will join me in a minute. i'll ask him whether mitt romney was absent or sleeping when he approved that claim. but to be fair politicians make a lot of promises to get your vote that they don't keep. we tracked more than 500 promises that president obama made during his campaign in 2008 when he was candidate obama. he's kept 37% of those promises. he's working on 23% of them. he's broken 16% outright and compromised on 14% to get the job done. the rest, some of you like to tweet me a lot and point out the many promises that he hasn't kept. some of those broken promises can be blamed on congress. they are stalled because your lawmakers won't do a thing about them. i blame congress for things, but it's not congress that's going to stand in the way of romney's ridiculous promise, it's the state of the u.s. economy. 12 million jobs over four years, that's what romney is promising. that's 3 million jobs a year or an average of 250,000 jobs per month every month for an entire presidency. i'm going to save my next guest some time. he'll say it's possible and it's been done before during clinton's second term. but that was a very different economy. one that was growing at an average of 4.2% a year. ours is crawling at 1.5%. you see companies need to be on solid footing to be confident enough to hire those people. i'm for big thinking, but instead we get big promises that often end up being lies. i'm joined now by david gergen. but i want to start with kevin hasset. he's one of the authors of the 12 million jobs in four years pledge. kevin, good to see you back here. you authored this claim. please give me a solid economic basis for creating 12 million jobs in four years, three million a year. on average starting in january 2013. >> right. if you've looked at the study and it sounds like you have a strong opinion about it, the fact is that there are lots of countries around the world that have been tinkering with their economic policies and then we have lots of data what happens when they do that. so for example, governor romney proposed we cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25. now we're about the highest on earth. two countries have higher. but other than that, everybody has a lower rate. clinton increased it by 1% in the '90s, we were in the middle of the countries around the world. so we have had 50 countries changing every two or three years and we watch what happens when they do that and seen a lot of job creation. if you look at our study, we look at the individual proposals that governor romney made and go to the literature just like a sports show. and then if you add it up, you get that big number you mentioned. of course, it's very important to mention that's conditional on everything happening. >> right. conditional on everything ppening. later in the show, i have them lined up. i have the entire u.s. tax code lined up here. all 73,000 pages of it. that's not going to change in january 2013 no matter what mitt romney wants. here's my question to you. i'm not saying it's impossible to create 250,000 jobs a month. we have done it before. the issue is in order to do that, you have to change things, which means it's not going to happen in the first month or even six months which means creating more jobs. what economic circumstances in this country changes the day mitt romney takes office that would allow for immediate job growth at that pace? we still have slow economic growth and there are no forecasts for faster economic growth over the course of the next few years. we still have an inefficient tax code. we still have foreclosures and credit problems. so how is it that the world somehow changes and the economic sunshines through the storm clouds because mitt romney becomes president? >> you listed a lot of the major things that we need to address and that governor romney is talking about on the stump. it's absolutely right that if governor romney is elected and then he goes into thewhite house and nobody wants to adopt any of his policies in congress, then one wouldn't expect that all of a sudden businesses would start investing again and things that need to happen to lift the economy. but if romney is elected and he has a congress he can work with, which i think is highly likely, then what's going to happen is he's going to start list pg the problems and knocking them down one by one and a lot of them are kind of easy to legislate. so it's not the kind of thing that's going to take a staff 10 or 15 months to write a bill so we can look at it. . we could cut the rate today. we cut it from 35 to 25. there's a heck of a lot of stuff that could happen right away. once it does, this is something we talk about in the paper x it's going to bring a lot of certainty back, which we don't have now with the tax code expiring. >> there are a lot of americans that are not going to be interested in you cutting corporate taxes without dealing with the loopholes that make up the pages and that's where it gets bogged down. >> you're always so cheery. >> sorry about that. >> no we like that. politicians make very big promises in election times. president bush said read my lips, no new taxes. president obama and this is the one he keeps getting held to, the stimulus would make sure that unemployment never rose above 8%. people said that his people said it and they published it. is this the kind of thing that could come back and bite a president romney? >> absolutely. just like obama. but i do think this. kevin has a legitimate argument that we could be doing a lot better than we're doing now. there are a lot of businessmen sitting on cash right now. cash is on the sidelines because of the uncertainty over the election and of the fiscal cliff after the elections. uncertain we're going to get serious about tackling a debt. if you did those things and undertook them in a bold way, you could unleash a lot more economic growth in this country. but the notion of getting 12 million jobs over four years is a great dream. but most economists will say that's a pipe dream. the fact is whatever we do, we are