that s been proven wrong. where you have low inflation and historically low interest rates. right now our problem is jobs, and there is no question cutting that sort of spending is going to hurt jobs. michael grunwald, good to have you with us tonight. thanks for being on the ed show. erskine bowles and allen simpson introduced a new simpson/bowles deficit reduction plan today, even though nobody asked them to do it. the new simpson/bowles is worse than the old one. there is only $600 billion in tax savings less than what they proposed before. now there are cuts to medicare, medicaid and social security benefits. the ratio of cuts to new tax revenue is three-to-one. who voted for that? today bowles and simpson were interrupted by protesters as they tried to pitch their new plan. this is a proper response to the latest simpson/bowles proposal. pay your fair taxes. pay your fair tax. some cuts don t yield.
class. and then there is simpson/bowles, which i think is a total fraud, and we shouldn t be listening to people who have, number one, retirement security and health care security for the rest of their lives. they re the wrong people to listen to. they re doing a lot of grandstanding. but they shouldn t get much attention. more commentary coming on simpson/bowles in just a moment. get your cell phones out. i want to know what you think. tonight s question. will the republicans allow the sequester to destroy the middle class? text a for yes. text b for no to 67622. you can always go to our blog at ed.msnbc.com. we ll bring you the results later on in the show. joining me tonight, michael grunwald. he is a senior correspondent for time magazine, and author of the new new deal: the hidden story of change in the obama era. great to have you with us tonight, michael. thank you. here we are, a week from friday and the big cuts are going to take place. four legislative days. of co
michael grunwald, good to have you with us tonight. thanks ofor being on the ed show. erskine bowles and allen simpson introduced a new simpson/bowles deficit reduction plan today, even though nobody asked them to do it. the new simpson/bowles is worse than the old one. there is only $600 billion in tax savings less than what they proposed before. now there are cuts to medicare, medicaid and social security benefits. the ratio of cuts to new tax revenue is three-to-one. who voted for that? today bowles and simpson were interrupted by protesters as they tried to pitch their new plan. this is a proper response to the latest simpson/bowles proposal. pay your fair taxes. pay your fair tax. some cuts don t yield. we need good jobs now. pay your tax. let s bring in jonathan alter, msnbc political analyst and columnist for bloomberg view
inherited this economy that was in absolute free-fall. we were losing 800,000 jobs a month, and he passed this $800 billion stimulus that the next quarter you had the biggest improvement in jobs in 30 years. and he continued to quietly push stimulus throughout the next couple of years while he had a democratic congress. and that s why we avoided the fates that you had in great britain and spain. since then well, isn t a stalemate. isn t that what simpson/bowles is throwing at us right now? what has pretty much taken place in europe. absolutely. could we stay out of a recession if we were to adapt simpson/bowles? well, we might stay out of a recession because the economy is a lot stronger than it was in january 2009. but there is no question that at this point there is still slack in the economy, and this sort of austerity would hurt. remember, the argument for austerity was that if you do stimulus, if you run big deficits, you re going to have runaway inflation, and you
understands. this is the republicans fault when these cuts come through. the president needs to use his bully pulpit to take on these bullies, and to really speak to what the priorities of these republicans are. yeah. because you see it so clearly. and no investment in health care or education. let s protect the top 0.1%. if it wasn t going to hurt people, i would almost look forward to this happening. no it s cruel. it s cruel. it is cruel. and they were all rejected in the election. in the election. all of the plans that boehner is talking about was totally rejected by the american people. yep. they had their chance for him to say the senate needs to go do their work is a cop-out. it s cruel. 2014 is coming up. it is cruel. it s damaging the very ones who have already been hurt so much. and it s a hoax because it won t work. president obama needs to hear from the public again. this is when people need to connect with their representatives and senators to ma