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The least productive years in history. chief congressional correspondent mike emanuel tells us there is not an abundance of optimism about get things done. >> as congress starts the 2012 session, one of the first fight will be the one that ended 2011, extenting the payroll tax holiday, unemployment benefit and medicare doc fix for the rest of the year. senator row blount now member of the republican leadership says this is a critical first test. >> there are plenty of votes to get it done. it just matters whether or not, what matters is whether or not people have the will to try to find an agr...

Accounting, adds up the book at the end of the year. they dump this and they usually do it before christmas day. it's called net present value. that is what we owe now plus what we have promised to spend. it's the usual suspects, it's medicare, medicaid, social security. in particular the troubling thing with how the gao came out with the numbers is that they haven't actually factored in a couple of key things. what they are saying is we will owe $33.8 trillion if we had to pay up today if the president's healthcare law stays. we don't know if that is going to happen. the supreme court will he...

The tea party yesterday in the deal? >> no, absolutely not. the speaker didn't betray anyone. first of all, you have to remember something, just like myself, speaker boehner has an obligation to govern. and governing is not an easy thing to do. we went into this with good faith. we wanted to push -- that's why i got a big kick of your first segment how we're not protecting taxpayers. we're pushing for one year because it's good policy. everyone has told me since i took office in january, don't do band-aid approaches, don't take the easy way out, stand up and try to enforce good policy even tho...

Different ways. we have to be somewhat inventive. during this past few days i've had many calls from my caucus members about ideas that they have would protect the people that need the extra few bucks each month but also save money in the long run. unemployment, we have to figure out a way to extend that. we, this is the first time that we paid for unemployment tax extension, which i did not favor but significant number of my own caucus did so something we had to do. we'll continue to fight for the long-term unemployed. i would hope that we can do something to do something final, to get rid of...

We don't -- we can do the doc fix -- >> okay. but, wait a second, though. you're saying that republicans should be for raising taxes on middle class americans? >> no, they should be for eliminating the payroll tax entirely. that's what i'm saying. >> entirely. and what happens to the social security trust fund then? >> righted. and how do we pay for that? if we're not willing to make millions and billionaires pay their fair share, how do we pay for that, j.p.? >> but this is another interesting thing about what president obama said. he talked about how these are hard times for the middle class...