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Trump Outlines Economic Plan in Major Speech; Clinton to Give Economic Plan in Detroit Thursday; Fact Checking Trump's Economic Plan Speech; Polls Show Trump Campaign Needs Reset; Iran Executes Nuclear Scientist for Espionage. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired August 08, 2016 - 13:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[13:30:00] WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: What about the minimum wage? At one point he didn't want to raise it and another point said maybe $10. Where does he stand nationally on the minimum wage?

DAVID MALPASS, SENIOR ECONOMIC ADVISOR, DONALD TRUMP PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN & FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT TREASURY SECRETARY: You know, that wasn't addressed in this speech and there's going to be more parts of the economic program going forward. But the clear priority is to have wages go up for all workers and, very importantly, is to bring more workers and minority and youth into the labor force.

A critical problem in the economy right now is they are getting left out and that's so divisive for the country. And so the best way to get us going forward is to have a really vibrant business community that wants to hire new workers, workers that may not have the greatest skills but can improve their skills. That's what we want to achieve.

BLITZER: Why didn't he mention anything about the minimum wage in this very detailed nearly one-hour speech?

MALPASS: No, but that's not the priority. And I want to -- and so the priority of the speech is to unleash the economy, and so that's not the focus of the policy question right now. The focus of the policy is to get wages going up in a market system.

BLITZER: David Malpass is a senior economic adviser to Donald Trump.

David, thank you very much for joining us.

MALPASS: Thanks, Wolf.

BLITZER: The Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, will lay out her economic plan in Detroit on Thursday. It's expected to -- that plan will give more specific details on how her policies, from her perspective, will strengthen the overall U.S. economy.

I'm joined by Moody's Analytics chief economist, Mark Zandi. He's a registered Democrat. He's donated money to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Mark, thanks very much for joining us.

MARK ZANDI, CHIEF ECONOMIST, MOODY'S ANALYTICS: Thank you, Wolf.

BLITZER: What's your biggest criticism of the lengthy plan that Donald Trump just released?

ZANDI: Well, there's some stuff in it that I like and don't like. You know, I do think -- I'm sympathetic to the idea that if you lower marginal rates on businesses, individuals, you get more investment, you get more saving, all good, but you have to pay for it. Maybe we get a lot more growth. Maybe. But I don't think that's prudent to count on it.

What I would do is say, OK, let's have a plan that is deficit neutral, in a static sense, not counting on growth. And if we get the extra growth, great, and then we can have more tax cuts. I think that's the best way. Otherwise, you'll be in a situation where, if you're wrong -- and the academic literature is pretty mixed. If you're wrong and don't get the growth you expect, we end up with very large deficit and debt, and we can't afford that. It's not prudent to go down a path that we're unsure of.

BLITZER: What if you get 4 percent growth, as Mr. Malpass suggested? They think their plan will result in 4 percent growth. Will that eliminate more deficit, more national debt?

ZANDI: Hey, I mean, that would be fantastic. I mean, 4 percent growth would on a sustained basis. You can get that for a quarter or a year, but if you get that on a sustained basis, fantastic. And that does allow for more options for fiscal policy. You can do a lot of things with that. You can cut tax rates more and have spending on infrastructure, you know, all of the kind of things that we want to do. So bring it on.

But I don't think I center a plan around the idea that you're going to get 4 percent. That's something that we'll have to see. I wouldn't expect that you'd get it. So, you know, I don't think that's the prudent way to go.

BLITZER: What do you think of his proposal to lower the top income tax bracket from 39-plus percent down to 33 percent?

ZANDI: Well, again, can we pay for it? You know, and if we don't pay know, through extra growth, what are we going to cut? What is it that you have in mind? What kind of spending would you cut from your budget to make all of the arithmetic work? If you're not going to address Medicaid, Social Security, the parts of the budget growing more quickly, exactly what would you do?

The arithmetic here is very important. That's key for people like me, economists that actually sit down, look at the numbers, go through it in careful detail and see what the implications are. So we need that information and that detail, and until we get it, then it's really hard to know.

BLITZER: Like a lot of Republicans, he wants to eliminate the estate tax, what he calls the death tax. Is that a good idea? ZANDI: You know, I don't think that's a growth engine. No. That's

more about who pays the tax? High-income net worth households? The estate tax, then they pay more in tax. If you don't have an estate tax, they pay less in tax. It's more about the incidents of the tax, who is paying for it. It has much less to say about economic growth. That's not going to get you much juice in the economy, no.

