GOP presidential candidate John Kasich has many goals should he be elected to the White House, but he says enforcing tax reform and particularly corporate taxes are foremost on his agenda.
"It's all about jobs," the Ohio governor told MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski in a weekend interview that ran on their
"Morning Joe" program Monday. "The first day, you call everybody and say, 'let's stop having a war.'
"And secondly, lets get on the path to getting some common sense regulations, lets get some tax reform, and get particularly the corporate taxes down so people will invest in America rather than in Europe."
In addition, said Kasich, "we have to rebuild the defense, but I have to find the magical defense secretary who is not going to beat up people in the Pentagon, but isn't going to get rolled over by people in the Pentagon and we have to create personal relationships with these world leaders."
The governor and former U.S. congressman said he also has confidence he can get along with powerful Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer because he has in the past.
"I still go there and people come up and say 'we miss you, can't we get something done here?' With Nancy, I'm friendly with her," said Kasich. "We're Americans before Republicans and Democrats. I negotiated a budget in the middle of impeachment, government shutdown and we still got it done, right? We can do it."
Meanwhile, Kasich said that he knows taxes can be lowered, as "everybody in the world knows our taxes are too high," but the nation's woes won't be fixed without bipartisan support.
"If people say I don't want anything to do with this, I want a guy to go in with a sledge hammer, but nothing is going to get fixed," said Kasich. "It means we have to battle the system, but make the system better."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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