superficial level incredibly appealing to voters, isn t it? it certainly is. there are pretty obvious reasons why. you try to explain this on the notion of fallacy of competition, you lose them warfare you even start. the whole idea you have to save is contingent upon someone having income. they spend the income, you have to save. the government being a family, completely fallacious. first of all, the united states issues the global reserve asset that everybody else needs to earn in order to conduct foreign trade. families don t get to do that. i don t get to import people to my family and tax them for the next three generations. governments get to do that. you have to take that next step. there s also a political dynamic. there s a procyclical bias to accumulating debt, regardless of the country. king said back in the day, the time for the start is the boom not the slump. at the top of the boom, when houses are going up in volume, everybody s having a good time, what s the reward in
spending is already the lowest but what i think you re getting at here is to me is a very interesting point about all this is that you ask people specific questions about the size and scope of government, about you ask philosophically about the size and scope of government, they want a small government, a lean government. they think it s too big right now. you ask them about safety net programs, they are all very pop gr you lar and as you re saying it costs money if you re going to have the kind of safety net that people in individual questions say they want. because of what eliot spitzer said, people don t know what the federal government spends money on. we re spending less and less as a percent of the economy and in absolute terms on things like aid for kids to go to college today. college is becoming unafforda e unaffordable. almost any social expenditure, we re spending less. we have an interesting graphic here. they also don t realize is at a basic level what they re pa
not doing a good job with. health care and education, which are eating up enormous amounts of paychecks have the same problem. families don t feel they can say no to whatever they are charging. they can say no to the hospital when your loved one is in it. you can t say no to providing your kid a college education. they are getting way, way, way into debt. the government funds these debts. they don t demand good prices for it. when talking social mobility, it s not just wealth, it s the human capital, which now, again, that same distinction is occurring. only the wealthiest families can begin to imagine. it s a story we have to worry about the damage that was done in this economy through this recession and this recovery. for example, one bad piece of new that is came out with the
can t we cut 2% like american familys? american families don t build their own roads, or run prisons. janet napolitano argues the sequester threatens homeland security. and says the department has $# billion in unspent preferences fund. they appoint to $90,000 spent to upgrade security at spring training site in arizona for pro baseball teams. general services administration runs the federal properties won notoriety when an official memorialized lavish paid trip to vegas. stark contrast to building in the gsa inventory. in washington, the hearing noted many go unused. there are over 500 buildings here and over 200 of them vacant or underutilized. in 2010, president obama said gsa had billions in property that should be sold by 2014. only a portion has been. officials question the value of even those.
authority he already has. bret: frankly, mara, the meeting friday, that could be one thing that is decided the transfer authority. it could be the final white flag that both sides say okay, let s just do this. bret: it could be. or it could be the beginning of negotiations for real deficit reduction. that is a longshot. but we have gone through the dances before. don t forget the reason we re here is because both sides fail to make a grand bargain. the grand bargain is where the president agrees to entitlement cut and republicans agree to some revenue increases. since then, we have had a series of fiscal cliffs and we ll get more of them. i just want to say something about the bigger talk. the president has been repeating in recent days, jay carney said this, he said this in the state of the union he is willing to do chain cpi and means testing of benefit. he is reminding people he is willing to do the. john boehner said the other day he is willing to close loopholes in the context