Criticism leveled at Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for his photos with his wife posing with his newly signed and minted dollars, calling the couple "villains from a James Bond movie," was brushed off Sunday by Mnuchin as merely having fun with the "great privilege and great honor" to sign the dollar bills.
"I never thought I'd be quoted as looking like villains from the James Bond," Secretary Mnuchin told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace.
"I guess I should take that as a compliment that I look like a villain in a great, successful James Bond movie."
Mnuchin recognized the "great privilege and great honor" of signing the dollar bills, even changing his "very, very messy signature" to write his name in print for a "neat and clean" look, and said he never anticipated the criticized photos to be shared.
"I didn't realize that the pictures were public and going on the Internet and viral, but people have the right to do that," Mnuchin told Wallace. "People can express what they want. That's the great thing about social media today. People can say and communicate what they want."
Earlier in the program, Mnuchin rejected the suggestion the Senate GOP tax reform plan should have made the individual tax cuts permanent and the corporate tax cuts temporary, instead of vice versa.
"Because we are changing from an international [tax] system to a territorial system, we need to make the tax cuts permanent," Mnuchin told Wallace, citing the Byrd Rule, which restricts budget reconciliation legislation in the Senate. "You can't tell corporations they're going back to a worldwide system.
"Because of that, we were forced to phase out the personal tax side, but nobody thinks that's going to be the case. Of course Congress is going to vote down the road to keep these cuts."
Mnuchin dismissed the "technical issues in the Senate," stating the focus of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is to create growth. As part of the bill, individual tax cuts would have to be revisited in 2025, to which Wallace suggested Mnuchin would "not going to be in office" then.
"I don't know that – maybe I'll be working for President [Mike] Pence at the time, but I don't know that," Mnuchin said on "Fox News Sunday." "We’ll know by then whether this creates growth or not. If it does, we'll have an incredible economy . . . if it doesn't, Congress will deal with it at the time.
". . . We have a lot of confidence Congress will do the right thing."
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