might skip work altogether. another 3 million expected to arrive late and 3.4 million will work from home. no spoilers in this clip. cut it in case if you haven t seen it. there you go. this morning, good news. 396 graduating seniors waking up weren t an unexpected gift. commencement speaker at morehouse college off script with this big time announcement. this is my class, 2019. and my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans. [ cheers and applause ] that gift is worth an estimated $40 million. it is awesome, it is a ton of money, yet still just a drop in the bucket of the total outstanding student debt in the u.s. $1.5 trillion. to put it in perspective, last year nearly 70% of students had to take out loans to make it through college. on average each student
think it was $787 billion. but now they re going to vote to add a $1.5 trillion debt? i mean, how do they rationalize? they didn t want to bail a country out on the verge of a depression. and suddenly a recession with $787 billion. but the bill they would now put on us $1.5 trillion in the name of what? i mean, the economy is supposed to be doing well. why don t they worry about the debt now. and they have no former way to pay for it? it makes no sense. that s why the american people should be joutz raged. here are the same individuals who are talking about, as you re correct, we talked about fixing the economy, which hasn t been fixed by the obama administration, of which we are in now. that s why they are trying to round up on the present. without, that we wouldn t be who we are today.
say no. that s what he said yesterday. what he said, too, here s what he said. he said i m going to save over 10 years, $580 billion medicare and medicaid. doesn t say how. also put together this and i can t believe he s going to say this. but oh, yeah, $1 trillion i will save by ending the wars from the surge levels in afghanistan and iraq. that was already on the books. that s a made-up number. you can t count that. been counted on by the way and already figured into the total. also, he s talked about getting rid of the bush tax cuts to save us $1.5 trillion. that s supposed to go up in 2014, 2015. and the reason that they re doing this, though, from the white house, i don t doubt that they believe that principally they think that millionaires and billionaires should pay more taxes even though seven months ago when they extended the bush tax cuts, they said the worst thing they could do in a bad economy is to raise taxes on job creators. that s exactly who these people are bu
deductions, including ones that they ve tried to get rid of before, you know, lowering from 36 to 28 charitable deductions, things like that. and then an additional $300 billion out of corporate taxes getting rid of some loopholes. again, what they re saying is this can all come in the form of lowering tax rates as long as there are as long as you find that amount of revenue. the white house is saying, chuck, give us $1.5 trillion of new revenue, and we don t care whether the rates go up or down if you want to close tax loophol loopholes, we re good with it. but we need $1.5 trillion in new revenue. and that s the political shot, right? that s the attempt of drawing the populous line here. you know what? the republicans are trying to protect the millionaires and president obama s trying to
ideal either, so it s a tough situation and everybody knows that. evan kohlmann and steve clemens, we appreciate your expertise tonight. the chairman of the senate armed services committee, carl levin thinks that the death of bin laden reinforces 9 president s intention to move toward a robust reduction of troops this summer. it s about time we ve gotten out of the conflict that s resulted in the death of more than 1,500 troops, add that to the numbers of soldiers killed in iraq, and you see that it s cost us more than 6,000 american lives, not to mention that so far the wars in afghanistan and iraq have cost us $1.5 trillion. joining me now is robert greenwad producers of documentaries rethink afghanistan and iraq for sale.