race less than a week until the florida primary and it's a virtual dead heat between mitt and newt. absentee voters may make the difference. a navy s.e.a.l. rescuing american from pirates. it's real life. it's real life. we go there tonight. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com good evening. tonight, the super rich surtax. okay, i keep stumbling on that one. but president obama today went on the road to press a theme from his state of the union address telling millionaires they need to pay up. >> if you make more than a million dollars a year you should pay a tax rate of at least 30%. >> all right, the president's proposal would affect about 240,000 tax filers across the country. an expert tells us it would effectively raise the top margin rate about 44% for millionaires. now, that's the highest it's been since the middle of this guy's administration when he was cutting taxes. now, putting aside the debate over whether it's fair, here's the math. tacking this group would bring in $41 billion in revenue a year. that adds up to about 380 billion over ten years. all right. that sounds like a lot of money, right? but here is an interesting thing. compare it to our debt and you'll see it is only a teeny, tiny, minute sliver. about 2.5%. the bottom line is that president obama's plan whether you like it or not, won't be enough to fix the debt problem. to fix the problem, we're going to need bigger numbers. for example, the bush tax kets are set to expire at the end of the year. letting them for people who make $250 million, will raise 678 billion over ten years, but if you let them expire for everyone, you're looking at $2.8 trillion and that math works. that cuts the debt by 18% immediately. big problems need bigger solutions. adam davidson is with "the new york times," john avlon, great to have you with us. adam, you've looked into the numbers and done incredible breakdowns on this. actually, you've looked at if you taxed all millionaires at 100%, it doesn't do what taxing the middle class would do. >> we tax new income. if you look at all the millionaires in america, they make around $700 billion in income and pay about $200 billion a year in taxes. the two bipartisan commissions -- they both gave similar numbers. we need about $400 billion either in more taxes or less spending. and so, you'd have to tax all the millionaires at much close to 100% to break that nut. now, i'm not saying we shouldn't tax the rich more. i think for equity reasons, fairness reasons, sure. maybe it's a good idea. but the math doesn't add up that that solves our problems. >> and what about when you look at the middle class? you actually had looked at what it would take to make a big difference. what kind of increases? >> the thing about the 1% is there's only 1% of them. if you add up the entire 1%, it's about $1.7 trillion and they pay i'm doing the math in my head, something like $400 billion already. they can pay more. probably a reasonable thing to propose, but there's not a reasonable amount they can pay that really solves our problem. i saw and am not proposing that since the middle class makes around $5 trillion a year, that's three times more than the 1% does, you can tax increase their taxes by 8% and it has the impact of taxing the very rich at 100%, so clearly, the middle class will have to share some of the burden. >> that's on the tax side. then there's the spending sign, john, which is a big way to get rid of the debt. >> that's right. here's what's important. yes, we have a spending problem in this country, but just like we can't tax our way out, we can't cut our spending out of this problem alone. domestic spending about makes around 12% of the federal budget. everybody knows this is true. yeah, you need to raise revenues, cut spending and bend the cost curve on entitlements. every time we've had a chance to do it, the committee couldn't find the political will to do the tough thing. tha the problem we're facing. >> now, jamal, the whole concept of raising taxes on millionaires is popular. always has been, still is. from the political point of view, that seems to be what the president thinks he can get benefit from, right? >> what the president said last night was everybody needs a fair shot in this country and everybody has to do their fair share. and i think there's a sentiment in the country that we had bank bailouts, auto bailouts, but not homeowner bailouts. the president said no more bailouts, handouts and copouts. everybody's got to participate. that's right politically. on the economic side, john is right. one piece he left out though. we've got to grow this economy. if we don't, all the rest of this stuff is still not going to get us all the way to a closed up deficit. >> on that issue, jamal, let me play something newt gingrich had to say talk k about what the effect of focusing taxation on this group of people might do to growth. >> i just want to comment on one thing in the state of the union last night, which i'm not sure the president understood, but if he meant what he said, it would be a disaster of the first order. >> now, obviously, i don't think jamal the president's not trying to say he can solve this all by taxing millionaires, is he? >> no, i don't think he said that at all. you need a fair shot, everybody's got to do their fair share. that's a part of this where the tax increase comes from. but he said he's going to cut off the bush tax cuts for people making over $250,000. and let's not forget, last summer, he sat at the table with john boehner and said he was willing to go somewhere on entitlement cuts. politically, i guess it's impossible for him to say certain things last night. it's easy for him to talk about taxing millionaires. everyone likes that. but some of the other things that would get us there. simpson bowles, helps the the wealthy, but not something people want to hear. he didn't want to touch the things that are kryptonite. >> remember, the goal here isn't just equity or fairness. it's to deal with our deficit and debt. the question is