base in this country when we have to respond and mobilize. >> all right. thank you very much. mr. chairman, i give you back the balance of my time. >> thank you. mr. scott. >> thank you, mr. chairman. gentlemen, i appreciate you hanging around just for my question. and general you spoke about the isr capabilities. we have the jsors there and it's not appropriate here but would like to get some information. there is an efficient way to increase capabilities of that unit and those planes that would i think be a significant cost savings so i'll provide that information for you and work my staff to your staff. i will tell you i did not vote for the sequestration. i represent robbins air force base. i'm from georgia. we have ft. benning, we have ft. gordon, we have ft. stewart. we have king's bay.

i'll also as chairman would tell you, tell you i'm one of the ones that did not sign the letter saying no cuts to the military. i recognize that we are going to have to have some reductions. what i see happening, though, through the communities that have such a large military industrial base is the fear between sequestration and talk of brac. it's disrupting businesses whether it's a entrepreneur that wants to build a restaurant or city trying to determine what sewer capacity they need or water capacity or other types of farah they need. it's i think in the end causing us more unemployment because of that uncertainty. zell miller was one of georgia's governors and was a u.s. senator and one of the things that he did and he received some criticism for it when he did it but in the end it worked, he

went through a process called redirection where he asked every agency to deliver the agency head was to deliver the 5% that they would cut. it wasn't up to any of the elected officials, the agency heads delivered the 5% that they would cut so your base commander could deliver the 5% that they would take out and then they were allowed to present back to command where they would put 2 1/2% of that. the net result of that was a 2 1/2% reduction in spending and quite honestly a more efficient agency. and so as somebody who's come from a state appropriations committee and secretary panetta and general and controller i know you have more experience than i do with these issues but that's something that we did see that work ed. i'd also like to say, mr. secretary, there were 89 of us that are freshmen

republicans. we very much enjoy a discussion with the president. that's something that we're not allowed. i wish we could. i wish that what was said about us working together could happen and obviously that means have you those meetings, but i would ask, as we talk about these cuts, you know, there's no -- there's no discussion of cutting food stamps, we're talking about cutting veterans' benefits. you know, there's not -- not talk of cutting housing programs or other things. i mean the things that have been outlined to us are cuts to the military, and we need your help. i mean when fox news and cnn were on and i watched fox, i'll tell you, but cnn is a georgia company and i mean we need you out there talking about the damage that sequestration is going to do to national

security, to our economy, the military industrial complex. those people work. my people at robbins want to get up and have a job and want to build an airplane so i will just ask that, you know, we're going to do everything we can to have your back and we need you out there outlining the damage that can be done for us. >> congressman, thank you for those comments and obviously i'll continue to talk about the impact sequestration would have and i agree just having the shadow of that out there is of tremendous concern to communities across the country and industries across the country and something that we really have to try to get rid of. look, just to -- bottom line here is we were handed a number for defense reductions. we stepped up to the plate but we made our obligations to try to do this in a way that would still preserve for us an effective force to deal with the

threats, but you can't balance the budget on the backs of defense either. you've got to look at every other area in the budget in order to deal with the deficits that we're confronting and i just hope that congress ultimately makes the decision along with the president to do that. >> and, mr. secretary, that's the statement that we need to hear over and over and over from those of you at the dod and our military leaders. you can't balance the budgets on the back of the military. thank you so much. >> thank you for waiting to get your question out there. thank you very much, mr. secretary. general. >> thank you very much. >> mr. hale, we appreciate you being here, the work you're doing. this hearing is now at an end.

in a few moments c-span radio's "washington today" program. more about the administration's 2013 budget request and a hearing with treasury secretary tim geithner. and then we'll reair defense secretary leon panetta and joint chiefs of staff chairman general martin dempsey testifying about the pentagon's 2013 budget request. several live events to tell you about tomorrow. energy secretary steven chu will take questions about his department's budget request from members of the senate energy committee. that's on c-span 3 at 3:30 a.m. eastern. also on c-span 3 at 2:00 p.m. eastern, treasury secretary tim geithner will return to capitol hill to testify about the president's 2013 budget. he's before the house budget committee.

