randi? recently came home from afghanistan on emergency leave to witness the birth of his daughter. he knew he had to do something to make sure his other child, noah, would feel important with a new baby around. and, boy, did it work. >> spiderman. >> reporter: 3-year-old noah reynolds was thrilled when spiderman jumped into his backyard. but when the masked crusader pulled off the mask, he was stunned. >> daddy! >> but not for long. he quickly realized it was his dad, sergeant jason reynold. >> he surprised me. daddy, you surprised me. >> so cute. that was from cnn affiliate wtvd. unfortunately he just missed his daughter's birth. all was not lost. he said he is pretty sure his son thinks that he's actually spiderman, which pretty much makes him the coolest dad ever. thanks so much for watching today. i'll see you back here at the

top of the hour. >> your bottom line starts right now. thanks, randi and victor. see you at the top of the hour. for the first time in 20 years, higher taxes for america's richest taxpayers. oh, but it's still very good to be rich in america. good morning. i'm christine romans. it redefines who is rich and who is not and sets the bar pretty high. individuals making more than $400,000 and couples making more than $450,000 will jump from 35% back to 39.6%. setting the bar at $400,000 instead of the $200,000 the president wanted means only 0.7% of tax filers will be hit with that rate increase. the top top earners came out pretty well after all. it's true, they also face higher taxes on their investments. the rate on dividends and capital gains rises from 15% to 20%. but it could have been worse. the idea to tax investment

income as ordinary income subject to a 39.6% rate was scrapped. that saved millionaires and billionaires billions. and, yes, estate taxes are rising from 35% to 40%, but how about this sweetener for the wealthiest americans? the first $5 million of an estate is exempt. it could have been $1 million. and that exemption will now be capped for inflation, adjusted for inflation. so, yes, taxes are rising for the super rich. but they're not the only ones. under the new law, three-quarters of americans will pay more. those in the middle making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year should expect to pay about $822 more. the tax bite for the middle class comes at the end of that tax cut, a temporary tax guide that wasn't renewed as part of this deal. workers will pay 6.2% in payroll taxes, up from the 4.2% they paid the past couple of years. potomac research group. bob herbert, and economics

editor at the economist. welcome to all of you. greg, president obama ran an entire campaign, promising the wealthy would be forced to pay what he termed their fair share. did the rich get a god deal here? >> i think they got off pretty easily, frankly. obama had to compromise in order to get any kind of deal at all. my bottom line, christine, is that the markets have done very well in the last few days because the bottom line is that we avoided a recession. >> bob, the president promised to raise taxes on individuals making more than 200, $200,000 a year and couples making more than 250. listen. >> serious about protecting middle class families and we're also going to have to ask the wealthiest americans to pay higher tax rates. that's one principle i won't compromise on. >> principle he didn't compromise on, but the number behind the principle, he did. that was december 8th. by so widely defining the middle

class now, all the way up to $400,000. >> right. >> doesn't that give a big pool of people that you're going to have to go after later? >> if they're serious about debt reduction, they're going to have to do that. i don't think anybody seriously thinks families with an income of $400,000. the truth is that i agree with you that i think the wealthy got off pretty easily here. there's a modest tax increase for the very wealthiest in society, very tiny percentage. frankly, i think there are more tax coming and they will bite deeper into the middle class. >> you can't just tax the rich to fix our problems, whether the rich is $200,000 or $400,000. do you agree they got off easy here, first of all. second of all, it can't be just about taxing the rich and taxing people to fix our problems. >> absolutely. i think it's -- you can say that the rich got off lightly. i will put it a different way. we didn't really solve the problem. what this deal did was to put

