Election, havent provided anything to lead me to believe or should lead you to believe, and i continue to see reports coming from Media Sources saying when they checked in with Law Enforcement or Intelligence Community sources. Theres nothing more than has been previously reported over and over again. So at some point you do have to ask yourself what are you actually looking for . How many times do you have to come to the same conclusion before you take the answer . Thats what im saying. Mara . Just to followup, did you personally reach out im not going to say what we discussed internally. We did our job about making sure that when people had reporters had questions, we let them know what subject Matter Experts were available to discuss the accuracy of a newspaper story. Mara . Im sure people will come back to the budget question, which is during the campaign, the president said he was not going to touch medicare, social security. Treasury secretary repeated that. Sounds like the direc
he means the 22 budget. that involves a big cut in discretionary money if you are not including social security, medicare and defense. because of inflation. reporter: you are right. the speaker has been very consistent to the point of repeating stories that many of us in the press corps could repeat from memory now about his view that the discussion is about cutting spending. spending less money next year than we spent this year. the problem for democrats as you laid out is of all the things that are fenced off, that you can t you can t touch medicare or social security or defense spending, if you won t accept a freeze as a cut, if you won t accept other ideas that the white house and democrats have put forward as ways to achieve the same goals in terms of deficit reduction, what you are left with are very draconian cuts to everything else, every kind of other domestic spending
about spending levels. they keep walling off sections of the budget they don t want to cut and as the white house has indicated has tried to put other things on the table, tried to spend or save money or achieve some of the same deficit reductions the house republicans want and house republicans are saying thanks but no thanks. take medicare savings. the idea that perhaps the u.s. government could make up some of the costs that republicans want to make up by spending less money on prescription drugs or payments to insurers. here s what happened when i asked kevin mccarthy about that a little while ago. how can the white house be interested in that when they said you can t touch medicare or social security? you don t think there are savings to be had there? no, remember what the president said? so that s a cut in your view. the president said you can t i m asking your opinion. okay.
and by how much should the defense budget increase? a process of give and take. we need a strong defense budget and number two we do not want to touch medicare did not want to cut the line in the sand. for example that need sick that need help up to the age of 55 who are single, healthy, no children. they should either work or we have been so decent in the way the bill was drawn up you can even volunteer. there is an example where we can save money. we can save money on all of these irs. arthel: if i could jump in for a second we have a weird, okay i
she was clearly light on the details, but i hope going forward we will see are talking about things she can do immediately as president with issues like immigration and crime and the economy. a do republicans really want to have this conversation about social security? there was the moment at the president s state of the union speech where he got everybody to agree we are not going to touch medicare and social security and despite that moment, which was rightly regarded as kind of a winning moment for joe biden they are still touching what used to be called the third rail in politics. it really is. the voters hate it. it s something that nobody wants. people love social security and medicare. i just don t get it. i think this is a really bad thing to run on, and i understand that there is math here and that we may need to fix to figure out how to continue funding it, but i just do not see a way. i think what is sort of disappointing is here she is struggling in an interview on fox n