Neal Boortz Interviewed by PBS’s Tavis Smiley
Neal Boortz was interviewed Thursday by PBS’s Tavis Smiley, to discuss The FairTax Book. The full program is available in streaming audio. The transcript, too, is available online.
Here’s an interesting excerpt:
Tavis: This is 2005. So, he’s been talking about this since ‘99 in terms of introducing legislation. No traction has been generated by this piece of legislation in Congress since ‘99. As I listen to you talk about this, I can see this one of two ways, either it’s too radical to ever get passed or, as my grandmother used to say, Neal, it’s too much like right. It just makes, it makes too much sense for the folk in Washington to actually pass something like this. So tell me whether or not something like this has any real chance in your lifetime or mine of ever getting passed. This is a huge undertaking.
Boortz: Well, it is. It is a massive undertaking, Tavis. Usually things like this don’t happen until we have civil unrest that demands it, okay? This tax plan, the FairTax plan, takes power away from politicians, and it will really hurt. And you know this, you know the lobbyists on K Street just like I do. It’ll kill them because these guys make a half a million dollars a year manipulating our current tax system for the benefit of their clients.
The only way this plan passes, and I’m telling you, people read this book and they come away, they write me letters, they come to the book signings, I’ve signed 15,000 books in the last month, and they say, how do we get this done? I don’t get any negative comments about the plan.
But you have to let these people in Congress know that you’re aware of the plan, you know the details, you understand that there’s a wart or a blemish on any tax plan, but you want this done and their jobs depend on it. It’s, this is not going to happen unless the people of this country get behind it, and get behind it strongly, and let their congressmen know that they’re watching and they’re aware.
Tavis: I ask this question not to cast dispersion on you at all, but you and I over the years have debated any number of topics. My politics are a little bit more left than your politics are.
Boortz: Oh, we’ve fought like cats and dogs.
Tavis: We have. We love each other, but we fight like cats and dogs. Our politics are dramatically different, and I raise that only because I want to ask this question.
Boortz: Okay.
Tavis: How have you avoided, because it seems to me at this point you have, brilliantly, strategically, avoided the politics of this issue? So that even though it’s put forth by a Republican member of Congress, it’s put forth by a conservative radio talk show host named Neal Boortz, the people out here talking about this really are trying to analyze it for what it means. How have you avoided the Republican-Democrat, left-right politics on something that is clearly political?
Boortz: Well, we wrote the book to avoid that. We wrote the book to avoid left-right. We wrote the book to avoid conservative or Republican or Libertarian, which is what I call myself, like your good friend Larry Elder. This, this is not a matter of partisan politics.
We all know that the government has to be funded. I’m not an anarchist. Neither are you, Tavis. The government has to be funded. And I think that you and I would agree that it ought to be funded in a fair, under a fair tax plan that treats every American alike.
Now, if we get the FairTax plan, here’s where we’re going to cross horns again, Tavis. We still need government reform. We still need spending reform. We need Social Security, we need to straighten that out, and Medicare. That’s another fight when you and I can get here on PBS and we can hash that one out.
Right now, we want a tax system that is fair to the people, not power to the politicians. We want it to treat everybody alike. We want our economy to grow. We want jobs for, I mean, conservatives don’t want people to go without jobs. Conservatives don’t want the economy to grow. We all want these things, and the FairTax can bring that about.
See the full interview for more.
