The following is an edited transcript of Mitt Romney’s Jan. 27 phone interview with The Denver Post’s editorial board.
The Post: We thought we’d give you a couple minutes to give us an opening statement about why Americans should elect you president, but we also hope that you talk about why people in the West ought to vote for you.
Romney: I believe that America faces extraordinary challenges right now, and they come in a number of different shapes and forms and from different arenas. The greatest threat to our nation is the threat of radical violent jihad. Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan but all the way from Indonesia to Nigeria and Algeria and Kenya and throughout the world where various moderate leaders are facing a threat from radical jihadists.
The next challenge we face is an economic challenge both short and long term. Short term a lot is being said about the various stimulus plans and I’d be happy to describe mine if you like. But longer term is a greater concern to me in some respects. And that’s a recognition that Asia … is now becoming an economic powerhouse. And they will give us a real run for our money economically. And frankly the trends are not good. And the world markets and financial investors are seeing a crash in our foundation relative to the Chinese and Indians and others.
And a third area of challenge relates to our failure as a nation, and particularly in government, to deal with the out of control growth of entitlements. Overspending, generally. Overdependence on foreign oil, which we talk about every election cycle but about virtually nothing gets done. Issues related to our environment maintaining the air, water and beauty of our current environment and issues related to global warming. Again, very little progress made on that front.
And the list goes on as we have 47 million people who don’t have health insurance. We can solve that, but we have not. falling behind. We have a number of major challenges and confronting those challenges is … going to require thinking outside the beltway and a person who knows how to build a team and evaluate and analyze complex situations, creating solutions that will deal with those issues and then implement them. These are critical times that require more than a person who is a typical politician and I spent the last 30-plus years in the private sector dealing with tough issues with the Olympics in Salt Lake City and finally as a governor and have gotten some unusual things done in each of those venues.
With regards to the intermountain West where obviously I have some familiarity given my work at the Olympics. Philosophically, I am a federalist. Being a former governor, I must admit from time to time, I feel resentful when the federal government steps in and tries to take away from the state and their own leaders and their own people the authority to make decisions that affect that state. And I would resist playing the heavy hand of the federal government in making decisions that Coloradans should make for themselves such as the development of energy sources, the preservation of key lands, issues related to the sharing of water.
I favor state and regional approaches and generally look for the federal government to serve the power of the people. I’m convinced that America’s future can be brighter than our past. But I am also convinced that if we continue to operate the way we have the last few years in Washington that we will potentially find ourselves being passed by China somewhere down the road and that’s frankly unthinkable to me to think of an economic military power other than the U.S. leading the world. And so I am in this race because I want America to be strong and prosperous for my kids and my grandkids and for the people of America. So with that I turn it to you.
The Post: You mentioned that you would be willing to share with us your economic stimulus plan. Give us a bullet point presentation on your economic stimulus plan.
Romney: I’ve got three parts: consumer, business and housing. First with regards to consumer, I would lower the lowest tax rate from 10 percent to 7.5 percent, give people the bigger refund check this April 15. It’s about a $400 benefit for each family this year and another $400 for the coming year because of the lower rate. It’s not as large as a consumer driven stimulus as the president’s, but there are some other features that I propose that have longer term impact.
The other is allowing people who make $200,000 and less and that’s 95 percent of Americans, to save their money entirely tax-free. So no interest, dividends, or capital gains tax on people who are making under two-hundred grand a year that would encourage people to save, and it would allow them to see a faster roll up in their savings value. We put more capital in the market place and at the same time we encourage Americans to become investors in America. So that’s my consumer piece.
Then on the business side very much like the president’s, I propose that businesses write off capital expenditures in each of the next two years, 100 percent in the year they acquired the capitol item. And obviously that would be a very quick stimulus. I also propose lowering corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent to 20 percent. I’d do that over a couple of years but lower tax rates mean more investment here in this country, more jobs, higher wages. I’m not trying to find a way to get the wealthy wealthier. That is not my incentive, but I do want to create more jobs and stimulate our economy and have more businesses stay and grow here.
