special report . i was chuckling at that line, the president, you heard an audible chuckle from the audience assembled in the rose garden when he made that remark but there were some pretty sharp elbows, if i could say so, in this speech. he took on the speaker of the house directly. that doesn t often happen when it comes to presidential negotiations, does it bret? well jon, you have to look at this as the first salvo in the next negotiation over this supercommittee, this bipartisan committee that will be starting, that has already started, its back and forth over decifit reduction. the president is now calling for additional decifit reduction to pay for so- called his additional stimulus package, the $447 billion plan that he unveiled just last week. so yes, it was pointed, yes, it will have a lot of pushback in washington.
a tax plan. he says we have to worry about spending. that s the problem that really needs to be addressed. then i asked him about the buffet tax increase. here s what the speaker said: i don t think i would describe class warfare as leadership. america has a spending problem. the government continues to spend more money than what we have. and i don t believe it makes any sense to tax the very people that we expect to invest in our economy, help grow our economy, and to create jobs in america. if i were giving the president advice, my advice would be let s tackle the spending problem, let s get our economy going, get more people back to work, more people on the tax rolls, and then if we need more revenue, all right, we ll take a look at where we can get it then. reporter: all right. so i asked the speaker, is there any common ground between you and the president on decifit reduction. he said he could support free trade agreements and thought other republicans would as well.
election? over time, you will see that a class warfare argument can have a temporary benefit. but i am worried, because this economy is in a very fragile recovery right now. and especially with gas prices now at 4.14 a gallon, for example, in chicagoland, people are not feeling very wealthy. i m pretty worried, also, about the federal reserve missing a huge inflation signal that s now hitting this economy, and a big tax increase could also put an engine behind inflation which would hurt this economic recovery. i think in the long run, we should look at the gang of six, three republicans, three democrats, that are looking in putting in the bipartisan commission report on decifit reduction. that report offers us a chance to solve this problem, just as reagan and o neill did in 1983. gregg: i want to throw one more poll at you and we ll put it on the screen.
rhetoric now because there s a federal balance sheet that he ll be judged against, and i think the problem, if he s too obviously and blatantly cynical about this and doesn t have enough details and doesn t genuinely seek a deal and people snip that about him it s really going to erode his leadership quality. bill: doug, why does he trail so badly in that poll you pointed out? because until yesterday, there was no long term plan to balance the budget, to get the debt and decifit under control. bottom line, the president, to get back the independents who are 38 percent of the electorate, largest group, has to commit himself seriously to decifit reduction, hasn t done it. yesterday hopefully was a step in the right direction. bill: i think everybody watching this, yesterday, and we have yet to hear from ryan, are saying what next! these guys are east coast-west coast down there. i mentioned doug s piece, a reminder, doug frequently writes for the op-ed section for fox news.com, our
workers for every retiree. that means that at some point, it s got to break. you ve got to end up reforming the system. and we can either wait until 2037, when we hit a crisis, or we can do it now, and phase this in over a 30-year period, which i think most americans would agree on. it s not a question of if we re going to do decifit reduction. it s only a question of when, are we going to do it on our timetable or wait until the financial markets to dictate this. jon: senator mark warner, democrat from virginia, joining with saxby chambliss who introduced that legislation he was just telling us about. senator warner, thank you for being with us. jenna: the home of the dollar menu, mcdonald s, raising prices. the company said listen, with this higher cost of food we re seeing we re going to have to adjust and charge you more for a big mac. robert gray from the fox business network, breaking the bad news to us. this is the dollar menu, robert. is that going anywhere or will we see the p