months. it s another hammer blow to the struggling middle class families in america. what the numbers say about business with bet founder bob johnson and former hewlett-packard ceo carly fiorina. i m candy crowley, and this is state of the union. first today, mitt romney. gloria borger caught up with the nominee yesterday in indiana and he hit back on president obama s proposal to raise tax rates for people making over $250,000 a year. i think it would be an enormous mistake for us to raise taxes on anyone right now with the economy in the trouble it s in. i also hope people understand that when they talk about raising taxes on the wealthy, as the president does, he s also talking about the same tax rate that applies to small business. more of that romney interview in just a few minutes. but i wanted to bring in republican senator lindsey graham of south carolina. thank you for joining us, senator. glad to be with you. let me ask you first about the president
credibility, with his inability to push back, there will be a meat ax. if you follow comments this weekend of carl levyn and barney frank, their guns are loaded. shotguns are ready. and they are coming after the banks. and i think we have to be careful about that. you can strain the banks too much. you can put them in a position of taking more risk if you don t allow certain kinds of hedging that reduce risk. sore th or they cut back on lending, and that s not good for the economy. and i do disagree with ezra in the sense that of course banks can fail. of course we can have another systematic failure about. you this is not an example of that. this is a modest, modest loss from a group, by the way, that has made billions of profits for this bank over the past several years. which is part of why this problem happened, because this group was allowed to keep going. but isn t aren t they cutting back on lending? no. loans are going up at the moment. the number of loans are going up?