Interview: Hillary Clinton
>> whatever she decides to do about her party’s presidential nomination, hillary clinton is coasting to a second term in the united states senate. my interview with senator clinton continues with the issues now dominating the national debate―illegal immigration, a nuclear iran, the “scooter” libby leak case and, of course, taxes. you cited fiscal discipline earlier and i know that you and most democrats advocate rolling back the bush tax cuts for the very wealthy e.. do you think the 15% capital gains tax rate, then, is too low?
>> we have to look at the whole package. i, obviously, am an adherent to the clinton economic policies. i believe in fiscal responsibility and i know there are some who come on your shows and say that’s outdated, we don’t need it. i think that’s a very dangerous position to take. we need to figure out what is it we’re trying to achieve and then we have to look and see on both the spending and taxing sides how we get there.
>> that would involve a higher capital gains tax?
>> i don’t know.
>> if you roll back the bush -- >>.
>> if we went back to the clinton policies, it would. i’m not sure that’s exactly what we should do but i think the combination of fiscal responsibility and economic growth proved to be beneficial.
>> what about the level of corporate taxes?
>> there’s a great debate on this. it’s hard to answer because even what’s on the books isn’t often paid, we know that. there are so many loopholes. what is the effective corporate tax rate for the average american company? i don’t know. i don’t think anybody does. how many more companies can be jammed into that little building in the bahamas that’s the corporate hckets for -- headquarters for these companies to evade their tax rates. i think we have to take a hard look at it. i think we want to incentivize american corporations to invest more in r&d and over the long term, not lurching year to year as the research and development tax credit needs to be reauthorized. we need a much more robust r&d agenda for american businesses. we also want them to begin to take some of these profits and productivity gains and put it into wages, something we haven’t seen in five years. i don’t want to do anything that interferes with those two major objectives which should be part of the economic growth that we should be looking at in this country.
>> senator, you said in the armed services committee, reports this weekend that the united states is considering military option against iran if it won’t relinquish ambitions to nuclear weapons. “the new yorker” said we’re considering using tactital nuclear weapons. should those options be on the table when it comes to iran?
>> i have said publicly no option should be off the table but i would certainly take nuclear weapons off the table. this administration has been very willing to talk about using nuclear weapons in a way we haven’t seen since the dawn of the nuclear age. i think that’s a terrible mistake. secondly, when it comes to iran, i think the administration needs to engage in a process with iran. they outsource this issue of whether iran would go nuclear to the europeans. i thought that was a mistake then. i’ve said it a number of times since. we dealt with the soviet union with thousands of missiles on hair-trigger alert pointed at us. i remember hiding under my besk desk as a child. but we lived with that threat and never stopped negotiating and engaging in a prose with our most implacable foe for decades, a country that was dedicated to destroying us. this administration takes this kind of hands-off approach to north korea, to iran. all i know is that five years ago north korea didn’t have nuclear weapons. we now believe it does. and five years ago iran may have been toying with it or thinking about it, now it looks as though it’s on the road to it. we have to be much more diplomatically engaged and not have this hands-off approach to it. here we have a president at least giving an implicit go ahead.
>> is this analogous to what nixon did?
>> we don’t know. we don’t know. but we do know that for political purposes that used national security to score political points and to protect decisions and decision makers, material was declassified.
>> on the next “for the record,” cisco c.e.o. john chambers and charles phillips.
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Listen Interview: Hillary Clinton
>> immigration came close to getting a deal in the senate, fell through. will you get a deal and was that a good accord.
>> it was a decent compromise, a republican compromise. senators martinez and hagel hammered it out. the bipartisan coalition in favor of comprehensive reform stood behind it and then it was torpedoed, i think under pressure from those members of the republican cautious who don’t―caucus who don’t want any deal, even one that was scaled back in a way that kept border security paramount but had a path to earned legalization. this is another example of the denial that i see afflicting washington right now. it’s part of what i call turning washington into an evidence-free zone. the evidence is clear that our borders are not secure and we have 12 million immigrants, we don’t know who they are, we don’t know what they’re doing,