And the third leg I mentioned here is housing. With regards to housing, I would put additional funding behind the FHA (Federal Housing Administration) and allow them to relax their standards to a certain degree on down payment levels and the scale of mortgages they can guarantee so we can keep more people in homes who are able to meet the original terms of their original mortgage and have a financial where with all to do so. I just don’t want so many homes going into foreclosure that we kill our housing market and throw ourselves into a housing led recession.
The Post: Now when you cut that much taxes how do you deal with the budget crisis that would help create?
Romney: The numbers are actually remarkably small, which surprises some folks. So, for instance, no capital gains for middle-income Americans — no capital gains, interest or dividends costs about 32 billion dollars a year. And that’s the biggest single impact. And lowering the corporate tax rate, that’s one where you have to look dynamically and say what will that do in terms of job creation and business growth? Without any growth, without any job creation, it wouldn’t make any sense at all. You get the growth impact that we’ve calculated. Of course we have a lot of folks looking at this and interestingly both Democrats and Republicans agree on this.
The Post: Talk about what the federal government’s role should be in expanding access to health care.
Romney: What I would do as president is provide the incentives for each state to create their own plan to get everybody insured. I think most states would copy what we did. There are some features of our plan that I didn’t like. I vetoed them; the legislature put them back in so our plan is not perfect, far from it.
But it does lay out a very good basic imprint for getting everybody in this country insured, not with government insurance, not with Medicaid, Medicare or the federal employee insurance but instead with private free market insurance. So in our state what we did is we get everybody insured either by Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Fallon, Harvard Pilgrim all the different companies that offer products.
We get them insured with those products, and it did not cost us more money than we were spending in giving out free care at the hospitals. Let me take a second because a lot of people think, ‘What are you talking about?’ We as a state were spending about a billion three giving out free care at hospitals and that was between the federal and state government as well as insurance companies. We said, what would happen if we tried to get everybody to buy private insurance and we helped the poor buy their own policy? We subsidized the poor. Initially, we thought there’s nowhere near enough money because there are so many uninsured.
Then we found out that more than half of the people who were uninsured could afford to buy their own insurance; they just chose not to. And we said look guys either buy your own insurance or pay your own way but no more showing up at the hospital as free riders expecting someone else to pay your way.
So that took care of the people who could buy their own insurance. It lead to this small pool of the poor that needed help buying insurance and a process that spent less money to help the poor buy insurance than it had been costing us to give them free care in the hospital. We got help from the federal government because they said that the money we had been receiving about $400 million a year, we had been receiving under a Medicaid waiver. They said they’d let us use that money to help people buy insurance rather than to just give to hospitals so it took some flexibility from the federal government.
I would provide that flexibility to each state.
Frankly having 47 million people in the country without insurance means that you have 47 million people who when they get sick, go to the hospital, they get treated for free. And everybody else is paying for them. That doesn’t make sense. And we said no more free riders; we’re getting people to pay their own way.
The Post: We had a poll in The Denver Post this morning saying immigration, second to the economy, was most on people’s mind. We know what you think about the issue. But what would you do as president with a Democratically-controlled Congress?
Romney: I think actually we could have gotten a deal done had Ted Kennedy not taken over the McCain-Kennedy bill and have his staff redraft it. What went wrong and I frankly haven’t had this discussion with Sen. McCain and probably he won’t be anxious to have it. But under the original McCain-Kennedy bill, the number of people who were here illegally that got to stay without having to go home, the people who got amnesty in some form, was a very small percent. It was 5 or 10 percent based on our calculation. Ninety plus percent had to go home.
Under the final bill. however, literally every illegal alien that was not a convicted criminal, every illegal alien, got to stay.
There was something known as ‘Z’ visa and if you read the bill, and I read it and it said that every illegal alien can apply for a ‘Z’ visa while they are waiting for their process to become a citizen. And it said that the ‘Z’ visa is only temporary. It only lasts for two years. But then if you read further back in the bill it said ‘Z’ visa may be renewed indefinitely, and so basically you’re saying every illegal alien got to stay in the country forever whether or not they applied for citizenship or they were ever given a green card. And that’s what killed the bill.
