congress should support no more earmarks period and across the board spending cuts every department, period. can you do that, yes or no? yes, again, you can do it if you have the political will and now maybe you have the votes for something like that. but i really, again, think that people have this perception that it s a lot of kind of discretionary spending that drives the long-term budget imbalance, and that s really not the case. you really have to do things like get momentum to raise the social security retirement age, that would reassure markets, that would put you on a better trajectory for a longer-term budget fix. it s not really waste and abuse of public funds. jon: peter, i don t know of a family in america that hasn t sat down over the last couple of years and tightened up its pelt in one way or the other belt. why is the government unable to do that? you know, in 2007 before the crisis the government was spending 19.6% of gdp. in 2011, two years after the recession i
federal spending was 19.6% of the gdp, the deficit was $161 billion. here we are in 2011 the deficit is projected to be 25.1% of gdp. reporter: spending. jon: i m sorry, federal spending 25.1, that s why i brought you in because you re smart and the deficit projected to be 1.3 trillion. reporter: that s right. some of that is the recession and it would have happened no matter who was in charge, okay. have you a recession, revenues go down and some counter circumstance louisiana cal spending for unemployment benefits goes up. the difference is we had an incredible increase in the last two years in spending historic, higher than during any time since 1946 as a share of the economy, that is something that is increasing the deficit and that is something that voters are skittish about and saying wait a minute this was supposed to produce a recovery it s not. jon: i bet people can read more about this thing in the wall street journal if they d like.
19.6% among blacks. 13.3% among hispanics. this in the new national urban league state of black america survey that came out today. what s worrisome is this gap still very much exists. that s why the urban league, for 100 years, has been championing these issues and trying to close the economic gap, the housing gap, the health gap. there are so many gaps. roland has been a strong advocate these last couple of weeks in terms of pushing student aid and the pell grant funding. that s important. if we re going to close these gaps we need more federal assistance but i also want to echo what roland said about the private sector. the jobs come from the private sector. we need the pry vivate sector to more. do you think the president can do more? i would like for the president to sit here and call his cabinet, secretaries together and say, look, we want a fair share amount of dollars going to all communities in this country. and i want the president and his
the d.o.t., but also unions. african-americans and hispanics are routinely shut out of those kinds of jobs. so here we have the department of transportation trying to push the money to the states. who doesn t get hireded? these are jobs providing benefits sending kids to school, so i challenge the same unions who want black and hispanic votes, how dare you lock people out of those particular jobs? it goes beyond government. it s also private industry playing a critical role in the numbers. take a look at these numbers behind you. you can see them. 25-year-olds with bachelor degrees. 32.6%. among whites. 19.6%. among hispanic, 13.3%. a survey that came out today. what s worry some is the gap
because if the hard earned tax dollars can be treated like monopoly money. the president is going to have to be consistent and clear. he can t spend big part of his state of the union talking about more spending programs and then say that we re we have got a serious deficit problem. bret: the president, the administration submitted a 3. trillion-dollar budget proposal to congress today. that means the proposal has it at $1.6 trillion deficits for the following year. here is a quick breakdown of the numbers. the receipts are taxes are scheduled to rise from 14.8% of the gross domestic product of 2009 to 19.6% by 2020. outlays or spending scheduled to fall from 24.7 of the g.d.p. this past year to 23.7, g.d.p. in 2020. and the national debt is scheduled to rise from 53% of the gross domestic product in 2009 to 77.2% of g.d.p. in 2020.