BLITZER: He was very critical of Hillary Clinton on a whole host of issues, including this. Let me play a clip. He criticized her record when she was a Senator from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[13:35:12] DONALD TRUMP, (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE & CEO, TRUMP ORGANIZATION: Data shows that Upstate actually lost jobs -- a lot of them -- during Clinton's first term. In other words, she was all talk, no action. Upstate New York, the disaster. It's a disaster what's happened to Upstate New York. And NAFTA, which her husband signed, is a very, very big reason.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: So he keeps talking about NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Bill Clinton signed into law, saying that has been a disaster for the United States. Has it been a disaster for the U.S.?

ZANDI: No. No. I think it's been a significant net positive for the U.S. economy. Now, there are winners, big winners, and there are losers, big losers. And places like upstate New York may have suffered as part of NAFTA. I haven't done the research but it's plausible. On net, when you add up who wins, who loses, and add it all together, the U.S. economy is in a meaningful better place today, 23 years after NAFTA was signed, than otherwise.

And I think that trade, in general, you know, smart trade, good trade deals are a significant plus with the U.S. economy. It makes our economy grow, makes our economy tick. It's to our comparative narrative.

And by the way, Wolf, I think it's increasingly so going forward, because the rest of the word, the Chinas, the Mexicos, have deep middle classes that have grown out because of the trade we've engaged with them, and now they are buying the kinds of things that we produce.

So going forward, if we step back from trade, it would be dark irony. We are poised to benefit enormously, all of us, across the board, from our trade relationships with the rest of the world. That, in my view, is a mistake. That doesn't matter in any given year, it's not a big deal the next year or the year after, but when you look back a decade, a generation or two, if we step back from trade in any meaningful way, our economy will be significantly diminished.

BLITZER: Mark Zandi, thank you very much for joining us.

ZANDI: Thank you, Wolf.

BLITZER: Coming up, our reality check team has been digging through Donald Trump's speech line by line. We'll have a report when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:41:57] BLITZER: We're following the breaking news. In a speech today, Donald Trump spoke about making sweeping reforms, from reducing taxes to rewriting international trade deals, but how feasible are some of his proposals?

"CNN Money" correspondent, Cristina Alesci, is joining us; as is our CNN correspondent, Tom foreman. They're checking the facts.

Tom, first of all, what did you find?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I've got out reality check team busy with their calculators, Wolf, trying to get back to all of this.

Trump attacked a point he's made many times before, something he argues is holding businesses back and costing the country jobs. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: The United States also has the highest business tax rate among the major industrialized nations of the world at 35 percent. It's almost 40 percent --

(SHOUTING)

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: It's almost 40 percent when you add in taxes at the state level.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FOREMAN: Those are big numbers and they are pretty much correct. The federal rate is 35 percent and the state and local rates are around 6 percent. So he's on the money there with his math. But here's the catch, companies don't generally pay that. Thanks to tax credits, exemptions and offshore tax havens, in 2010, the Government Accountability Office found they actually paid about 12.6 percent. Two-thirds of American corporations had no federal tax liability. So in terms of what is actually paid, the U.S. is not at the top level but they are 16th highest. Now, maybe that's too high, in your political view but, nonetheless, it's not number one. Trump said it's true on the math but it's also misleading.

We checked out a whole lot more, Wolf. The calculators have been going. So much more to see. We'll have more as the day goes on.

BLITZER: That's very, very interesting. Cristina, does Trump's plan disproportionately help the wealthy, as

his critics are charging?

CRISTINA ALESCI, CNN MONEY CORRESPONDENT: Trump missed an opportunity to really highlight how his plan would impact the average and lower- income Americans here. One of the things he could have talked about more is his plan to increase infrastructure spending, which would have a direct impact on jobs, probably more immediately than what he talked about, which are his tax reductions.

I've got to be honest, Wolf, most of the tax reductions, if you look at them, will probably disproportionately benefit the wealthy. And he talked about Clinton and her $1.3 trillion in tax cuts, but those will fall on shoulders of the very rich. Fact, Clinton wants to apply something called the Buffett Rule. If your adjusted growth income is more than a million dollars, 30 percent. The burden clearly falling on the wealthiest Americans. He made it sound like taxes would -- reduced taxes would help middle to lower-income families but it's unclear exactly how that would trickle down to lower classes.

