billion a year. in the first year you d take us down to $472 billion for the core pentagon program, and that would be about the equivalent of 2006-2007, which incidentally was one of the highest spending years since world war ii, including all of the cold war. we d only be cutting about 14%. dick cheney myself, and my boss colin powell at the time and george h.w. bush cut about 25%. this is not a draconian cut, even if it s done by sequestration. you ve warned about the industrial complex, nice turn of phrase there. is there any way out of it. well, dwight eisenhower is the man we should give credit to that. i don t know anymore. that s an excellent question. my former boss, colin powell, mentioned about nine months ago or something about us having created a industrial terrorism complex, and when you look at the homeland security budget, you look at $100 billion-plus for the intelligence community and ask what are we getting for it, and you look at this complex
core pentagon program, and that would be about the equivalent of 2006-2007, which incidentally was one of the highest spending years since world war ii, including all of the cold war. we d only be cutting about 14%. dick cheney myself, and my boss colin powell at the time and george h.w. bush cut about 25%. this is not a draconian cut, even if it s done by se questation. you ve warned about the industrial complex, nice turn of phrase there. is there any way out of it. well, dwight eisenhower is the man we should give credit to that. i don t know anymore. that s an excellent question. my former boss, colin powell, mentioned about nine months ago or something about us having created a industrial terrorism complex, and when you look at the homeland security budget, you look at $100 billion-plus for the intelligence community
government was fighting over cuts to one-third of 1% of what we ll spend overall this fiscal year. that is not to diminish the actual impact of any cut to any individual program or agency. the government is about services and not about ledgers. the $786 million in first responder grant which this bill cuts, may only be 2% of the homeland security budget, but can fund a whole lot and most americans care most about funding just one, the one in their neighborhood. the point is this budget deal does very little to improve the nation s fiscal situation, and it manages to do quite a bit in terms of the programs and jobs and cuts for programs and jobs that help an awful lot of people. joining me now to discuss this are two house members on opposite sides of the aisle, democratic congressman raoul grihalva, the chair of the progressive caucus and
budget by 5 percent and leadership budget by 5 percent. if we re going to lead by example i think members of congress should also cut our own salaries by 5 percent. it s been 77 years since members of congress have reduced their salary, and with millions of people out of work right now i think it s the appropriate thing to do. bill: you remember the year that was, can you name it? it was 1933. bill: 1933. and we all remember what this country was going through. that was the last time congress took a pay cut. now, you know that this came up a year ago and it went nowhere. does it go anywhere now? i think more people are focused on the debt and decifit, the president had a bipartisan debt commission, i think those recommendations should have been forwarded to the congress. again, they were bipartisan. unfortunately, it lacked the 14 out of the 18 needed to forward the proposals on to the congress but this is debt and decifit that we re acouple accumulating, it will be our greatest
the way we are looking at our financial position. secretary geithner himself, in august of 2009, requested a democratic congress to raise the debt ceiling, he didn t get the answer for five months. there was no sky is falling mantra from the administration. so i think a lot of this is about trying to intimidate the republican house into just going along with business as usual and further indebting americans. jamie: speaker boehner made a preelection pledge that he would cut $100 billion from the budget. is that enough? and if, in fact, that is accomplished, what impact would that have if we raise the debt ceiling now? well, i don t think he s going to get that accomplished. right now they re looking at about 50 billion. you only has half the fiscal year to do that. take a look at medicare alone, the waste and corruption is another 60 billion, so they can find it out there, boehner can definitely do that. what i think should happen, you should have the spending cuts along with raising