Boston's annual St. Patrick's Breakfast was a surprisingly tame affair this year. With a wide open race for governor and the state still buzzing about new Sen. Scott Brown, the traditional breakfast roast certainly had lots of material. But the breakfast isn't what it used to be.
larry king live starts in a few moments. first from cosmo to congress, jeanne moos has tonight s guilty pleasure. reporter: technically, he s still only a senator-elect and already he has been anointed senator hunk daddy, sexy hunk. first of all, scott brown is a hunk. reporter: washington post writer sally quinn is just saying what others are thinking, the hunk factor. anatomy is destiny. scott brown s anatomy is already fodder for saturday night live with brown played by the star of mad man seducing democrats like house speaker nancy pelosi. i want to introduce something to the floor. it s called your panties. reporter: but senator-elect brown didn t get his panties in a twist over snl. it was great, he told the boston
again, there was a pre-existing deficit that was there when the president stepped into office. we think that this is the best way forward and we hope that members of congress will step forward with ideas just like some of the ideas we have in our budget. bottom line, over the past year, what mistakes do you think you have learned in the budget-making process and how are you guys trying to do things differently now? well, we have tried some things that didn t work so well and other things that did. for example, we put forward proposals to eliminate defense programs. we were successful in that. we ve gone back through the budget to look for additional savings, additional proposals and actually about half of the programs that we re now putting forward to terminate or reduce are new this year with the additional time we ve had to go back through the budget and reexamine things carefully. you mentioned excess success on the f-22. what didn t work? what was one of the mistakes you
something has to be done to free up the money. so, what can you do? if you were in the president s shoes right now, and you didn t have to worry about congress and you could say, you know, i designate or require the banks to do a, b or c, what would the is there an be easy fix here? well, you have to give the banks incentive to lend. then you get into a very complex situation. are they lending on good projects? because we ve been there where they ve lent on lots of bad things. right. you have to give the banks incentive to lend. i ve watched banker get huge commissions on deals that were just done. they should get the commissions five years later on deals that were just done and worked as opposed to that just didn t work. they were making deals that they probably even thought were bad deals, just to pick up a commission. and half of them picked up these huge commissions, left and went to another bank. so, you have to create incentives for the banks and the lending institution
that s why we have this $100 billion job creation package, including a new jobs and wages tax credit intended to spur hiring among small businesses. so, unemployment still at 10%. when are we going to see that number go down, do you think? it s going to start to come down but the unemployment rate remains elevated and that s one reason, again, we re putting forward this $100 billion package, to try to get it down faster than otherwise would be the case. but, look, it s going to take time, unfortunately. you want, i understand, to just talk about the deficit reduction here. you guys want to create a bipartisan commission to come up with deficit reduction solutions by december and present them to congress. why do you need a commission to do that? well, i think that the answer is that to get first, we have $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction that we put forward. to get the rest of the way there to a sustainable fiscal course we need bipartisan buy-in and