oppose raising tax rates. lawmakers on both sides are now eyeing tax expenditures as a way to accomplish their goals. jim angle, live in washington. tax expenditures, jim, what are they? reporter: well jon, that s just a fancy word for the accumulation of tax deductions and subsidies in the tax code. some people call it spending by another name. so going into the tax code, to clean up all of those ducks and subsidies is seen as the best possibility to unite both democrats and republicans because it could generate money that could be used both for decifit reduction and to actually reduce tax rates. listen: this is where the revenue deal is to be done. i don t think there s the political will to do significant increases in tax rates. the deal to be done is to look at the tax preferences and walk them back in some intelligent way. tax expenditures or tax preferences add up to about $1.3 trillion a year, more than all individual and
maybe even a vice presidential candidate or a presidential candidate. well, it just makes my heart sing. i mean, what the hell? that s the goofiest thing i ever heard in my life. i never aspired to that when i was there. i m a legislator. i couldn t administer my way out of a paper sack. but i sure love to legislate. i love the hearings, i love to learn, i love to research, i love the debate, i love the floor debate, i loved everything about it. and that s, that s what they re not doing. they re not legislating. they re meeting in their caucuses to figure out how to screw the other party instead of how to heal america. what a sad thing to watch. it didn t work that way when i was there. you worked with guys on the other side. i didn t have to agree with ted kennedy or admire what he did, all i knew was when he shook my hand or looked me the eye, he never broke his word once. now we have guys that won t compromise on anything. you could give them the whole deal, they wouldn t even kno
away and as recently as only two weeks ago said they ve already, you know, stored it in the attic. they re going to have to apparently take it out again and indications are while this might not the proverbial qe3, for want of a better expression, they re going to be back in there doing this again and that s what the markets want to hear. this is a little eye ironic when you think about it, jenna, the capitalism that abhors rescues or bailout the, when it comes time to saving their own heinie sevment are all for it, and that s what they want, that s what they re doing bidding up prices and that s exactly what they re going to get. jenna: that s what the markets wants, as you were seeing, ahead of this decision. we have about two hours until this happens. what about the rest of us? is this something that we want as a country? when we mention stimulus in another form, you get a lot of people with raised eyebrows and the fed does it, it seems like it slips by. what s the deal there? i ve
today it s over 72%. that is outrageous. we have some serious economic concerns that need to be addressed and they need to stop doing this blame game, because it s not getting us anywhere. jon: i get all kinds of emails and top lines from the folks on our chat who say, hey, please don t describe what was achieved last week any kind of a budget cut, what they ve really done is slow the growth in future deficits. yeah i think a lot of what you ve seen in the markets actually is a response to the fact that the deal that they reached was really not the type of deal that the market wanted to see. it was not anything that was substantial. that s where a lot of anger is coming there. yes, the real problem is the deal that they reached. it just isn t going to do enough to get us to where we need to be in terms of cutting our deficit. jon: let s get back to the question from the lead in, from
one aide says all options really remain on the table. the question is why are they doing this now? elizabeth mcdonald of fox business network is with us. what exactly is this committee doing several days after this? this is the chairman of the the chairman has put out a statement saying this is irresponsible, others say they want to see the effect off foreign american costs and foreign costs and their households. i ve been looking at the math behind it and it s simple, the $2 trillion error that s&p is being accused of making, what happened was s&p used an annual growth rate and government spending on discretionary programs, very simple, of 5 percent, the government came back to them said no, you should use 2 1/2%, which is going to be the inflation rate over the next ten years, so that blew out the $2 trillion difference. that s because they came back and said we don t trust you re going to keep the caps on spending and the decifit reduction deal.