Newt Gingrich Says Obamanomics Is Killing Jobs

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," July 1, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: The unemployment numbers are set to be released tomorrow, expected to show that the country has lost jobs. Now this comes during the president's stimulus summer during which he's calling attention to the raging success of the $787 billion stimulus bill.

Now with unemployment at sky high levels, his logic might be hard to comprehend for, you know, us common folks. But "The Anointed One" figured out just how to spin this. Here's what told the crowd yesterday in Wisconsin.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Things would have been a lot worse. Right? You know, so people kind of say, yes, but unemployment is still at 9.6. Yes, but it's not 12 or 13 or 15.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: Wow. Or 15. Now if the president is worried about job creation he should just ask Princess Pelosi. Earlier today she told reporters that she has a brilliant solution.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Now let me say that unemployment insurance we talk about it as a safety net. This is one of the biggest stimuluses to our economy.

Economists will tell you it injects demand into the economy and is job creating. It creates jobs faster than any other initiative you can name.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

HANNITY: All right. But neither the president nor Speaker Pelosi need to make excuses because the mainstream media is doing it for them. Now the Associated Press took the cake, writing, quote, "It is true that employers are expected to have cut more than 100,000 jobs in June. But that figure, if accurate, will be deceptive. It will reflect the end of up to 250,000 temporary census jobs."

And the key word there is temporary. As the Wall Street Journal points out, I guess the AP is saying that the job numbers will bounce back in 2020 when the government starts to hire workers to conduct the next census.

But for now it looks like we're stuck with an unemployment rate that has hovered around 10 percent for months despite the massive government spending.

Joining me now with analysis is former speaker of the House, Fox News contributor, and the co-producer of the documentary, "Nine Days That Changed the World," which you can get, by the way, at GingrichProductions.com, Newt Gingrich is back with us.

Mr. Speaker, welcome back.

NEWT GINGRICH, "NINE DAYS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD": It's good to be with you.

HANNITY: Only you can do this. Only you can interpret what Nancy Pelosi was saying. You are best suited for this job.

GINGRICH: Well, look, I think what you had was a San Francisco liberal who lives in a world where, by her standard, the more unemployed there are the more we can give away unemployment payments, the more stimulus there will be, so it will be an even better economy if we have more unemployed people so they can get even more unemployment payments.

Because as she pointed, out all those unemployment payments were really stimulative. The only question you have to ask is, if that would have worked, wouldn't it have worked by now? I mean why is it we've been paying unemployment now for two years and it hasn't worked?

And the reason of course is, this administration and modern left-wing policies kill jobs. They frighten small business. They frighten the independent producer. They frighten entrepreneurs. They frighten investors.

We recently at American Solutions had a small business meeting in St. Louis. We had 24 small businesses there. Not a single one planned to add any new people in the next six months. And they were all frightened about the economy.

So I think the core problem is, if you're on the left, that you don't understand how jobs are created. You don't understand the people who create them. And you don't understand what incentivizes them and encourages them to go out and take the risk to create a job.

And as a result, this president is on the way to becoming the worst unemployment rate for a president since the Great Depression.

HANNITY: Well, and there are numbers now to back this up. What I'd like you to do is - I want you to put your analysis hat on here for just a second. With this in mind - you know, because the president set up this fiscal commission.

All right, so, I think the fiscal commission is ultimately going to be a cover to come up with an idea and for him to break his pledge and to raise taxes. Steny Hoyer suggested as much last week that they would be open to raising taxes on the middle class here.

Anyway, so then while they are meeting to figure out how to deal with the record deficit, the economic problems, the unemployment problems, the CBO is saying - and this is where it's key - is the national debt will rise to 62 percent of our GDP by the end of this year, the highest number since the end World War II.

Those numbers would scare me if I was president. What do we make of it?

GINGRICH: Look - what do I, make them simple. We're spending too much money. Government is the fourth bubble after IT in 1999, housing in 2007 and Wall Street in 2008.

Whether it is in Greece or in Sacramento or it's in Albany, or it's in Washington, D.C., government is too big, too expensive. Government employee unions cost too much. The average working taxpaying American can't sustain it.