I’m convinced that the Democratic Congress along with the Republicans would say, ‘Look, for those who would come here illegally we’re going to have a set period of time for those individuals to be able to stay in the country and complete their work here and so forth.’ Ultimately they will return but they get some period of time. So for instance somebody who’s been here for 10 years has kids in school, you’re not going to have them go back in 30 days to go home. You’re going to stay instead you can stay for some extended period time after which you go home. You can apply for citizenship or permanent residency but no special pathway for you to get back in. But you know that’s going to take negotiation.
The Post: Why should national security Republicans vote for you as commander-in-chief instead of John McCain, a Vietnam veteran.
Romney: Why support me in a time of war? I guess if it is true that the president of the United States needs to serve in the U.S. military then I can’t make a very good argument. But I happen to believe that we’ve had some excellent presidents like Ronald Reagan, who although I know Ronald Reagan served but certainly did not serve in the capacities that would have led him to have made critical decisions as a general.I believe we have seen great presidents who have the capacity to make important decisions. We’ll go back to Abraham Lincoln. And the capacity to deal with complicated issues to analyze them to solve them to have the temperament and judgment and wisdom and perspective to make complicated difficult decisions. That’s what’s required, not simply somebody who has served in the military.
But I must admit I do wish that I had that military experience. It would be valuable. I certainly expect that military experience in the Secretary of Defense and other key military leaders of course, but I can tell you that when it comes to the judgment, experience, that temperament and wisdom to make complicated, difficult decisions, well, that is what I know how to do. And I’ve demonstrated that through 25 years of the business world through management of the Olympics, through my management of a state. I’ll mention one more thing. Over the last 35 years I have been an executive leader. I have been running businesses, running the Olympics, or running a state.
Sen. McCain is a fine person, but for the last 25 years he’s been a legislator. He’s been expressing his opinion, but he hasn’t been an executive leader. He has not had to build teams, lay out strategies, monitor other strategies, benchmark how other strategies are moving and achieve results. And that’s something that is very different between a legislator and an executive leader.
The Post: As governor of Massachusetts you gave high priority to developing renewable energy. As president would you support the mandatory 10 percent renewable portfolio standard for electrical utilities?
Romney: You know I haven’t laid out a specific standard. I do want to move toward renewable energy, and I just haven’t put out a position paper on how on what percentage would be required and so I’m going to allow myself to study that further. I can say that I think we have to have a strategy, which gets America entirely energy independent and energy secure. I’m a believer in generating our electricity through more clean burning ways.
We in our state for instance moved very heavily toward natural gas and found that of course to be a very clean burning, low greenhouse gas-emitting source of energy. I also will substantially increase our investment in technology both for generation of new sources of energy as well as for efficient use of energy.
Frankly, I believe that energy efficiency is lower cost and a more immediate way of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and also reducing our dependence on foreign oil. So I propose that we increase our spending over time from $4 billion a year on energy research and energy efficiency up to about $20 billion a year. I know that’s a big number, but I think it’s going to be necessary to get us off of foreign oil. I would also look to work in public-private partnerships agreeing to off-set high prices of certain clean burning features like liquid coal where you could sequester the CO2 and stimulate the development of a market. I like wind power. I like solar power. I don’t believe they alone can begin to solve our massive energy dependence problem.
The Post: You can find examples in Colo., N.M., Wyo., and Utah where there’s consensus that there are some places that are too special to drill or where people have called for very limited drilling, and I wonder if given your stance that you would try to leave decisions to the states if that would apply to the drilling of natural gas in some of those areas.
Romney: I would want to look at the specifics of the circumstance. But for instance in the state of Utah, you had the federal government come in and take vast tracks of land and say you can’t harvest your coal resources from that land. I know that the governor at that time was very concerned by the Clinton administration. I think it was an overreaching on the part of the federal government. There are of course certain resources in this country, which should be preserved and protected.
The Post: One of the challenges that we face in the West is that the federal government is the largest landowner. Generally it’s the federal government telling us what they’re going to do with their land.
