california is going to call it quits. latest in a string of retirements for the lower chamber. what s your reaction? i think it s a sad day for progressives. this comes on the heels of the retirement of congressman george miller, another californian. they have been responsible for huge amounts of legislation over the last couple of decades that have really protected people all kinds of consumer protection legislation, education legislation. health care. health care. obviously they were central in working with nancy pelosi on health care. but the list goes on and on. all kinds of smaller programs that help people. women, infant children program, for instance. anybody who like wants to understand politics at a deeper level and get to know some of the figures who actually really changed this country, should take a look at the careers of henry waxman and george miller
i don t understand why he doesn t have something like that in real life on the other side, the democrats side. your thoughts, bob. this is something a lot of people were talking about it, infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. i don t understand why the democrats aren t the outrageous guys who say, let s go out and create jobs, and if the republicans say no, fine. we re going to show what we have in our bags and this is what we stand for, putting people to work. they re listening to you, chris, in chicago and the white house. i think they listen every day, and i think ultimately they may do something like this. they re going to draw a whole series of contrasts with romney on jobs on heal, on health care medicare. have a jobs bill they have to say no to. don t say no to yourself. that s what harry truman did,
rightly because it s the one concrete proposal on the plans for medical care, which involve a completely radical deconstruction of the medicare system. it s shifting the risk on to private people, and i m sure that it would have very adverse consequences for those people. you ve written about that. but it does say essentially we are now spending about 5.5% of gdp on these plans. the congressional office says 40 years from now it will be 12.5% and i m offering you less than five. that s very radical. but a really radical part of this plan is somewhere else which people don t seem to me to have noticed. it s not revenue but it s quite optimistic. i think you noticed that, too. but if you look at non-health care, non social security and non-interest spending, this is the defense department, health, educati education, the parks, everything, that s 12% of gdp
deal with this. it s the number one problem facing the country. that s why i, frankly, was disappointed that the obama administration didn t come with a budget proposal that dealt with this continuing growth of entitlement. we have to deal with that. somehow we have to find the political will to deal with that. do you think president obama has led enough on this issue? i would like to have seen him be more forceful in saying yes, we re going to take care we re going to confront these problems. i would have liked to have seen that. let me tell you a couple of things that could be done that don t solve the debt problem. one would be to do tax reform. i was in washington before the joint committee on taxation. chairman max baucus and senate on ways and means. i said the stars are aligned just like they were when ronald reagan last reformed the tax
this spending binge we re on. the united states of america, if we didn t have the dollar as the de facto reserve currency of the world we d be greece. i mean, we are broke, bankrupt, really bankrupt. we re going to have debt to gdp over the next five years of over 100%. that is not sustainable. now, you ve got to take care of that. how do you take care of that? you ve got to do it by cutting spending with respect to which there is no political will on the part of either party, not just a democratic problem but also a republican problem. primarily a democratic problem, i need to say. or raising and/or raising revenues. you need to do both. both have to be on the table. we have to get a handle on that. one way to bring a lot of attention to the problem is to not keep increasing, keep giving ourselves a new credit card every time we run out of