off the short-term calamity of big tax increases and spending cuts but we didn't do anything to solve the american fiscal problem. the left doesn't want to talk about, and it's going to nand more on taxes. >> one thing, greg, i'm hearing from republicans this week, i'm hearing, look, we did what you all wanted on the left and what the president wanted. we raised taxes on the rich, even though rich is now $400,000 and above. we raised those taxes. now come the spending cuts. now we have the leverage in the spending cut fight. >> i agree. and i think the battleground is now shifting. the republicans will now get to their sweet spot. and that's to say we've got to do something about spending. the polls support them. the republicans are totally unified on this. while the democrats, especially on the left, are not unified on any additional spending cuts. this will be a very juicy battle for the next two or three months on spending. >> you know, zanny, when i talk

to republicans, i get that you want to go after spending cuts. what are you going to cut? employment benefits for your constituents? are you going to cut defense? what do you want to cut? i don't get a lot of specifics quite yet. >> you're absolutely right. i don't think very many people do. republicans are very good about talking about spending cuts in general. when you psh for specifics there don't seem to be many specifics. over the next couple of months we'll see yet again a whole load of fireworks, brinkmanship, but probably another thing that looks like this one, which is kicking the can down the road. people don't want to deal with the tough questions of how do you reform entitlements? i think it's impossible to think about the next ten, 15 years without doing that. it's politically very tough so it's easier to come up with these short-term solutions. >> i agree with zanny. we have not dealt with our most serious problems. we've not only kicked the can down the road we haven't given any indication that down the

road we're going to engage these problems either. we're not doing anything real about deficit reduction, debt reduction. we're not doing anything real about entitlements, including even talking about what makes sense in terms of cutting entitlements and we haven't done anything serious about jobs, which is going to be the cornerstone of a long-term, healthy economy. so i think that they're playing these sort of political brinkmanship games in washington, but they're not really engaging the biggest issues facing the country. >> i would say the public is equally polarized when you talk about this debt. you say the word entitlement on this show, i get all this hate mail from people that say it's not just about entitlement. why do you want to cut granny out of the equation? it gets very -- is it going to calm down at all or are we in the midst of one budget war after another? >> it's probably the latter. it's very emotional. if we do keep kicking the can down the road, unable to deal with this, the credit rating

agencies will inject themselves into this narrative. >> right. no one moves, because we're going to talk more about this in two seconds. we do have to pay bills here and we do have a budget. hold on, everybody. congress has set into stone as much as you can tax rates in america. they still have to come up with a plan to deal with those budget cuts. they also did come up with a plan to deal with the debt ceiling and the budget resolution -- yeah. all of this and the fighting holding back america's growth. i'll tell you how to fix it right after this.

okay. so the american economy is adding jobs, but not really as robustly as you would want. take a look. you've got an economy that sells 14.4% underemployment rate and 39% of the people who have been out of work are long-term unemployed. that's still a problem. over the last year, the economy adding on average 153,000 jobs each month, well below the 200,000 to 250,000 you really want for a real and durable recovery. want to know why job growth remains so sluggish? look no further than washington, d.c. i want to bring back zanny

bedoes, bob herbert. that uncertainty from planning businesses and the hiring. is this the new normal? >> i think it is. i hate to say t i wee have to get used to the fact that wz is in this environment where it will keep kicking the can down the road. it's becoming like europe. i hate to say that. but it's not going to go away. the next two months will be more uncertainty. i suspect the american economy will -- american business will aadapt, will deal with this continuing uncertainty but certainly the world would be much better off if we didn't have this export of uncertainty from d.c. >> greg, i will tell you i'm so surprised that the s&p 500 is up last year and you did have 155,000 jobs created in december, right, despite all this craziness we've gone through. >> right. >> what do we need to do, the president and the 113th congress, what do we need to do to boost job growth?

