federal government than barack obama is today, one-third less. we ve increased the size of the government by over 33%. gregg:er hereby announce you king for a day. you re it. oh, please. but that s it. we re spending too much and the only way to afford this kind of spending is to tax everyone. and that s what i m worried about. we re moving toward a value-added tax. gregg: brian wesbury, good to see you. thanks so much. good to see you, gregg. patti ann: greg says he can have the power. can i be queen? gregg: you may. this is great story. a man loses a ring on the highway and another person finds it. he is looking for the rightful owner. i hope you re watching! we ll tell you how you can help coming up. a touching story of a fifth grader and how he decided to honor the victims in newtown, connecticut. when i heard about sandy hook i felt really bad for
rejects it. it is beyond revenue. it is about spending. that is our problem. you can stop going over cliff first of the year. what about spending that got us in bind we re in? none of the revenue that will be generated will make a dent in our spending especially the 6 trillion the president has . patti ann: brad, democrats are arguing, you know obama won re-election and that means voters prefer his economic strategy and it is really the republicans obligation to bend here. what do you say to that? that is nonsense. the president has no mapped date. if anything, we have more division today than we did back on election day. the electorate may have wanted divided governing but they re not going to expect the kind of gridlock we ve had the last four years. look they control the senate and white house. when the president controlled all branches government he rejected his own deficit commission which we re fighting over the same things we could have solved back when the democrats co
roll back taxes once they exist. so is this a strategy do you believe? absolutely. i think the president believes he has much better leverage in january by us going over the cliff as you say correctly, there is nothing the president needs to do. there is nothing he has to sign. as a matter of law the law changes in january and taxes go up. president doesn t have to do anything. he can sit back and as taxes go up on everybody including that 1% that he has been after, nothing has been done on spending. sequestration could be rolled back with retro activity where the president thinks he is better shape on spending in january. patti ann: alan? you forget the president offered boehner a deal to keep taxes keep the bush tax rate on 98% of the americans. keep those tax rates where they are. not raise taxes and boehner rejected that. he had opportunity excuse me, i m still talking. he has opportunity now to do exactly what the republicans say they want and boehner
democratic charge. so that s kind of a nightmare scenario for democrats, and it s why you saw john boehner, speaker of the house, offer to raise taxes on americans who mange more than $1 million a year. patti ann: yeah. so the idea, though, behind this fiscal cliff is that it was supposed to have items in it that were unacceptable to both sides so that both sides would be motivated to not go over that cliff with the understanding that they might not be able to fix it all with legislation after the fact. so are there items in there that democrats would really not want to see enacted with the fear that maybe they couldn t get them rolled back? well, you re right, but it wasn t quite equal. the two big disasters of the fiscal cliff are, one, tax cuts, tax rates going up for everybody, and, two, all of these automatic spending cuts in place. but democrats feel confident that if tax rates do go up for everybody, they can, again, propose to relower them for everyone and put republicans in
unemployment rates. we would have a slow economy and high unemployment forever if we taxed ourselves like that. gregg: all right. this idea that somehow you can t tax the middle class or we won t, it s impossible. if we keep . gregg: that is a bad idea, right, i get it. i get it. vat. that i get. value-added tax is the worst thing. gregg: brian, what is the solution? yeah. i, well, if i were king for a day and told to make the economy grow faster, i would cut the size of our federal government. we need to cut spending everywhere because, the best our economy has done in the last 30 years is during the 80s and 90s. that s when ronald reagan and bill clinton cut spending. i would take the clinton tax rates, right now, i would take them. gregg: really. they won t hurt the economy, if, i got clinton s spending. he spent one-third less on