these benefits by lifting the burden of obamacare s individual mandate for one year. he wants to pay for them by whacking obamacare. that s a nonstarter. if they come with something that s serious, i ll talk to them. but right now everyone should understand the low hanging fruit is gone. among the offsets that some senators are proposing, let me go through them. new hampshire s kelly ayotte. she will role out on amendment which would prevent illegal immigrants from claiming the child tax credit. john thune a payroll tax break for businesses that hire long term unemployed. tom coburn wants to block jobless benefits from those receiving disability benefits. does this sound familiar? new york democrat chuck schumer proposing that congress end tax deductions for companies that move operations overseas. something that gets brought up a lot. other democrats want to pay for the extension with cuts to
wages have been flat for worse, falling relative to inflation, meanwhile corporate profitability is very high. so there s that inekwaulgt there. you take the payroll tax break out of the picture and people are squeezed in their wallet and it s one of the reasons why this economy has just not gotten the liftoff that we have been searching for a while. i want to look at a graph that we have, that looks at the markets over the last three years. look at the dow, it s gone more than 100% since february of 2009. my question, are big countries, should the public be angry another the government or the private sector over jobs? well, i think the issue it s a good question. the issue with the dow has a lot to do with basically who benefits when the stock market goes up. it s not just the rich or the top 1%. there s a lot of 401(k)s in there, and there s a lot of people who feel wealthier when
goolsby. we all overshot it, this is a bun punch to the gut, this is not a good number. i think now when we start seeing a lot of discussion about maybe the sequester is a bigger deal. actually you were right there on that panel. so you really know what was said. what s to blame here? is it the sequester? is it the payroll tax? more payroll tax probably than the sequester, we don t know either for certain. i don t think the sequester is a big deal in these numbers yet. i think what austin was suggesting is that the sequester is going to bite more in furlows, that really haven t taken effect. you kind of want it to take effect from a higher level than where we re at right now. if the sequester is coming, it s coming from a job markets that s already pretty weak. but the payroll tax break which ended starting in january may be
important word here. you said something to the effect of an unnecessary manufactured crisis. remember, this is not the way governance is supposed to look, especially at a time when the economy is already too weak. so instead of thinking about how can we help things get better, they keep setting fiscal time on one after another. and by the way, this is not the beginning of awe strarausterity. we already lost over $100 billion in people s paychecks through the expiration of the payroll tax break this $85 billion in fiscal contraction is on part of that. dr. peterson though, it is clear that the american people don t support these cuts in the areas they re talking about. when you look at the polls, 89% don t want to cut education. 84% don t want to cut disaster relief. 83% don t want to cut food or drug safety. 71% don t want to cut aid to the
president of finance for wal-mart. in case you haven t seen a sales report. month to date sales are a total disaster, the worst start to a month i ve seen in my seven years with the company and the results some economists believe may be due to the tax hikes just imposed in particular the rollback of the payroll tax break that all taxing all americans, we re not just talking about the rich, but regular folks, what does it mean for our economy. matt mccall is the manager of penn financial group and charles payne at the fox business network and so when you hear these dire comments from wal-mart and their top executives, you think holley moly, why? why? and economists are saying it could be the payroll tax and that may be a bigger deal than quote, any of us thought. your thoughts on it, charles. i agree he, about a month ago we got consumer confidence numbers for january came in substantially below what anyone thought.