my panel today, doug hattaway, erin mcpike and robert traynham, doug, what s your must-read? a piece by alan fram of the associated press, what he calls the pragmatic voices in congress. a lot of people left in this election cycle could make congress even more polarized, unless some people will step up, drop the idealogue rigidness and get things done. does he say anything about the likelihood of some kind of a change. when you see the likes of a saxby chambliss and a lindsay graham getting up there. does he name anyone who he thinks might morph a little. i think he focuses more on the problem than the heroes. he lays out the stark situation which is surprising a lot of people. because the president won so big, congress might be a harder nut to crack. say it ain t so, doug. how about you, erin?
get any worse. how long does the president have? robert mentioned lame duck. how long until that phrase becomes present? i don t know. i think the pressure is on all sides to get something done now because of the fiscal cliff. so i think he s got the upper hand to get people to the table if he gets the message right about getting this, the tax code in balance so we can have the prosperity that we had back in the 90s when it was more in balance. but i don t know, i think people will want to work to get these things done. i don t know if he ll have too much of a lame duck problem. can i ask all three of you about the fiscal cliff prospects, in terms of the timeliness of them getting it done before the end of the year and in a fashion that has a sense of permanency to it you can make an argument as to why you think one way might be better than the other. we re already in the religious holidays with hanukkah coming up. i can t see the president, with congress divided as it is, to
adequated addressed the underwater mortgages. answer a small percentage of people who have needed help have gotten it. we re four years out of the crisis and the housing market is starting to recover. how are we prepared for anything that the president may want to tackle in the next term? how much have we rebounded? the economy is definitely rebounding. you can say that with confidence things are better. longer term there is great structural questions. people s income is not increasing. if the middle class income is not going up, you don t feel it getting better. we haven t resolved questions about whether we ll have an educated workforce for the future. okay. zachary, thank you so much going in. we appreciate that.
that. morsi s decrees, they say, feel they are a sign of times to come. it r will it be secular or islamic? they fear it s heading towards theorocracy like iran. are people harp pending back to mubarak days when things lasted, i don t know, three decades? look it, people have known in this country they ve known power grabs, military coos, assassinations and nothing but that. so, of course, that s the baseline that they go on. there s a real fear amongst all of those people who are not muslim brotherhood that morsi is going to use their power, at least some would suggest paranoid about it, they are very hyper sensitive to what has happened. they understand that in different times, in recent
what they don t agree upon yet is raising that top rate, that 35% rate right now for the wealthiest americans. president obama campaigned on t. raising it to 39.6% where it was during the clintoned a handwritin administration. now, here s peter king from this morning. i myself am opposed to tax increases. they are going to be in a room trying to find the best prackag. we should not be making iron clad positions. so far he s pretty conciliatory in his language. so pretty hopeful as the clock particulars towards january 1st and the fiscal cliff, some call it a fiscal slope, some people are talking about it as a way to force people to really come to the table and there s one things that republicans are insisting on that they say they are opened