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GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
GLENN: From Radio
City in Midtown Manhattan, third most listened to show in
all of America. I'm glad you are listening. Thank you so
much. My name is Glenn Beck. Mr. Neil Cavuto is with us,
started the Fox Business Channel. Hello, Neil, how are you?
CAVUTO: Very good, Glenn.
GLENN: How are things with the business channel?
CAVUTO: Well, so far, so good. Always have kinks to work
out.
GLENN: Do you have sleep?
CAVUTO: No, Glenn, I've had no sleep. I'm like Jerry Lewis
at the end of the telethon.
GLENN: Well, I'm glad to have you on. I want to give you a
chance to talk a little bit about the Fox Business Channel
in probably a little better terms than what I read in the
paper -- I shouldn't say better terms. I haven't seen
anybody slam you guys. I don't know if they have. I'm sure
Fox, but I read an article where somebody actually said the
advantage of the Fox Business Channel over CNBC, and I just
wanted verification on this, is that you guys are in true
high definition where CNBC is not and I thought to myself, I
can't tell you how many times I think, if I could just get
my stock ticker in true high definition, I'd be set.
CAVUTO: Well, you know, some of the that I've seen come up
in review, I just shake my head. You are always prepared
for, you know, oh, they slanted this or they said this. I
wasn't expecting some of the ticker stuff. So I don't know.
GLENN: I've got to tell you, you know, I looked at the
ticker and Stu and I were talking about this. I think the
ticker thing is quite possibly brilliant. I mean, if you are
a sports fan, you are used to the ticker looking like that.
CAVUTO: Right, right.
GLENN: And then, of course, you have hot babes on the -- so
-- but then you --
CAVUTO: The females, I alone carry it for the sex appeal.
GLENN: I know. And I wish they would just have your voice
and not really show your face, just --
CAVUTO: Like Charlie's Angels.
GLENN: I'm just saying wouldn't that be great? You could
have Neil Cavuto and you could have the angels all sitting
around, the business angels and then just --
CAVUTO: Glenn, don't give them ideas.
GLENN: I'm telling you, a little speakerphone in the middle
and they can say, isn't that right, Neil?
CAVUTO: Careful. They will get ideas.
GLENN: I like it, I like it. I wanted to talk to you about a
couple of things. Why do you suppose there is this seemingly
unquenchable desire or drive to take this country socialist?
CAVUTO: Well, I do believe that a lot of folks, but more
politicians than average folks on the street want an easy
way out and when you're angry that someone has done well or
that you buy the notion that the haves and have-nots are
somehow greater than they were today 10 years ago, 20 years
ago, as long as I've been in this business, Glenn, sadly
there has always been that dichotomy. But if you're really
ticked off about it, then you have two choices, to lift the
bottom or bring down the top, and I find it a little
disconcerting that most of the Democratic candidates running
for President right now, in fact all of them, would rather
bring down the top. In other words, raise taxes from the top
to level the playing field and that's scary.
GLENN: But Neil, they're lying. It is something based not
only against our Constitution, it's a lie. I have Stephen
Moore on, what, in about 90 minutes from now. He's got an
op-ed pieces coming out in The Wall Street Journal tomorrow.
We were talking about it yesterday afternoon. And he said,
Glenn, have you crunched the numbers on the taxes and
revenue?
CAVUTO: Well, he's right. He's right.
GLENN: The rich are being hit harder, paying a bigger
percentage of the tax than ever before in all of history.
CAVUTO: That's true. And Glenn, I'll tell you one other
thing. Because I'm the business nerd here at Fox, it's my
job to keep track of the nerdy statistics. And the numbers,
the economics --
GLENN: Yeah, but you're surrounded by babes.
CAVUTO: Yeah, but that again backs to the Bosley thing.
GLENN: Okay.
CAVUTO: I tell you, Glenn, we have seen -- we've always used
the same measures for the economy, you know, unemployment,
productivity, retail sales, corporate profits. And by all
those measures we are actually better than we were 10 years
ago. Now, is it because there's a different President if the
Oval Office? Maybe. The war, I'm sure, has a very big effect
on people's psyche, but this idea that there's sort of a
class that's been deliberately disenfranchised when you talk
about the haves and have-nots or those who are ticked off,
been downsized or just totally left out of the picture is
that percentages are no greater or remarkable now than they
were 10 years, 20 years, 30 years ago. It gets a great deal
of press. This is a crucial type of election where you just
sort of exploit what you feel to be a class issue, but I've
never seen that issue work in any, in any race,
presidential, congressional, gubernatorial. I don't know how
that registers because when you talk to average folks,
Glenn, where they say what are their goals, they all want to
be wealthy. They all want to get ahead and I don't think
they think too highly of knocking down the top guys so that
they have a shot at the top.
