stopgap they need federal approval to make voting changes. >> sunday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span's healing day. but tax day isl, july 15. we are often joined on tax day by grover norquist. joining us to talk about tax day this year. an unusual one with a delay from april 15. what do you think the pandemic means or has done to the coffers of taxes coming in westmark guest: certainly revenues have come down. we saw that complete collapse in march-april. 20 million jobs lost. it is starting to come back strong.

then in june, 4.8 million net new jobs. both of those are historic records. we never had that much job creation before. it is not as if the economy was weak. the economy was strong. parts shut down in any and then as it opens up, it is returning to the more robust economy we had in january and february of this year. nothing has changed. the lower taxes that give us more growth are still there. bitderegulation, which is a a year ago was saving $220 billion a year in terms of the cost of things is down because of changes in regulations. that is an old number. what they are struggling with and thevernors, mayors,

federal government have shut down, it is tough to get on a plane, after travel, people are not allowed to go to bars and restaurants. killed,jobs were not but on pause. and hopefully will come back strong. they haven't yet come back to the status quo. revenues for state and local governments are lower. there has not been as much activity to rein in spending, recognizing this challenge. some states have very good, robust rainy day funds. for minutes host:. -- host: in terms of the federal response, do you think most of that response by the federal government has been appropriate? it's not only that it is

a government program so there could be massive errors and , given that it is a brand-new program, one expect problems like that. the government did a calculation that they think they preserved 51 million jobs with the paycheck -- paycheck protection program. that was helpful because those were jobs threatened because of the government shutdown. it is not that some company was stupid and lost money. these are problems caused by the government. kind of like when the government decides to build a road across gore farm, have to pay you for the damage they are doing. when the government says they

are stopping you from going into the office and having this normal work routine, ppp was to try to keep people employed. that has certainly stabilized the job loss. people lose their jobs even in the middle of a strong economy. normal,losses back to at what you would expect to have them in a regular economy, people living jobs or coming back to them. that has been helpful. one challenge we have is when they increased, when they put a federal addition on the federal compensation. atlantic cover usually half of your salary up to a point. it is a good cushion, it is not the same as having a job, but it gives you something. the federal government added $600 a week or $2400 a month.

that is temporary. most of the federal response has been temporary reforms. that is very helpful, because you don't want to have a temporary problem and make permanent changes that 100 years from now you are still paying for the croak -- the covid program. they haven't done that. because they added the $600 a unemployment,e americans,3-68% of they actually took on more money on employed than employed. and it was for four months, it is going to discourage bringing people back into the workforce. that ends august 1. he should see significant people returning to work. host: on the payroll protection washingtone ppp, the post poinsettia photo of you. they point out that your

anndation took a loan of hundred $50,000 to 350,000 dollars from the program. tell us the difference between your foundation and americans for tax reform and how did you use that money from that loan? guest: sure. americans for tax reform as a political organization that fights for lower taxes. four.called a 501(c) that organization was not open to the ppp program. he received no federal money. it would not take federal money. the foundation is like the heritage foundation for the brookings institute, which is a foundation that does research. nations and companies were open too, they wanted you to keep people employed. we laid nobody off. we did noty cut, but

have to lay anybody off. what ppp wastly looking for. whether you are a foundation or university or college, those are also not for profits, they wanted those jobs protected as well as what we think of as a manufacturing firm or company. it is for both nonprofits and or prophets. to make up foris the damage that telling people they can't fly places and do certain work does to a nonprofit or for profit. host: do you think your foundation will need additional aid? guest: i don't think so. it was badly hurt at first because they do conferences and so on. they were all canceled. that will not continue forever. i think that is fine. protecten able to both

those jobs and keep people working, which is the point. you never know how other ways you could have done it. we have certainly been advocates , eliminating for six months or a year, the social security tax. that would drop the cost of hiring somebody for company or nonprofit by 15%. both hiring somebody becomes less expensive and they keep more of their earnings. it both makes coming back to and makesremunerative it less expensive to keep somebody in job or hire somebody new. i like that idea. the president expressed interest in it. it had less support in congress. it is always brought up as an

option. host: what kind of impact might that have on social security? will it reduce revenues to the trust fund? guest: they've done this in the past. they simply say, the federal government will make up the it adds to the deficit, but if you had spent the money on some other program, it adds to the deficit. this is a tax-cut you do deficit spending into the social security program. thank you for asking. all of the money that would have been raised for social security would be raised, it would simply come through the income tax and through deficit spending. that is one proposal. the most important thing to do is consistent with health concerns, to open up those parts of the economy that can be opened up.

