House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says Republicans are losing the public relations battle over the tax cuts.
“They won the vote,” Pelosi said Thursday at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s annual Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C., “but they have not won the public opinion of it because the experience people have is something very contrary to misrepresentations they have made about it.” (The Fiscal Times is an editorially independent site founded by Peter G. Peterson.)
Pelosi said that, if Democrats win the House in November and she is elected speaker, she would look to revise the tax overhaul and negotiate an extension of the law’s tax cuts for the middle class while rolling back its deficit-increasing effects. She added that cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent was the “wrong way to go.”
More from Pelosi, via Bloomberg and The Washington Times:
- “Let me just say this: This tax bill has nothing going for it except helping the 1 percent.”
- "The tax bill is a dark cloud over our children’s future. We want to revisit in a way that puts the middle class first and reduces the debt."
- “Yes, we want to revisit it in a way that puts the middle class first but does reduce the debt — not increase the debt.”
- "Wouldn’t it have been better if we had spent over a trillion dollars on infrastructure" instead of "tax breaks for the wealthy?"
House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that Pelosi’s indication earlier this week that Democrats want to undo parts of the new tax law would fall flat with voters. “They want to raise taxes on hard-working Americans. They want to raise taxes on businesses. They want to make it harder for American businesses to stay in America,” Ryan said, according to The Washington Times. “I can’t imagine that America will want that to happen.”
