Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich argues the U.S. should charge the Chinese with total coronavirus economic damages and also open them up to U.S. courts so American families can hold them accountable for losses.
Transcript:
Newt Gingrich
Varney & Co.
04/28/2020
NEWT:
No, look, I think if you are Nancy Pelosi, this is your chance to pay off every left wing ally you’ve got, whether it’s sending extra money to states or it’s proposing really left-wing ideas. What we need to do is get the economy growing. I think 100% expensing to maximize investment, six-month holiday on the FICA tax for both employer and employee to accelerate instead of giving people money for not working, what we want to do is get people back working. I think that’s what America is all about. We will have a special incentive for everybody willing to bring their factories back from China and insource rather than outsource and then I think we need to have an all-out effort on the virus in terms of therapies, because people, if we are going to really recover, people need to have a much lower level of fear about being out, traveling, going to hotels, your last report. And finally, we should plan starting right now so that we have a thorough defense in the fall if the virus does come back so we can defeat it without closing down the economy. I think that’s vital.
NEWT:
Absolutely. I was talking to my daughter who lives in Key Biscayne and she said when the word came out this morning that they were going to reopen boat docks and the arenas, that her husband’s morale went up instantly. He loves to fish and has been totally caught up in their condominium, a nice condominium looking out over the ocean but still, it isn’t like being out on the water. So, tomorrow morning, he will be down at their local marina. I think people, Americans are very energetic, very optimistic and very future-oriented people. I think as you know, I’m talking to you from Rome, where my wife is ambassador to the Vatican. We have been watching eight weeks now of Italians being shut down but here, the crisis was so great, the whole country was like New York City. So, I think the Italians to be a degree I have been amazed by have been very patient with the very severe lockdown, only grocery stores, gas stations and pharmacies have been open. Even here, they are beginning to open up starting this coming weekend and I think people are going to be just desperate to get out, particularly because it’s spring. It’s nice. People want to have a chance to go out.
NEWT:
Well, we should. I mean first of all; I wrote a book called “Trump versus China” that came out last October. I think if you read it, you will see they are behaving just like the dictatorship they are. This virus is their fault. There’s a university that came out and said probably 95% of the people would be alive today who have died if the Chinese had told the truth. They are clearly guilty, and I think we should, one, open them up to American courts as we did with Lockerbie bombing and allow families who have lost a loved one to sue them. In Lockerbie they got about $8 million per person. I suspect with inflation it would be about $11 million now. Second, we ought to take total economic damages and charge it to the Chinese. We ought to impound our escrow, all of their U.S. bonds, all of their holdings in the U.S., and say we are going to hold all of this at risk until you pay what you owe, and we should consider potentially a virus tariff that would charge the Chinese and we should encourage the whole planet, people ought to be furious at the way this dictatorship has lied to the entire world, leading to several hundred thousand unnecessary deaths, a worldwide depression, trillions of dollars of lost wealth. These things aren’t an accident. This is the Chinese dictatorship running amok thinking it can lie to everybody and get away with it. You are exactly right; we should react very aggressively.
