social security. the big dollars are entitlements the health care versus social security. i think everything should be on the table. and means testing is pretty much become an acceptable thing. raising the age, it makes sense, we live longer. my point is you don t get very many dollars. play the class warfare stuff, the president did it brilliantly during the campaign. marginal tax rates, bush tax rates go away and you re talking about $80 billion in the next ten years. what needs to happen, the really heavy lifting with democrats is going to be entitlement spending. but the game is, the real math problem, it s 218, nothing else, 218, that s the number of house votes. can boehner get he may accept less than the majority a majority, but how much medicare can be put on the table before democrats lose 100? not very much. i don t have a nurl, but not very much.
between 500,000 and a million they re going to end up agreeing to an increase in rates. that will be slight. it won t be 39.6. but that would probably end up with republicans budging there. democrats have one place to go. they have to agree to some movement on medicare reform. the president has inched over there but he is under tremendous pressure from liberals not to touch medicare. he will have to give something or republicans won t give increase in the debt ceiling. jon: you talked to bret baier a lot on special report and he was on yesterday and gave us a statistic our brain room developed but bret didn t get it right and wanted me to correct it. if you take the increase in the bush tax rates that president obama campaigned on and wants to go forward with, you get funding for the federal government for about eight and a half days per year. that is all. yeah. jon: now that, i guess you might say more than a drop in the bucket, i m not sure but you will have to come up
you could spark some global financial crisis. but the fiscal cliff, people are going to wake up january 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and nothing substantial will have changed. because these are cuts that are phased in, it ll take a long time for the withholding to start hitting people s paychecks, and even after withholding starts hitting people s paychecks, you re not going to see an immediate change in spending that would have some type of immediate and cataclysmic effect on the economy. what does immediately change is december you have the bush tax rates in effect. january, you have the clinton tax rates in effect. democrats are better off negotiating from the clinton rates and then they re saying, okay, look, here are the rates, we re going to bring this down, we re going to bring this down. we re going to leave these how they are. how would you like to vote for this? are you going to oppose this? and people didn t really vote for compromise necessarily this election. they overwhelmingly el
pessimism. it s going to look terrible until it all gets solved. i did a lot of reporting on this over the weekend. the initial offer from house republicans coming back to the white house after that big kumbaya summit meeting the other day was, okay, we ll give you revenue but we re not specifying a number, we re not having an enforcement mechanism like the trigger. we are extending all the bush tax rates in the interim and, by the way, we need all of these we re going to disarm the sequester of the defense spending cuts and we re not going to fold the debt ceiling increase into this deal, and i think the white house was very taken aback by the meagerness of that offer. and so there s a different tone. but if the substance is going to be enough and the time is short, it s really going to be complicated to get this done by the end of the year. mosark, if the debt ceiling not wrapped up, the president is not going for it.
pledge can no longer be a conservative litmus test. when you re $16 trillion in it debt, the only pledge we should be making to each other is to avoid becoming greece. but i will violate the pledge, long story short, for the good of the country only if it democrats will do entitlement reform. but a bipartisan consensus to raise taxes grows, republicans insist they won t budge on kaepg the bush tax rates for the wealthiest at 33% and 35%. they ve expressed more openness to raising revenue by eliminating individual loopholes and deductions in the tax code and believe they have public opinion on their side. boehner aides point to a new republican poll. in the survey 61% say they prefer a deal that raises revenue by reforming the tax code, lowering rates and closing loopholes. just 28% favor raising rates on those making over $250,000 a year. shocking nobody wants to raise