some serious concessions from democrats. we have over $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities. all of them are unsustainable. we need to raise the debt ceiling both short term, medium term and long term. that s what it would take to get my vote. will cain is a cnn contributor. secretary geithner said not raising the debt ceiling would be catastrophic for the economy. he concedes no one knows for certain in the event that it s not raised. are republicans willing to risk sending this fragile recovery that we re in into chaos to find out if they re right? no. but neither are democrats. let me tell you why i m so certain about this. the debt ceiling has been raised 74 times since 1962. second, the consequences for not raising the debt ceiling are dire and everyone knows it. i have my prop here. the issue is, if we don t raise the debt ceiling, the government cannot issue new debt. the problem is we take in 60 cents for every dollar we spent. we spend 40% more than we take in
recession hit. that is a stark reminder that this program was borne out of the depression when an unemployed factory worker used stamps to buy surplus eggs and butter in rochester, new york. of course, these aren t just statistics, they are family and faces and people trying to get by in tough economic times. where is the good news in all this? well, the increase in the number of people using food stamps is starting to level off, actually. and that could be an indication things are stabilizing in the economy. we turn our focus back to the killing of osama bin laden now. his death comes nearly ten years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. but at what human and financial cost? well, here s a look by the numbers, according to the week.com. we ll start off with this number first. 2,976. that is the official tally, the number of victims, the number of people killed on 9/11. not including the terrorists. next, our next number for you is 20%. that is the percentage of americans who say that the
comes in and takes it away? listen, i feel badly. i say the same thing to the factory worker that got laid off, despite the fact that he wasn t planning on it. because the economy turned down, the promises made were too big and we have people unemployed in new jersey who are losing their homes, because they can t pay their property taxes and the main driver of property taxes in new jersey are employee costs, public employee costs are 75% of property taxes so i say the same thing to that state worker that i say to the others. you may have to leave new jersey because taxes are so high. my property tax now exceeds my interest on my mortgage. i never thought this could happen. it s incredible. i cut my mortgage, refinanced. my amount went up because of what you re talking about. no one can sustain that. it can t be sustained. we have to work together to try to fix the problem. i ll tell you this. i haven t gotten any cooperation from unions in new jersey on any level. i asked teacher
people understand that the difference between us and somebody in a difficult circumstance in the game isn t a big difference at all. pete, i want to bring you in on this because you have been playing the game for the past hour. pete, explain to our viewers the various scenarios that you can actually play out here and maybe what has been the hardest choice that you ve had to make so far. you actually have a choice of what you can do within this game, right? yeah. right now, i m a factory worker, and a lot of the choices i had to make so far seem easy, selling your stuff to get a little extra money, and as things go on it gets difficult. my grandfather died. can i go, it costs $350 and i have only $300 in the bank or your child needs something to make them a better person and you can t give them that. you say you re a factory worker in this game, and it puts
situation in the context of the kind of sacrifice you re asking from the public-sector employee unions? first off, one thing you re wrong about, we didn t cut corporate taxes. we cut we said if you come in from another state and you haven t paid taxes, if you haven t done work in the state, we ll give you a two-year break if you bring your jobs in. our number-one priority is showing that wisconsin is open for business to put more people to work. we reduced the birden and the impact of taxes. we need to put 250,000 more people to work in the private sector between now and 2015 to get this economy going again. there s a great piece in the new york times today about an unemployed factory worker down in wisconsin. a union guy in a union town who agrees with me. when gm left the town slowly started to slip away. they need to have a shared sacrifice. they re making the sacrifice. he like so many other factory workers and middle-class