>> booktv is live saturday from the savannah book festival. coverage starts at 9:30 eastern with tom clavin on the last hours of the vietnam war followed by karl marlantes on what it's like to go to war and scotty smiley at noon. at 1:30 eastern, the changing israeli/palestinian conflict and irshad manji and toure on "who's afraid of blackness" and the rice and fall of the comanches on c-span 2's become tv. >> c-span radio's "washington today." over the next 90 minutes a look at today's top stories including the president's trip to milwaukee to talk about the

economy. >> welcome back to "washington today" here on c-span radio. i'm steve scully. we're on the website with a photograph of the president as he toured the master lock plant in milwaukee. wisconsin, of course, with its ten electoral vote, a key battleground state in this 2012 election year but the president traveling there to talk about jobs and the economy. master lock factory is a facility that has 100 jobs that return from china back to the ua -- usa and the president and white house using this to tout job growth now returning to the united states. >> we've got to seize this moment of opportunity. we can't let it slip away. we've got an opportunity to create new american jobs and american manufacturing, put that back where it needs to be. one place to start is with our tax code.

i talked about this at the state of the union. right now companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. they're taking deductions for the expenses of moving out of the united states. meanwhile, companies that are doing the right thing and choosing to stay here, they get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. that doesn't make sense. everybody knows it doesn't make sense. politicians of both parties have been talking about changing it for year, so my message to congress is, don't wait. get it done. do it now. let's get it done. [ applause ] as congress thinks about tax reform principles, there's some basic things they can do. first, if you're a business that wants to outsource jobs, you have that right. but you shouldn't get a tax deduction for doing it. that money should be used to

cover moving expenses for companies like master lock that decide to bring jobs home. give them the tax break. second of all, no american company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. so we've said from now on every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. and every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay and hire here in the united states of america. giver them a bigger tax break. [ cheers and applause ] third, third, if you're an american manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. [ cheers ] >> if you're a high-tech manufacturer creating new product, new services we should double the tax deduction you get for making products in america.

if you want to relocate in a community like this one that's been hard hit when factories left town, you should get help financing a new plant. financing new equipment. training new workers. it is time to stop rewarding companies that ship jobs overseas and start rewarding companies that are creating jobs right here in the united states of america. [ cheers and applause ] and this congress should send me these tax reforms right now. i will sign them right away. right now. right now. right now. >> all: right now. right now. >> the president at the master lock plant in milwaukee.

the first stop in a series of visits that will take the president out west for politics and public policy and joining us live on the phone from the political newsroom is kerry boudoff-brown. thanks for being with us. >> thank you, steve. >> let's talk about the trip to width. as we said it is an important battleground state in the 2012 election and the president using this as one of the issues that he brought up in his state of the union address. part of the themes of we can't wait and bringing jobs back to the u.s. >> sure, i mean the importance of wisconsin is the obama campaign has a number of scenarios they have laid out how to get to 70 electoral votes. something to note, though, wisconsin is in all of those game plans so they're really relying on wisconsin to be a stalwart state for them. he won it pretty easily in '08 but since then there's been a republican governor, it's been become a more republican tate in terms of elected officials so he

has some work to do, the message he brought back there today is one he's hitting hard, a manufacturing message that he really feels contrasts well with romney or just the eventual republican nominee and we know santorum is the one exception. he talks more about manufacturing and the need to, you know, support a rebirth of manufacturing in this country, but this isn't a sort of comfortable conversation for him givingen what he did with the auto industry and michigan, i think the white house feels pretty confident about this message. >> where does the president head from here? it's three days of campaign-style events as he talks about the economy and themes from his state of the union address. >> this is a heavily dominated -- how do i say it -- trip that's focused heavily on campaign events. i mean, he has eight fu fund-raise fund-raisers, he's in los angeles now. he had two fund-raisers, at least two fund-raisers there.

he heads tomorrow morning to carona delmar which is another area around los angeles, he'll be giving remarks. he's going to san francisco then he heads to seattle where he'll be doing an official event but also raising money there, as well. so this is i would say since the first of the year or even for several months before that a trip that's heavily focused on raising money of any that he's taken in his first term. >> one of those fund-raisers, we should point out co-hosted by comedian will ferrell. collectively we're told from the white house the campaign will raise in excess of $8 million for his re-election effort. what kind of reaction, though, has he had in the past among the so-called hollywood moguls because i know there have been a lot of issues including the debate within the industry over anti-piracy legislation and sometimes it's been a lukewarm relationship he's had with some celebs that may be coming back

to the fold in 2012. >> sure, this is his first trip back to l.a. to raise money since that issue kind of blew up over the last month or two and then, of course, he heads to san francisco where, you know, there's the tech industry and tech september 11th hollywood on that whole issue so that's something that, you know, folks traveling with him are watching for. i mean i think there's a lot of stories that will be written and continue to be written about whether he has the support in hollywood i think at the end of the day, you know, he lines up more closely with many of the big moguls, you know, in terms of politics then i think what we'll see from a romney or santorum at this point. so i still expect there to be stories and -- showing cracks in his support, but, you know, i think maybe by the end of this trip we'll have a little bit of a better sense than that but, you know, he's an incumbent now running on a record that hasn't obviously pleased everybody so he'll be losing support while

