greta: straight ahead, does senator john cornyn think president obama wants you to go over the fiscal cliff? that question. that s next. huh? [ male announcer ] alka-seltzer plus rushes relief to all your worst cold symptoms, plus it relieves your runny nose. [ sighs ] thank you! [ male announcer ] you re welcome. that s the cold truth! the distances aren t getting shorter.
cornyn about president obama s plans too tax hikes. talking about increasing taxes, letting the tax rate go up on people making over $250,000 a year. as i understand it, that s about $85 billion a year, funding the government for eight days. $85 billion is a lot of money, but if you look at government waste, even senator tom coburn has identified $20 billion in waste. has anybody thought about getting the revenue from waste, seeing just how much we really need? the problem has usually been if you rdise taxes, the spending cuts will come later, and they never seem to manifest. greta: but not even spending cuts. actually waste. well, yeah, waste and fraud and abuse are the famous three horsemen of cuts. but the fact is that many times they re harder to get to it would afternoon. i think tom coburn has done a great service by identifying a lot of duplication and waste in the government, including in the pentagon.
and it can be broken down by them into a series of steps that can be taken without having to be rushed into one gigantic last-minute, little understood, with no hearings, one vote up or down, i think it s a terrible way to govern the united states. greta: well, the sequestration deadline is coming up the 1st of january. what people are saying on capitol hill, the president is saying, congress is saying, it may be scary stuff, but if we go over the fiscal cliff that all sorts of things will happen, that there will be another recession, we ll go deeper into our existing one, if we have an existing one, jobs lost, the market will crater, should we go over the fiscal cliff, even though it s created by the president, the house, the senate, failed to do their work a year and a half ago and pushed us against this deadline. your thoughts. right. my thoughts, they could pass a provision to extend it 90 days,
to set up a state exchange would be far too risky, far too expensive, and it would be an exchange in name only in the state of arizona. it just doesn t make any sense whatsoever at all for us to move forward in that direction. greta: i ve seen that you ve done a study that governors, that it would cost anywhere between $27 million and $40 million in the year 2015, the first year the federal government picks up the cost, then goes to the states from then on. that s a lot of money. i m curious, what do any of the states, if you know, what do any of the states who do their own exchanges, what do they get out of it that would possibly compensate for $27 million to $40 million expense? i would have no idea. after investigating this very, very thoroughly, this was one of the most difficult decisions i ve had to make, and we know that the affordable care act is going to be the law of the land, but the bottom line is is that
why do we have the brinkmanship? he sees this as ultimate leverage. i think he also thinks he got a mandate from the election, which he s mistaken about. we got exactly the same after the election as we had before, which is decided government, which to means the american public trust neither political party to have all the answers. last time we had the president s party in complete control of the government for the first two years of the obama administration, we got obamacare, the stimulus, a lot of spending that s contributed to the debt. so what we need to do is the reasonable thing, and that s to try to work together to bridge our differences. you re right, nobody s going to get all of what they want, but i think this is an area where the 80/20 rule might asupply. you get 80% of what we find in common we need to do, and leave the other 20% behind. greta: coming up, move over, mtv, there s a new music video. that s next.