5. Which industry will you tax into oblivion in order to create jobs?
Every presidential candidate has his or her pet program for creating new jobs. What is yours? What new taxes and new tax incentives are you going to use to turn the economy around? What, you can’t think of any? You aren’t very well prepared, are you? Don’t you want to put tariffs on imports so that Wal-Mart will go out of business, and Americans will have nowhere to shop for cheap goods, thereby promoting more expensive goods made in America? No? Well, surely you want to tax successful businesses so you can use the money to give loans to unsuccessful businesses to keep them afloat? No? Then what is your economic plan? You’re not going to interfere with the market at all? That’s not a plan. That’s just doing nothing. Nobody can run for president on a platform like that.
If only Bill Weld could keep drilling Gary Johnson with these questions, then maybe Johnson could come up with a better strategy than simply answering truthfully that he can think of nothing to do along the lines the interviewer is suggesting. These “Aleppo moments” are an opportunity to educate the mainstream media in what a libertarian candidate stands for, and why Gary Johnson is head and shoulders above the competition.
