Robert Reich in CNN Late Edition 2008, with Wolf Blitzer

On Energy & Oil: $4 gas hurts, but we need long-term solution

A: Well, it’s great but it’s not going to solve the long-term problem because demand is outstripping supply when it comes to oil. Demand from developing countries, demand from developed countries and there’s a limited supply of oil. This is the whole point--to move the nation as rapidly as possible to wind and solar and other alternatives, renewable sources of energy, that are also not going to harm the environment.

Q: But that’s going to take a long time for all of those other sources of energy to really have an impact. People are suffering right now, $4 a gallon.

A: It is going to take some time, but even the Energy Department says that if we had more drilling here in the US, it wouldn’t be until 2030 that you real saw the results.

On Free Trade: NAFTA would be better with labor & environment standards

A: I don’t think it was a mistake, but it wasn’t really a tremendous help. If you put labor and environmental standards into our trade agreements, it’s not a race to the bottom. If you have an environmental standard and a labor standard that, for example, bars all slave labor, guarantees the right to organize, maintains kind of minimum labor standards throughout the world, you are setting a floor for all nations. It’s not protectionism. This is a way of actually getting everybody up rather than having the bar continue to trend downward. We tried to do this in NAFTA, and, unfortunately, we couldn’t get the Mexican government support. We tried to have a labor and environmental side agreement. I think it would have been a much better agreement had we had that.

On Tax Reform: Bush tax cuts for rich are bad for the economy

A: It is a good idea to cut taxes on the people who are going to spend the additional tax revenues and those are people in the middle class. You have to have some revenues to keep the government going and the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy, people over $750,000 a year, are not great for the economy because the wealthy already have as much money as they need, you know. That’s the definition of being very wealthy. You’re not going to spend your additional tax cuts. Look, what you want to do is get the tax cuts where they will have a big impact. That’s what Senator Obama wants to do. That is on the middle class and, again, every independent analysis shows that his tax cuts for the middle class and his overall tax cuts are bigger than John McCain. What John McCain wants to do is continue supply-side economics. Continue to give big tax cuts for the rich. That’s the last thing we need now.