caught at the tail end of a very different kind of recession. they go back to the analysis of this. financial recessions are deeper than you expect and they last longer than they expect and leave you a hangover. that's what we're experiencing. plus we're in a new global economy. this is hard to compete to create jobs. i think all of us believe we can do better. >> we may disagree on the number of 12 million jobs over three months, but what we agree on is we can do better. we want to discuss how we do better. where's the plan that backs up the claims? even if the claims don't live up to the expectations, i want to talk to you about the campaign. the romney campaign says under obama is not getting better fast enough. plus whether you own your home or squat in your parents basement, i'm going to show you how people are making money off the real estate recovery. you don't need a down payment or a loan. stay with us. 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[ announcer ] we are insurance. ♪ we are farmers bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum ♪ i told you why i think mitt romney's claim that he can create 12 million jobs in four years is false. now let me show you how hard it would be to do that. romney, like many other politicians, goes on the offensive rusing the rising unemployment rate against president obama. >> in july unemployment went up again and the president is running out of time. under obama's economy, it's just not getting better. >> that is at best a misrepresentation of the unemployment situation. the rate is a favorite talking point amongst politicians. i have been consistent about this for many years. it's a secondary measure of the health of the labor market. it follows a group of people moving in and out of the job hunt. the monthly payroll numbers, the job creation or loss numbers, are a much clearer gauge of what we are, where we are. the total job creation number is an absolute. everyone can measure it. everyone can feel it. everyone can understand it. so let's throw that unemployment rate out the window. i have been saying this for years and look at job creation numbers. you can see the deep cuts. this was during the recession. at the height of the recession, the end of 2008, 2009 losing somewhere in the neighborhood of 800,000 jobs a month when president bush left office and president obama takes off. in 2009 you can see things started to improve. job growth fluctuated but started to improve. a lot of that had to do with the stimulus bill. we saw a peak in 2009. and we started to see losses again and then the end of 2010 all the way to now, we have seen about two years worth of net job gains. romney's promise of 12 million jobs over 48 months means that this economy would have to create 250,000 jobs every single month. that's about this level over he here. it doesn't happen very often. we have only seen a handful of months with that kind of job growth over the last four years. it would take a sharp turn around to all of a sudden be at a steady pace of 250,000 jobs a month. i'm rejoined by david gergen and kevin hassett. he's an author of this claim that 12 million jobs can be created in four years. kevin, you and your co-authors wrote, quote, that americans took a wrong turn in economic policy, end quote. does this mean we can see stronger job creation simply from a political policy change in washington. because as you know from being on this show before, i think there's something else at play here including this massive storm from europe that washington can do little about. >> what we have to do is focus on the things that we can have an impact on and other things could happen. there could be months that are bad. the fact is think about the problem this way. suppose that the economy was really struggling like it is now. we had a brilliant tax code. the government had a balanced budget, everything was perfect and we weren't growing. then we'd be scratching our heads. but the fact is that if you look at pretty much any of our poli y policies it's indefensible. everything is broken. and that's kind of almost our best asset. if we go in and do obvious fixes, we can turn tis economy around and deliver a lot more jobs than we have. president obama hasn't fixed anything. so instead of saying, being the highest corporate tax on earth is bad, let's fix that. he decided to leave the big problems untouched and that's why the growth is so low. >> kevin makes an interesting point. there's so much not working that if you fixed that we could see stronger job numbers. does it get you to the numbers that romney is talking about? >> no, i don't think they do. but we could a lot better. the fact is our economy is back to where it was in terms of gdp from before the recession and we have five million fewer jobs. that's not exactly impressive. we can do better than that. and some of the things that kevin is talking about have to be done like tax reform and getting the deficits under control, but i also think it's true that republicans haven't been very helpful. they have opposed the president when he tried to fix these things. it's been hard for him to deal with this. he wanted to go for the big bang sort of theory approach to getting the deficit under control. the president ought to do more now. bill clinton said why don't you extend the bush tax cuts for a year. do that before the elections. will mitt romney join president obama in trying to do that? i don't know. kevin, what leadership will you show on the fiscal cliff, for example, if you're elected what are you going to do about the fiscal cliff? >> governor romney has a very detailed plan. he goes after medicare, medicaid, social security. >> would you push that? >> he has all these things on the table. the thing i disagree ith, david, is that i think you're being too kind to president obama. the fact is he had a super majorityn the senate. he could have done anything he wanted and e he decided to take fixing things off the table. if we made a list of the problems he had when we took office, we have less money. if