This morning on ABC’s ‘This Week’ Jon Karl pitched Trump’s acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney this softball question with a nice Freedumb Caucus Republican spin, as if it was an irrefutable fact:
'This Week' Transcript 12-23-18: Mick Mulvaney and Sen. Jeff Merkley
KARL: OK, I want to get to the change at the Pentagon and Syria, but first, you of course are the -- currently still the budget chairman. I know you’re -- you’re one of the real deficit hawks, budget hawks, you’re founder of the Freedom Caucus. How crushingly disappointing is it to you to see what has happened to the federal deficit and federal spending? If you look at it -- you had a $600 billion-plus deficit in 2017, now we are approaching a trillion dollar deficit and it is driven, as you know better than anybody, overwhelmingly by out of control government spending.
MULVANEY: It’s -- it’s hard. It really is. Blah blah blah…
Then Karl’s next guest Senator Jeff Merkley set the record straight in no uncertain terms.
KARL: You also heard Director Mulvaney say that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. Do you agree?
MERKLEY: I had to laugh when I heard him say the economy has delivered just as planned. When they were putting together that, well, $2 trillion giveaway to the wealthy from the tax bill in 2017, they said, hey, this is going to increase wages for working Americans. Well, that didn't happen. They said it's going to reduce the deficit. Well, that didn't happen. And of course Mick Mulvaney is saying today saying that we need to cut Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, he's called them entitlements.
Well, that was the big plan, wasn't it? To give away the national treasury to the wealthy, the wealthiest among us, and then proceed to cut the benefits for ordinary working people. I don't think you're not going to find support for that strategy of rip off ordinary people to give extra money to the rich.
KARL: Although, as I'm sure you know, the revenues are up actually up slightly since the tax cut. It's really spending that's gone up so much driving that deficit.
Karl ignores that revenues are up slightly mainly because of Trump’s tariffs, which are being paid disproportionately by the American Middle Class, NOT the top 1% beneficiaries of the GOP’s trillions in tax cuts for the super wealthy.