somee 50 states there was mistakes. people were told they could not allowed in a rowboat in the lake by themselves or couldn't play golf by themselves. but it was ok if you wandered around on the golf course, but not if you had a golf club. this is the governor of michigan. that had nothing to do with health. cant of these jobs, you with masks do them quite safely. we need to move more and more of that as quickly as we can to get people back working. it is also, there is the health concerns of covid. there are also the health concerns of people not being at work, both mental health and because they told people, you can't come into the hospitals and do certain elective surgeries, people have been putting off surgeries. debtve seen increases in from other things that may be caused because people are told, don't come into the hospital. and they let something go longer

than they should have. the cost of the reaction to covid is not just more unemployment. it is also a health cost. we need to keep an eye on, keep that down. host: our guest is grover norquist. as we approach this year's tax day, july 15, moved from april 15, we welcome your calls and comments. (202) 748-8000 four democrats. for republicans. for independence, (202) 748-8002 . a quick headline. mnuchin sees new stimulus. there is talk that mitch mcconnell also interested in additional spending. we talked about ppp. what is your view of more monetary response to the pandemic? guest: there are different ways you can do it. there are a number of taxing --

tax-cut you can do. making it easier to keep people hired. some of those were done in a first plan. of, could you average your tax burden word and backwards so you are not paying more or less but even it out? that was very helpful, saved a lot of companies. that was a good idea. is, whene challenges you talk about stimulus, if you take a dollar from somebody and give it to somebody else, you haven't stimulated the economy. if you take a bucket of water from one side of the light -- like and report back into the lake haven't stimulated like, you have simply moved it. had this challenge when obama had this 800 dollars of what he called a stimulus package. we had the weakest recovery since the great depression because he didn't change the

incentives to people to work, save, and in test. you just threw a of money out there and that can be helpful in a crisis. it doesn't stimulate the economy. and i would be -- i know that both the president or the vice president said they wanted to keep $1 trillion, which, washington is restrained. there are concerns we need to do some tort reform. the trial lawyers have been talking about suing the people who make vaccines. that could delay vaccines. if people go back to work and get covid, can you sue everybody involved? in which case, people won't rehire and bring people back. there are some protections that are important. i do think that reducing or eliminating the social security tax is the way to increase wages to people and reduce the cost of hiring people and keeping them

hired. that would give you a real impact on, as a way to do it. host: let me ask you, one of your notable quotes, paraphrasing you. you said you don't want to get rid of government you would like it small enough to drown in a bathtub. extending that metaphor, could a government the size of a bathtub respond to something like this pandemic? guest: that's a very interesting issue. what has been the response to covid? what did we learn in health care? there have been 700-plus different deregulations getting rid of laws, suspending regulation because we found they got in the way of fighting against the virus. , 700cans for tax reform and 40 regulations.

announced, wedc are going to come up with a test. and nobody else is allowed to. for six weeks they did that, they came up with a test that didn't work. instead of going to the companies and universities around the world and around the united states and say, what have you got? for six weeks we had a tellnment napoli, cdc, everybody they are smarter than everybody else and nobody else could do this. when it was opened up we got lots of different testing and accurate testing. we have plenty of testing now, but we lost six weeks because of government bureaucracy got in the way. to whack them because the cdc wanted you to send your test into them. roles, thel these fda has lots of rules on a new vaccine. they are going back to some of the progress we made in the

fight on aids. all of the things that the food and drug administration taken theyof speeding things up, sidetracked that for aids. we should do that for all new drugs. who should move it forward as safely and as quickly as possible, because when you come up with a new medicine that saves $5,000 -- 5000 lives a year -- but it took you 10 years to get there, that means 50,000 people died while you are waiting for that. maybe you spend some time testing, but is tenures necessary? maybe not. -- 10 years necessary? maybe not. you have seen laws at the state level where a doctor is not a doctor in the next state or a nurse practitioner. those have been put aside because they got on the way of moving doctors and nurses across

state lines. those should be permanent reforms. most of the problems we have had have come from government being too sclerotic. governments are always monopolies until you take it to the local level and let them compete. i think we've learned a great deal. i think we can avoid some of those mistakes in the future. government was too large and too monopolistic, stopped other people from helping, got in the way. remember the plastic bag bans? biden stated he wants to ban plastic bags nationally. they found that those one time use plastic bags were very good in avoiding getting covid because when you have those bags that you use again and again, they built up problems. banning plastic bags got people sick. government telling people what to do and how to take care of their health, do-gooders who

wanted to blame -- ban plastic bags killed some people. host: let's open up for callers. we will go first to south bend, indiana. donald, good morning. caller: i told the screener that i will be civil, but listening spiel, exactly what you just said to the moderator. you said about that infamous quote. we would have -- we wouldn't be here if this current gutted our -- had the people that were supposed to go over to fight such intentional epidemics. guest: you mean china? caller: just listen to what i am saying.

