building tunnels and highways. jon: unless you re barack obama until you find out there weren t as many shovel-ready projects. will there be republicans having just cut taxes and added a trillion dollars to deficits in the next decade? how many people who portray themselves as budget hawks, as fiscal hawks will be willing to go along with something the president talks about a trillion dollars, we think what we re getting out of the white house is not a trillion in federal spending but maybe a quarter of that in federal spending that he hopes will leverage public works spending by private concerns. will enough republicans be willing to go along with that? i don t think we know. i think we will know, however, once we see whether they keep the government open at the end of january, whether the republicans get together on that, on increasing spending levels that will allow that to happen. whether they get together on an immigration fix that the democrats will have leverage on.
they were able to do their effort on healthcare and turn it into a budget bill and able to do it on taxes. they aren t going to be able to do it on infrastructure. there will be in the senate they will need 60 votes. that means if all the republicans hang together that s 51. they would need to get at least nine of the democrats to join with them on an infrastructure bill. that gives the democrats much more leverage in the new year than they had on the big ticket items healthcare and taxes last year. jon: the president said in a speech that infrastructure would have been easy for him to start his administration with an infrastructure bill because both parties are generally in favor of it. do you see democrats getting on board? i think they would like to get on board. i think in general it s true that democrats are more about priming the economic pump with federal spending. public works spending primes the pump. it puts people to work and