Imus kinda took off on Sharpton's Hardball appearance, but Kerry defended Al and turned it around to bash Bush. Very cool. The whole transcript is interesting. Kerry talking to the regular joe types.
http://www.johnkerry.com/news/clips/news_2003_1028a.html>>>>>>
KERRY: They're not really debates, number one. And number two, there are so many people it's just very, very difficult. I mean, you get 60 seconds to talk about the country every 11 minutes or so and it's pretty hard.
IMUS: Reverend Al really just steals the show every place, doesn't he? I mean...
KERRY: You know, I got to tell you, he is really funny and he has a way of just summarizing it. Boy, I tell you, I'd love to have his skill. He's very, very good. Very good.
IMUS: I saw him last night with Chris Matthews. There's no answers to him, his solutions are moronic. So...
KERRY: Well...
IMUS: Don't you agree?
KERRY: Well, that's a pretty harsh word.
No, I think he has a sense of right and wrong and I think he has a sense of direction and I think he's motivated by -- look, the special interest in this country, Don, are out of control. I mean, look, it's hard to find the words that people don't say, that's, sort of, rhetoric or something.
But look take a company like Tyco in New Hampshire; it was at Exeter, New Hampshire. They just moved their address to Bermuda. They left the people who do the work in Exeter, they left the buildings there obviously, and the products that they make are still made there. They moved the address to Bermuda. And just by moving the address to Bermuda they took $400 million off the tax rolls, that's what they saved themselves.
But guess what? They stick the average worker with that bill; they've got to make up the difference. So, you know, right now we've gone from about $200 billion of offshore assets about 15 years ago to $5 trillion of offshore assets. You've got American companies moving profits abroad, moving work abroad and he American worker is really beginning to feel desperate about it. People can't pay their health care, they can't get health care. The companies are having a harder and harder time paying for it.
I have a plan to lower the cost of health care for Americans, Don, but it's a tradeoff. You got to get rid of the high end of the Bush tax cuts, and if we do, we can lower the cost of health care for every American and make companies more competitive. I think that's what elections are about are those kinds of choices.
IMUS: Well, for example Chris Matthews -- not to paraphrase all of it -- but asked Reverend Sharpton about -- Reverend Sharpton wants to provide guaranteed health care for every person in America, which is a noble goal and there's nobody who wouldn't want that.
KERRY: But it's achievable. It is achievable.
IMUS: OK, but how is it achievable?
Well, first of all, Reverend Sharpton said he would do it by -- talking about these offshore companies -- by taxing -- by the trillions of dollars we would get -- but how are you or Reverend Sharpton or anybody else as president going to do that?
KERRY: Well, here's what -- I mean, that's what -- I mean, when Franklin Roosevelt came in with the New Deal, he had a Congress that he was able to pass it with and there were desperate situations in America. We hope we don't go back to that kind of desperation, but I'll tell you, 3 million jobs have been lost.
This is the worst jobs economy since Herbert Hoover was president. This is the worst growth rate in our economy in about 45 or 50 years. And it's been the biggest transfer of wealth: We've gone from $5.6 trillion of surplus to $2 trillion of deficit, which adds to the debt, which adds to the interest rates we pay every year
-- the interest payments go up -- and all over the country governors are having to raise taxes and cut services for $90 billion total deficit across the country.
You know, Joe Biden and I brought in an amendment a week or so ago to try to pay for the $87 billion to Iraq. Instead of piling it onto the deficit, we thought that wealthiest people in the country, just like the reservists who are spending an extra year in Iraq -- who are sacrificing -- that the wealthiest people in the country could sacrifice something. So instead of giving them a $690 billion tax cut over the next 10 years, we thought they might be happy with a $600 billion tax cut over the next 10 years.
No way. The president opposed it, the Republicans opposed it, it's not going to happen.
So there's no sense of shared sacrifice here. There's no sense of fairness in this process.
You know, in the last tax cut we had 54 percent of the tax cut went to the top 1 percent of income earners in America. Meanwhile, you know, everybody's grandmother, aunt, uncle, father or mother is struggling to pay for the nursing home costs to keep their families together. Tuitions went up 20 percent last year. Who's helping those people pay for their kids to go to school?
I mean, you know on the front there's a story today in the New York Times about how the president -- I guess it was Paul Krugman's column on the op-ed page -- you know, the president says he doesn't read the newspapers. He gets his news from a filtered source. The filtered source is his staff. I mean this is craziness. And the result is, he really isn't in touch with what's happening in a lot of America.
IMUS: What should he read, the New York Times?
KERRY: Well, I think he should read a lot of papers.
IMUS: Get it from Jayson Blair?
(LAUGHTER)
Well, in that answer of yours about providing health care for everybody, I didn't hear how you were going to do and who's going to pay for it.
KERRY: Here's what I'm going to do. Out of the tax cut at the top end that you get rid of there is enough money to create a federal fund. The federal fund is about $35 billion. With that federal fund, we're going to say to all the companies in American, ``If you're covering your employee and you promise to give any savings I give you back to your employee and you agree to have a health wellness education plan in your company, so you teach people about early screening for cancer, diabetes or nutrition'' -- that's all you have to do; those are simple things -- ``that federal fund is going to pay 75 percent of the cost of any catastrophic case $50,000 or more that falls into your risk pool, the pool you're paying insurance for.''
That means that every premium in America will go down at least $1,000, it means that health care will be more affordable to people because the premiums will be lower, and it means that businesses will be more competitive because they're not going to have to put in as much money to match the money for their employees. So you can lower the cost of health care.
You know, we spend $1.4 trillion a year on health care in America. $350 billion of that is not for care, it's all for administrative costs. I mean, no company in America works at 25 percent overhead costs, so we have to reduce the overhead.
If you take money out of a bank it costs you about a penny a transaction. You walk into a hospital and pull a hospital record, it costs you $25 to pull a record. In an age of computers and, you know, modern technology, we can reduce the cost of health care significantly but you have to invest in it to do it and we're not doing that.
IMUS: So does that mean all companies like those small companies that have four of five employees, I think those kinds of companies or...
KERRY: And we're going to give them a 50 percent tax credit to help them to be able to purchase the health care. And since we're lowering the cost by paying the catastrophic cases the health care costs will go down.
We're also going to cover all children in America automatically, immediately, day one. We're going to take over Medicaid from the states.
And all this is affordable. I've had some of the top health care experts in the country working on this. They've done all the cost analysis, the experts have gone over it and it's a tradeoff. If we don't do the Bush tax cuts at the high end we can afford to have health care for all Americans and we can lower the costs. If we don't do that we can go on, you know, having an economy that becomes more and more unbalanced, more and more jobs lost. You know, it's getting tougher for a lot of people.
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