i understand that people don't like to pay taxes. there is a role for government. this is a classic example where people,rnment who had health care professionals ready to help us keep virus atemic or this bay. i think people like you and i think also people like chris jankowski, people like you, you are responsible for what we are going through. i hope you two people responsible. if you want to know why i hold chris jankowski responsible, it , thisause of how he has

project read map and how this has gutted our government. that were so one-sided -- host: i will let you go there. grosvenor west, any response? -- grover norquist, any response? if you remember, the idea that government's fix things, communist china is a very big government. they decided to lie to the world about the nature of covid, about whether it was spreading. they knew about it for some time. then the world health organization bought their line. and were telling people this is not a big deal. the idea we have too little government is counterfactual. very big government decided to lie to people about the problem and i to the rest of the world

and light to the who. the reason the united states is pulling out of the who, is that were praising the chinese and not playing a role getting information out, but basically repeating -- i understand governments don't like to be embarrassed. that is why government monopolies are problem attic. they don't like the truth out. they don't like embarrassing things said. you go to the whole list of how we got from here to there, too much government, too intrusive government allowed this to spread faster. governments lying to people, not letting people have information. dictatorship in how it runs of politics.

host: you pointed out, your issues with the cdc's slow response. what about on the ground in china? could we have had a better presence there? guest: if the communist chinese had given them permission to see what they want to see, that is, you know, having people on the ground blocked by chinese officials to show them potemkin villages would not necessarily have you more. all of the preparations for the down in thepent obama-biden years. and not replaced. this idea that government plans ahead well is counterfactual or that hyden and obama did a good job, there is counterfactual.

back toer brought us the storage we had. i think we have -- should have stores in private hospitals so we don't rely on the governments to tell us, we've got enough. how do we know that? government is big and clunky and doesn't get things done quickly. they tell other people they can't participate. that is what the cdc did, that is what the fda has done. japan says that the united dates has tested something, we will look at it for a month or two, but as long as their tests look good, that new drug is available here. they don't replicate the expense of american process again. there is no reason why we should in coming up with vaccines, after replicate serious work done in british or german or efforts diversities and

or companies. there is a lot we can do. competition always beats monopolies and government is always a monopoly. government is always a monopoly. host: let's hear from renee in waterbury, connecticut, republican line. hello grover norquist. i have some questions for you and i hope you can be as honest as you can. does someone with as much education, wealth, and backing behind you feel you needed to take the cares act for your nonprofit and at the same time, you are asking for smaller government, yet you are taking this money and you have all of this power, knowledge, friends,

and do you feel at all guilty for the mom and pops that can't get the money because you took it and was there any alternative you could have done in your company with all your wisdom to have not taken that money? you address that a little bit. care to expand? been: we have sort of through that and this call is on the republican line? the point is what we are trying to do with the ppp -- the paycheck attraction -- paycheck protection plan has plenty of resources. they have not funneled all the money that they have. it is a loan and your goal is when you get badly damaged as a company, business, foundation, school or university, try to make sure you don't have to lay people off in the short term. it is a short-term problem or

fix and americans for tax reform 's sister organization, we did not oppose the ppp plan for just that reason. we said this is an effort by government to fix a problem that government created. they shut your business down, they told you you couldn't go to work, they made the planes not fly. as a result, it is reasonable for the government to make some effort at making people whole, but we want to do it in the most effective way possible, which is why i suggested earlier a better way to do it is to temporarily budgetor eliminate the tax. host: everett from colorado on the republican line. i would like to refer to a place in the constitution when it comes to taxes that maybe you

can explain to me and maybe your audience. article one, section a where it says taxes throughout the united states should be uniform. could you explain the uniform part as far as percentage growth and how that would balance out with people? i would also like to encourage people to read the constitution. i had to go through it word for word since this impeachment thing was going on and i would like to make a small comment about the guarantee in the to look for the word democratic or democrat in the constitution or declaration of independence or the confederation papers. article four, section four, it iners to the united states the united-- it says

states shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government. i cannot find democrat in there anywhere. explain uniform. because taxes have to be uniform, that was the reason they struck down the original effort to get an income tax because the income tax was going to discriminate among people based on their income as opposed to a sales tax or head tax or property tax. as a result, it was struck down by the courts and they had to amend the constitution to allow the income tax to be put in. when it was put in about 1913, the top rate was 7%. you had to make about $11 million to pay 7%. it was below that for everybody else.

