Alec Baldwin Talks Higher Taxes, Money for the Arts, Mitt Romney
Hamptons hero Alec Baldwin was not talking only on Capitol Hill Tuesday, advocating for Americans for the Arts. The 30 Rock star was interviewed by Bloomberg, discussing topics from funding for the arts and his continued interest in politics to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to his own 32 percent tax bill.
Baldwin on taxes: “I fully expect my taxes to go up. There is a bill that’s due. One of the tragedies in this country right now, one of the primary political conditions is we are not taking responsibility for the situation we got ourselves into. The American people elected Bush, particularly to a second term, he was elected to a second term and all of these things and did not want to raise taxes in that classic kind of guns and butter analysis. You cannot have that in this country. I paid 32% of my income in federal taxes last year. I pay a lot of money in taxes, for me, happily so because that is the cost of living in this country.”
Baldwin on government and the deficit: “There are two things—one is an opinion and one is a fact. The opinion is that we cannot run the government like a business. The government needs to be run in a more businesslike way, but you can never run a government like a business. There is a humanistic component to government work that trumps most kind of business models. Number two, every single person from both parties that has come into office in the last 30 or 40 years has talked about cutting government spending, and none of them have done that. Worse, two Republican administrations, Reagan and Bush W., from 2000 to 2008, they increased deficits more than the Democrats did.”
Baldwin on Mitt Romney: “I think Romney is a serious challenger, but I do not think that he will beat Obama.”