business friendly guy to the economic team, gene sperling the week he brought in former clinton commerce secretary, a sign that he is changing? karl rove? guest: look, a nuanced view. look, 103,000 more people working, good. but be clear, 2.3 million fewer are working today than the day that president obama came into office and we are 5.9 million jobs fewer people employed than he said would be. employed at this point if we passed the stimulus bill, $814 billion would put people to work immediately. gene sperling has been at the treasury department of president obama and this is a lateral move, from the treasury department to the white house, and this is no big policy deal. neil: he is bringing a lot with clinton administration. guest: and daley is a smart
$814 billion economic stimulus. a massive health care overhaul. new regulations on wall street trading. and consumer credit cards. then in this month s lame duck session alone, an extension of the bush tax cuts. a nuclear arms treaty. and a repeal of the don t ask, don t tell policy on gays in the military. if there s any lesson to draw from these past few weeks it s that we are not doomed to endless gridlock. reporter: there was also plenty of controversy. the filibuster threats, chaotic town hall meetings, the emergence of the tea party. and many who will take office in january campaigned on the promise they would try and repeal some of the laws passed during this historic session. still, the president is enjoying a big bump. according to a new cnn poll, 56% of americans approve of the way the president handled the issues that congress considered during its lame duck session. mike and vinita? thank you, t.j. prices at the pump may be going through the roof but some drivers in
the projected cost of this tax deal is between $700 billion and $800 billion which means if approved could be added to the deficit. that factors into extending the bush era tax cuts for two years, extending unemployment benefits for 13 months. so how does it compare to other programs? it s roughly the same size of the 2009 stimulus package, estimated at $814 billion. and that as you remember was an expenditure that generated a lot of anger around the country, it helped spark the tea party movement. another program with a similar price tag, t.a.r.p., short for bank bailouts which committed $700 billion, most of which has largely been repaid. the largest chunk of it, the bush era tax cuts weren t
president they have some context. this is bigger than t.a.r.p. in terms of the amount of money involved. it is bigger than the stimulus bill. in fact, it s bigger than the stimulus bill which no republican went near with a ten-foot pole. why are republicans in favor of something that will add to the deficit as much as this will? because there are a lot of tax cuts in there. and that s the honest truth. republicans won t necessarily won t want to admit. they ll say, look, we were all about trying to stop the any tax increases from taking effect on january 1st, but you re right. i seem to remember in january, february of 2009 a lot of republicans saying, look, this whole idea of an emergency for the stimulus is ridiculous, sure we have economic problem, but this is socialism, this is government, spending run amok, and that this is a bloated stimulus bill which turned out to be, by the way, about $814 billion. and they rejected the president s argument about an economic emergency.
well, you can do that or if you want to make sure you made personal contact, you got to call the guy. anyway or gal. e-mail us right now, we ll try to share some of your stuff a little later on. let s talk a little bit about the stimulus and whether or not it created any jobs or not. well, there s a new study out by a worker at the federal reserve bank of san francisco that suggests the net job creation from the stimulus package was drum roll. zero. zero jobs created from the billions of dollars that we put into the economy, the taxpayer dollars in the stimulus package. zero jobs. it was interesting because they said, you know, he created two million jobs, it created or saved two million jobs. so ok, if that is indeed true, they re gone now because they were temporary jobs and at a cost of $400,000 per worker. so you have $814 billion doing something that was did not do what it was supposed to do.