i have a question for mr. biggs. my question is what was the deficit when the last deficit that was projections put in by president bush. just before president obama took office, everybody is talking about the debt and the deficit, is less than what we need. at the put in the minimal amount to get the country going. all we hear about is the deficit and debt. what did president bush buy his last year when he left? he put in something p. who is gonna pay for the wars? it's not medicare. it's medicare advantage. the ceo score it had lower for republicans. when they finally come out with the numbers. it was three times the amount that they had originally said it would be. what president obama did is cut out the waist and abuse in medicare advantage. host: we'll leave it there. andrew, go ahead. guest: one point i think i made early on, i don't hold current deficits against the obama administration. they inherited a difficult economy and financial crisis. you are going to run large budget deficits this year and next regar

i haven't work is -- worked as closely as mr. biggs, andrew, but maybe we'll do that in the future. don ketti, thank you for your leadership. this is not a town meeting. if it were every seat here would be filled. indeed, when i held a town meeting on health care, there were 1,500 people in the auditorium and the subject we were discussing was not as important adds the subject we're discussing today. it was not, perhaps, as consequential, certainly in the long term as the subject we discuss today. and i want to congratulate those with this entire effort to indicate our public and to look for solutions. it's easy to lament reality, what is. it's difficult to say what should be and how we're going to get there. we're here to discuss what i believe is america's single most pressing challenge. putting our fiscal house in order. america's accumulation of debt is a common danger and one that ought to engage the best efforts of liberals and queverts -- conservatives alike. because while all of us here have our own view of the prop proper role of government, facts do not have ideal zpwi. to

and some very nice work that mr. biggs did recently that was reported on the "new york times" shows that state governments when you look at their explicit or implicit liabilities are in a world of hurt right now. the work that mr. walker pioneered at the gao. i just wondered given the situation that states are in, does it really make sense to ask them to bail out the federal government? by raising their tax base basically. >> well, i think a value-added tax is a form of sales tax that if you're going to have a sales tax an value added tax it's self-enforcing so you have less problems with evasion. it would not be my choice. my choice would be scaled down programs. try to minimize the increase in taxes. at the end of the day, though, if you're going to have a european-size welfare state, you have to start taxing the way they tax. they tend to tax through high payroll taxes and things like value added taxes. you can't finance all these programs with just, you know, tweaking tax rates on people making over $250,000. so there