and i think they see lies across the board on the economy. shovel ready it s not shovel ready it s going to help the economy. we are going to spend $860 billion on the stimulus. it s going to juice unemployment. we will get people back to work. they see lies across the board. this just happens to be a really graphic one. bill: this was one i can t think of anything that really competes with this. calling reporters into your office, setting them up and then just come on. no. no. i think you know, he had coffee and lattes for them and trying to ply them with starbucks? isn t that what happened? it s all very odd. bill: let s get to this rasmussen poll. put up the screen. these are likely republican primary voters, all right? people who are going to make the decisions in the early months of 2012. so romney surges at 33%. michele bachmann does very well at 19%. herman cain moves up a few points 10%.
have said and this man who asked this question, lars, let me put this to you, implicit in his question was, you know, i m sure president obama you understand, and i m sure people went over this with you when you launched this program that it s very tough to get through a lot of the red tape when you actually try to put this money to work. oh, yes, that s why i think this is baloney, because number one, of the 860 billion only 30 billion went into infrastructure, roads, bridges and other forms of infrastructure. the rest of it basically went into the pockets of unions, martha. what the man was saying to the president was. lars, you re actually wrong. hold on rob. rob, let me finish. what he was saying was, mr. president government regulations are keeping us from getting business going. the president keeps loading regulations on, that s hurting our ability to get back to work. and most of that money, rob, 5% went for infrastructure, the rest went as political payoffs. frankly i t
it bought a lot of votes. it was a reelection program for the president, not a jobs program for america. we have been saying that for two years. we are in the uncomfortable position of saying, i told you so. it was not an effective way to put people back to work. bill: i remember when it was signed into law. we sent a crew out to central missouri. they did repairs on a broken down bridge they wanted to restore. there were 7 guys working that day. and we looked at the size of the bill. it was $700 billion. it has gone up to 860 billion in total cost. i think your point is well taken. i think most people thought when you were putting money into rebuilding the infrastructure in america, that s what you were going to gets. freshly paved roads and new
they ve been moving, i think, by the force of the american people, and reality, the threat we are facing from this debt and the danger it places our economy in. so we have to do this. it s not something we d like to do. bill: is the number $61 billion for you? $61 billion is a minimum amount, i think. for example, $61 billion reduces the baseline of federal spending and would save over ten years, $860 billion. almost a trillion dollars. bill: but it it doesn t appear that your democratic colleagues in the senate are even close to that. well bill: if that s the case, what gives over the next five days to the deadline? the deadline is soon, our agreement has to be reached or a disagreement will be noted. i believe that we need to do more than 33. the leadership has to deal with the reality of the senate, the fact that the
control. we know that. where are the cuts. this is 09, 2010, 2011. okay. was this all the time the president was in office. so you went from 62.9 trillion to 88 because you ignored the problem. you said nothing. we re dealing with basically the budget, the budget for this year. yes. we re talking the democrats have agreed to $10 billion in cuts and you folks want about $50 billion more, something like that? yes. 57. you put it over to the senate, didn t get anything from the senate. how much will you get out of this year? you re talking about a pit tans of this enormous budget, maybe not even 1%. wait. this year remember what you can talk about. you only have six months left go to september 30th, can only talk discretionary, you may think the number is small, $61 billion, what does that add up in 10 year when you produce a budget, $860 billion. hold on a second, pat.