Also, on trade, a very complicated issue here. You know, he talked about how trade has hurt the American economy. Mark Zandi has said it has actually benefited the American economy. You just spoke to him. I was in Indiana, Mike Pence's home state, where there are dozens of researchers looking into whether these trade deals have actually helped Indiana, a big manufacturing state.

And on many of the objective, researchers say, it's a net positive for the state. I visited a manufacturer of large industrial engines there. Its executives told me TPP would help their bottom line. So it really is a complicated issue and you could pull an anecdote -- like Mark Zandi says, at Moody's, there are winners and there are losers. But next positive on trade.

[13:46:11] BLITZER: Cristina, thank you.

Tom Foreman, thanks to you.

Good work.

As Donald Trump tries to reboot his campaign with this major speech on the economy, the latest polls show the campaign is in need, in fact, of a reset. Take a look at this brand-new Monmouth University poll released this hour. Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 12 points, 46-34 percent. Clinton also has a double-digit lead in our latest average of recent surveys. She's up 49-39 percent in the CNN poll of polls.

Let's discuss. Our CNN senior political reporter, Nia-Malika Henderson, is with us. And Patrick Murray is with us, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Patrick, what's your analysis of the latest numbers you have in your brand new poll?

PATRICK MURRAY, DIRECTOR, MONMOUTH UNIVERSITY POLLING INSTITUTE: I think the clear thing here is about temperament, I think. And it's going to be interesting to see how this policy speech that Trump had today helps with changing the narrative because it has to become is Trump really capable, does he have the temperament to be president? We've seen those numbers slide. His numbers have gone down. In fact, after both conventions, Clinton's numbers have gone up. 61 percent say she has the right temperament to be president. So he has to do something which changes that dynamic, either moving it away or convincing the voters that he actually is a steady hand at the tiller.

BLITZER: You're an expert on polling. How concerned should the Trump campaign be about the numbers in your Monmouth University poll and our average polls of polls we've just put up?

MURRAY: They're consistent, right? So double-digit lead for Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump got a small bump in the few days between the two conventions. Hillary Clinton got a significantly larger bump. Part of that bump is positive -- a slight positive rating of her that has gone up, but also negative ratings of Donald Trump that have gone down. This is a big bump. Now, we're still in the convention bounce period, which means it's likely to come down again.

But the question is how much. This is a pretty big bounce. He needs to be concerned about because this is a bounce that suggests that voters are solidifying their view of what Donald Trump would be like as a president. And if that continues in the trend that we're seeing right now, particularly among white college educated women -- that's the big one where Mitt Romney won that vote and Donald Trump is losing it by 30 points right now. If he's got to convince those people that he's actually a stable hand.

BLITZER: He seems to be listening to his advisers and Republican leaders want a more focused, deliberate Donald Trump, not going off on tangent issues. The speech was very carefully written today and he read it from a teleprompter.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: He did. A rare thing from this candidate, to see him standing there and just reading text, reading about policy, reading about his own policy proposals. And in that speech, he also, I think, was thinking about the gaps he's seen in terms of women, he talked about the child care deduction which he would make unlimited in his tax plan, something like 6,000 now. He pointed to Ivanka Trump, who was in the audience there, who many people see as his ambassador to women, particularly college-educated suburban women. Those are the areas that he really has to focus. You think about states like Virginia, Pennsylvania where he's down in a lot of the polls we've seen so far. He's really got to figure out a way to drill down and really connect with that particular constituency because, as you said, these numbers -- I mean, we haven't seen these numbers before when you're talking about a Republican candidate. So to see him doing so horribly there, they've got a lot of work to do.

BLITZER: You said, Patrick, that in your poll, temperament was his biggest liability among voters, likely voters, registered voters. In your new poll, what is the biggest liability for Hillary Clinton?

MURRAY: It continues to be her trustworthiness. The e-mails are the key thing that really are driving her down. But what we're seeing in our polls, more than six in 10 say she hasn't been honest about how she handled her e-mails.

(CROSSTALK)

[13:50:10] BLITZER: Similar number for Trump?

MURRAY: Yes. But the issue we see with her e-mails is that most people say, we've heard enough about them, which means I think they maxed out on the e-mail potential. You can't drive them down further. Whereas, with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has raised issues about his friendliness with Vladimir Putin. We're starting to see that as a concern. Nearly half of voters say that concerns them. There are things that can move for Donald Trump that can't move for Hillary Clinton and that's why there are more warning signs in here for Trump.

