House Speaker John Boehner is in a “dishonest conversation” with President Barack Obama on a plan to avert the fiscal cliff because everyone’s taxes will rise regardless of whether the nation goes over the cliff or not, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus tells Newsmax TV.
“It’s ridiculous that we’re having conversations about raising taxes in order to avoid a fiscal cliff, which is something that will, obviously, raise taxes on every American no matter what you make — and that the president is willing to do in order to try to raise taxes on people no matter what their income is,” Priebus tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview. “It’s important for our folks to realize that we don’t have a revenue issue; we have a spending issue.
“Everyone says that, and it sounds cliché, but the fact is if you took 100 percent of every dollar that any person in America made over $100,000 a year — you took it all, not 39 percent, 100 percent, take it — sent it Washington, you’d run the government for 34 days,” he added. “This is a ridiculous conversation.
“If we’re really worried about the fiscal health of this country and where we’re heading on our debts and our deficits, we would be having a conversation about spending. That’s the issue facing America. It’s spending. These bits of revenue that we’re talking about that’s taking up space, it’s a ridiculous conversation.”
The discussions are even more fallacious, Priebus added, because “at some point, though, you’ve got to look at this president and realize that he’s not serious about spending.
“What he is serious about, though, is leveraging every bit of PR and every bit of pressure that he can on going over the cliff and getting the spin,” he said. “The president’s leveraging the politics. That’s what he wants to do. He wants to leverage the politics to get what he wants: higher taxes and as much of it as he can across the board. Our side doesn’t want to do that, and that’s what we’re fighting.”
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Editor's Note: Read the full Newsmax interview with Reince Priebus:
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