clown all in the span of a generation. when we think of great congressional leaders, we think of powerful politicians like lbj, the master of the senate, or house speakers like sam raburn, tip o neill or even newt gingrich. all of these leaders had much, much more leverage than boehner. wow! ouch! nancy pelosi was a powerful speaker. what s happened? why is john boehner a feckless herder of cats, in your words? i think some want to say that boehner is weak or that the republican freshmen are too fringy. i think there s a culmination of a few factors. one, speakers used to have the earmarks. they could kind of brag you with. you re going to get a bridge in your district. that s pretty much off the table. i think that our culture, our society doesn t respect leaders the way that it used to, and institutions. and i think that s manifesting itself in politics. but i also you also that s an incredible point. it s broken up. the internet has played into that. and also club
and, again, all due respect, he couldn t be any more wrong. he said, you don t get this done by sitting in a room. yes, you do. yes, you do. you re a businessman. you know. that s how you get the deal done. what can you live with? i think the problem, though, that the president may have been alluding to is everything we ve just been saying, for him to sit in a room with john boehner doesn t necessarily get the deal done because john boehner doesn t necessarily speak for enough republicans. john boehner knows what he can get from his congress and what he can t, right? yes. and i think that s exactly why that letter was so firm on rates, where he just did not leave himself one bit of wiggle room. he said, i am not going to raise tax rates, period. you ve heard the president say that he s going to raise rates, but he s not insisting on 39.6. he s willing to compromise. you heard the president put entitlements on the table and say i m willing to do stuff on entitlements. there s talk
do what jim demint did? and that s what i did when i was in congress. i think that actually helps boehner. why does it help painer? because he s drawn a line in the sand for the fiscal conservatives. and it communicates to both the white house and boehner, here s how far you can go. the other side of that is is the proposal that was offered to the president had all these signatures of all the leadership plus paul ryan coming back. so what boehner s done is said here s, we re as a team including paul ryan, suggesting this. what you have is some firming up on the conservative side, which i think says boehner, this is probably about as far as you can go. right. exactly. and so since joe said, so what is the outcome? what is your a compromise, you want to get a deal done, what do you think is possible here as a final tactic? i think you could create a what i would recommend doing is create a small package that shows the debt markets, not the
to be in the middle because they re starting from these positions. i have a feeling that when a deal is done and i think one will get done, barnicle, i know you re a pessimist, i m an optimist they re going to raise that $250,000. that will be a gift to the republicans. and then maybe we ll see reducing mortgage interest deductions from $1 million, which is how much you can deduct now, to $750,000. it will be somewhere in the middle between those two things. second homes, and there s a lot of running room there, you re right. i think one of the problems here is that you don t have relationships. boehner and the president, very little trust, even though, as you ve pointed out, joe, john boehner is right now the best friend that bill clinton that, excuse me, that barack obama in wanting a deal can have. but unlike bill clinton, they don t have relationships. boehner was there sunday night for the congressional christmas party. there was no conversation even monday night. i don t
debt we have. and unless, in my estimation, a lot of economists, you re not going to put us on a path to prosperity unless you take about $9 trillion out over the next ten years. and we re barely talking $4 trillion. yeah, nobody s talking $9 trillion. yeah. and $9 trillion is the only thing that actually solves this. so we re sitting here as a country, we have made commitments that have to be rearranged and made more efficient. we have a tax structure that is subpar to what we need for our economy in terms of our historical averages. and nobody s talking long run. everybody s talking december 31st. i know. you see john boehner s proposal, he was very critical of the president s proposaproposal, it nonstarter, but boehner comes out talking cutting $2.2 trillion. you talk about $9 trillion needed over the next ten years. look at the past four years. we ve almost added $5 trillion to the national debt. over the next four years, we re