Republicans in Congress should be putting options on the table to raise government revenues as part of fiscal cliff negotiations, but raising taxes should not be one of those options, Newt Gingrich said in an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV.
The GOP has given up on about 40 percent of the electorate in the last couple of elections, he also said, and needs to focus on inclusion of not just immigrants, but on states where Democrats automatically expect to win.
Every time Democrats negotiate a budget deal that includes tax increases and spending cuts, taxes go up but in most cases — such as with Ronald Reagan’s tax deal with Congress in 1982 and George H.W. Bush’s deal in 1990 — but nothing is ever cut from the budget, Gingrich explained.
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“They get the taxes, we don’t get the spending cuts,” he said. “So I’d be very cautious about that. We actually balanced the budget for four years when I was speaker and we did it by actually lowering taxes to increase economic growth . . . If we’re not careful, this economy is going to go back into an even deeper recession.”
Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are focused on a philosophy of tax increases for the sake of fairness, Gingrich said. That’s because the left wing, ideology is built on anti-success and anti-achievement. “They’re people who believe that the government should decide how much you’re allowed to keep and that your money belongs to the government unless they decide to leave it with you.”
“What Republicans ought to do is put revenue on the table,” he said. “So, you could say, ‘We’re willing to put $1 trillion, $700 billion dollars on the table by opening up America’s oil and America’s gas, making us the number one producer in the world.’ We won’t raise taxes a penny and what you’re going to find is that Obama will say that doesn’t count. He actually deliberately wants to raise taxes in the name of fairness because it’s his ideology — even if it kills jobs and weakens the economy.”
Obama owes his second term to a poor election strategy by the GOP, which failed to effectively target about 40 percent of the electorate.
He said that the party must try to make inroads tino traditionally Democratic-leaning states such as New York and California. But it must also try to attract Hispanics and Asian-Americans into the fold — not only because Republicans can’t win without them, but because their views line up with the party in terms of hard work and entrepreneurship.
“You have to start with the idea of inclusion, and I draw a distinction between outreach and inclusion,” Gingrich said. “Outreach is when five white guys have a meeting and call you. Inclusion is when you’re in the meeting. If we sat down — you can’t do this in October — but just the act this coming year of House Republicans and governors and senators sitting down with people and listening to them.
"We would discover what a lot of their concerns are. Asian-Americans really worry about education because they come out of backgrounds where they know how competitive the world is and they know that their children are going to have a better life if they’re well-educated. So just the act of listening and talking and working with them substantially changes their response to where we are.”
Gingrich also joined Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in calling for a special investigation into the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Gingrich said he was puzzled as to why the White House and federal agencies aren’t calling it a terror attack.
Something is off with the way the entire situation has been handled, he said.
“I find it puzzling that if the director of Central Intelligence, from the get-go, as he put it, said, ‘Look, this is a terrorist attack.’ Why did Ambassador Rice go on five different television shows the following Sunday and say this is all because of some stupid movie,’” Gingrich explained. “I don’t understand psychologically where Obama’s coming from on this issue. It’s almost as though he never wants to tell the truth about Islamic radicalism for whatever reason — whether it’s ideological, or psychological, or whatever it is. So he’s always trying to find some excuse to blame us.”
Gingrich insisted that the skirmish between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is also being bungled by the Obama administration.
“We should first of all say that the idea that your neighbor can fire missiles at you is totally, utterly unacceptable,” he said. “I don’t understand why we don’t cut off all of our aid to Hamas and to the refugee camps and so forth. Just say, ‘look, we’re not helping you until you decide you’re going to live in peace with your neighbors.’”
“We are really negligent and not being honest about this fight,” he said.
See more from our exclusive interview with Newt Gingrich: