a bold request, give him nearly a trillion dollars. give it to him now. let him spend it on whatever he wants, no questions asked. we need to make that bill quickly and cleanly. if they didn t, paulson insisted america could be hit by a second great depression. to help the american people is the goal of this plan. john: with the stock market tanking paulson got his so-called tarp money. eventually tarp was used in all sorts of ways few had envisioned, including to bail out the auto companies. meantime, barack obama had defeated john mccain in the race to succeed george bush. during the transition, incoming chief of staff rahm emanuel mapped out a governing strategy. you never want a serious crisis to go to waste, what i mean by that, an opportunity to do things you could not do before. do you remember when rahm emanuel said in 2008 never let
going to pass that next week which gives us the flexibility to put these cuts in place in a better way. john: if the deal materializes or even if it doesn t, it may be that this sequester, which was supposed to signify a profound failure of government, was in fact a real, if untidy success. senator ron johnson has been saying this all along. if and when sequestration goes through, would that be a victory for the tea party? sure, absolutely. tea party taxed enough already. the federal government gets enough revenue, it s about time to lower the rate of spending, lower the size of government. this is a great debatet what you want to have, how big a government do you want to have, things like sequester, the operation of government, raising of the debt ceiling all are opportunities to try to achieve the kind of result the american people need, just go back to the debates between hamilton and jefferson, the beginning of the country. john: do you see that as being a healthy part of
deploy to the persian gulf. it s sad, john, to have the chief of this land scaring people when in fact if any of those things happen it will be because the president wants them to happen. the cuts are not smart, fair, it will hurt our economy. john: is this all a little over the top? look it, i don t think these are the facts, what people who report on the facts, how they decide to describe them is their decision, but i think the facts are the facts. certain cuts will be made, certain programs will be affected. but is it over the top to say that all of the these horrible things will happen? what depends there are clearly negative outcomes associated with the sequester, there are clearly negative outcomes not dealing with it, including threatening the public. i could describe the sequester, if i needed to, as
gas revenue. put people to work as soon as possible on most urgent repairs. make high quality preschool available to every single child in america. redesign america s high schools so they better equip graduates, training and equipping forces. and invest in capabilities, reduce waste in war time spending. invest in worldclass hacare including mental care for our warriors. and he throws out platitudes and the underlying economics behind that are illusional. i think that a lot of politics here, we re not funding things that are obsolete and the obvious things, there s a whole variety of things that need to be done in government today, because if we don t deal with this we will not as a country be able to invest in the things that are important. these problems are solvable. they take some courage. john: do you he see courage out there? i see some courage.
reductions have to occur, 40 plus cents of every single dollar that we spend in this country. john: february 26th, newport news, virginia, president obama speaks to ship yard workers. what the sequester does, it uses a meat cleaver approach to gut critical investments in things like education and national security. john: but he again resists talk of an immediate catastrop catastrophe. the impact of this policy will not be felt overnight, but it will be real. john: it s tuesday, congressman, there are just a few days left to avoid the sequester. do you see anything coming down the pike in the next few days that will avoid the sequester being triggered? i think the sequester will be triggered, yes, indeed. john: georgia republican congressman paul brown. there are a lot of republicans, yourself included, who say this is really bad for the u.s. military and for na reason they were opposed to the sequestration. senator lindsey graham says the party of ronald reagan would neve