he had a tax reform that stimulated the economy, broaden the base, lowered the rates and stimulated that way, we wouldn't have the hangover now and we wouldn't have so many problems. >> we can do better. the three of us are agreed. but there are complicated things. maybe the president is getting too much blame and too much credit for what e he can do. love to soo you author some adst that talk about what congress can do and whether some of this can get done before the election. i will go on a limb and tell people to vote for congressman that make a decision to deal with these things before the election and not after. but i may grow hair before that happens. kevin, good to see you as always. kevin hassett, a romney economic advisor. coming up, thousands of pink slips going out days before the election. why it could happen just as the economic storm approaches. ask me. is just fine... ask me what it's like to get your best night's sleep every night. 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[ male announcer ] tempur-pedic. the most highly recommended bed in america. i tell mike what i can spend. i do my best to make that work. we're driving safely. and sue saved money on brakes. now that's personal pricing. the fiscal cliff that we are head headed over if congress refuses to act. one rocky area of the cliff is the so-called sequester, which is a stupid name for a stupid thing. $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over ten years. half will come from defense including $55 billion alone next year. jobs will be lost. possibly more than a million defense-related jobs next year. most of them, by the way, are not government jobs. the bulk of the pink slips come from private contractors hired by uncle sam. i don't know if the number is right. but let's say it's in the ballpa ballpark. that would be equivalent, take a look at the red bars, to all of the jobs created this year. i'm not willing to take that chance and your congress shouldn't be either. defense companies aren't waiting around. they are already starting to prepare for the job losses. why? because of something called the warn act. the obama administration says the act doesn't apply here and that's triggering a plolitical fire storm. before we get to that, you need to know what the warn act is. i want to bring in poppy harlow. tell us what the warn act is. >> most people haven't heard of it, but it's important because if you work for a medium to big-size company, this applies to you. it's technically called the worker adjustment and retraining act. it requires them to send out these notices 60 days in advance if they are going to close a plant or have mass layoffs. so if defense contractors have to do mass layoffs, they may need to send out these notices. so what is it? 500 employees or 33% of the workforce. you need to send these out. here's where timing is so important. sequester, as you said, a stupid name for a stupid thing. that would take effect if it happens on january 2nd. so what's 60 days before that? when would the notices go out? november 2nd, just a few day before the election. so the big question now is does this apply in this case? the labor department came out this week and said, no. they issued guidance which is this quote and they basically said, well, we don't know if it's going to happen so we don't know if the job cuts are going to come so it would be inappropriate to send out a notice. but republicans say, look, that guidance is politically motivated. take a listen. >> the only reason the administration sent out this guidance was to keep people in the dark about the impact these defense cuts will have until, of course, after the election. >> that's mitch mcconnell. so republicans siding with him on this. the obama administration and labor department saying you shouldn't be alarmed. we shouldn't send out noeltss because we don't know if they are going to come. it's going to be up to the companies. and as you know, if they don't send out the notices and do layoffs, they could get sued. so it will be interesting to see if the companies are going to do this. and it's absolutely political now. saying inappropriate to send the notices out. >> once again, we have uncertainty by employers not knowing what to do and that could cost americans jobs. thank you for a great explanation. what are the defense contractors planning to do? the biggest government defense contractor says they are reviewing the guidance. their ceo says they may have to layoff 10,000 workers if congress doesn't act. and warn notices are possible it could layoff 4,000 if the sequester happens. joining me is rick mcneil, the president and ceo of lord corporation, which makes critical parts for helicopters. and thomas buffenbarger. rick, you have 2800 employees worldwide. you say you're not laying anyone off yet. how does congress's inability to act effect jobs? are there plans for hiring off the table right now? are there contingencies for laying people off? >> yes, we're looking at different scenarios, but it's very difficult to understand where we're going because until we understand how that 55 million cuts will occur and the cuts beyond that, it's very difficult to plan and decide what you're going to do. so we're not only having an issue, but our suppliers that supply castings and forgings and machinists parts are not hiring, they are not spending capital to expand in areas where expansion is needed. so there's just a lot of uncertainty out there right. >> thomas, critics say the defense industry is sounding the alarm on job cuts and the warn act because its trying to protect profits. in your case, i imagine, you're interested in protecting jobs. >> i certainly am interested in protecting jobs and mr. mcneel is correct about the difficulties he faces as the union is in the same position. we're confused by the pronouncements of the government as to when this is going to kick in, if it kicks in. we know we have to abide by the law. we're going to represent and defend our members. if there is going to be a significant, catastrophic in my opi