GLENN: That comes to the point that Michael Moore made in
one of his ridiculous books where he was saying, you will
never make it in America. I had just the opposite view. I
mean, Neil, I grew up poor, I became mildly wealthy, I lost
it all.
CAVUTO: I hear it's more than mild by wealthy.
GLENN: I lost it all. Oh, no, I'm obscenely wealthy now. I'm
sure I'll lose it at some point but then I'll come back
again. If I can do it twice in America, anyone can do it.
CAVUTO: What worries me, Glenn, about it's not so much about
Americans who know how this game is played and I think you
are too smart for that. I worry about impressionable kids
when the message is sent from those in power, you can give
something away, you can provide shortcuts, you can find
alternatives to aspiring to the American dream. By having
the government doing it, I think that's very --
GLENN: We're doing that in everything.
CAVUTO: You're right we are.
GLENN: In everything.
CAVUTO: You're right. You know where I think it started,
Glenn, that woman who spilled the hot coffee on her at
McDonald's, it was all downhill from there. She won $9
million and then every -- it was open season and we lost
America from that woman who spilled her coffee.
GLENN: You know, I don't know if you're joking or not
because you are Tom Bosley. I mean, I think it did --
CAVUTO: Start blaming people for a spilled cup of coffee or
you are not getting ahead in life or you are arguing with
your spouse or something isn't working on the job and you
always try to shift the blame. I'll tell you, Glenn, the
shift has hit the fan here and people have got to realize
what's going on. It's bad.
GLENN: Okay. So tell me what do you see is bad? I see a few
things that nobody is talking about, Neil, and I'll have
people talk to me off the air, I mean, at the highest
levels, and tell me how concerned they are on a few things
if -- it's always preceded with, if, we add more stress to
this system or this economy, we are going to be in real
trouble. I can't even begin to understand it and if you
would just think of me as an ant and you as a human and talk
to the ant for a second in real -- I mean, in less than a
minute, if you can, the -- I can't -- I don't even
understand the Citigroup Banc of America, you know,
commercial paper, you know, half a trillion dollar thing
that's going on, but everybody tells me this could be a
very, very bad thing.
CAVUTO: Well, you know, you could always have very bad
things happening. You could always have in the case of these
three banks putting up all of this money. They are doing it
under great pressure from Washington: Look, you do something
to fix the these credit marks and calm them down or we'll
force you to. We'll force bailouts, we'll force higher
regulation, we'll do what the Resolution Trust Corporation
did to allegedly rescue the S&Ls back in the Eighties and so
under great Tony Soprano-like pressure, you know, they
folded like a cheap suit and did it. My only concern with
this is when we overdramatize it. I'm not here to say that,
look, things are peachy keen, they are problems. But we can
make a mole out of a molehill by saying that mortgage
meltdown is happening everywhere when we know that 96% of
mortgages are being paid on time. Meltdown to me means every
mortgage, every home in America is under lava and that's not
the case.
GLENN: Well, here's the problem as I see it. I mean, you
have the commercial paper problem, you have the mortgage
problem but then on top of that you've got oil going up,
you've got a war happening, you've got tensions in the
Middle East, you've got healthcare going crazy.
CAVUTO: Glenn, pick a time. You can pick a time and a moment
in a snapshot and you can look at all the problems at any
given bull market, even in bear markets, anything you want,
and you could find all the problems. Or you can flip it
around as the media loves to do and find that we have record
low unemployment, the highest productivity in the
industrialized world, the best corporate profits anywhere in
the world. We have a market that has shaken innumerable
attempts to knock it down. So I'm not saying everything is
perfect but would it kill us to now and then say some of the
things that are good.
GLENN: No, it wouldn't, it wouldn't. I'm overly concerned
and you'd make me feel better if you were on a speakerphone
and you had hot chicks around you.
All right, let me ask you. Have you been looking at the
candidates at all?
CAVUTO: No, I've been looking at the hot chicks.
GLENN: Me, too. Have you been talking about the candidates
while you've been -- while you were with the hot chicks?
CAVUTO: Yes.
GLENN: Can you explain to me at all the Huckabee fair tax
thing? I'm doing an hour with Huckabee on Friday and I've
already recorded it and he was going into it, and I don't --
what I don't understand is how some people say, well, --
because what I hear is he says it's 23% or 25% tax and
everybody else is saying, no, that's actually 33. What is
that? What is this thing?
