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Showing that only 120,000 jobs were added in march, also wasn t a great number last week, so that s raising eyebrows and stephen moore is watching all of this, senior economic writer for the wall street journal . steve, good to see you. martha, good to see you. martha: basically we have the first form of stimulus that took its form in a huge, $800 billion bill that came through congress. but then you have the quantitative easing plans which are a little more subtle and sneak out there, qe1, qe2, as they were called. is there any indication that ben bernanke is concerned enough about another dip in the u.s. economy that he may go for a third quantitative easing plan? you know, there is. and it s a scary thought, martha, because as you just said, we ve had the most, the biggest stimulus injection into the economy in both money and decifit spending in the history of this country. you mentioned the $800 billion spending stimulus, we ve had $1.2 trillion deficits for three or four year ....
See what the president has been talking about, this so-called buffet tax, has been a distraction, with the president s spending, the decifit from last year alone, you d have to collect this buffet tax for the next over 200 years, just to make up for last year s decifit alone. rick: you talk about comprehensive overhaul of the tax code, and that s something that your colleague in the senate, rob portman, is talking about as well. but realistically, is that something that we re likely to see in an election year? i think that as a result of the election, people are going to be voting and saying yeah, we need overall tax reform, we ve got to get rid of the lobbyist loopholes that are out there, lower tax rates across the board so we can get more people back to work and overall, revenue for the country will then increase. but remember, the president said that he wanted to raise taxes on some people, even if it meant that overall the country would bring in less revenue because he thought i ....
To close the decifit. but the notion that it doesn t solve the entire problem doesn t mean that we shouldn t do it at all. there are enough excuses for inaction in washington. we certainly don t need more excuses. i just point out that the buffet rule is something that will get us moving in the right direction, towards fairness, towards economic growth, it will help us close our decifit, and it s a lot more specific than anything that the other side has proposed so far. and if republicans in congress were truly concerned with decifits and debt, then i m assuming they haven t would just proposed to spend an additional $4.6 trillion on lower tax rates, including an average tax cut of at least $150,000 for every millionaire in america. they want to go in the opposite direction. they want to double down on some of the iniquities that already exist in the tax code. if we re going to keep ....
A year. we ve got a $1.3 trillion decifit, bill. so that means that even if we impose this tax, it will only reduce the budget decifit by a whopping .5%! it is not going to reduce the debt, it s not going to reduce the decifit. one of the points that mitt romney made in that excellent interview martha did, this is about class envy, it s not about reducing the decifit. bill: it would raise $47 billion over the next ten years, $47 billion from the government for seven days? so just more than one working week projected decifit over ten years, at $7 trillion. so why do you bank on this, then? well, i think this is all about the theme that president obama has laid out in the last couple of months that he reiterated yesterday, which is this is about class warfare, it s about basically trying to tell the middle class, if he we could take more money from the rich that will make you better off. it s a theme that in history, bill, has not really worked very well. you know, americans have a ....
Giving somebody like me or some of the people in this room tax breaks that we don t need and we can t afford, then one of two things happens. either you ve got to borrow more money to pay down a deeper decifit or you ve got to demand deeper sacrifices from the middle class and you ve got to cut investments that help us grow as an economy. you ve got to tell seniors to pay a little bit more for their medicare. you ve got to tell the college student, we re going to have to charge you higher interest rates on your student loan or you re just going to get smaller student loans. you re going to have to tell that working family that s scraping by that they re going to have to do more because the wealthiest of americans are doing less. that s not right. the middle class has seen enough of its security erode over the past few decades. we shouldn t let that happen. we re not going to stop investing in the things that create real and lasting growth in this country, just ....