to do it. if you re talking small ball, i m assuming revenue is off the table. besides medicare, are there other cuts that democrats could live with in place of the sequester? i think when you took everyone through the beginning of what has been happening here and where are sort of the battle scars in the last couple of years, you know, we chuckled when we got to do you remember the supercommittee? and i thought, wow, the super committee is the laugh line now. but i think the bottom line that you really get to now is this issue of sequester and the fact that actually the american economy failed to grow by $24 billion over the last couple of weeks. people are suffering under the sequester. additional cuts are not going to make life easier for americans and i think this is really the issue now before the budget committees and i think that it is up to the democrats if they care about this to keep it front and center because i think, you know, this issue of where the economy is headed an
getting $1.2 trillion in cuts. and those gl 1.2 trillion were going to come in an agreement by the super committee which failed or the sequester which guess what? they just turned off for two months. so we are right back to where we were in august of 2011. right. and again, just to recap, this dpeel right now, temporary deal has passed in the senate. it is due for a vote probably sometime later today in the house, where passage is not exactly clear. but either way, it is just a temporary bill that s going to put off some of these issues for a while. we did technically, go off the cliff, at midnight. but officials are pointing out that, since january 1 is a holiday, none of it was going to be implemented anyway. and if the house does vote on this today, january 1, then this deal can take effect by january 2. then we didn t actually go off the cliff. it was more like a bungee jump as one pundit put it.
have businesses fearful of expansion. we have calculated there will be some millions of dollars across our system. some millions. so what does that say in that says we won t build more restaurants, we won t hire more people. that is the opposite effect. in a separate gathering of ceos today, the wall street journal ceo counsel meeting, few industry titans were optimistic. i had sessions this morning. they definitely believe there will be some agreement before the fiscal cliff. on the fiscal cliff. the pessimism may be rooted in history. the last budget negotiations conducted by the super committee. it s disappointing but the reality is the president did not weigh in. he issued a threat immediately upon the first meeting. he gave democrats no cover. he showed no leadership. he didn t help us on tax reform, entitlement reform. he needs to be part of the process. that would make a huge difference. today, white house signals about the pending negotiation sounded similar to
the whole thing was set in motion by the collapse of the talks and the sequester and negotiations by the super committee. they re starting with actually boehner and obama came quite close that summer. so they re starting with a lot of work done. it s one of the reasons why i think there s a chance there s a cause for hope that this can get done relatively quickly. they ve had a lot of pieces of paper with a lot of numbers on them that got them close. chris is right, the president will feel like he ll have a stronger mandate in a stronger position and i also think they really think about the president he thinks of himself in historic terms. he already can see if he can get this done, and get it done whether by the end of the year or gets if you kick the can down the road into the early part of next year but you can get the big grand bargain down, man that will tee up a very stable, really great basis to work on for the rest of the
layoffs happen. this is a lost deal making, a lot of politics in this situation because the defense contractors big in virginia which is a battle ground state. neil: can they do that? is that legal? guest: well, republicans say no, republicans are saying the white house is playing politics with this. the g.o.p. is going to go on the offense on the sequester. they note that the house republicans have passed a plan that would hold off the cuts and would replace them with other cuts. the administration has not adopted a specific plan. there has been speculation they would embrace a democratic proposal offered by a maryland congressman but they have not formally embraced that. this is becoming a political hot potato. it was set up in a debt deal set up by the super committee s failure and now we are looking at cuts january 2nd which everyone agrees would be devastating especially for defense contractor jobs neil: how many jobs are we