Letterman And Rand Paul Engage In Spirited Debate Over Education, Class And Taxes

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) is making the rounds on late-night TV promoting his new book The Tea Party Goes to Washington, and last night he showed up on the set of Late Night with David Letterman. The discussion was entirely civil, though it was not without some significant disagreement and passion over tax cuts for the wealthy, public and private sector jobs and the labor dispute in Wisconsin. Paul appeared to score on points, though Letterman’s disagreements were severely undercut by a lack of facts.

After exchanging pleasantries over Paul’s new role in Washington D.C. and their mutual friend Al Franken, Letterman turned the conversation to policy “You want to shrink that strata of American workers and give tax breaks to people who well could afford to pay higher taxes.
So are we hurting the middle class?” This led Senator Paul to provide an overly simplistic explanation and defense of why the wealthy should be taxed less and how a free market produces better product than that which is government funded, or is lacking in competition.

A number of times Letterman responded to Paul’s confident explanation of facts that he claims have support his organization by claiming “that doesn’t sound right.” And Paul’s assertion that Wisconsin teacher’s make $89,000 a year (to which Letterman exclaimed “they should make twice that!”) has been declared by Politifact to be “barely true” because its an “apples-to-oranges” comparison. Still, the back and forth between host and Senator was quite entertaining.

Unless there was any confusion on where Letterman stood, when he came back from the commercial break, he told band leader and show compadre Paul Schaffer “they want the regular guys to lose their collective bargaining positioning and also wealthy fat guys to get tax breaks!” So there’s that.

Watch the segment, courtesy of CBS below: