sequester, it s really hard to see how anything is going to happen. eventually washington turns to immigration to gun control to midterm elections and then you really can t have it. we wait until the markets collapse? markets don t care. they re up. defense stocks like we hear it will be cut so much and it will be the end. care about profits. dividends. balance sheet is great. the market doesn t care. no. the market is actually saying washington is a big distraction. we got the tax rule. capital gains. dividends. where they fit. the american people for the most part don t have a tax increase. left behind. we don t care about sequester on wall street. not at all. there is an answer on this. you can impose cuts to phase in gradually. have cuts at the back end. you can do things that wall street would like and that would help the deficit. there just doesn t seem to be enough trust on either side. republicans don t believe those cuts if they are put in future will come into eff
sequester. in fact, he is taking the long view. because you have said that you believe that we need to close loopholes, because that is the president s position, because of the long view on the economy, why is it over the weeks and weeks and weeks leading up to today, not just a meeting tomorrow but leading up to today, hasn t there been a move to a long view that involves dealing with loopholes and preventing the sequester from going into place? i hope, melody, that we will get to a place where we are doing the big deal. we need to do entitlement reform and tax reform together but picking and choosing little things now to fix the short-term problem makes the long-term deal even more difficult to get to. and here s my view on taxes. the president got what he wanted on january 1st. he got a $620 billion tax increase. if you add that to all tax increases in the health care bill, you talk about $1.6 trillion in new revenues coming
these people. is it possible that they didn t follow watergate? they don t know all of the president s men? they don t know the history? is it possible they are ignorant of the greatness of this man that defined journalism? is it possible? a guy that keeps breaking stories. broke stories first in afghanistan. breaking stories as we move forward. listen, let s get to the bottom line here. they caught the white house in the lie. at the end of the day, they are kicking back. it s stupid. i ll say it. this is stupid. they got caught in a lie and instead of saying we screwed up, they are trying to attack the guy that revealed the lie. when the president said i had nothing to do with the sequester and of course woodward specifically got them to back down. great for bob to have done that absolutely. it s embarrassing that none of
year and so this isn t the last step in the process of this debate. i think we re going to have a number of opportunities over the course of the next several months to talk about spending and debt but we ought to talk about it in how can we reform and restructure entitlement programs. ten years from now entitlement spending and interest on the debt will represent 91% of all federal spending if we don t do something about it. senator, you mentioned earlier this is josh green with bloomberg. he comes with billions of dollars. go ahead. you mentioned earlier the imperative of economic growth. economists say the sequester will cut about 0.6 of a percentage point from gdp and kill 750,000 jobs. why not undo or delay the sequester? i think there s a certain amount of pain. josh, i m not trying to minimize when you reduce government spending it will have impacts. i think the short-term consequence in terms of economic growth is going to be a lot smaller relative to long-term
budget machine. there s a front page story in the new york times where both sides are starting to say maybe this won t be so bad after all. what is it the republican conference s position on the sequester today? well, two things, joe. one, we need to honor the commitment that we made and not shut it off. not do away with the sequester. secondly, we shouldn t allow it to be replaced with a tax increase. the president got his tax increase in january and so the republican position on this really is that we should make this a lot less painful than what the president is advertising it will be and so we re going to offer a proposal that would give him more discretion if he s really concerned about the impact this is going to have, he would be able then to target low priority spending opposed to high priority spending that he says that will impact. we re going to have a vote on that today. okay. just curious aside from all this