that gives us a significant edge to romney. if we are starting to tank by the fall, i think that is probably the less likely scenario. i think the grinding continuation of growth and jobs. in terms of other things that could change, the dynamic, i don't see anything other -- what the administration wants to see is a big, sweeping solution to the european crisis which involves pooling of kdebt there. something that gives the confidence that there is not going to be failures. if something like that emerges,

then we get the 50/50. >> yeah, i mean, second quarter probably 2.3% i think that is what the economists are calling for. people don't focus on gdp numbers as much. the people have moved on. like them, i think the monthly numbers will be stronger. i think these things will be important. i like ben's scenario of job growth. yeah. but i think the really big problem for obama is the risks around the forecast are not smet trick. i struggle to come up with the scenario but i can think of so many things that can go wrong with that scenario. oil spiking again.

election in mexico that goes against american interests and producing bad news that evokes a new phase of this crisis and obama doesn't have a lot of show for his four years in office as it is. almost every leader of this crisis has been replaced. it is not surprising that he is running a negative campaign than to define his opponent to be somebody who shouldn't be running the country. the republican party damaged the brand and opponents but he has quickly closed the gap since the primary ended. so in that sense he is in

trouble because the main thing he has going for him was the weakness for the opponent. an economy good enough for obama to scrape through but i can think of so many reasons for that to go wrong. >> back in january, i was sure that president was a shoe in for a second term. he is one of the most intelligent presidents that we have ever had and today i believe he has already lost the election. this hinges on romney being able to keep his lips sealed. he is a hard man to develop warm feelings for. but just like president bush, this will be a vote against the

ink incumbent president. he's a talker and we are in a crisis it is like the civil war. abe lincoln wasn't worried about a second term. it reminds me of the job jar, it is so small. he is not taking bold steps, again, i think the election has been decided by the economy.

>> i don't think that is true. i think it is possible and you could still win. the campaign pushed us to new initiatives. and you know, they basically admitted that there is not much we can do now.

they can do it quickly and easily. but, that is not going to happen. and the frustration that people have, it is not incorrect for obama to say look at congress, they are trying to create jobs, but people want a president who can say, this is my agenda. people feel the strength from

him. they don't feel like he has the answers to getting the economy moving again. >> so, when, you are trying to convey an economic argument, and you are trying to stimulate growth, there should be more public works people aren't buying it. we asked people what do you think would be the best way to stimulate the economy. 46% said cut the deficit. the point is, voters are not

expected to do the math and understand why the policies are supposed to work. listening to obama say iing wel growth would be y instead of x if only if congress would pass my policies. voters are saying we vote on results not on hypotheses and that is the major issue that obama is going to struggle with for the remainder of the campaign.

>> what is the economical differences between bobama and romney? >> romney wants to cut taxes. the banking sector's ability to help the economy grow. this tax reduction rates on businesses and individuals and also somehow capping government spending 20% of gdp, i don't

know how he figures the numbers they don't add up to me. but what obama wants to do is actually raise the taxes slightly on the top income earners and wants the highest taxes on the highest salaries to lapse and extend tax cuts on the middle class and he want to keep the regulations in place that we have. and that is the basic argument between democrats and republicans. that has been the way it has been higher taxes versus continued regulation. >> and that is a laundry list. >> well, a lot of it depends on the make up of the next congress. i doubt that they would pass the across the board tax cut. >> you had to back off.

i don't see a sweeping republican take over from the senate. it is likely that they will take the senate. in which case there will be a block on the stuff that he has to get done. so no, i don't think there is a chance that a lot of what romney is processing. >> he is pretending to be a conservative. can he accomplish something in congress if he is elected? sure. it wasn't too many decades ago that the difference between republicans and democrats were not that extreme and there are moderates who are afraid to come out because they don't wanthamm story of the election.

romney is a business man i think he is against the creep of socialism, central planning. he would give the economy more leverage. he is anti-oppressive regulation. i think you can get people on both sides of the aisle. the president tried to pick winners and losers on them. >> i love the website for the u.s. labor board and statistics.

