In what was one of the more useless, softball interviews I've seen in some time, CBS's Bob Schieffer allowed Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan get away with one lie after another with little to no push back during their first interview together on 60 Minutes this Sunday evening. Here's one portion where Schieffer allowed Ryan to play the Solyndra straw man instead of responding to his question about the rich not paying their share in taxes.
He then allowed Romney to dodge his question about the rates not being fair and use the weasel words that the wealthiest pay the "largest share of taxes" knowing full well the question Schieffer was attempting to ask him. And he allowed him to lie about his plan not raising taxes on the middle class when the experts at the Tax Policy Center say that's not true. Then he let Ryan get away with the whopper that there are enough tax loopholes they can close to be able to lower the rates for the rich, when that same study "concluded that there aren’t enough loopholes in the tax code to balance out the cuts."
SCHIEFFER: You said yesterday, I'm going to quote you Mr. Ryan “America is a place where if you work hard and play by the rules you can get ahead,” but the fact is a lot of people don't think that's true any more. They don't think the rules are fair. They think corporations and rich people are getting all these breaks and they're getting stuck with paying the bills. They see some of the wealthiest paying the lowest tax rates. How are you going to fix that?
RYAN: What I see is a new amount of crony capitalism and corporate welfare, which both parties have been engaged in, but the President has brought this to a whole new level, where President Obama is picking winners and losers based on connections, based on fads like Solyndra and basically giving handouts to businesses, giving preferences to the tax code. We want to get Washington out of the business of picking winners and losers. We want entrepreneurs to have the barriers removed from in front of them, so that people can work hard and succeed. We want to turn the American ideal back on. We want a system of upward mobility and what we think we need to do is bring fairness back to the system by getting government bureaucracy and political clout out of the system. Those are the kinds of reforms we've been talking about.
SCHIEFFER: Well, doesn't fairness dictate that the wealthiest people should not be paying the lowest taxes? Because that's what's happening many times.
ROMNEY: Well, fairness dictates that the highest income people should pay the greatest share of taxes, and they do. And the commitment that I've made is, we will not have the top income earners in this country pay a smaller share of the tax burden. The highest income people will continue to pay the largest share of the tax burden and middle income tax payers, under my plan, get a break. Their taxes come down, so we're not going to reduce taxes for high income people and we are going to reduce taxes for middle income people.
SCHIEFFER: You say that of course the wealthiest people pay the largest share, but don't they also pay the lower rate when you figure in capital gains and all of that?
ROMNEY: Well, it depends on the individual and what their source of income is, but if you look at the top one percent or five percent or quartile, whatever, they pay the largest share of taxes and that's not something which I would propose making smaller.
RYAN: What we're saying is take away the tax shelters that are uniquely enjoyed by people in the top tax brackets so they can't shelter as much money from taxation, so we can lower tax rates for everybody to make America more competitive.
Ryan followed that up by telling Bob Schieffer he was only going to release two years of his tax returns: Paul Ryan: I Gave Romney ‘Several’ Tax Returns, Will Release Two:
Mitt Romney knows more about Paul Ryan’s taxes than America will.
Ryan told 60 Minutes Sunday that he gave Romney’s campaign “several” years of tax returns during the vetting process, but promised only to release two publicly, in keeping with the number Romney has promised to release.
He dismissed calls from both Democrats and Republicans for Romney to release more of his tax returns.
“I think these issues are more or less distractions to try and take us off the fact that the president has given us failed policies that are putting us deeper into debt, that are costing us jobs,” Ryan said.
The 42 year-old congressman said he went through a “very exhaustive vetting process” before being selected as Romney’s running mate. He said the process was “confidential.”
Mission accomplished Bob. I'm sure they'll both be more than willing to come back on your network and on your Sunday show and lie some more.
