Vice President Joe Biden said on NBC’s "Meet the Press" Sunday that the compromise tax-and-unemployment benefits package that President Obama signed into law last week was a matter of pragmatism.
The president chose to "compromise to save people who are drowning," Biden said to NBC’s David Gregory. "There’s people out there drowning. There are two million people this month that can’t afford to go get a Christmas tree, let alone buy any gifts, because their unemployment has run out…."
Biden described Obama as "a progressive leader" who understands that politics is "all about the possible."
Still thinks taxes too low for upper-income people
The vice president said that he and Obama still believe that the lower 2001 tax rates for higher-income earners that Obama agreed to extend for two years are "morally troubling" to quote a phrase Obama used in his book, "The Audacity of Hope". But, Biden explained, "Life is a matter of really tough choices."
Biden insisted that the president would come back in 2012 and make the case that the 2001 tax rates for upper-income people ought to be scrapped and that they ought to pay higher taxes.
“We will be able to make the case much more clearly that spending $700 billion over 10 years to extend tax cuts for people whose income averages well over a million dollars does not make sense,” the vice president contended. He said the fiscal commission headed by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles had recently helped make that point in its call for deficit and debt reduction.
He argued that economic growth is likely to be stronger in 2012 than today so a tax-and-spending accord of the kind Obama signed into law last week won’t be necessary.
Tradeoff may be necessary on earmarks
In another example of what he portrayed as necessary pragmatism, Biden told Gregory that Obama might in some cases decide to sign spending bills which include specific earmarks he disapproves of. “If the question is in order to keep the patient alive, we have to use a medicine we don’t like, we may have to do it,” Biden said.
He added, “If we say we have to support a levee in Mississippi in order to make sure my kid who’s out in the middle of Iraq or Afghanistan gets what he needs, I’m gonna say, ‘yeah, I don’t want to do it. But I may have to do it.’ It depends on the proportions. It depends on what’s at stake.”
On another topic, Biden implied that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange might face legal jeopardy for his role in making confidential U.S. government documents available to news media organizations.
Wikileaks Assange facing legal jeopardy?
“If he conspired to get these classified documents with a member of the U.S. military, that’s fundamentally different than if somebody drops on your lap here, David, you’re a press person, ‘Here is classified material,’” Biden said.
Gregory pointed out that Senate Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell said Assange is “a high-tech terrorist,” while others say his document release was more like the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department history of decision-making in the Vietnam War. “Where do you come down?” Gregory asked
“I would argue that it’s closer to being high-tech terrorist than to the Pentagon Papers,” Biden replied.
“This guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world,” he said. “He’s made it more difficult for us to conduct our business with our allies and our friends. For example, in my meetings, you know I meet with most of these world leaders. There is a desire now to meet with me alone rather than have staff in the room. It makes things more cumbersome. And so it has done damage.”
Biden comments were a slight change in emphasis from what he said in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell last week. “I don't think there's any substantive damage,” as a result of the Wikileaks disclosures, he told Mitchell. He acknowledged that “some of the cables that are coming out here and around the world are embarrassing,” but they have contained “nothing that I am aware of that goes to the essence of the relationship” between the U.S. and foreign governments.