if you read the website, oil and gas extraction and the financial services industry. they are two areas under attack by the obama administration, and so why why do you want to have a war against two of the highest pay i paying groups? >> i mean, the last time i checked, those were the statistics. you can argue that we could

revisit some of those. you think about romney, he owns homes in three states, none of which he will carry this fall. this is a man whose pedigree is a blue state. this is a man who -- if you read the documents of the campaign book, it is an impressive document of careful i know more

than anyone else in this room stuff. a lot of sensible proposals, when he needed to meet his aponents but how aggressive he would be on tax cuts? when he sits down and thinks about things carefully, he would appeal to independents. health care is the most obvious. you cannot see light between obamacare and romneycare other than one is federal and one is a state program. i suspect that had romney been president four years ago, you would have ended up with the romney care. >> the evolution towards the

right will stick with him. when paul ryan had the first bu budget, he stayed far away from it and gave it a tepid welcome and a year later he is calling it terrific andwonderful.he sai into place a year ago. paul ryan is like our jack kemp. he is exciting and they want to see his ideas in place. grow vgrover norquist said he only needs five votes.

i suspect we'll see something further to the right of what he planned. ryan is not as far to the right as he is made out to be. he sees himself as a negotiating document. he will see the principle of what he is aiming for it is more important than the letter of what he is put out there. democrats will have 41 seats in the senate. the republicans will have to deal with the fact that there is only so much he can do without the filibuster. >> the question -- >> i have a question about what you might see about the bright spots in the economy. there is a lot of focus on what is not working. what do you see as something that we can look to with

optimism? >> you guys are doing a terrific job. without joking. one of the major stories has been the discovery that prices work. if you raise oil over $100 a barrel, prices would be the lowest now. natural gas of course, a game changer. major progress has been made. one of the reasons i worry less, is because we don't important as much of the stuff as we used to. few years ago, the ceo of bp said i will never sell as much gasoline as he did in 2006. there is a secular decline of fossil fuels going on. most would have occurred and it

is possible to overdue the negativism and the american decline argument. the numbers are not negative. jobs are being created four million over the last 27 months. it is not true to say the private sector is doing fine. in some areas it is doing quite well. there is a lot of uncertainty in terms of holding people back. there are solutions available to them should they avail themselves of them. they just need the help of the germans in particular, control of money and power but if they an come up with a shared risk you know pooling, there is a way for europe to be solved, at least moving on the correct

direction and that risk gets taken off the table. you have small we're not in this disastrous, everything is horrible type of economy. we're in a painfully slow economy, as greg has said. it's frustrating. we've been through these things before and we tend to come out of them with stronger growth and there's every reason to think we can do that again. and, you know, i feel like we're in this era where we just go from, you know, things are getting a lot better to a few weeks of bad headlines and we're in the tank again and everybody is jumping off of bridges. and there's really no reason to go to either extreme. there's a million reasons why we do. a lot of it is media driven. but the underlying data does not support a case for catastrophe and, you know, crisis and return to, you know, another recession and depression. it supports, a, you know,

slow-growing economy that's adding jobs and one that would assume would find a faster pace going over the next three, four, five years. >> yeah, we're on the road to energy independence because of advanced scientific advancements in the extraction of natural gas. it's a wonderful development that will help our country in ways too numerous to count. the other thing. this hurts the president. and it's not his fault. but we are in an era of creating destruction. if you go to your local supermarket, you'll probably check yourself out at a kiosk. that's a good thing. it's efficient. it's fast. it saves the supermarket money in accounting, in tracking in the warehouse. it's bad for the employment because i think in 2011, according to the bureau of labor and statistics, my favorite web site, there were three million cashiers in this country. so there's displacement there.

the advances in robotics are just astounding. if you do a google search of james bond theme and quadracopter, you will see the most amazing display of robotics from a team of students at the university of pennsylvania that really is the -- you know, it's the calling card of a revolution. what these guys have done is they have taken the x-box 360's kinect technology and created vision for robots. so it's quite possible that you can have robots in the fields picking fruit within a decade. that's a bad thing for the farm workers. but it's a good thing overall for society. we just have to learn to adjust. it's a very painful adjustment because people who are under-educated are going to have a much more difficult time finding gainful employment in the economy. no president can control that.

