up. you have the bold simpson proposal. the final solution will have to look something like that. i don t agree with that, i ll be honest with you. in that proposal taxes were also cut. they raise them in other ways. robert, i don t know if you studied up on the deficit commission, but they seem to lower the top brackets like ryan does, but increase taxes, so i like that solution in some ways even less. the middle class gets spending cuts, and the rich still get their tax cut. the commission clearly is preferable to ryan. my concerns about the deficit commission package is that i think a really balanced package would be about half budget cuts and about half revenue increases. t the simpson does have it closes tax deductions, credits and the like, but it doesn t
even more irrelevant at 1%. but before we discuss that, if you take out the people who probably will not run or have not voiced an interest in running, huckabee, trump s not really going to run, palin, santorum. huckabee may very well. i think he might, too. this gets to how relevant he is, and i think santorum will run, but he s irrelevant anyway. mitt romney comes 40%, newt gingrich at 20%, and then what i m getting out of that is if huckabee leaves the race, mitt romney looks like he s in great shape, doesn t he? he certainly does at the start. i m just reminded, having done this for five decades. i m reminded of president giuliani that led in all 50 states last time and president thompson who jumped in. right now polls dompd trump, everybody knows who he is, but
it s from rob greenstein. it shows that two thirds of the spending cuts come from programs that help lower-income americans like medicaid, food stamps and low-income housing, but i guess it shouldn t be a surprise. after all, someone s got to pay for all those tax breaks for the rich. remember, the proposal also drops the top tax bracket for individuals and corporations from 35 to 25%. that s a huge gift to the rich. somebody s got to pay for it. that is part of why you pay so much from the middle class and the poor. here s the scary part. the plan might just work anyway. but you have to understand its real goal. even though ryan s numbers don t add up, they could have a huge impact on the bigger fight, which is the ultimate objective. imagine this is a current budget debate. democrats on one end of the spectrum and republicans on the other. you see where the center is, right? that s interesting.
now comes paul ryan with his gigantic speccer-shifting proposal. $6 trillion in reductions he claims over ten years. what happens? suddenly the whole debate shifts, and you ve got a whole new center. suddenly democrats are forced into a fight over defending medicare. last year it was over whether we should expend the bush tax cuts. this year overcutting spending by tens of billions. next year overcutting trillions instead. all of a sudden the whole country is further and further right? that s the big win for extremist ring-wingers, shifting the whole debate. thrls that the democrats can t be pushed around, so they figure the further we put our side out to the right, the further we can bring democrats in that direction. now, let me tell you how you stop that. you stop giving into them, and the fight back. all right. now, let s talk more about this issue with robert greenstein, the president of the center on