that this is going to raise $70 billion a year -- by the way, i don't think this will raise any money at all because i think it is going to hurt the economy. even if you do that, here's the question for you and fareed -- where we going to get the other 93%? this only reduces the deficit by less than 6%! so it's not a solution -- anybody who thinks -- out there watching this show who thinks soak the rich is the way to reduce our deficit, it is just factually not true. you can't do it. >> all i set out to do was say that this business about small business, job killing stuff, is not accurate. i am kind of with you. what we have to -- >> you got to get some small businessmen on this show who will tell you -- >> i had several small businessmen on the show. i do agree the amount of money in the grand scheme of things between taxing the rich and not taxing the rich is actually quite small at this point. that i will concede to. >> you know why? because this is still a middle class country where most of the wealth in this country is still in the hands of the middle class. >> we would like that to be the case. again, that's another discussion

for another week. i'm not sure that is the direction we are going in but it is the direction we would like it to be. thank you so much. editorial riwriter with the "wa street journal." i have promised to name names. but it is not for doing the right thing and protecting america that's the storm that's approaching. it is for standing in the way. it is the name at the top of the list, the person most responsible for partisanship and polarization in america. stick around. i'm coming back and will tell you who it is.

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i have been telling you about the economic stormmakering its way to our shores. headwinds from europe and asia may be unavoidable. congress' refusal to act to protect the u.s. economy, on the other hand, is entirely avoidable, though not likely. at least not before the election. by then, the storm could be just about upon us. this week, the republican controlled house voted to repeal obama care for the 33rd time. it is the latest example of scorched earth partisan politics that have taken the place of serious discourse. whether you agree or disagree with the president's health care plan, that vote was absurd and an outrageous waste of taxpayer time. i wonder how my boss would feel if i told him i wasn't going to go to work today because i really just wanted to make a point. he'd probably tell me to look for another job. the point, by the way, in case you didn't already know, is that republicans don't like obama care. i know that, you know that, but we don't need political messages, we need results. is dangerous for our economy.

but politicians, particularly uncompromising highly partisan ones, don't simply drop out of the sky and land in washington. someone hires them. someone pays them, and someone encourages them. that someone is at the root of the problem. that someone could end the partisanship and that someone could get our politicians doing what they are supposed to be doing. you may not want to hear this, but that someone is you. the one person who that can really make a difference now as these economic storm clouds approach our shores is you. so why are you doing this? well, a couple of reasons probably. first, you want it all. you want all the benefits of government -- medicare, social security, unemployment checks, maintains highways, homeland security, loans to buy a house or go to college but you don't want to pay for it, at least you don't want to pay any more for it. you want lower taxes. so do i, by the way. and number two, you are having trouble getting past the politic and voting real adults into office who are actually willing to act on what america needs. politicians i am holding

responsible are actually pandering to you. you think i'm wrong, i know i'll hear from you and you know i'll respond. i'll get to that a little later. but first i want to bring back christine romans and bring in the sharp conservative mind of cnn contributor will cain, as well as norm onstein, self-described centrist. will, i kept new suspense here. let's get your gut reaction. >> gut reaction? it's you. it's you folks. you're the problem. i agreed with you 100%. >> i have never heard that in history. the voter. look. we borrow $3.6 billion every single day to keep our standard of living in this country the way it is. we scream about earmarks but people expect to elect someone to come home and bring them jobs -- >> jobs, swimming pools, schools. >> you hear people talking about big government, especially in an election year, talking about big government, they hate it. they don't want you to touch their medicare. you know, you hear all of this

talk about what we want from our government. then they turn around and they vote people in office who are just rushing for the status quo which is getting elected in nour four years and not really planning for america. we have been spending beyond our means for so long that now when we're really in a tough spot again, it is all those bad choices up to now that really put us in the worst spot. >> norm, please, voters put politicians into office. how do we stop the blaming and start solving our problems? if the voters listening to me and hasn't turned off the television yet because i've just insulted them, what can they do? >> part of the problem is that politicians have learned that if you do straight talk, if you tell them this is going to hurt and this is going to cost you something, it gets you bounced from office. so we have to in some ways educate voters. do i think the second point that you made is a particularly critical one. it is true on the first point, nobody pays retail anymore.

we all like things at a discount and that's the same with government. but we keep leaching out of the system the problem solvers. the last one voted for t.a.r.p. which i believe is something that will go down saving the global economy from a catastrophe at least as bad as the great depression. some bozo who says i don't speak politician, i'm not like the rest of them, i've got all the answers ands it easy and it won't cost you a dime, somehow gets to the head of the line? that can't go on. >> will? >> we got two separate problems right now. one is the voters' tendency to want something for nothing. right? asking for these government entitlement programs and not paying for it with the requisite tax rate. the second problem, one norm has written about, partisanship. idea that because these parties have become so ideologically extreme we can get nothing done. here's what i want to posit. i know norm has probably considered this fact.