but, you know, i'm optimistic about these developments. i think in the long run, it will all work out for the better. >> we have a question in the middle of the room. >> i just wanted to know what you see, if any, is the major economic impact of the aca being declared unconstitutional or being held up? and if it's going to be immediate or if it's going to be in the long-term, meaning prior to the election or after the election? >> we get into a lot of partisan arguments about that and the idea that if it's thrown out entirely, that lifts a cloud of uncertainty over job creators who aren't hiring people because they're concerned about the cost of insuring them. you know, i think that's probably not entirely accurate. there's also the question of if it's a split decision, does it somehow create deficit reduction

that is beneficial to the economy? you know, i don't know whether it has an answer to the economy right now. i don't think it does. my guess is it's probably fairly minimal. it will have a huge political impact. it will validate, you know, one of the president's signature achievements first initiative. it will be a major negative political story for the white house, whether it has an immediate impact on the economy and job creation, my guess is no. >> yeah, i completely agree with what ben was just saying. with one small exception that one part -- this depends partly on whether the entire act is struck down or just the individual mandate. but if the entire act is struck down, one of the provisions is a medicare and investment tax that's to come into effect next year. and that's one of the pieces that makes the fiscal cliff so steep. so if that is invalidated, it won't hurt quite as much when we go over that cliff. >> i think it will be very good news for the economy if the whole wall was struck doub.

now, the conventional wisdom is that the wall will stand. the con vingsal wisdom among attorneys is that the wall will stand. i'm on a capitalist. i grew up in an era when there was no health insurance and i was the oldest of six and we always had the doctor at the house. we managed to survive. we were not rich. i think a spend more out of pocket and you have maybe catastrophic insurance for the big stuff and you negotiate with the doctor for your treatments and you don't go for silly treatments that you may not need in the first place. we all know what they are. i won't embarrass the medical profession. but, you know, with insurance, we're being treated for things we really don't have to be treated for today. and that jacks up costs. so i think the best way is to get back to the nation's capitalistic roots and get away from the socialism. >> i think we have time for a

few more questions. >> hi, my name is lauren openheimer. the congress and president just signed into law the jobs act and repealed the number for small companies going public. i wanted to hear your thoughts on that, as well as facebook's ipo. >> facebook's ipo, my initial thought on that was that it was bad. it didn't perform well. $38 to, i don't know, $21 or whatever it is now. actually, i think we joke about facebook being overpriced and overhyped and all of that stuff. i think to some degree, it's poor performance and negative headlines surrounding it. it's, you know, impacts the market and general psychology and people's feelings about the market which, in turn, are a major factor in the presidential race and, you know, electoral politics in general. the direction the dow matters for how people wind up voting in

terms of the, you know, the jobs act, which, you know, is intended to allow crowd funding and other, you know, sources of capital raising. you know, there are critics of it who say that it would, you know, create, you know, petty stocks again and boiler room operations and hoodwink small investors into buying into crummy companies. i think that's probably not all that true. i think, you know, at the margins, it's a helpful thing and we should be encouraging small businesses to raise capital in whatever ways they possibly can. i don't know, it's another one of these things where it's not a big factor, i don't think, in greasing the economy. i don't think it's going to play a large role in job creation. it's probably helpful at the margins, but i don't think it's a big factor. >> number writing for the jobs act and then several days after it, groupon had that problem and then a few weeks later, facebook

had all of their problems. so having a little bit of buyer's remorse. all of that said, i think unblaps is probably still a good thing. i think where the best of intentions, we've made it far too difficult for companies to raise capital and to access the public markets. i think one of the reasons for whatever misgivings for example, it was fairly low-cost way of demonstrating that he is, in fact, pro business when everybody, you know, pants all of his adversaries paint him as anti-business. it's a major issue for him to overcome. to the point that i was making a little while ago that i think obama and romney sort of battle against their opponents' efforts to paint them in one extreme than they really are. obama has a terrible ability to connect with business. i mean, he's the teleprompter.

he's not the one that business folks can relate to. and i think that translates to a sense that he's not sympathetic or understanding of how a private sector economy works. i think he has saulgt to find directions forward that is unintrusive to businesses. you know, i think, again, the affordable care act is one of them and the jobs act is one of them. one of the ironies of the keystone pipeline issue is that if he did not have to worry about how approval of the pipeline would disenchant his base, he would have approved it days ago. >> he just couldn't take the headline risk with the environmental groups saying i'm going to green light this thing and they are very concerned about the watershed.