Transcript of Fred Thompson on Glenn Beck

Fred Thompson Interview

Audio Available:

January 18, 2008 - 11:19 ET

GLENN: Senator Fred Thompson, how are you, sir?

SENATOR THOMPSON: Hey, Glenn, how are you doing?

GLENN: Very good. It's a big weekend for you. I want to talk to you a little bit about the economy. Everybody now is talking about a stimulus package. George Bush, $800 tax rebates, Hillary Clinton wants everything from environmental rebates to -- I mean, everybody's giving away money. What would you do if you were President of the United States for the economy?

SENATOR THOMPSON: Well, it doesn't sound very exciting to start with but I'd try to make sure I knew what I was doing. We went through this in 2001, you know, and it's a rebate -- I mean, it's a stimulus party and everybody wants to load up the Christmas tree for their favorite projects and, you know, the Democrats want to drop money out of an airplane and things of that nature. But I think we need to first of all count on the Fed to do the right thing, which probably is going to be another 1/2 point cut from all I can tell. I think that that will do a lot in terms of the short term. We need to look at things like doing away with the lower tax bracket for a year, increasing the child tax credits from $1,500 for a year. I think that's probably what Fred was talking about. Sounds like it's about $150 billion package that would probably do some good in the form of tax rebates. But we can waste a lot of money in this respect and increase our deficit if we're not careful. We need to be target, we need to be somewhat careful and we need to make sure that the remedy matches the problem. [more here]