general reports. there are no adequate controls, management oversight to make sure that the pay is commensurate to the quality of the work and the results of the work that they are getting. shannon: you mentioned the inspector general. the senate confirmed him to be look at these things. he points out. fannie and freddie have gotten $154 billion of our tax dollars to get control of the housing mark it in the u.s. he mentioned he doesn t think they have the internal controls necessary to keep things above board. senator i issa and grassley wonr whether it s paying off or doing anything for taxpayers because he s suppose to be in charge, but does he have the authority to make any changes?
in the capital gains if it was just raised to 20%, which i don t think is nearly high enough. if you add all those up, you would save $154 billion the that s what you would have done if you actually cared about balancinging the budget, which i do, but apparently republicans don t care about that at all. when they say they re deficit hawks, not true. when they say they want to balance the budget, not even close to true of the fiscally conservative? please don t make me laugh. one set of numbers more, okay? i want to get even further into this. so the republicans say, hey, you know what? we re going to cut $61 billion overall. that s of course in non-defense discretionary spending. 1.1 trillion is the tote deficit, but to give you a sense of perspective, you know what it is if you cut all of nondefense discretionary spending, all of it, we spend zero dollars
the very top bracket in the country. in two years we could raise $91 billion by scrapping the bush tax cut for the top 2%. another $23 billion by raising the estate tax and $40 billion by raising capital gains taxes to 20%. the level they were under president clinton. by the way, that s still a comically low rate, but even that would do the job. that took me two minutes, and i raised $154 billion. now, i know conventional wisdom in washington says raising taxes is political suicide. you can t do it, but that s also not true. look, the holes don t bear it out at all. in a new poll people were asked if you had to reduce your state s budget deficit, what would you do. 40% said that they would raise taxes. 22% said they would decrease public employees benefits, 20% said they would decrease funding for roads and just 3% said they
department of defense, but i will not stand by and watch the white house cut defense when americans are deployed in harm s way. barbara starr joining us from washington. what prompted the cuts? basically, tough economic times. a recessionary economy. the white house told the pentagon, come up with $78 million in budget cuts. gates had the services and the department identify about $154 billion in cost savings. what do these numbers mean? what does it add up to? gates is talking about making a fundamental shift in the way the military does business. have a listen. i hope an expectation is that as a result of these changes over time, what had been a culture of endless money where cost was rarely a consideration will become a culture of savings and restraint. there will be some cuts in
budget and near 10% of the base defense budget. reporter: gates wants to take $154 billion in proposed cost saving yous and put about half of it into new communication, intelligence and electronic gear to deal with future threats from places like somalia and yemen. so, even as they are going to cut spending at the pentagon, they are going to invest in trying to deal with new threats. gates i want to start a significant new program, a new nuclear-capable bomber aircraft to deal with rising threats from places like china, north korea and russia. wolf? rncht they simply assuming, barbara, with all u.s. troops out of iraq, for example, by the end of this year, and a significant reduction of u.s. troops in afghanistan, the number, the billions and billions and billions of dollars spent every month in iraq and afghanistan will dramatically go down? reporter: well that will go down but that is actually outside all of this the winding down of the bars in iraq and