all taxes tend to grow. the income tax was put in and partly as a result of trying to replace the money lost when you wanted to do prohibition, they wanted to get rid of liquor sales, prohibition help to give us income tax because people say we can't outlaw beer, wine, and spirits, that's a lot of federal revenue. we will replace it with an income tax. which we lived with for more than 100 years without an income tax doing just fine, but that was the argument you have there. going forward, this election gives you a very stark comparison between the two candidates and how the economy is going to do will be more determined by the direction of taxes over the next year than the pandemic at this point, because we are opening up and

things are getting better, but our friend mr. biden call for a 4.3 trillion dollar tax increase on the american people over a decade. hillary clinton wanted $1 he wants three times as large a tax increase -- three point -- 3.4 trillion dollars. when we are talking about china, the chinese have a 25% tax on business. with obama, jobs were moving torseas, jobs were moving china, the federal income tax was 35% on businesses and we lost money and we lost jobs as a result. american corporate rate

permanently down to 21% which makes us comparative -- which makes us competitive with much of europe but ireland is at 12%. but we are below china, below germany, and below france now. we got a text from this question -- why do we have economic growth after clinton raised taxes and increased safety regulations? guest: two things. if you look at the growth in the eight years when clinton was president, the first two years, not much growth. democratack house, senate. the day the republicans won the house and senate and you knew there would be no more government massive regulatory programs and no tax increases, that is when the stock market shot up and the republicans passed a cut in the capital gains tax and the president had to sign it.

that made for a lot of growth. the republicans passed three times welfare reform. the first two times it was vetoed by the president and the third time he embraced it. it was the one big success of his presidency. 50 states with 50 different approaches and we learned what works and what doesn't work better. a very strong economy when the republicans had the house and senate and they dropped clinton's planned spending by 200 billion dollars a year. he planned to spend every penny of his tax increase in the republicans said no, we are not doing that. that's why when revenue came in, you cut the capital gains tax as spending did not jump as the to,ident had planned for it these are budget numbers that we actually went into a surplus as a result.

administration is a good example where tax increases are not very helpful. tax is the capital gains helpful in raining and spending is helpful. host: let's go to paul in new york city, a call on the democrats line. caller: good morning c-span and thank you for taking my call. grover norquist has been on your show a number of times and spreads so much misinformation. -biden administration left the cdc intact and they were able to handle things like ebola and all of these other pandemics that came around. when the republicans and donald trump came in, not only did he fold that organization and molded into another, he cut the research grant and c-span has had people on c-span saying the trump administration has cut research. grover norquist is saying

is totally incorrect and, by the way, these tax cuts donald trump has done has exploded our deficit. i notice we never talk about the visit problems with republicans in office but they explode the deficit like you can't believe. i hate to say this to you, grover norquist talks about clinton. clinton closed a lot of military bases which freed up a lot of capital. that's why we had such a great economy under bill clinton. grover norquist belongs in jail. host: we will let you go there. any response to the points paul raised? guest: it is problematic when somebody gets a little carried away. are he didn't rebut anything that i said and the point is when the cdc said they and only they could do the

testing and the one thing they did didn't work, we lost six weeks and their monopoly and assertion of their power that no one else could participate in getting this done lost us a bunch of time. the fda having ruled to make it very difficult to come up with takerugs and expensive and too long has been a problem for quite some time. there was a tremendous step forward when 40 states past the right to try law. which that if you have a drug and the fda says it's safe, but they want to spend another several years finding its effective and are not going to let you buy it unless they say it is effective. have ates said if they terminal disease, their child is we are not willing to wait three or four years and watch our child die while you think it's effective or not. we will handle that question.

