america's divided over minimum wage and my supericized panelist, austan goolsbee and also an adviseror the obama administration and grover norquist and christine, web editor for townhall.com and a former walmart employee and alexis goalsteen. i'll start with you, again, grover. ralph nader wrote you a letter, right? >> he called about it. i haven't seen the letter, but i think he was in favor of having a minimum wage increase. >> i want to read directly from the letter that he sent you. low wages at the ten largest fast food chains cost taxpayers $3.8 billion per year. at 52% of families of front line fast food workers rely only on government assistance. i'll ask you the same question he asked. why should taxpayers shell out $1.2 billion a year to help mcdonald's pay its workers? >> okay, i think nadir's point he is trying to make is that the government spends a great deal of money on welfare and he thinks that if you increase the minimum wage that that would change. here's the challenge. we only have about 3,000 years of history of wage and price controls. they don't work very well.

stuart: austan goolsbee, what an interview, come back anytime you look. good stuff. >> you bet. stuart: now we'll take you to the new york stock exchange where they are observing a minute of silence in honor of nelson mandela. [ male announcer ] here's a question for you: if every u.s. home replaced one light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb, the energy saved could light how many homes? 1 million? 2 million? 3 million? thenswer is. 3 million homes. by 2030, investments in energy efficiency could help americans save $300 billion each year. take the energy quiz. energy lives here. ♪ >> that's it? i found what i want for christm christmas, a keyboard for my iphone? is it as good a deal as it is. by the way the keyboard for the iphone is backed by ryan seacrest. clayton morris has the story coming up in a moment from now. look, we're off and running, it's friday morning, we've had a fairly strong jobs report. the market loves it and will you look at this? we're right in the trading session and we're going to go up about 100 points. before we show you that, here is-- yes, look, w

it is austan goolsbee, the former chief economic adviser to the president called the emerging deal notcalled it an embryonic stem cell sized deal, but we don't know for sure that this congress can get that done. >> i heard that too. and also, john, last up, there's a whole bunch of discussions about revenues going on which makes a lot of republicans unhappy. but co-pay for federal employee pension funds is one of the big sticking points. apparently over ten years worth $130 billion. democrats hate it. republicans want it. is that going to get in the way? >> you're going to have democrats who don't like it, but i believe that will be part of the deal. if you're not going to touch medicare and social security, this deal doesn't touch the two programs. it also isn't going to raise any taxes. if you avoid the hot buttons you have to get the money some place and the fees they'll get the money from are aviation fees. some people may call those a tax. and the amount -- kind of entitlement cuts would be from federal retirement and if you're stepny hoyer, you're not doing to like that. but to g

joining us now mark zandi, christian weller at the university of massachusetts in boston, and austan goolsbeer of economics at the university of chicago school of business and former chairman of the council of economic advisers in the obama administration. our guest host this morning has been gary stern, continues to be, former president at the federal reserve bank of minneapolis where there's a lot of lakes. and arthur brooks, president -- aren't there? >> yes, there are. >> and arthur -- i knew i had that right. arthur brooks president of aei. >> nailed it. >> american enterprise institute. >> american enterprise institute. >> for young enterprisers. all right. you want to? >> i don't want to take your jobs report away. let's start with mark zandi. what's your number today and why? >> 200,000, it should be a strong report, unemployment should fall to 7.2. i don't think the trend has changed, though. we've been getting 175,000 per month for about three years, i think that's roughly where we are. i don't think we've broken out yet. i think we need stronger gdp growth. and even though we got a