blow of last week s cuts to several federal agencies. the new proposal would shift $10 billions to the pentagon operations, and it would prohibit cuts to holding facilities to illegal immigrants provide $2 billion funding for embassy security and extend the salary freeze for federal employees and members of congress. that gop bill slated to hit the house floor this thursday. last night, morning joe anchor joe scarborough went head to head with economist paul krugman for an-hour. the two debated the u.s. economy. they hit everything from entitlement reform to the urgency of paying down the debt, they address the cutting government spending and whether or not congress can focus on more than one thing at a time. as bob rubin said, you never know when a bond crisis will come. it s not like we ll get a warning. you ll wake up one day and suddenly there s a crisis. when is that going to happen? i don t know. all kinds of things can
it got really intense. we re going to to show more. didn t like me quoting him, actually. it s a real question right now, mark. this debate does matter because it s always been understood that this president i ve been assured by david axelrod going back to 2008. you ve been assured that the president understands this entitlement crisis, understands it s a generational theft we re engaging in, that we re stealing money from our children, from our grandchildren. as i said last night and as bob rueben has said, you never know when the bond crisis is going to hit. you don t see it coming like a hurricane. it comes immediately like an earthquake. then are you ready for it or not? so i guess this debate matters so much right now because there is a question as to whether the president has changed his position on entitlement reform. do you still believe he thinks
now, you can say it would be desirable to do something in the next ten years what will happen later on, but what s the desire to do this? where s the evidence we have to do something, that we have to be focused on this as opposed to the clear and present problem of high unemployment? you know, where is this coming from? bowles and simpson said i mean, i like this because they gave us a date. they said two years we ll have a fiscal crisis unless we deal with this. that was two years ago. you ve made some projections yourself in the past that have been wrong. that s the point. if you want to tell me this is urgent, tell me what s going to happen if we don t deal with this right now. why is it that five years from now, according to the cbo, debt being a little lower relative to gdp than it is now, something will happen if we don t address those long-term issues. the thing is, though, we don t know. as bob rueben says, you never know when a bond crisis is going to come. it s not li
ought to be and give him responsibility and accountability. if europe goes to hell in a hand basket and if america suddenly there s a bond crisis or something like that, he is fully responsible, we are not. pat it s unheroic. this is not a strategic retreat. this is not george washington on long island. this is this is napoleon. this is the end of any hopes of any real deficit reduction. they are giving barack obama complete power, forget the $4 trillion bill to curb the debtor the $2 trillion deal to curb the debt. this is boehner and mcconnell saying, you win, you have all of the power to raise the debt
the things we re going to have to do eventually but in a more gradual way. what happens if you wait and wait and wait to deal with the debt you make yourself more vulnerable to a bond crisis, interest rate spike. you have to make sudden, harsh changes. very draconian. that s never good on a mass scale. particularly some of the changes being described, things that will tax, things that we don t already pay taxes on. things that affect the mortgage rate interest deduction. david gergen, cnn senior analyst, the debt commission is dealing with proposed changes we just talked about and social security, the age which we get it. taxes, defense spending, every single one a highly charged issue. listen to erskin bowls and what he said this week. solutions are all painful. there s no easy way out. for many years elected officials would be worried if they made