how you get there. it's going to take pain. politicians are so pain averse. they're willing to demagogue the debt, but then run waway in the other direction. especially on social security. >> the president did intimidate to john boehner last summer, he was will on entitlement cut. >> you need plans on the table. the question is whether we're going to find the the political will. right now is a great opportunity for tax reform. from the romney tax returns, let's get a fair, flatter tax system in place. >> adam, you look at the math and say, okay, look, 5 trillion a year in the middle class, 700 billion for the millionaires, but all this kind of masks the overall point, if you went to a flatter system, you could get rid of loopholes and end up with a wealthier paying more. >> yes, at least the intellectuals of both parties are much closer. all within five points, 20%, that we should eliminate corporate loopholes, make the tax 20%. have a simpler two or three level system. make the rich pay more, but at a lower rate. >> so why doesn't the president talk about closing loopholes? why instead does he choose to put out a number that says i'm punching him? >> i think he spent last summer and into the fall talking about comprehensive tax reform, closing loopholes. having a simpler system. and the tea party folks to say we're going to have tax revenue increases. everybody knows you've got to do it. but he needs a partner who's willing and able to cut the deal. >> this is about getting a deal to get his base fired up. what mitch daniels said in his republican response, he talked about closing loopholes on the super rich. >> that would result in them paying more and so theoretically, everybody would be happy. >> there's a deal to be made. >> i know very few people who would say they're not happy to may more. knanavy s.e.a.l.s. rescue a american aide worker. the man who wrote the book spent time with the -- comes out front from africa tonight. google, they've been collecting a lot of information about you over the years. they said they weren't going to do anything with it. but. and was it a murder or tragic accident? 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[ female announcer ] tell your story at progressosoup.com for the chance to win an ultimate makeover in hollywood. but when she got asthma, all i could do was worry ! specialists, lots of doctors, lots of advice... and my hands were full. i couldn't sort through it all. with unitedhealthcare, it's different. we have access to great specialists, and our pediatrician gets all the information. everyone works as a team. and i only need to talk to one person about her care. we're more than 78,000 people looking out for 70 million americans. that's health in numbers. unitedhealthcare. new details about the daring u.s. raid that freed an american and hostage hostage held by pirates. the navy s.e.a.l. team that killed osama bin laden parachuted in and entered. they killed nine pirates and escaped unharmed. american aid worker jessica buchanan and -- were kidnapped last october. now, there's a lot of land d kidnappings. they've been terrorizing captives and the whole point is to get ransom money. while we hear a lot about them in headlines, very few have spent time with them. in part, kidnapping and death are real and present risks for anyone in somalia. he went in there, lived with them, had protection of a clan. he's in nairobi right now and i spoke to him before the show and asked him about the pirates behind this kidnapping. >> well, it was based in central somalia. now, you're seeing more brutal gangs and gangs turning inwards. these two hostages that were freed, from the danish demining group, they were kidnapped on land, so oddly enough, pirates, because it's becoming more difficult for them to hijack ships at sea, they're actually as i said, turning inland and i guess you can't call it piracy anymore. you can call it straight up kidn kidnapping. they become more brutal. the pirates aren't at the level of the farc in colombia or taliban. it's get tog that point. >> the groups we're talking about, some of these pirates part of larger criminal groups. they have access to financing. issues with al shabaab, how big is the network? >> i would say pirate groups are less organized than people think. now, they're becoming more organized, more like standing militias. when i was there, it was more loose business organizations that cocok ko alessed around pe are money. people will get their friends and relatives, put together a gang and engage in kidnapping. there are some links to al shabaab. it's not like you can speak of pirates as a singular organization. >> where does the money from the ransom go? it's interesting down in, rio, gangs there want to have gold plated guns. you have other gangs that have much broader goals and more religious goals. where does the meoney go? >> i say it comes down to two things. cars and cot. cot being the narcotic drug they're addicted to and the pirate company car, the toyota surf. a baby land cruiser that less affluent pirates can afford. that's where most of the money goes. >> what do you think it was like r or could you tell us it was like for these two hostages while they were in captivity? how do you think they were treated or what can you tell us about what they might have gone through? we're looking at them now. >> yeah, i don't know too much about the particular circumstances, but i can major they were probably treated better than your average hostage. the pirates were so pair noid of an attack on land. at one point, one report found out that they were taken on board a hijacked ship because the pirates were so paranoid of what happened. so i guess hindsight's 20/20. they were kicked off that ship after there was a disagreement among the various stakeholders and they were forced back on land and that's when this rescue happened. jessica was experiencing a serious kidney ailment. they brought a doctor to look at her, but the resources he had were not sufficient. that's what i think determined the exact