but the reason we ve got a problem right now is people keep on avoiding hard things. and i think now is the time for us to go ahead and take it one. rich wolf. you keep talking about balance, and sacrifice, in the 4 trillion-dollar deal that you re talking about roughly it seems that we are now 4-1 spending to taxes, we re talking 800 billion in taxes roughly. that doesn t seem very fair to democrats. i wonder if you could clarify why we re at that level and if you could clarify your social security position, if any of the money from social security, even from chain cpi go to the defic deficit? with respect to social security, that is not the source of our deficit problems. social security is part of a package and would be an issue of how do we make sure social security extends its life and is
good to see you. hi, ezra. i don t want you to be constrained by what congress can and cannot do, but what can we do. well, as the president alluded to, there is a lot of infrastructure work that needs to be done, with bridges and roads and rail lines that are showing the age, and you can imagine the big plan to spend the money for the upgrade of the infrastructure and something of long lasting benefits to be done over several years and not one-off stimulus, but takes place over five or ten years and you could spend a half a trillion or trillion dollars and if you did, that you might want to think about simultaneously fiscal restraint on the health care cost are the long-term deficit problems and make sure that the interest rates don t rise and offset the rises, but there is a real opportunity to put construction workers to work, and make the infrastructure stronger. when we talk about jobs, we tend to talk about congress a lot, but you report on the
or down the road. so in an odd juxtaposition, do you think the financial service industry is in the same space as the american consumer is worrying about the now today? it ice somewh s somewhat of phenomenon. it goes beyond greed. i think it s looking at the immediate and i think some of that is technology and information that we re left with. it s a cultural shift somewhat. we don t want to roll up the sleeves and do hard work and it will take some of the years for the problems we have. the deficit problems. there are no quickç fixes. no easy answers here. it s going to take a lot of tough decisions and hard work. i do worry as a nation we seemed to have lost a bit of that will we had. willie geist, you mentioned that you feel that the banks are still too interconnected. there is a sense that things hasn t changed that much, despite the near cans that
we have seen some good numbers. and the bears are going to take those numbers right back from you today. the cpi came out. this is consumer inflation, the prices you and i pay when we start paying up for extra things. it was up by 0.2% on the headline number. if you strip out energy and gas, it was actually up 0.3% because we have seen gas prices come back down a little bit this month. that was hotter than the street had been expecting. we also got some empire state numbers that tells you about how the economy is going in new york. and those were very disappointing, down by more than 7 points. and all of that added up to put some heavy duty pressure on stocks this morning. right now the dow futures are down by 118 points so we could be in for a rough ride this morning. we also were a little concerned even before we got those numbers about what is happening in greece, because it s a new day so we have a new outlook and think greece is not going to get solved with its budget and deficit
resolution of major energy problems, major health care problems, major deficit problems, major educational problems, and that the nickel and dime version of politics that you re describing which has been around forever and will be around forever is inadequate to the problems that we now face? right. even inherent in what coburn was trying to do here there was politics. no doubt. 100%. no, a good guy, jimmy and i talking about it earlier. what tends to happen, we get into ideological debates, focusing on little pieces rather than the big picture. what are we really trying to accomplish here? not only that, these elected officials are there to govern. sometimes they caught up, whether the grower, now he s at war with, with tom coburn. i don t think anyone would consider senator tom coburn relaxed on fiscal policy at all. it s crazy. but you come up with a catchy pledge or are able to pigeonhole