trying to maintain as much as he can. >> talking to carrie budoff brown. california has given more to the president's campaign than any other state and the top two donor groups, the entertainment industry and silicon valley. before we let you go, let me get your reaction to the latest poll, again, just one snapshot in where the president stands. cbs news now has the president at a 50% approval rating. that was the highest that he's had since may of 2010. >> yeah, i mean, this is a good poll for him. not only are his approval ratings above the 50% mark you're seeing, a greater percentage of people saying they believe the economic outlook is improving of those who think it's getting worse, that's a very important indicator because he, you know, his re-election in large part rests on how people view the economy and whether it is actually getting better and so he's benefiting from that and i think that's, you know,

something that the white house is pretty thrilled with. of course, we've seen this before in march of last year there was an upturn in the economy and discussions of when does he declare a recovery, you know, complete or on its way and obviously things went terribly wrong after that for him in washington, so i think everyone, you know, at the white house thinks this is obviously tenuous that they feel good about it in polls like this to obviously boost their spirits. >> carrie brown joining us from the political newsroom, thanks for joining us on c-span and c-span radio. >> thanks, steve. >> let's turn our attention to a cull of bills moving through the house and senate, energy and transportation specifically, as a way of background. house republicans this week deciding to split what was the $260 billion transportation bill into three separate parts and house republicans did so according to the hill newspaper after it became clear the votes were not there when the provisions were packaged together. last night over some democratic

objection, the house rules committee approved a rule that governs the debate on all three bills, now, the house debate which began earlier today on that rule tries to clarify some of the bills. it also sent members of congress back and forth on not only the issue but also the rule that was put forth so to give you a sense of how this is all unfolding in washington we'll begin with congressman jim mcgovern, a democrat from massachusetts. >> madam speaker, speaker boehner used to be fond of criticizing bills by saying they wouldn't pass the straight faced test. well, let me tell you, i'm having trouble keeping a straight face right now. not when i look at this incredibly partisan slap dash set of bills before us. not when i look at the awful convoluted process that got us here. madam speaker, this process is an absolute travesty. republican leadership took a thousand-page bill, the most

partisan transportation bill in congressional history and made it worse. they took a bill that was written in secret and jamme committee and inserted unrelated and controversial provisions like keystone pipeline anwar, offshore drilling and cuts in federal pensions. even worse they changed the rules in the middle of the game because yesterday morning after everyone had submitted their amendments to the original single bill, speaker boehner decided to split it into three separate measures. and he said it was the name of transparency. transparency? give me a break. it was more like the valentine's massacre of transparency. you know, you know a bill is bad when the competitive enterprise institute taxpayers for common sense and the natural resources defense council are all opposed to how it's structured. talk about strange bed fellows.

transportation secretary ray lahood, a former republican congressman, called hr-7 and i quote, the most partisan transportation bill i have ever seen and i further quote him, he said, it is the worst transportation bill i've ever seen during 35 years of public service. the chairman of the transportation committee calls this a bipartisan product. madam speaker, making democratic amendments in order -- in and of itself and then defeating them doesn't make a bill bipartisan. transportation bills by their nature have always been truly bipartisan. written together by the majority and minority. republicans and democrats, in the past, have not only worked in good faith on this bill, they have put their differences aside and did their jobs. i should know. i serve on the transportation committee during a

republican-controlled house in my first term and i served as a conferee to the 1998 reauthorization bill. yet, hr-7 abandons years of good faith efforts by members of both parties to thoughtfully and responsibly craft a bipartisan transportation bill that reflects the priorities and vital importance of farah investments across this country. >> hr-7 that the congressman is speaking is titled american energy and farah jobs act and again, the debate that really began last night and continued today on the house floor, the announcement from the house rules committee that approved a rule governing debate on all three bills so instead of collectively vote on a single piece of legislation it's divided into three separate parts. defending the pressure and defending the decision, defending the rule congressman ron bishop, republican of utah. >> you know, i enjoyed watching "moneyball" and enjoyed reading

the book, as well. in the book they talk about the concept of fielding averages, players who don't make many mistakes and in the book billy bean says the talent for avo avoiding failure is not a great trait. easiest way to avoid making a mistake is getting too slow to get to the ball. in all due respect, this administration and my good friends on the other side are simply too slow to get to the ball. they are in the background or the basis of their arguments against this particular rule for this particular bill is they wish to fund transportation programs the old-fashioned way, which means we spend money we don't have. what we're trying to do with this particular bill is go outside of the box and find a way to pay for farah improvement, a way to pay for our transportation needs and to do it with energy development. like we all have a problem with escalating prices of gas at the pump. for the most vulnerable of our society we have a problem with them paying for heating oil.

