PBS Newshour 7/8/2011
Excerpts from transcript on World News scandal
DAVID BROOKS, New York Times columnist: There is also sort of a bad boy ethos in some of the -- especially the tabloids: We break the rules. We get the stories. We snoop. We're rats.
And we don't quite have that kind of tabloid culture.
WAIT! David, how about Fox News?
RUTH MARCUS, Washington Post columnist: Not entirely, because I think it's a very different situation here than it is there.
And I hate to sound awfully, you know, overly American chest-thumping, but, look, you cannot overestimate the degree to which Rupert Murdoch and his properties have an impact in the United Kingdom that is just so different from even his impact, despite the influence of FOX News and the 8,000 Republican presidential candidates that are on their payroll, here.
Excerpts on jobs
JIM LEHRER (Editor, Newshour): ... and go on to, what do you make of today's job numbers?
DAVID BROOKS: Pretty terrible, obviously.
I guess, to me, one of the things you take away is that we constantly have gotten this wrong. And I say "we" as sort of the economic consensus. There has been a view -- first, the administration saying that jobs -- unemployment would be down at seven percent or eight.
JIM LEHRER: Right.
DAVID BROOKS: Then we had the summer of recovery. And then we had some real job growth. And then we had a lot of economists saying, even up until yesterday evening, that the job creation was going to be better.
And it is just not there. And so one of the lessons I take away is, we don't know much about the economy. And the second lesson I take away...
JIM LEHRER: Nobody knows very much.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Nobody knows very much.
DAVID BROOKS: And I think most economists would concede that.
JIM LEHRER: Yes.
DAVID BROOKS: And the second thing I take away is that we're just not really good, the government is not really good at manipulating quarter-to-quarter growth.
The government can create the terms for long-range growth with human capital policies and good structures and good tax -- but boosting the economy from quarter to quarter, month to month, we just -- especially with fiscal policy, just don't have that within our power.
----
DAVID BROOKS: I just wish somebody would measure the magnitude of these effects. So, cutting taxes, it probably does hurt growth a little. Does it hurt growth a lot? I kind of doubt it. Cutting spending, it probably hurts growth a little, but a lot? Hard to measure these things.
RUTH MARCUS: Raising -- raising taxes.
DAVID BROOKS: Raising taxes, yes.
JIM LEHRER: But you cut spending, government spending, people lose their jobs. And that's what -- those people were counted in today's unemployment numbers.
RUTH MARCUS: Sure. You saw the -- you saw, the biggest category of loss was government, and state and local governments. Duh.
JIM LEHRER: Yes.
RUTH MARCUS: But the magnitude -- the thing that I find so frustrating about the use of these jobs numbers in the context of the tax debate -- or -- I'm sorry -- the debt ceiling debate is that people are not talking about massive tax increases now.
We're talking about -- and so, yes, there is a magnitude, and we can disagree about how great it is, about the impact of raising taxes. Nobody is talking about huge tax increases now. We're talking about the prospect of raising tax revenue over 10 years.
And lord knows, if we're not out of this terrible economy in 10 years, we're -- you know, we will be sitting here in sackcloth and ashes.
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