saying another american was killed by insurgents in a different part of the country. the attacks coming in the same day the chairman of joint chiefs of staff dempsey is due inside that country assessing security there. the president is using his weekly saturday address to confront critics from both sides of the political aisle on his new federal budget. he talked about it today, giving a bit of a preview ahead of next week s official release. critics calling the proposal unwise and unpopular. the president argues his plan would reform the nation s benefit program and close the hoop holes for the wealthy. but republican leaders warn they are firmly against $580 billion in new taxes, included in the president s new budget. molly has more now from washington. harris, republicans say the president is moving in the, quote, wrong direction, in his plan for a new budget. today in his weekly radio and internet address, president obama says, while it might not be ideal, it is a fiscally
that onlyover $1 million. who thinks that is a bad idea that a millionaire pays the same percentage of taxes as a sector a guy who builds roads? does anybody think that s a bad idea? if the republicans were smart, they would haed the message from the jan brewers and scott walkers and say to themselves, look, that s a pretty good compromise because no middle class working people get hit by that. legality let s go with that. the president is willing to, almost 2 1/2 times as many cuts. let s get this thing done. but isn t that the point, governor? the point is that the millionaires and the billionaires are not going to be hurt by this at all. even if you close the hoop holes. but ordinary people, i m talking about that mother watching this show tonight that has got to deal with the fact that come
makers and takers. i mean, consider that the gop message on the one hand they re saying we need to be talking about the middle class more. we know we need to do that. we need to change those talking points, but in the sequester conversation have they said anything about the middle class? no. they ve been talking they won t even talk about what tax breaks they would be willing oop holes they would be willing to close at the benefit of the middle class. they won t even say the word middle class. i think karen has a great point. the republican party is in the middle of this soul searching, but like they can t sort it out this week, and it s march 1st in a couple of days, and in the meantime, really what they ve got is this internal politics around tax cuts where the house leadership the leadership see noz way to sell any kind of revenues to the membership, and they haven t figured out this new set of policies that they kind of in theory know they need to start pitching that really
i want to address what monica said, the stimulus did work. i know people like to say over and over it didn t work. economist after economist have said this. it did keep us from he said we would be in a worse situation if we had not done it. we could have gone into a great depression. taxes have not really gone up. we have had the bush tax cuts right now for a decades. the not stimulated the economy in the way republicans say they would. i think there s a real debate to be had here. we have to be honest about the fact that the deficit is not the immediate issue. what does this do to the push that the president wants and some other democrats want for more tax hikes? they want to close hoop holes which is the tax hike. the president was saying when we were struggling and in a recession now is not the time to raise taxes. this is the worst we have been since we came out of that recession. hoping for a one-percent growth which is an nehm mick.
need more revenue than we got in this deal. but the other thing is we forget how much we have already done. there has been one deal after another after another that has cut spending very significantly. and that s why to say it s now only about spending and no more revenue on the table is just a big mistake. we have cut a. widespread agreement if the revenue argument was, as simpson-bowles have suggested, a vast simplification of the tax code. this latest deal complicated the tax code. continued corporate welfare. simplify the tax code. close the hoop holes, lower the rates, you would get broad agreement. unfortunately, that has never been part of the deal. you re right. that s what we need to do. but let me come back to exactly the point that you just made. if we could because the media plays a major role in this mess, ok? we went through a fiscal cliff. oh, my god, i was on your show that somebody from bloomberg said don t start bashing the media here. it s not a question