Romney: You’re about — what — 40 percent of federal land in Colorado? Places like Nevada it’s over 90 percent. And talk about the heavy hand of the federal government when they take your land and own it, it puts you in a very weak position. And frankly that is something I would not be inclined to do is to have the federal government play that kind of dictorial role.
The Post: One of the criticisms against you is that some of your social positions when you were running for Senate in 1994 and the same social positions today are somewhat different. Can you talk to about that?
Romney: I’d be happy to and I’d note that rumors of those changes have been greatly exaggerated by my opponents, and it’s stuck. And I recognize that, and I’ve done my best to try and shake that but it’s going to be with me there’s no doubt about that.
The most significant change was with regards to abortion, when I ran for office both in ’94 and then again when I ran in 2002. I said, ‘Look, I personally oppose abortion, but I think the government ought to stay out of it. And that’s effectively a pro-choice position. And then I became governor and I became government and I got a bill on my desk, which would have caused the creation of new life through cloning and the destruction of that life after 14 days and I simply said I cannot be party to that. I cannot sign a bill that will allow that. And said, look I recognize that now that I am government, I simply must come down on side of life. I described why that was, and during my term as governor I was consistently pro-life.
Whether you agree with me on that one or not I am pro-life, and it is a significant change and I’m not apologetic about it. It’s the same change that George Herbert Walker Bush made and Ronald Reagan. As you know Ronald Reagan as governor signed a very expansive abortion rights bill. I never did that. I came down on the side of life the first time I got a bill that related to life.
On other issues … I continue to oppose discrimination against gay people or anyone else for that matter. And when I ran for Senate in 1994, I made it very clear that I would fight for the rights of gay people and for efforts to oppose discrimination. What has happened in the ensuing years, of course, is with the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial court, now gay marriage is the law of the land in my state. I continue to oppose gay marriage, but I also continue to believe that in avoiding discrimination in housing and employment against gay people. So there is no change in that view with regards to anti-discrimination and favoring traditional marriage. But the fact that in ’94 I said I was strongly in favor of gay rights and anti-discrimination and I am. It’s just that the world changed when gay marriage occurred and that became a new definition of gay rights.
The last area is with regards to the 2nd Amendment. In ’94 when I ran I said I supported the 2nd Amendment, I also supported the assault weapon ban at that time. As governor I supported the 2nd Amendment, and the NRA made support calls to people in the election to ask them to support me when I became governor. We had an assault weapon ban that was negotiated between the pro-gun lobby and the anti-gun lobby. It relaxed our licensing requirements in our state and because the pro-gun lobby and the anti-gun lobby agreed; I signed that. I indicated that if I were president, I would sign the assault weapon ban extension. But I’ve also indicated that I do not favor any new assault weapon bans including assault weapon bans on semi-automatics. So I support the 2nd Amendment, and I supported the former assault weapon ban. I do no support new federal legislation.
And let me tell you that anybody who says that over 14 or 15 years that they haven’t learned anything that would tell them they were wrong about something and someone who hasn’t changed their mind is someone you wouldn’t want them a president.
The Post: If you become president you are going to inherit a fairly unpopular war. What do you think needs to happen in Iraq?
Romney: I want to take this to a broader answer as well, a battle against jihad. I do support the troop surge. I would not pull our troops out until we have become convinced that the Iraqi military is able to secure the country from becoming a safe haven for Al Qaeda. I recognize that Al Qaeda was not there in force prior to the Iraq War, but they are there now. They’re trying to take over major portions of the country, the Sunni portions of the country.
We simply cannot allow Iraq to become a safe haven for Al Qaeda or any other group of that nature. So I will support that, that effort. I will work aggressively with the leadership of that country to try and get political progress but I can tell you that the progress that is surprising is the progress that’s happening at the local level. Local sheiks particularly Sunni are working with our military as you know. That came as a surprise. There is progress, albeit slow. I will encourage that progress. But the key thing of course is to make sure that Al Qaeda is not playing a dominant role there.
Right now we’re fighting wars and that’s what we’ve got to do. But in addition to fighting those wars we have got to support moderate Islamic people so that what’s happening in Pakistan doesn’t get duplicated throughout the world of Islam.