CAVUTO: I don't know enough about his proposal outside of I
like the direction he's trying to go in. A number of the
candidates have talked about a fairer, simpler tax, as Steve
Forbes who signed up with Rudy Giuliani's campaign has been
pushing much the same thing, different percentages but same
story, try to simplify the tax cut.
GLENN: Wait, wait, he is not talking about simplifying it.
He is saying abolish it.
CAVUTO: Well, right. But the bottom line is you've got to do
something. Now, what I'm saying is it doesn't matter the
program that they are coming up with. If they are looking
for something radically different, we should welcome that.
We shouldn't be frowning on it. We should welcome radical
surgery, and we as a country should demand it. I think
tinkering around the edges with the tax code isn't the
answer. Throwing it out is. And I think --
GLENN: But nobody will -- I mean, what kills me, the media
has done such a disservice to this country. Here we have
damn near every member of the former Soviet Union going to a
flat tax of 17%. Their revenues are gangbusters. Everybody
else is cutting tax. We have the highest corporate tax rate
in the world and they're still talking -- Hillary Clinton is
actually talking about seizing profits from oil companies.
CAVUTO: Well, just be careful what's going on there. The
alarms, and if it were not for the babes, I'd be absolutely
apoplectic.
GLENN: See what I mean?
CAVUTO: I'm telling you, Glenn, what's happening is
something we should be aware of. We have a really big choice
coming up here and it's really up to your point of view.
More government, less government. More taxation, less
taxation. Some people, I have friends of mine that look at
the tax structure now and say, well, there should be higher
taxes for the approaching entitlement issues we're
addressing. All fair game, but that is the debate in 2008.
Don't get it clouded and muddied with all these other
issues. It's down to that and it's down to how much you're
willing to pay for what you're willing to offer.
GLENN: But you have, for the first time, if I'm not
mistaken, you have these companies, these giant companies
saying, yeah, you know what, I'm going to go for more
government, because they want the relief of the healthcare.
They think they are just going to be able to pass it on to
the federal government. The federal government is -- I mean,
the same thing is happening with, when these big
corporations tried to pass their healthcare nightmare on to
the unions, the unions aren't going to be able to handle it.
So they will pass it. Everybody's going to be standing in
line going, yeah, we want healthcare, except for the average
person.
CAVUTO: Well, I mean, this was the same issue raised with
Hillary Clinton's 401k plan that would be (inaudible) to the
government. Now, you might think that -- I thought that that
would be an (inaudible) to anyone in corporate America and
so one very bright Merrill Lynch partner told me, Neil, this
is a boom to Wall Street. They are going to be able to
invest all this money. So one man's lemons is another man's
lemonade. I understand how that works but I think we've got
to be very, very careful about assuming the government takes
over these burdens when companies will feel very happy to
shift.
GLENN: That's the thing that kills me that the media is
doing such a bad job. Tonight to bash these giant
corporations and they want to say, you know, A, the
government sucks but then they will never point out, you
know, wait a minute, you want to make it bigger? You want to
make it suck even more a part of your life?
CAVUTO: That's right.
GLENN: But then they also, while they want to tear down
these giant corporations, are they this stupid that they
don't see that the corporations want this stuff because it
will be huge for these global corporations? The only one
that loses in this is the American people.
CAVUTO: Well, I think also stepping back still further,
Glenn, is this notion of only in America can we reward a
poor performer by giving him more money. Now, corporate
America, if you had someone who was just doing a piss poor
job and then you said to them, you know what, I know you are
doing a piss poor job but I want to give you more money.
Essentially we are saying about the United States government
what we should be raising in debates by these programs that
are advocated, we already know that the Government, with the
best of intentions, is having a tough time even painting the
stripes on the highways and now you're entrusting them with
more and more responsibility. The best thing I saw is that
the Government is going to help me save. This is like me,
Glenn, offering you dietary advice. I find it hard to
believe that we are going to swallow the hypocrisy inherent
in that. But that said, only in America and only in this
campaign can we essentially be saying, you know that
government that keeps screwing up, that keeps overspending,
that can't keep track of where 20% of the revenues are
going? We want to give it more money. We want to reward it
with still more money to do still more of this stuff. That
would never fly in the private sector, nor should it.
GLENN: Neil Cavuto, the man who you can now see in high
definition. And by the way, I just want to say you should --
I'm not recommending that you're Tom Bosley because Tom was
seen. I am looking for you to be Charlie.
CAVUTO: Oh, oh, okay.
GLENN: We only see the back of your chair, maybe a hand.
CAVUTO: Maybe a hand. Speaker and a speakerphone on the desk
with the hot angels, all right?
CAVUTO: Got it, got it.
GLENN: Thanks a lot. Best of luck.
CAVUTO: Thank you.
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