's moving on to the border wall or he's moving on to entitlement reform.
00:20:45.540After all of that great news, we'll be right back.
00:20:48.000You know the holiday season is upon us.
00:21:00.540You know Christmas shopping has landed because that was just like 10 minutes of telling you all the great stuff that you have to get right now.
00:21:07.920But now we've got to bring it down a little bit.
00:21:09.920I know we're having such a great covfefe day.
00:21:11.680I've got the mistletoe sitting right behind me if anybody gets any ideas who isn't named Marshall.
00:21:17.580President Trump has re-endorsed, endorsed again, beleaguered Alabama's Senate candidate Roy Moore.
00:21:45.220Putting Pelosi-Schumer liberal puppet Jones into office in Alabama would hurt our great Republican agenda of low on taxes, tough on crime, strong on military and borders, and so much more.
00:21:55.380Look at your 401ks since the election.
00:22:51.480So this this Me Too movement has kind of been watered down a little bit.
00:22:55.700The people of Alabama, I think it was 71 percent, don't even believe the accusations because there's such a distrust with media for good reason.
00:23:03.520That's not to say these accusations are not true.
00:23:05.300I'm just saying that's kind of the consensus in Alabama.
00:23:31.000Did he need President Trump's reendorsement to win?
00:23:34.400I don't think he needed Trump's endorsement.
00:23:37.060He he is ticking back up in the polls after Doug Jones.
00:23:40.760We saw him take the lead a little bit when this was first in the new cycle and and dominating the new cycle.
00:23:48.400But as you said, you know, with the Franken and the Conyers allegations, that kind of was a little bit of a gift to Moore.
00:23:55.680I would like to say, though, that I think there's a pretty big distinction between someone who has been accused of molesting children and Franken,
00:24:05.540who has been accused of sexual harassment and Conyers, who's been accused of sexual harassment.
00:24:11.740And there's another difference, too, by the way, which is that all of the Roy Moore accusations.
00:24:16.020And I'm not saying they're not credible.
00:24:50.600Do you not think that it obviously those allegations, whether whether they're credible or not, just that they're made, should cause some reflection.
00:24:59.140But does it not say something that about Roy Moore's character that he hasn't had any accusations within 40 years?
00:25:06.420If he were some kind of creepy sex guy, then what we even if we conclude that we could say he seems to have reformed himself for four decades.
00:25:17.200That I think that says something about his character today.
00:25:21.040I would say that you can't really say that someone has reformed themselves when they aren't even admitting any wrongdoing.
00:25:25.600And I think that all of the accusations are credible.
00:25:28.300And there have been multiple women that have come out over the course of his career.
00:25:32.280And maybe you could say that no one came forward because at some point he got married and he has been married to Kayla since then.
00:26:54.700Yes, I mean, I wouldn't say it's necessarily convenient for certain outside groups that weren't around then.
00:26:59.980And they're coming forward saying that, yes, the left should reckon with what Bill Clinton did.
00:27:05.000But again, if we are going to talk about everything, which I think that we should, then we also should talk about the fact that Trump himself was accused by 16 women.
00:27:13.540So this is something that is a really big topic in D.C. right now.
00:27:18.740It's something that isn't going to go away.
00:27:20.580And I think you're going to see a lot more people being named in Congress on both sides of the aisle.
00:27:26.440And it's something that Congress needs to handle.
00:27:28.700And they should probably handle it as expeditiously as they possibly can.
00:27:31.620You know, I will say I did notice those left-wing groups didn't come forward in October or November of 2016.
00:27:38.300I noticed they waited a few months until the Clintons were no longer viable.
00:27:43.200And you make this great point about the reckoning with Roy Moore, which is I think it's certainly evidence that if those allegations are true,
00:27:51.640for decades of good behavior and of not doing creepy, weird sex stuff, is evidence of reform.
00:27:57.620But he's the guy out there on this pedestal saying that I'm the candidate of Christian virtues.
