[Cooper:] Lawmakers are back in town after the holiday weekend. The Republicans are focusing on one main priority, the GOP tax plan. This morning, the president tweeted about it, writing, "The Tax Cut Bill is coming along very well, great support. With just a few changes, some mathematical, the middle class and job producers can get even more in actual dollars and savings and the pass through provision becomes simpler and really works." Problem is that, it's not completely the case, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released its score the bill today. They say the plan would increase the deficit by $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years. But the average health insurance premium would increase by about 10 percent most years of the next decade taking more money out of family's pockets. And earlier, I spoke from Republican Senator James Lankford about the bill. Here's part of that conversation. Sir, Republicans have been selling this bill as tax reform that will benefit the middle class. I'm wondering how you square that with what the CBO is now saying, that Americans who earned $30,000 or less a year would be worse off under in 2019 when it goes into effect that most people earning less than $75,000 a year would be worse off by 2027 because of the losing subsidies, tax credits and premiums would rise.
[Sen. James Lankford , Oklahoma:] Yes. So, very interesting this is classic Washington math. If you take the CBO score or you lay it next to the JCT score, JCT is very, very different. Both of them are supposed to be nonpartisan. They are the two entities that we count on in Congress to be able to get a score of JCT. If you remove all the healthcare aspects, would be able to show a dramatic decrease in taxes for all those exact same people that you just talked about. CBO looks at it and says, well, if these individuals are not forced to be able to take healthcare, then the mayor may not take it, they don't use to be able to take it, then they won't have those subsidies and they count that as an increase in tax for them. It's not a matter of their taxes actually going up, it's a matter if they didn't actually take in the subsidies and so they count that in the strange way as actually removing taxes. It doesn't make sense to anyone, except for people in the Washington D.C., I would tell you, if you look at the actual score and actually what people paying taxes or don't pay in taxes, the actual amount they don't pay in taxes at this point would go down. Those individuals would pay less.
[Cooper:] But if premiums are rising for healthcare, if people are under 30,000 or under any number try to get healthcare, won't they end up paying more for it?
[Lankford:] Those premiums were still subsidized exact same way. You remove the individual mandate. It doesn't remove the subsidies that are there. So those individual that are receiving the subsidies right now under up to 400 percent poverty level will still be receiving those exact same subsidies. So we're not removing the subsidies, we're removing the mandates.
[Cooper:] The other headline from the CBO is that the tax bill would add $1.4 trillion to deficit over the next 10 years, you obviously, you know, traditionally been very concerned about the deficit, you've just put out your annual government wage report, blasting inefficient government spending and the growing national deficit, why this tax bill worth adding $1.4 trillion to deficit if you believe it does?
[Lankford:] Well, again, we go back to the same thing with the Washington math. The $1.4 trillion in additional deficit assumes there is no change in the economy. You lower taxes, people have more money in their pocket but they don't spend it and they don't save it, it just sits there. That's not true in real life. In real life, if people aren't have more money in their pockets, if businesses have more money, they buy more equipment, they hire more workers, people spend more money, they save more money, all of those things help the economy. If the economy starts to get healthy again, which is not healthy, it's stable, but it's not healthy right now. If the economy starts to get healthy again, then you have more people paying taxes and it goes up. So the and the essential thing is to look at is, what is the estimate for growth? Is it a reasonable growth estimate? Right now, it's 0.4 percent increase in the economy. If you have 0.4 percent, this is a break-even bill. Now, my proposal, and I've been very clear about it is, I want to have a backstop built into this bill that we currently don't have at this point. But, I'd like to have a backstop, so we in case we don't have a 0.4 percent growth, we have some way to be able to protect our deficit. Some way to be able to find the revenue to be able to resolve this. So, we're working through these negotiations right now as a part of this bill. But the key is, we got to get economic growth again. People lose track. We've had two percent growth for the last 10 years. We've not had a decade like that since the great depression. Every decade up until the last 10 years, we've had three percent of growth or more, except for the last 10. We can't get used to that as an American economy. We should be at three percent growth. We got to be able to nudge this economy to get healthy again.
[Cooper:] I want to ask you about the president's comment today about your colleagues Senator Elizabeth Warren, referring to her as "Pocahontas" during a ceremony honoring Navajo Code Talkers. Was it appropriate that the president of the United States to say that particularly in that moment?
[Lankford:] Yes. It seemed odd and out of place in that moment. I could definitely tell you that. I don't let my children and don't encourage my children to be able to speak that way. I think there's some good dialogue that you're going to have where you can agree or disagree without being personal. But it really did seem very out of place at that moment.
[Cooper:] Senator Lankford, appreciate your time. Thank you.
[Lankford:] Thank you.
[Cooper:] And we'll be right back.