economic development, business development demands a cheap source of energy. if it's going to happen, and we need to find a way to fund our farah needs and we are wrapping them all together by paying for it with economic energy development. who can possibly be opposed to that? even the president of the united states in one of his arguments for having a payroll tax increase said the reason we need to do it is because we are paying too much money at the pump for gasoline. which i think is a justifiable in his case. when president obama came into office, the average cost of gasoline was $1.79. today the average cost for a gallon of gasoline, not inflated prices, same dollars is $3.28. that's an 83% increase in the cost at the pump since president obama has been in office. now we ask on the rules committee the other day if we went to the old-fashioned way of paying for transportation and just pay for it out of gas taxes how much would we have to raise to fund this particular program?

and the guesstimate at that time was around 20 cents a gallon. 20 cents a gallon. even if you have a small car, that is still 2 to 3 bucks a time every time you want to fill up. at that rate nobody in the car can afford a bill gulp. basically we are trying to do on the republican side is allow people to drive with good drinks on good roads. our friends on the other side apparently want us to walk. or if we have good roads you have to pay significantly more for it. s that simply is wrong. we have problems with heating oil. the other side's approach is simply freeze in the dark. there is a better way of doing it and this bill, these bills try to accomplish that. >> the comments of congressman rob bishop, a republican from utah and, again, as this bill separated into three different parts, according to roll call, the energy and as you heard from the congressman the pay for bill, both expected to pass easily.

now, roll call saying that neither include any significantly new language and house republicans have already passed much of the language in separate legislation. however, the big issue, the transportation bill where difficulty comes together, one house republican saying that the measure was pitting republican factions against one another. the aide who is not identified is quoted as saying "this thing is a mess." let me share with you what roll call's john stanton writes, once again it appears speaker john boehner may have overestimated his willingness to support one of his legislative packages and finding himself forced to scrap plans for a grand transportation and energy bill. now, this legislation which now will be broken into those three smaller parts we talked about a moment ago done so in hopes of salvaging the energy portion of the bill at least and i'm getting a lot of contention and debate on capitol hill even from conservative republicans, meanwhile, senator harry reid also critical of the process on the other side of the chamber, he spoke to reporters earlier -- actually he spoke on the senate

floor earlier in the day about the house approach to this legislation. >> the house of representatives led by the republican caucus which is overwhelmingly tea party, they decided they were going to do some legislation. now, that is a dandy. their legislation is so bad that the congressional budget office said it would bankrupt the trust fund. we're trying to replenish the trust fund, they're bankrupting the trust fund. the -- but as i hear on the news this morning, the republican caucus over in the house is fractured and now they can't figure out what to do with that bill. they're thinking maybe we'll break it into three different pieces. even with the power of the tea party it is so obnoxious and so out of control that piece of legislation that they're not willing to appear to allow a vote to take place on that, the bill itself because it is so bad. >> senator harry reid on the

action in the house of representative, the decision by house republicans to split up the transportation and energy bills as the senate also taking up action on this legislation. well, transportation, one of the issues that came up on the senate floor and in a senate hearing with jeff sessions, republican from alabama, as he questioned ray lahood who is the transportation secretary, former member of congress from illinois as he testified before the senate budget committee on the issue of high-speed rail. its purpose, its goals and the cost of high-speed rail. >> so i know it sounds good to have a nationwide high-speed rail project but at this point in the history, we don't have the money and we don't have the possibility of anything close to paying for that plan, and i just would say to you that i think that's the reality you'll face in congress. but we do understand that their

traffic jams in cities, some cities could use mass transit, some cities could use improvements to their interstates and most of them could use high-speed interstate improvements throughout. -- i'll give you a chance to respond to that. thank you for your commitment to the program. we should have a person in this office that's committed to transportati transportation, but i got to tell you when you're talking about these kind of increases and these kind of programs, we're running the largest deficits in history, you got to understand congress is not going to be able to agree to everything. >> well, having served in congress for 14 years, i know that. i'm proud of the -- during the 14 year, 5 of those year, we had balanced budgets. thanks to the work of senator conrad and others. and we still had priorities. you have priorities, part -- one

of the priority satz pay down the debt. that's what we did during that five-year period but we still had priorities. one of our transportation priorities is implementing passenger rail. when florida turned back $2.3 billion, we had $10 billion worth of requests. some of that came from republican governors. one in michigan that we just gave almost a billion dollars to so he could fix up the tracks from detroit to chicago so people can get their little higher speeds. we've invested in the northeast corridor, which a lot of people in this town use from washington to new york. to get to higher speeds, to fix up the+++t