Weld: My motto when I was in office was "there's no such thing as government money; there's only taxpayer's money." Boy, has everyone in Washington forgotten about that. There's nobody looking out for the taxpayers there. The Dems want to raise spending by 5% or 10% on social programs. The Republicans want to raise that on military. So they demonize each other until they've both raised enough money to all get reelected. It's a total disgrace.
Q: Do you keep the Trump tax cut?
Weld: Oh, I would keep them. I never met a tax cut I didn't like.
Q: But then where do you cut?
Weld: You cut across the board. You have to zero base the budget and not assume you start with last year's appropriation. You have to measure outcomes instead of inputs. How much money was spent last year--that should be irrelevant. Was it a good program? Increase it. If it wasn't, zero it out. That's how you cut spending, and I did it.
Bill Weld: No, it is not. And the regulations that the president has rolled back are regulations dear to my heart to protect clean air & clean water in the United States. I'm a lifelong environmentalist. The Republican Party has a rich tradition in conserving our environment. Theodore Roosevelt started a national park service. It goes all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. The Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act were enacted when Richard Nixon was president. Mr. Trump is tossing that out the window in order to do whatever might be beneficial to the coal companies. But they deserve no credit for their deregulator efforts in the environmental area. The only other regulations they really rolled back are the regs designed to protect little people in the event of another 2008 financial crisis.
Bill Weld: Oh I absolutely would rejoin, would join TPP in a heartbeat. I point out that during the campaign candidate Trump said no we can't join the Trans-Pacific Partnership because it would be dominated by China. He's so incurious and so ignorant about foreign affairs that he didn't know that China is not a member of TPP. The whole idea was that we would have a consortium of 12 Pacific Navy facing nations some in Asia some in the Americas without China at the table. So it would be our beachhead in Asia. I think the relationship with China. Has to be a complex one. We're the two biggest players out there. Xi Jinping I had high hopes for when he came, in but he really has resubsidized all those SOEs, the state owned enterprises, and we're getting our brains beat in around the world and on intellectual property they are complete scofflaws. So you've got to be tough and I think we'll probably return to this.
WELD: One of the things that troubles me about Trump in the foreign area is he claims to be a non-interventionist but he's awful quick on sending those troops. A couple of months ago he said, "I'm sending 5,000 more troops to the Middle East immediately." Well, they never got there because they must have had a second thought. And he never said what it was for. I'm not quite clear why we're sending troops to Saudi Arabia to defend their oil supplies. Don't they have any troops over there? I know they have a lot of weapons--because we sold them all to Saudi Arabia--but maybe we should make sure they know how to fly those planes and fire those missiles. I just I don't get it. Boots on the ground to another country for regime change or to correct something that we see in the other country that we don't like? That's the height of the lessons we learned from the Iraq war --we shouldn't do that.
WELD: I think the Ukraine caper by the president is some combination of treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. The one thing that's absolutely clear is that it's grounds for removal from office. You have a sitting U.S. president essentially selling the results of an American presidential election in which he is a candidate and rigging it in his favor against another candidate corruptly. The end of the Mueller report makes it very plain that any activity this president takes to benefit himself or his family politically or financially is a corrupt action. Suspending the aid and then immediately calling up the president and saying "do this to kill Biden." And meanwhile $400 million is no longer there as of 3 or 4 days before the call. How stupid are we supposed to be? How stupid is the president of Ukraine supposed to be? He knows exactly what Mr. Trump is saying to him. And it's vastly illegal.
Bill Weld: First of all, as governor, I never met a tax cut I didn't like. I cut taxes 21 times and I never raised them--so I'm not going to criticize a tax cut, although obviously it could have been more equitable. But this this president is not a fiscal conservative. He's gone along with his trillion dollar deficits every year. I was ranked the most fiscally conservative governor in the United States. And I was governor of Massachusetts after three terms of Michael Dukakis. So that took some doing. But no, we simply can't sit still for this guy who's a disgrace to the office almost every day
Rep. Joe Walsh: I would be honest with the Saudis. Iran's the biggest threat in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is no great guy either. With these troops, I worry about us getting further involved in a region that we shouldn't get involved in. Our men and women ought to be home from Afghanistan by now. We support Israel and we've got to do whatever we can to encourage that part of the world to move toward a democracy. But I don't like us placing resources in there, especially placing American troops.
Gov. Weld: I agree with the congressman our troops should have been home from Afghanistan a long time ago. but we've been there 18 years. People say oh we can't bring them home now to which they respond. It begs the question "when?" How about "never?" Is never what you're for? Because that's what they really mean.
|
The above quotations are from Business Insider webzine.
Click here for other excerpts from Business Insider webzine. Click here for other excerpts by Bill Weld. Click here for a profile of Bill Weld.
Please consider a donation to OnTheIssues.org!
| Click for details -- or send donations to: 1770 Mass Ave. #630, Cambridge MA 02140 E-mail: submit@OnTheIssues.org (We rely on your support!) |