00:28:03.680And he hasn't acknowledged that these accusations are true.
00:32:18.920Laura, do you have any thoughts on who might fall if Mueller does have something?
00:32:24.100Do you have any thoughts on where this could lead?
00:32:26.080Or do you agree with Amanda that basically we're seeing the last throes of a witch hunt?
00:32:31.840I don't think we're seeing the last throes of a witch hunt.
00:32:34.340I think that this could go all the way to the present, not necessarily on a collusion, which again, is not illegal to be discussing things with foreign states.
00:32:45.560When you're an incoming administration, of course.
00:32:47.500When you're an incoming administration, yes.
00:32:48.920But we saw his tweet this weekend, which, of course, you have to take every tweet that comes from the president with the grain of salt, because it could not be true.
00:32:59.440That's the state that we're living in right now.
00:33:01.880But Trump's tweet pretty much says that he knew that Flynn committed a crime when he fired Comey.
00:33:10.800And if that timeline plays out, and if that timeline is accurate, and Trump did know that Flynn had lied to the FBI when he fired Comey, then that is pretty strong evidence of an attempt to obstruct justice.
00:33:23.580And so that is where Mueller will be able to get him, if that is something that he is looking at.
00:33:29.080And now I would say that the president has opened himself up to more scrutiny.
00:33:33.040Of course, the lawyer did say, hey, I penned that tweet.
00:33:37.320That being said, we've never heard the lawyer say that before.
00:33:41.700And so, again, either way, this is something that Mueller has to be looking at more now, given that Trump threw this out there.
00:33:54.620It is difficult for these investigations to conclude without getting somebody for something.
00:33:59.140But the question is, are we going to continue to hear insinuations of so-called Russia collusion, or are they basically going to bring this down to some procedural crime and we'll get Scooter Libby Part 2 or something?
00:34:17.840That is the cost of all the great communication that you get out of Twitter, bypassing the mainstream media, going direct to the American people.
00:34:26.240The cost of that is you open yourself up to a lot of on-the-record statements and your claims will be fact-checked.
00:34:34.200And just one thing, I know Ben Shapiro talked about this earlier.
00:34:36.800Even that, even let's say, because of that tweet, let's say Trump, that was from Trump, even that would possibly not be obstruction of justice.
00:34:45.180Ben Shapiro said he was looking at all the statutes and that wouldn't be obstruction of justice because the investigation is still going on.
00:34:51.460He can fire Comey for whatever reason he wants.
00:34:53.200And we still have the special counsel, nothing happened there.
00:36:21.500That, you know, the sexual harassment, assault, reckoning that the U.S. is happening is not going to go away.
00:36:29.760And it really did become a big force this year.
00:36:32.840So I would maybe say that that's where they're going to go.
00:36:36.460And it has, of all of the slacktivist campaigns, and we get a new one every single day, it does appear that hashtag Me Too has overtaken hashtag Take a Knee for the virtue signaling.
00:36:47.300So that is the one we're talking about that might get it.
00:36:51.320Yeah, I think they're going to choose the Me Too campaign.
00:36:53.780But, I mean, if we didn't know Time Magazine was left-wing before, I mean, the Dreamers, Robert Mueller, I mean, Jeff Bezos, like, anyone who Donald Trump doesn't like is, like, on this list.
00:37:06.420But I think they're going to go with the Me Too campaign, which is not a person, which is kind of weird.
00:37:28.620When was the last time you had a meal where, as desperately as you tried for Trump not to come up, someone had to bring up whatever tweet he sent out?
00:37:36.860It just, I don't know, it was like the 90s was the last time I didn't talk about that guy?
00:37:44.000Although, if they do go with the Dreamers, you could always have the compliment to that would be the nightmarers of all the voters who made Donald Trump the president.
00:37:52.620I'm sure they would give it to the nightmare for 2017.
00:38:33.100The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay, supervising producer Mathis Glover.
00:38:48.220Our technical producer is Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro.