Truncating quotes helps, too.
"The policies GOP espouses attract people" is how your post could be quoted. I'm sure you didn't mean it that way. It's why it's not considered ethical to quote in a way that changes the meaning.
Dickerson: "... Can you guarantee that every middle class person will get a tax cut once this becomes a bill and then that passes?"
Personally, I think that's a gotcha question. If you say "yes," if one person out of 10s of millions fails to get a tax cut--perhaps on paper, perhaps in effective tax rate, perhaps in absolute dollar amount paid--then you're a liar. I'm middle class. Part of the reason that I pay not so much in taxes is that my income covers my health insurance and my son's, pre tax, and because I'm having a fair chunk taken out for retirement, also pre-tax. If my son moves to my wife's insurance next year, my taxes will go up unless the rate is dropped precipitously.
Now, I sound petty, assuming that Dickerson really is expecting the middle-class tax cut to be a success only if it applies to each and every person, instead of even just, say, 99.999%. But I'm not: Under Dickerson's requirement, the tax cut wouldn't apply to me; but I file jointly, not individually, so it doesn't matter in the least whether I pay for my kid's insurance or my wife does. If we changed things tomorrow, my tax rate would go up, hers would go down, but it would balance out perfectly next April. So this is just not a reasonable expectation, right? The transcript continues:
PAUL RYAN: That's the purpose of doing this. The purpose of this is to get a middle class tax cut, to lower people's--
JOHN DICKERSON: So is that a guarantee?
PAUL RYAN: Well, I don't know every single person's little, small problem or issue--
JOHN DICKERSON: But it'll be minimal if nobody gets-- if I'm a middle class ...
So that's exactly what he's doing. He finally backs off a little and changes tack after a few utterances:
JOHN DICKERSON: But when the math gets worked out, there may be some families who do see their taxes increase. And I'm saying as an objective for the bill as it goes through its process--
PAUL RYAN: Right.
JOHN DICKERSON: --will you work to squeeze that number to as low as possible?
PAUL RYAN: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So the objective is to lower taxes for middle class taxpayers.
And Dickerson heads off in a slightly, but only slightly, different direction, but the topic's different and so this is a reasonable place to stop excerpting.
When the dust settled last week, the one surely true statement that could be made was nobody knows what the plan would produce; it's unlikely it would result in anything but a tax savings for the top 10%. All the details, all the estimates and numbers, crucially rely on the estimators' filling in and supplying numbers of their own, so those numbers reflect assumptions. They're all "what ifs" and hypotheticals, often masquerading as fact. Then again, Halloween is coming up soon.
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