timing of this raid. >> all right. thank you so much. appreciate you taking the time. >> thank you. my pleasure. from pirates to privacy. tonight's under surveillance talks on google's new push. google announced today it will merge all the information it collects about you through your searches, android phones, youtube, to give you a quote more intuitive google experience. are these changes an innovation of privacy? interesting, paul, i talked to eric schmidt at headquarters and asked him about his policy on tracking personal information. about a month ago. here's what he said. >> our strategy is to make sure anything we know about you, you opt in. so if there's information about your location, you choose to share that. >> you should have been accompanied by your lawyer on that little tour because you know, they've changed their policy completely. you have to opt out in order to evade these collection of this material and the only thing that's voluntary about google is signing up in the first place. once you're into their system, they collect so much information about you it's really staggering. >> how does this work though from the perspective of our rights. what is the difference between opting in and out? like, hey, when i go online and order from a catalog, i have to uncheck the box that says i'm going to get more e-mails. >> it's similar to that, but the opt out provision with google is very, very difficult because they collect so many items of information in so many different services. >> you can't just opt out all together. >> no, you can't. there's not one box that says unscribe when you search google, they're getting the information. if you have google mail, they're getting the information. if you're in picasa, they're getting the information there. they track where you travel to. >> and i have to trust their benevolence. in all seriousness, is this going to be challenged? >> it's been looked at by federal authorities. by european authorities who are very, very sensitive to privacy, but mixed bag. we get so much information as a result of having this service. they pay for it by using this generic information about us that advertise. so you know, it's a mixed bag. >> let us know what you think. next, the polls out of florida. it is a dead heat. plus, what's the healthiest place in america? that's next. n regimen now because i never want to feel that helplessness again. 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[ male announcer ] because enbrel suppresses your immune system, it may lower your ability to fight infections. serious, sometimes fatal, events including infections, tuberculosis, lymphoma, other cancers, and nervous system and blood disorders have occurred. before starting enbrel, your doctor should test you for tuberculosis and discuss whether you've been to a region where certain fungal infections are common. don't start enbrel if you have an infection like the flu. tell your doctor if you're prone to infections, have cuts or sores, have had hepatitis b, have been treated for heart failure, or if, while on enbrel, you experience persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, or paleness. if you've had enough, ask your dermatologist about enbrel. so, loma linda, california. if you're watching there tonight, listen up. it's the healthiest town in america. home to a medical center that attracts 600,000 patients a year. loma linda does not have any liquor stores and has been tobacco free for almost 30 years. wow, you say? well, it is certainly different from other places in this country. nation which brings us to tonight's number. one. that is the number of mcdonald's restaurants loma linda will have. in a controversial move today, the council voted to approve the town's first mcdonald's. half the town's population is seventh day adventist and some called a front to the teachings, but the town's mayor, an adventist who supports it says quote, my perspective as a conservative libertarian is that government's role can be minimalized. we should keep people from harming one another, but government doesn't have a strong need to keep them from harming ousts. we decided to check out what else is there. they have a carl's junior franchise. the big carl, yes. the big carl is actually even worse than the double quarter pounder with cheese. yep. so maybe the mayor's right. this is more about what the golden arches represent than what they serve. still outfront, the "outfront" five. a murder mystery. all this in our second half. bp has set aside 20 billion dollars to fund economic and environmental recovery. we're paying for all spill- related clean-up costs. and we've established a 500 million dollar fund so independent scientists can study the gulf's wildlife and environment for ten years. thousands of environmental samples from across the gulf have been analyzed by independent labs under the direction of the us coast guard. i'm glad to report all beaches and waters are open for everyone to enjoy. and the economy is showing progress with many areas on the gulf coast having their best tourism seasons in years. i was born here, i'm still here and so is bp. we're committed to the gulf for everyone who loves it, and everyone who calls it home. when it comes to home insurance, surprises can be a little scary. and a little costly. that's why the best agents present their clients with a lot of options. because when it comes to what's covered and what's not, nobody likes surprises. [ click ] [ chuckles ] we totally thought -- [ all scream ] obscure space junk falling from the sky? we cover that. moving on. aah, aah, aah, aah. [ male announcer ] we are insurance. ♪ we are farmers ♪ bum, ba-da-bum, bum, bum, bum ♪ we start the second half of the show with stories we care about, do the work and find the outfront fyive and tonight, the surtax. president obama on the road today pushing a 30% minimum tax on incomes over 1 million. he's the math. it would bring in $41 billion a year. you compare that to our debt, it's about 2.5% of the total. the plan may be a good id