well, we really shouldn t be. i argued going back to the spring this issue had to be dealt with. that s why in may the house moved a bill to replace the sequester with other cuts in mandatory spending. that is why in july the house passed a bill to expend extend all the current tax rates. i ve been pushing all year for us to address this problem. but here, we are, at the 11th hour around the president still isn t serious about dealing with this issue right here. it is this issue, spending! now you go back, want to talk about polling, most americans would agree that spending is a much bigger problem than raising taxes. they want us to deal with this in a responsible way. problem with congress? my point, whatever the issue is takes this long each year in december to get these things done. unfortunately that is the case that we re dealing with today.
rocketry. and what that means is they have the ability to build an icbm that could reach the western united states, guam, hawaii and, of course, alaska. what they haven t done yet is demonstrate the ability to tip it with a nuclear weapon. look, the payload in this rocket was about 100 kilograms, about 220 pounds. at their stage of nuclear developments, they would could miniaturize a nuclear weapon down to it, but they would need to miniaturize it down to about a ton, about 1500-2000 pounds and lift that into orbit. right now they re a long way from that, but that s not the point. jenna, it s now an engineering problem for north korea and not a scientific and technical problem, and that poses a real risk to the united states. jenna: so you say they re not there yet, but again, that s not the point. right. jenna: so what do we do about it, general scales? yeah, there are a couple of things. the first thing that i think we must do is expand our
solve this problem by getting the spending lien down. the president wants to pretend that spending isn t the problem. that s why we don t have an agreement. the chart depicts what i ve been saying for a long time now. washington has a spending problem. they can t be fixed with tax increases alone. the right answer is to start cutting spending, addressing our debt, and paving the way for long-term economic growth. unfortunately the white house is so unserious about cutting spending it a pierce willing to slow walk any agreement and walk our economy right up to the fiscal cliff. doing that puts jobs in our country in danger. it jeopardize as golden opportunity to make 2013 the year that we enact fundamental tax reform and entitlement reform to begin to solve our country s debt
our kids and our grandkids are the ones that will suffer because washington was too shortsighted to fix the problem. mr. speaker, several recent polls about 75% of the public believe that the tax rates for the upper income earners should expire. why are you holding out for a tax cut for the wealthy that most americans, even many wealthy people say we shouldn t have? raising tax rates will hurt small businesses at a time when we re expecting small businesses to be the engine of job creation in america. ernst & young made it clear if we do what the president is asking for, some 700,000 jobs would be at risk. it s simple as that. [inaudible].
they re saying pass the senate bill that extend tax rates for 9% of the americans. let the top two tax pace expire and this will go a long way to for a balanced approach and solve the problem. if you pass the senate bill. $800 billion in revenue. that is $80 billion a year. to put in context the president ran a deficit of $1.1 trillion. $80 billion of tax revenue, reduced that from 1.1 trillion to 1.02 trillion. that is the problem. spending is the issue. there is reticence among democrats to do big, hard reforms that will be necessary to really drop the numbers down by the trillions. that we re not making any progress. jon: seems to me and maybe you disagree with this the president is winning the pr