necessitated a lot of spending. your response would be what? what event necessitated a 70% increase in non-defense discretionary spending during george w. bush s presidency? there is no answer to that question. what crisis requires us to have 100,000 employees in the department of agriculture? i don t know. we just accept without questioning these hysterical levels of government spending and use that as the baseline. here s something. how about we pay for all of that in taxes right now. let s see what the true cost of government is. the fact is, i think, the true cost of government as we have it right now is recession. angela, as we heard earlier, the president while taking a firm stance, also being criticized by the gop for taking a campaign approach to using photo ops with the middle class families to hammer home his point about who stands to be hurt most. is he wrong? is his approach wrong this time around? no, i don t think his approach is wrong at all. what you re seeing the
do is not a campaign style approach. it s actually a human style approach. he s reaching out to the american people by finding american families who will be hit if we allow the bush tax cuts to expire for all americans. the point the president is trying to raise, and i think he s making it very clear, is that 2% of americans we can allow their tax cuts to expire, and we will be one step closer to averting this fiscal cliff crisis than we would have been if we didn t allow their tax cuts to expire. the american people spoke very loud and clear during the election. i think it s time for us to respond. both sides will definitely have to compromise, but i definitely think president obama is headed in the right direction. dave, earlier on the morning show, republican senator bob corker indicated he would be okay with raising tax rates. take a listen. there s a growing group of folks that are looking at this and realizing that we don t have a lot of cards as it relates to the tax issue
push in. i have no doubt about that. in fact it s smart politics, it s smart policy. i think you ve seen republicans and democrats coming to terms with that, this is something that s going to get done. my guess is it s probably going to get done in the first year of the new presidency. joe after immigration reform, most folks suspect that immigration reform is going to get done in some way, shape or, form or fashion. after that, joe, what s, what do you think is going to be the focus of this president? i think this president has a numb of challenges. i think his biggest challenge of course right now is trying to bring republicans and democrats together on the matter of the fiscal cliff. because as we all know if we go over the fiscal cliff. that means higher taxes for everybody. it means a hit of $3.9% to the gp it means unemployment will probably go over 9%, maybe as high as 10%. think those are all the kinds of things that the president would want to avoid. we don t want that to be
cards and that way we can live to cut another day and cutting spending. here s bob corker the republican from tennessee. a lot of people are putting forth a theory and i actually think it has merit. where you go ahead and give the president the 2% increase that he s talking about. the rate increase on the top 2%. and all of a sudden the shift goes back to entitlements. and so corker went on to say, the debt is growing, congress is going to have to vote early next year. perhaps in february to raise that debt ceiling that we heard so much about a year and a half ago. and corker says then republicans are going to have the upper hand in leverage. and on it goes, the president has shot that down, saying quote i m not going to play that game any more. we ve got to break that habit before it starts. the clock ticks, the cliff looms. vic from the lawn of the white house, thank you good sir, do proesht that. with good sides seemingly at
reform. they re willing to go over the cliff and when there s nothing else to talk about but the debt ceiling increase in january, it has to be for medicare reform and exchange. dollar figure on entitlement reform, what are you thinking? the president has offered $400 billion. they would look for, they don t think those are real aggressive reforms. they would look for a higher number and they would look for more substantial changes to the program. they don t think those are really getting at the drivers of debt in the program. ed, politico today, there s an article on entitlements. republicans ready to get any victory that they can. according to this article. the article goes on to say quote they re going to have to lower their sights by a lot. from the big ideas they pushed in the presidential campaign. with obama in the white house for another four years, republicans are looking for something much smaller. even a down payment on medicare. that they can still call victory. is th