the truth is america is partisan. that's why politicians are partisan. they simply reflect who we are. >> the public is getting more partisan and indeed, it now reflects what we've seen in washington for a while. the one place where i might disagree with you slightly, is that i think it started at the elite level and now it is metastasized out to the public. the other problem we have is, not just voters. what voices do voters have? most of them now come in primaries. that's true in the house and even in most cases in the senate. the primaries are dominated by small, elites who are even more ideological and more extreme than the mass of voters are. then you got another problem which is a mass media that refuses to say when people have gotten too partisan or obstructionist, and instead, it is on the one hand, on the other hand, they all do it -- >> we glorify them. krais cra crazier the thing you say, the

more likely you are to be booked on television. >> but the fact is, look. aren't everyone's taxes going to have to go up or the government is going to have to get a lot smaller or the economy has to grow gang busters from some new invention we haven't seen yet or some combination of all of those three? and why won't anybody in washington say, look, your standard of living, norm, right now, the way it is, it's not going to be like this. i promise you, it is going to be bad or really bad. >> hold your thought. by the way, you can't have a tax cut. we'll come right back and continue this conversation in a minute. [ male announcer ] now you can swipe... scroll... tap... pinch... and zoom... in your car. introducing the all-new cadillac xts with cue. ♪ don't worry. we haven't forgotten, you still like things to push.

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let's bring christine romans back, plus our resident conservative and cnn contributor, will cain, as well as norm onstein, resident scholar at the american enterprise institute, though he described himself as a centrist. i love your point that we systematically leach the compromisers out of the system in favor of partisans. will cain, you are taking issue with my premise that partisanship is bad. >> right. that's the assumption at the

beginning of this bad. >> can i say hyperpartisanship is bad? >> you're changing the game a little bit. i say we have two issues going on here. one, voters want something for nothing and two, partisanship. the culprit behind those of these conditions is the same, it is you, the voter, it is the viewer. that being said, what has enabled the wanting something for nothing is bipartisanship, not barpartisanship. if you want to correct that, you want bipartisanship to dlaekcor that. >> the bipartisanship is what got us here and that's to blame. >> i agree with will on a lot of things. in the book i did, "it's even

worse than it looks," strategic obstructionism is what happens. if you want to look for how bipartisanship can keep us from having everything, the 1990 budget agreement that george herbert walker bush put together with democrats helped to bring us back to a balanced budget along with the deals that democrats and republicans made with bill clinton in the 1990s. that also gave us pay as you go budgeting where you couldn't increase something without cutting something else. let me finally say in defense of voters, we have those plans that christine was talking about on the table from simpson-bowles and that gang of six in the senate. i believe that americans would accept it if you had bipartisan leadership consensus. you get a super committee together and mitch mcconnell does not put one 1 of the 3 very conservative people in that gak of six. tom coburn, saxby chambliss, and if he had one of them on, we'd have a deal right now and we

wouldn't be here discussing this. >> if all of these lawmakers, especially hyperpartisan lawmakers could somehow hide under the cloak of comprehensive tax reform, nobody could say i did anything bad for you, if they could all get together and make it look like no one was raising your taxes and no one was cutting your services, we were just hitting a reset on the way we are in america, that's the only way we can do it. >> will, if this is who we are and we as voters or the viewer are to blame, how do we reset that? i just want somebody that can get this done. >> it is the concept of responsibility. unfortunately, responsibility usually comes through the guise of crisis. europe will come to terms with the conseccept of responsibilit. it is not ronald reagan or fdr. it is the people forced to come to grips with responsibility -- i don't know how that happens without crisis. >> that comes full circle to my

blame being the people for the mess we're all in. please don't take this personally. thanks to all three of you. coming up next -- mitt romney wants to lower your taxes. that sounds great. but what does very to take back from you in order to pull it off? one of his key economic advisors joins me next. how is this possible? proper tire inflation, by using proper grades of oil, your car runs more efficiently, saves gas. you could be doing this right now? yes i could, mike. i'm slowing you down? yes you are. my bad. the works fuel saver package. just $29.95 or less after rebate. only at your ford dealer. so, to sum up, you take care of that, you take care of these, you save a bunch of this. that works.

