which could be a difficult sell, we'll get to that in a moment, but your idea is to get rid of mandatory spending programs that are, quote, dysfunctional in the u.s. government. what would you get rid of in order to keep the defense budget where you want it? >> well, this goes back to when we passed the decifit reduction act last year and we saved about $900 billion out of spending. half of that came out of the military, even though they only account for less than 20 percent of the budget. half of the savings came out of the military. and then on top of that, the supercommittee -- the special committee, supercommittee, was supposed to find savings on the mandatory side of spending because if you eliminated all of the discretionary spending, we would still be running a decifit of about a half trillion dollars a year. so the real problem that we have to address is reforms in the mandatory spending programs. bill: let me just pick up on the point you're making.