hamilton, go back to the constitutional convention when he became secretary of the treasury. the premise was, issue debt when you need it. we ve had six big debt surges in american history. none of those led to massive mismanagement of public spending. what s changed is the tax revolt. a huge shift in the political preferences of the republican party elite, prioritizing above all else cutting taxes. they used to care about being careful with the national debt. from the 70s they stopped caring about that. that is why the debt has got out of control. jonathan, go ahead. do you think the frenzy here in washington to reduce the debt is wrong? and the second question, given what you sate about congressman ryan s budget, how would you
hasn t happened. we ve gotten the tea party and anti-government rhetoric and a push once again for less government, less regulation. how did that happen? well, if you read news week this week, our guest friday is tina brown, by the way, one of our guests on the panel. there s a big story called i think it s called why are we so dumb, and it asks americans questions. i think they gave them the citizenship test that people who are trying to immigrate to this country have to take. and of course people just don t know very much. the tea party is a party named after a tax revolt, that does not know very much about taxes. it s very hard to get effective policy in place if the people are voting against their own economic interests. the tea party, it s supposed to be a party of the common man. a populist movement. yet somehow everything they want
amtrak hopes to build another tunnel, but it plans are tentative. it has no funding. it has done no design work or environmental studies. it is at the stage that the a.r.c. tunnel was about 20 years ago. so this won t happen. it s impossible. oh, wait, it happened. right. i got to go to you and say i actually i got my start in politics in a tax revolt in 1993, pensacola. they wanted to raise property taxes 65%. and i got a group of people together and we we killed it. and they were going, oh, this will never happen. we don t have the money. we re going to have to close down playgrounds. 1,000 cops. i mean, they went on and on. and we got them finally to overturn it. and then the city manager came forth and said, wait a second, oh, wait, we do have the money for it. here chris christie said, no, i m not paying $13 billion for a tunnel right now when we re in in economic crisis.
he saves the best stuff for us. these folks were out of control? reporter: that is the point that i lost control and i don t like to admit that. actually i don t no one has seen it until now but i saved it for you because it s almost embarrassing to me. megyn: oh, good, we like that. reporter: let s take a look at frank luntz being embarrassed by the american people. megyn: roll it. we are talking about extending for another period of time the rates that have been in existence for the last decade. secondly, those tax rates helped our economy and job production. megyn: that wasn t it. we cued up the wrong clip after all that drama. reporter: john kyl is so good we get to see a little bit more of him. megyn: sorry, guys this is like the blunders of what, tom you have it or you don t. no we don t have it. darn, you know what? we know frank well because he ll probably come back and show it to us. tell us what happened. reporter: there is a tax revolt that is coming and obama
christine o donnell didn t win. america is not burdened by being an intellectual country but drew a line in the sand somewhere. they said, you know, some stupidity is just a bridge too far even for us. so that s the good news. the bad news of course is that the teabaggers are already making rank and file republicans change the way they view things like on earmarks and so forth. they ll always have to answer to the tea party because they worry about a tea party rebellion against them. but what i think makes the teabaggers such a noncredible organization is that they pretend to be all about the deficit and taxes, you know. they re named after a tax revolt after all. and, first of all, almost none of them understand that their taxes have gone down under obama. so they re named after a tax revolt but they don t know anything about taxes. that s one thing.