or is it what they shouldn't do to mess it up? >> i think we won't do what's needed. we won't provide the certainty. i think the key theme here will be learning how to live with it. and one of the things that impressed me the most in the last few days is what happened in the bond market? treasury ten-year bond yields are moving higher. that's a sign in the markets that despite all of this washington nonsense, the economy is healing. slowly, but the economy is healing. so i think rates may head even a little bit higher. >> that's a very -- some people are talking about a bond, 40% of people surveyed by cnn money thought a bond bubble would burst within the next year. that means 60% don't, of course. we've been looking for rates to rise for a long time. we've been talking about the jobs numbers this week, bob. 39% of people who have been out of work have been out of work six months or longer. this, to me, is the most critical part of the jobs market. if you can't get those people engaged, back in the economy, those are families who have forever lost earnings ability

and a foot on the ladder into the middle class. >> right. this is what i think is the new normal going forward, lower standards of living. you have these folks who have been out of work so long. it's very unlikely they're going to come back into the job market at jobs that pay the kind of jobs they had before they were unemployed. a quick stat, if you take college graduates from 2006 with a four-year degree up until now, only a little more than 50% have full-time jobs of any kind, and many of them have jobs that don't require a four-year degree. this is not the kind of basis that you can build a strong economy on, going forward. >> what do you tell young people about that? what do you tell them that their country and their economy are doing for them? >> the thing we need to be doing that we're not doing is we need investments in education, investments in infrastrkture, we need to make higher education more affordable. you can't do that with the kind of deficits we're talking about. which is why i think we should have let the bush tax cuts lapse all together for everyone.

>> zanny, you talk about investments and that sounds like spending in a world where overspending is the buzz word. >> that's part of the problem right here. you know, on one side thinks all kind of spend iing is terrible. i agree that we need to have entitlement overhaul. i agree there are some spending that can be cut. you're absolutely right, this country needs investment in some areas, investment in infrastructure, investment in refocus, retraining programs and things like that. one lesson could be learned from europe. the europeans have mess aid lot of this stuff up in the past. in the early 1980s, europe had very high unemployment, very high long-term employment and didn't do anything about it. it became a millstone around these economies, a scar on them. long-term unemployment and people who won't be able to get back into the job market will be a big problem for this country if not more is done. >> if you have interest rates this low, heck, shouldn't we be borrowing money cheap and investing in building out for

tomorrow? >> i've got to say this, christine. i think the house wants vengeance. the house has been humiliated. i think there are a lot of conservatives in the house who would not want to spend one additional dime on new infrastructure, any kind of investment. i think the focus now in the next two or three months is going to be on cutting spending. >> wow! and that's going to be a fight, you guys. >> yep. >> we agree, right? a big, big fight. all three of you, have a great weekend. >> thank you so much. >> nice to see you. >> yep. >> job creation and budget battles hardly the president's only battles ahead. remember the promise in the days following the connecticut school shooting? >> i will use all the powers of this office to help advance efforts to prevent more tragedies like this. >> you might think police and law enforcement are your first line of defense against gun violence. maybe it should be your doctor. it's a big deal.

check your december 30th sunday paper or print the coupon at officemax.com. i've always had to keep my eye on her... but, i didn't always watch out for myself. with so much noise about health care... i tuned it all out. with unitedhealthcare, i get information that matters... my individual health profile. not random statistics. they even reward me for addressing my health risks. so i'm doing fine... but she's still going to give me a heart attack. we're more than 78,000 people looking out for more than 70 million americans. that's health in numbers. unitedhealthcare.

all right.

what if i told you about a huge burst of economic activity? a part of the economy that is booming? it's the run on guns. the mass murder at a connecticut elementary school shook the nation and sent gun buyers rushing to the stores. fbi background checks, one proxy for sales, they set a record last month. the fbi conducted nearly 2.8 million checks in december, up 39% from november. the gun industry says firearms and ammunition provide 200,000 jobs for americans and generate nearly $32 billion for the u.s. economy. but there are also costs. more than 30,000 americans were killed by guns in 2010. here is something interesting. 11,000 were homicides. the rest were suicides. the cdc says those deaths cost so side more than $42 billion a year, $10 billion more than the industry says it generates and gun deaths could soon outpace traffic fatalities. let me show you this chart from

bloomberg news. projects nearly 33,000 gun deaths in 2015 versus 32,000 traffic deaths. two weeks ago, cnn international's christiane am an power told us the shooting should be a game changer. >> this was a red line by anybody's account. these were babies. this was a biblical slaughter of the innocents. and i want to know well this is the kind of society that we are going to accept for ourselves. >> the medical community is now asking the same question. dr. christine lane is editor of the "internal annals of medicine." you co-authored an article about physicians getting involved saying, "the relative science of the health professional on matters related to gun violence is disturbing." whata roles can doctors play? >> i think the basic role that doctors can play is to stop being silent on this issue and to start to speak up.

