NEWT:
Well, I mean, first of all, at America’s New Majority Project, which people can see it, at America’s New Majority Project dot com, we post all of our data. They strongly want to cut spending. They believe the government’s way too big, way too inefficient, and frankly, has dramatically too much waste. Second, they want taxes cut. They’re deeply opposed to tax increases, and it doesn’t take much argument to get people to understand you get enough economic growth. You solve an awful lot of your Medicare problem, an awful lot of your Social Security problem, as you and I have discussed. If you get us back to the historic norm of three and a half percent growth a year, all sorts of things get solved. I can tell you flatly, as the only Speaker of the House to offer four consecutive balanced budgets in your lifetime, if we had not had a big pro-growth component, both on regulatory side and on the tax side, if we had not had that driving the system, increasing revenue not by raising taxes, but by raising incomes and raising workers and having a dramatically bigger, better economy, you could never have done it. You will never get to a balanced budget by focusing just on spending. You have to focus on on the requirements of economic growth.
NEWT:
No. I don’t know why. I mean, first of all, as Reagan proved in the eighties, you get the right level of economic growth. You mop up most of the inflation. Inflation is actually a bigger concern to Americans today than is economic growth. And you’ve got to you’ve got to bring a link together to say, look, the right policies create more jobs, raise incomes help save Medicare and Social Security. And by the way, mop up the inflation. As you know, you and I were part of the original supply side group when we were much younger. We believe that the answer to inflation is not what the Fed is doing, and the Fed is trying to punish the American people to a point where they can’t afford to spend anything and therefore they think inflation will come down. It’s a very painful, very destructive approach. We believe if you increase the goods and services, they mop up the money and that ends the inflation. So there are fundamentally different views. I think it’s a great opportunity for several candidates. Trump, obviously, since he authored the original tax cuts and certainly something DeSantis could do and something Tim Scott could do. And he’s having a great run in terms of the ideas he’s bringing forward. So there are a number of people who could be making this argument. But I think part of it is that they have very short sighted political consultants who don’t understand the underlying emotional political dynamic of being the positive, optimistic, pro-growth candidate.
NEWT:
Well, it could up until the Nixon era. I mean, for as long as period, the federal government, the president was able to stop spending. And I think that if you write the bill correctly, you can again, look, Trump as a businessman, understands that if you get more economic growth, everything works better. And I think he also understands that regulations, bad trade deals and high taxes all kill economic growth.
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