And the fact is, they're talking about tax increases. I deeply oppose the deficit commission because it's essentially a tax increase commission. And I think the number one problem in America is jobs. And if you want to create jobs, you don't want to have tax increases. You don't want to increase red tape. You don't want to centralized power at the Environmental Protection Agency. You don't want to have a moratorium along the Louisiana coast which according to Governor Jindal will kill 80,000 jobs.

And this president just doesn't seem to understand that what this is about is getting America back to work. And what he's doing is increasing the unemployment rate.

HANNITY: All right, Joe Biden called this guy at this custard shop in Wisconsin a smart ass because he said, Mr. Vice President, you know, please don't raise our taxes. Seems a little out of touch. That's a separate issue. But what he also said when he was out raising for Russ Feingold is, we're never going to recover the eight million jobs.

Now that's what they're saying privately. What they're saying publicly is that, you know, this is the - this is the summer of economic recovery. They're out there trying to tout 124 days out of election how successful they've been.

You think - is that a tough sell for the American people? Or is the real feeling in the White House what Joe Biden is saying privately?

GINGRICH: Look, I think that the parallels between this administration and the Carter administration are almost eerie. We are in a period when this government doesn't know what it's doing. And what it is doing is killing jobs. Making life harder for the average working American. Increasing the likelihood that small businesses will go out of business.

Drive through most of middle America and look at the number of stores that are closed, look at the number of restaurants that are closed. Look at the number of people who are looking for work.

It seems to me that it's not hard to see what's going on if you're willing to get out of the White House. Get away from your lobbyist friends and your bureaucratic friends.

You know, nobody in the White House is unemployed. The unemployment rate in the White House is zero. Federal government unemployment rate is zero. Washington, D.C. is not a city which is feeling the pain that when I go around the country with American Solutions and I see people in New Orleans, or in St. Petersburg or in Orange County, California, I see and I hear from people who are in the real economy and they in much greater trouble than Washington, D.C..

HANNITY: All right, you used the - I've used the term Jimmy Carter on steroids talking about this White House and its failure. It seems to me they got three big problems. And we'll talk politics in the next segment. The elections are 124 days away.

But I want to ask you specifically about this. When you look at oil spill and their response or lack thereof, when you look at the problems we're having internationally, this public firing of McChrystal. If you look at bad economic news on top of bad economic news, what is this - what is this doing to the president's popularity?

We see it in the polls. But what do you think it's doing to it in terms of the narrative it's creating? And do you think it's something that - is he so tone-deaf and ideological that he's not going to wake up? Or you see any tendency that he might?

GINGRICH: Well, I think so far you don't see any sign that they understand what's going on and that they're responding to it. I think that when you look, for example, at the Gulf of Mexico, where Steve Everly who I worked with at American Solutions is developing a paper on all the different things the federal government has done wrong in the period of this BP oil crisis and all the things that should have been done right.

And the list just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. As recently as today, the Coast Guard was stopping boats that were out skimming oil because they didn't have enough life vests on the boat.

HANNITY: Again?

GINGRICH: Now - again. I mean this is the kind of petty thing. Governor Haley Barbour told me they couldn't get the federal government to deliver on skimmers. And so two Mississippi boat-building companies just began building Mississippi skimmers.

We now learn that the Dutch offered to give us boats and the president refused to waive the Jones Act which protects the maritime unions. And as a result, they were told well, we're going to take them if they would train the American crews on how to run them.

So, you have weeks and weeks of training to protect the union while no one is protecting the coast of Louisiana.

HANNITY: All right. We're going to - stay right there, Mr. Speaker. We'll come back.

We'll have more with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. What does he think is going to happen in the election 124 short days from now.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HANNITY: And we continue now with former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

All right, 124 short days to go. I think one of the most important midterms in modern history. Where does it stand in your mind as of right now?

GINGRICH: I think right now the Republicans are poised to have a very, very good year. But it is not over. There's going to be a real campaign. The Republicans have to be prepared, I think, with good, positive ideas in September. And a lot depends on what happens - you know, nobody could have predicted three months ago how bad the BP oil spill would be and how bad the Obama administration would be trying to deal with it.

Nobody could have predicted a couple of months ago that the economy would continue to decay. And I think there's now some talk about a second dip recession. And I'm very concerned about tomorrow's unemployment numbers because everything coming out this week has been bad news on the economy.