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available only with liberty mutual auto insurance, if your car's totaled, we give you the money for a car one model year newer. to learn more, visit us today. responsibility. what's your policy? like in a special ops mission? you'd spot movement, gather intelligence with minimal collateral damage. but rather than neutralizing enemies in their sleep, you'd be targeting stocks to trade. well, that's what trade architect's heat maps do. they make you a trading assassin. trade architect. td ameritrade's empowering web-based trading platform. trade commission-free for 60 days, and we'll throw in up to $600 when you open an account. mitt romney wants to lower income tax rates across the board, and despite president obama's recent calls to extend the bush era tax cuts for nearly 98% of taxpayers, romney says

the current administration is pushing bigger government and he's out to change it. >> look, new democrats have done some good things. a lot of republicans have done some good things. but this old style liberalism of bigger and bigger government and bigger and bigger and bigger government and bigger and bigger taxes has got to end and we will end it in november. >> romney's plan would reduce current rates by 20% making the top rate 28% and the bottom would be 8%. the tax policy center says the cost of romney's plan would be high, in other words it would cost money to give you money. a report shows it would be nearly impossible to cut income tax rates without making concessions in other areas. that is not really news but this report gets specific. the real way to do that is to reduce or eliminate some

deductions you have been attached to. ram says reducing taxes will stimulate entrepreneurship, create jobs and help reduce the deficit. agree or disagree? this is your money. kevin hast has done extensive work and an unpaid economic advisor for the romney campaign. governor romney says his tax cuts would be paid for by curbing growth. let's talk about this. how much of the revenue loss from romney's tax cuts. does his campaign would expect would be made up from revenues generated from economic growth? >> i understand it is very easy to lower marginal tax rates which influence the decision at the margin without a proposal that reduces revenues as long

asio go after breaks written in the code. some of the more general like the state and local income tax reduction. so most economists have been saying what we need to do is stop having the government reward you if you do this but not if you do that with all of the confusing tax breaks and have a very simple code that takes a lot of that stuff and limits it and lowers the rate a lot. suppose you had $1 in income and the government said if you spend 50 cents on apples we won't tax the apple. then you have 50 cents left over of taxable income. if we didn't deduct the apples and taxing the whole dollar we could get the 20 cents. sopeople would no longer be

eating way more apples than they would want to. the point about the tax system is it tells you to do this and not that and make the government happy they reward you. if you don't we won't. what governor romney wants to do is just have a nice low rate that influences people's decisions. it is absolutely sensible. i think everybody in every party should want to do that. >> that is a very valid discussion. we give people a break to take a mortgage and buy a house. that sounded like a neat idea way back when. now we find that is contributed to some of the mess we are in. are you talking about taking away things like that inthe mortgage interest rate deduction? >> there have been a lot of proposals on how to do this in a wie to limit the disruption. governor romney thinks he needs to work with members of both parties to try to figure out how to get enough rollback of

deductions. he is absolutely confident that he can do that. i know he is right because i have seen lots of different calculations including the bowles-simpson guys got the rates way down. >> i started the show by criticizing republicans for calling any tax increase but particularly the failure to want to extend the bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest americans, job killing a word that republicans use all the time. how do you use tax reform to create jobs? given that you just told me that tax reforms shouldn't be used to get people to behave in certain way snz. >> they shouldn't be used to get people to buy apples instead of oranges. it should set a bunch of clear rules and get government out of the way. governor romney's plan will succeed for two reasons.

president obama has not told us what future tax rates are going to be. he had a super majority in the senate. if we have clarity. if governor romney gives us clarity then everybody who is worried will know and be able to optimize against that. businesses don't know what their tax ratsz are going to be next year and that uncertainty that president obama has introduced is harmful for the economy. if you lower marginal rates that makes people work more and invest more and grow the economy. >> we had higher marginal rates and people created jobs and for the last ten years we haven't. >> that's an absolutely valid point. you have to understand that the tax rate isn't the only thing going on.

i think the crucial thing is our corporate rate is the highest in the developed world. the only two countries less friendly on earth are -- and the congo. firms are saying let's locate there. governor romney wants to cut the corporate rate down to 25%. it wasn't a problem when clinton was in office because our rate was 34% and increased it to 35 the average around the world was about 40%. everybody else is lowering the rate. right now the average is 24%. we are giving away a huge tax disadvantage. >> you are conceding that it is not the only thing. lowering taxes doesn't just equal economic growth. what a great conversation. senior fell skpoe director of economic studies. coming up i pointed the finger at you. it is your turn to point the finger back at me.

be kind. it's more fun when you are not. i'm going to show you how you and i are going to debate this next on your money. [ male announcer ] this is the at&t network. in here, every powerful collaboration is backed by an equally powerful and secure cloud. that cloud is in the network, so it can deliver all the power of the network itself. bringing people together to develop the best ideas -- and providing the apps and computing power to make new ideas real. it's the cloud from at&t. with new ways to work together, business works better. ♪

i have been hard on you today. your congress refuses to act to save us from the potential economic storm that may have headed our way but i have pointed my finger as you because i think you have the ability to fix it