there are three things that doctors should speak up about. one is to end the moratorium on research about gun safety and gun violence so that we can come up with gun policies that are based on evidence rather than emotion and politics that keep the public safer. the second thing is that doctors can talk to their patients, gun ownership is not probably going to go away in this country. so that it's our imperative to keep our patients safer with respect to guns just like it is with respect to tobacco and alcohol and motor vehicle accidents. so to have those conversations. and the third thing that doctors can do as these discussions are going on is to be involved because we need to figure out -- we need to learn more about the associations of mental illness and substance abuse with violence and come up with ways to mitigate the risks that people with these problems are going to hurt themselves or others. >> now the number-two thing on your list is doctors talking to

their patients about their gun habits, the gun ownership in their household. there's a little-known provision in obama care that's so interesting, it actually bars -- physicians, it bars doctors from asking patients about gun use. some physicians say it's impossible to get federal funding for gun studies. tell me, is the gun lobby in your view thwarting the public health aspect of gun violence? >> i think that it is. i think that it's definitely a public health issue. the statistics that you mentioned in the introduction show that quite clearly. and that the laws that inhibit doctor/patient discussions go b guns or any other thing that threatens their health is really dangerous and frightening. one of the most fright new england things about all of the conversation -- frightening things about all of this conversation right now. >> when an industry's products hurt consumers, society regulates it. doctors are often involved in

discussion, think tobacco advertising, think air bags, seat belts, speed limits. in fact, traffic fatalities have fallen because the industry has embraced safety. do you think there is a lesson there for gunmakers? >> you know, cars can cause deaths and injuries. and the automobile industry has stepped up to make cars safer. the medical profession was vocal in conversations about how to make cars safer, child restraints, seat belts and all of that. and i think there are a lot of parallels. and the culture has really changed in the car industry now. the car industry brags about how safe their cars are. it would be nice if the gun industry could brag about how safe their firearms are. >> dr. lane, we reached out to representatives of the industry and the trade association for the gunmakers, and they did not return our calls seeking comment or to participate in this broadcast. we'll continue to try to get some response from the industry

about how it can try to make its product safer for people who are harmed by it for sure. nice to see you. thank you very much. >> thank you so much. coming up, have you heard enough about the fiscal cliff? >> the fiscal cliff -- >> the fiscal cliff -- >> over the cliff. >> so-called fiscal cliff. >> i'll rant on the metaphorpalooza and why it isn't over yet.

if there is one thing america is tired of it's the fiscal cliff. and not just the cliff itself, i'm talking about the talking about the cliff. the more wonky and arcane the budget battle got, the more washington reached to explain it. just like the yodeler in the

cliffhanger's game on "the price is right," we did fall off a cliff. a metaphor cliff. >> fiscal cliff. >> the fiscal cliff. >> over the cliff. >> so-called flagstaiscal cliff. >> maybe not. cue julie andrews in "the sound of music." >> a slope. >> not a cliff, a slope. >> more of a slip. rope hill, cliff, slope, be honest. it felt more like this -- >> this place is starting to have the feel of the movie ground hog day. >> this is pitiful. >> reporter: at least the movie made you laugh, this was more like "the hurt locker." >> oh, boy. >> congress set this time bomb. now they're scrambling to defuse it. >> reporter: in the end, the cliff, slope, bomb, groundhog day, call it what you will, it became a bill and a new metaphor. >> kick the can down the road. >> kicking the can down the road -- >> kicking the can. >> kicking the can. >> we are done with kicking this can down the road. we