So if the economy continues to decay, and if the deficit continues to grow as an issue, and everywhere I go in the country people are genuinely worried about the amount of spending and genuinely worried about their children and grandchildren being crushed by the interest payments on a huge federal debt.

Then you have a September and October where the Democrats, I think, have a very hard campaign. And that's what seems to be shaping up. But it's a long way from over.

HANNITY: No, and I don't want Republicans or conservatives to get overconfident. I also think there's some skepticism out there about politicians in general. You and I have discussed the idea that the Republican Party needs to go back and follow a model that - and a paradigm that you yourself helped create. And that's the Contract with America.

Put their ideas, their positive agenda on paper and let the American people, you know, say look, if you elect us, we're going to do this. If we don't follow through you can fire us. That's pretty much what you said in '94.

GINGRICH: True. You wrote a book on this topic which was 100 percent on target. I recently wrote "To Save America" which has a long section on how you do a contract and what a contract ought to look like.

I think you and I are in total agreement. I think a lot of Republicans are, too. Congressman John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House, has asked Kevin McCarthy, a brilliant member from California, to organize a potential contract which I would hope about mid-September that they would unveil and stick with and really focus on.

They have to have the courage to come out for positive, big solutions because the problems we have are very big.

HANNITY: Yes. Well, I'm wondering, for example, watching the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan. I mean, you know, the more I hear from her, she says she's a progressive. She says she's a liberal Democrat. She has no experience on the court.

She's openly talked about the idea that the Supreme Court, it would be acceptable to her that the government can write laws and legislation and it wouldn't be unconstitutional telling Americans what to eat.

We know her story about, you know, trying to ban military recruiters. She supports a book ban which was quite shocking to me with the rational that, well, they're not going to enforce it any way.

Do you think the Republicans should pick a fight here and should she be filibustered?

GINGRICH: Well, I think, first of all, the Republicans should refuse to bring her up until the White House releases her memos on the health act. I mean the fact is that the decision about whether or not the individual mandate is constitutional may be one of the biggest decisions the court faces in the next few years.

She must have written articles and had opinions when she was the counsel during the period of drafting this legislation. They are refusing to release it. In fact the Justice Department issued an utterly cynical and arrogant comment that they weren't quite sure what the Obama health legislation referred to and they refused to release it.

Now liberal Democrats would have known exactly what to do. They would have blocked the nomination from moving forward until they got to see all the documents. So I'd start there.

Second, I'd look at the National Rifle Association message today which points out that she is deeply opposed to the Second Amendment. Well, I think that's an issue people ought to look at carefully. And frankly, there are a lot of Democrats from rural America who ought to be looking at it very carefully.

Because if her position on the Second Amendment is as radically opposed as the National Rifle Association suggests, I suspect there are millions of Americans who would find her unacceptable.

HANNITY: All right.

GINGRICH: And finally, the maneuvering she engaged in on partial birth abortion in which she wrote the language that a supposedly private group then released as though it was the group's own language is something somebody should be asking her about in detail.

Because it's a remarkable effort to have her - and she admits in her internal memos which were released that what she was doing was fundamentally false and that in fact the original technical scientific position of the medical group on partial birth abortion totally undercut the Clinton administration's position.

HANNITY: What are the top then, four or five items, you'd want to see the Republicans put in a new contract with America or promises to the American people? And when should they release it publicly?

GINGRICH: Well, I think the number one issue is going to be jobs this fall. We have a real jobs campaign in American Solutions. I would hope they would look at something like Congressman Jordan's American Economic Freedom Act and put something like that in with his dramatic tax cuts really rebuilding the Kemp-Roth Ronald Reagan model.

So first of all, huge tax cuts and regulatory reform in order to create jobs. And I'd add frankly have litigation reform.

Second, we need an American energy act which creates energy in the United States, keep $500 billion a year here at home. That would create a tremendous number of jobs and be better for our national security.

Third, they should be for dramatic controlling of federal spending. When I became speaker we kept spending down to 2.9 percent increase a year for four straight years. The lowest rate of increase since Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s. As a result we balanced the federal budget for four years, paid off $405 billion in debt.

I think cutting spending to get to a balanced budget with a smaller government while cutting taxes to increase the economy would be big winners and the environment will be in this fall.

HANNITY: I think if you add national security and energy independence, you're there.

Mr. Speaker, good to see you. Thanks for being with us.

GINGRICH: Glad to be with you.

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