basicallyates legalized medical care for the terminally ill that is safe but not yet approved by the fda. law and was taken to congress passed it. it's the law of the land and the fda fought it the entire time. they were slowing down getting addison's two people because they wanted to control the bureaucracy on that and they got because they were told they could not use drugs -- these are drugs they have weeady said are safe and -- want to test and see if they are really effective. some drugs are effective for some people and some for others. this was very bipartisan, past and blue states, red states, california vetoed it first, but then when they realized what they had done, they passed it and made it the law of the land

in california as well. there are some real steps forward we have had with getting the government out of the way and allowing more and better drugs quicker and less expensively. from stephen hear next, a call on the independent line. good morning. to see grover norquist on your show is just laughable. americans for tax reforms and grover norquist is nothing more than his attempts to continue to feed the billionaire elites in this country that are entitled to what they think is complete control over the tax structure of america. norquist believes in reaganomics and trickle-down economics, which was the largest, fraudulent piece of legislation that was ever passed in this country and transferred between

$6 billion to $7 billion to people who did not need it in this country. if you are an american for tax reform, why for 20 years or maybe it is still going on today, have you had every gop an edict whenn they start office to never raise taxes on the rich? please answer that for all of america. guest: a couple of things. with theme start facts. americans for tax reform in 1986 to help pass the tax reform act with bipartisan support which reduced our marginal tax rates and helped give us a very strong time of economic growth didn't happen until bush raised taxes. and throw away perfectly good presidency. in 86, we created the pledge which people could sign, it was

-- that allowed people to trust when they went into the smoke-filled rooms to make the final compromises and deals that it would not morph into an income tax hike. int became so popular that 1994, 95% of all the republicans running maids that commitment to the american people not to raise taxes. rich people, but he missed speaks. the pledge is no net tax increase. if you want to reform tax and move around, but don't increase the taxes on american people. as a result, the republicans won the house in 94 and held the house two out of three years since then.

we will reform government to make it caused -- make it cost less. that's a winning political message, certainly a winning economic message, and we saw the growth from the trump tax cuts, we saw the weakest recovery because of the way obama handled it, much weaker than the other recoveries going back to the great depression, spending more money does not stimulate the incentivesanging the . biden is now promising to eliminate the tax cut, and that means for a family of four, four, income family of eight 2000 dollar tax increase every year forward. a $1300 tax increase. biden is saying to the middle income person, single parent, one child, we are going to raise

your taxes $1300. a couple with two children, he's going to raise your taxes $2000. he has reiterated he wants to take the capital gains tax to 40% to more than double it. that's not just for rich people. i know the color likes to say it's rich people, he said on every single american. every single american, making it clear that even lower income , so every single solitary gains areere capital going to go and they are going to pay 40% on their capital gains tax. they are taking the corporate rate higher and will take us americanhe days when companies were purchased by people overseas or moved overseas because our taxes were so much higher on the margin then other countries. burger king was bought by a

canadian company. as an americand company because of our policies when biden and obama were president. at your taxes when you fill them out on july 15 and compare them to three or four years ago and see how your taxes have gone down. it's particularly important. we saw the job creation not once increase the value of your 401(k), 81 million americans have a 401(k) or ira. that is their life savings. that is the number right now -- 81 people, there life savings is an ira and that life savings dramatically increased as there

was less regulation and more growth, so peoples retirement is more secure. it went down during covid but it never went as low during covid as it was when obama and biden were running things. economic policies were unfortunately comparable to the worst of covid going back again, so your life savings and 401(k), ira and pension are strengthened and going up. biden says he will take that all away. host: the organization is americans for tax reform. grover norquist, we appreciate you being with us this morning. guest: good to be with you. host: we are joined next by the author and cofounder and the managing editor of the beat in the sea and the author of than whiteok "black voters, narratives are co-welcome to "washington journal co. tell us about your new book.

why did you write it and what is it about? andt: i worked in media politics for almost 20 years now . i've been in this space for two decades and what i have discovered in my time working in different capacities, at cnn, as a field producer, executive producer, running the d.c. bureau is that black voters have an and ordinate amount of power as does the media. sometimes these two powerful entities are running parallel, but frequently, they are running contrary. every political conversation we have had centered white people. so as we are in this moment of a cultural shift, i wanted to write something that highlighted the unique black experience and unique black patriotism that exists in this country. remember i was writing this

before ahmaud arbery, before george floyd, before breonna taylor. a lot of what i highlight is timely and relevant to what i have today from the modern-day feminist movement to the unrest we are seeing in the street. it shows how black people have been historically brutalized in this country -- >> we take you live now to a house subcommittee meeting on the coronavirus and how the virus is affecting minorities harder. >> novel corona pandemic has millioninfected over 3 and killed over 100,000 americans. the scale of the loss is staggering and efforts to produce a lifesaving axing continues, but not all americans have been impacted equally. communities of color are not only more likel