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That's right. texas congressman and military veteran ron paul wants to cut pentagon spending. his progressive partner joins you us presently. the pentagon budget is $693 billion. more than all the government's discretionary spending combined. if you subtract the wars in afghanistan and iraq it accounts for 42% of spending. the u.s. spends more now on military spending than during the cold war. it spends more than russia, china, all the middle east and all of nato and the rest of europe combined. operating 11 large nuclear powered carriers, no other country has one, a navy that can carry twice ...

From l.a., christopher thornburgh, founding principal of beacon economics, welcome to our show, good morning to you. >> good morning. bill: who knew! >> well, actually, we all did, because when they put the stimulus plan into place, they had already said this is going to be spread out over a multi-year period. in fact they told us up front some of the money was not going to be spent until 2011. a lot of economists were upset about that because you know, stimulus money needs to be spent, and what happened is they got the money and it started going to all the sort of pet projects and next thing ...

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Deficit, trillions. >> no, i think we're forgetting what caused the bigger gaps. by and large, yeah, they're wasting money, no question about it. but, all of them combined don't add up to just the payroll tax, that's 97 billion dollars or 93 billion dollars we don't have the dough for that's just deficit spending, it's more than the pet projects to get through and the ones proposed combined and it's going to have to be closed, and i will say at this point, the government is borrowing such a low rate, that we have little wiggle room, compared to greece and italy. we have to have a plan to close...

>> i wasn't required to do math of course. bill: that is a lot of cash. stuart, thank you. i know you talk a lot about this on varney and company today. thank you, stuart. here's martha. martha: let's put this number into context. talking about astronomical numbers so hang with me, folks. the u.s. budget deficit is projected to $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2012. the current budget deficit projection is $93 billion more than was forecast just two months ago. the u.s. government will run a trillion dollar deficit for a fourth consecutive year. these are numbers the likes of which the u.s. economy has...