HENDERSON: Yeah. He essentially keeps giving the Clinton campaign and Democrats more material. And in ads, if you go to these swing states, they are just using his words against him. There are entire ads that are just based on things he said in the past. I think Republicans, they have to be worried about, even if he reset, can he undo the damage over these last, not only just couple of weeks we've seen in terms of him talking about the Khans and getting into that back and forth, there have been many, many months of gaffes that Democrats will continue to seize on. I think the question is, can he reset and make it permanent.

BLITZER: Donald Trump throughout the primaries -- he's obsessed with the polls. He always spoke about the polls. But during the primary, he was doing well in the polls. So he's going to look at your poll right now, his advisors will look at your poll right now, and they'll say to Donald Trump, "Mr. Trump, you need to do -- based on your polling results, Patrick, what does he need to do?

MURRAY: He needs to become a policy candidate. He needs to do what he did today, simply talk about policies, instead of drifting off and trying to attack Hillary Clinton for being unhinged and all that. That doesn't play well among these voters, these white suburban women, who tend to vote Republican, who are swinging wildly towards Hillary Clinton because they don't like that language. They want to hear about child care and education and these bread-and-butter issues.

BLITZER: Patrick Murray is the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

Patrick, thank you very much for coming in.

MURRAY: My pleasure.

BLITZER: Nia, she is our CNN political report. She has no choice. She has to be here.

(LAUGHTER)

Guys, thanks very much. Coming up, a very different story we're following right now. Iran

executes a nuclear scientist they accuse of sharing secrets with the United States. We have new information right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:56:45] BLITZER: It's a true story so spectacular it could have come from a spy thriller. An Iranian nuclear scientist vanishes, reemerges in the United States under speculation he's working with the CIA, only to return to Iran, and years later, be executed in his home country.

Our global affairs correspondent, Elise Labott, joins us now.

Elise, it's unclear how this scientist, Shahram Amiri, came to the United States and his role with U.S. intelligence. You're getting new information. What can you tell us?

ELISE LABOTT, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, it certainly is a dark end to this real-life spy drama. A very strange case. Mr. Amiri came to the United States in 2009. He said in a video that he was abducted from a pilgrimage to Mecca. But U.S. officials said at the time that he actually was a willing participant and provided useful information to the United States about Iran's nuclear program. But what happened was they said that he changed his mind and he wanted to go back to Iran. He showed up at the Pakistani embassy, which runs the Iranian Intersection, demanded to go home, and when he was arrived he was greeted with a hero's welcome.

Secretary of State Clinton, who was serving at the time, said that he was not kidnapped, that he was free to come and he was free to go. It was all his decision.

But as we know, when he arrived back home, he disappeared, and the Iranian judiciary ministry just announced yesterday that he was executed for spying on behalf of the United States -- Wolf?

BLITZER: You mentioned Hillary Clinton. She was secretary of state for four years. The story -- this whole exchange, this whole meeting, encounter, with this Iranian nuclear scientist, there was references to it in her e-mails that have become public. What did they say?

LABOTT: Well, references to when he showed up at the Pakistani embassy. They never mentioned him by name but her aides were telling Hillary Clinton that he did show up at the Iranian intersection wanting to go home, there was nothing that really could be done. They needed to find a way out. But actually, Hillary Clinton was much more public about the case. When she spoke publicly to reporters saying he was not kidnapped, he was free to come, free to go. She said these were all his decisions to make, kind of pouring water on his claims that he was abducted and he escaped his so-called captors -- Wolf?

BLITZER: You've seen these reports that he wanted to go back because he was missing his little son. That's why he went back. Was he told by U.S. authorities before he went to the Pakistani intersection -- the Iranian intersection at the Pakistani embassy here in Washington, that he'd likely be killed if he went back?

LABOTT: Well, certainly they told him about what has happened to other so-called would-be defectors that have gone back and changed their mind. And he -- there was some suspicion that perhaps his family was being threatened or his family was being arrested and so he needed to go back home, but it was pretty clear he knew the risks -- Wolf?

BLITZER: He certainly -- I assume he knew the risks.

Thanks very much, Elise.

We'll have more on the story coming up later today in "The Situation Room."

That's it for me. I'll be back 5:00 p.m. eastern in The Situation Room.

Up next, the news continues right here on CNN.