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Smart. they want the political cover from a democratic administration that says, okay, well, we want to cut medicare, too, but there s no reason for the administration to give them that cover. david, how strong is john boehner right now within his own party? that s interesting, craig. look back a year and a half ago with the debt ceiling negotiations, looked like the republicans won that, president had low approval ratings after that. but boehner had to learn a lesson there, too, because he was outmaneuvered with the majority leader. i think he s trying to consolidate his power. the white house has put out since that time a year and a half ago that they don t believe boehner can control thiz conservative party wing. he wants to speak with one voice, his. he s moved to get rid of those working against him. what s really interesting is is yesterday he came out and made it sound like he might be open to raising taxes. he quickly then backtracked. so even his own voice may not be as co ....
The 39.6% where they were under bill clinton before the bush tax cults but i think you re seeing some element of pragmatism, some understanding that obama really does hold the cards having campaigned on this, having won re-election, having, you know, the sort of default being on his side, which is that all these things go away at midnight on december 31st. i think you are starting to see some movement despite the rhetoric. the question is really i think for obama, you know. i think he will have a deal available to him to avoid going over the fiscal cliff, i think, in exchange for raising rates a bit. the question is, is it a good enough deal or does he just say it s not a good enough deal, i can get a better deal by going over the cliff and i prefer to do that? because you guys haven t moved toward me enough. david, the sentiment noam expressed is the same we heard from tim geithner a few days ago. we ve had a number of congressmen on this show who have said the same thing. ....
Be important but the president has other goals, health care being one of them, cap and trade, climate change, legislation being another. he was unwilling to set aside those goals to focus 100% on jobs and the economy, i think they lost they took their eye off the ball a bit and once they figured out they hadn t done enough, it was a little late and the question for voters and for the white house is did they kind of figure it out in time? did they return to what voters really care about which is the unemployment rate? noam, before you go, you got a liberal point of view, this isn t exactly what the white house wants to hear right now. no. they definitely get a little frustrated when people like me and others criticize them from the left. they do like to argue that, you know, they ve done enough, the unemployment rate is coming down quickly enough. it s interesting, there s a poll done in the president s state of the union address, he said, you know, america is back and the polling ....
Assessing the scale of the liability. yes. even if you don t like her solution, she was the one person in the room saying the scope of the problem that we are trying to solve, like the 30 million jobs, it sounds like she was arguing we didn t even understand the scale of the problem. that s right. on top of that, she argued the president should see these tradeoffs clearly. even if you re not going to recommend $1.8 trillion, he should see how far away you are from the ideal. one premise, noam, which if you spent more the economy would be better. mostly the republican party and all the austrian economists would argue with the press saying spending less would have been more if you look at their economic views than spending more. the thing about the way the recovery shook out is they made a series of predictions. one of those predictions was that the economy would begin to turn around based on the stimulus in late 2009. they actually nailed that, nailed the date it would turn ar ....
Is that fair? i think that s right. the president needs to have every piece of information in front of him, needs to know exactly how far away he is from the ideal. when you have an economic adviser internalizing the political constraint, you become confused about what the person is giving you political, economic advice. that s a tough spot for the president. he has to sort out what kind of advice he s getting before deciding what to do. a great point. congratulations on the book. thank you. it s called the escape artists: how obama s team fumbled the recovery. if you want to learn more about his book, we have an excerpt of it up over at dylanratigan.com. if you like it, i m sure noam would be happy for you to read the rest of it. coming up here, consider this a less controversial subject. playboy bunnies with jet packs. yes, jonathan. it may not be as out there as you think. ....