robert rice, you heard marty feldstein on that. you're pessimistic in the jobs market in your op-ed piece in the paper this morning. wouldn't therefore a value added tax be an absolute bone crusher to this economy? >> larry, i'm not in favor of a value added tax for two reasons. number one, i think that any tax that hides itself, and a value added tax would be a hidden tax, because most of it would be on every stage of production up to a consumer goods. that means consumers would not really know how much they were paying. any tax that hides itself is not a good tax. it's not a democratically accountable tax. secondly, i worry that a value added tax, because it is a kind of super sales tax, is a regressive tax. it does not take a bigger bite out of the incomes of the wealthy than it does out of the incomes of the poor. therefore, it's a step backwards toward greater tax regressivity as is every sales tax. >> marty, do you agree with that? >> i do. and i think one thing that reinforces it is that about half of all americans who file

first of all, this morning we had liberal robert reich and conservative marty feldstein, they both came out against paul volck volcker's back tax proposal. how do you stand? >> it's hard for me to understand how paul volcker, as bright as he is, is going to ask for a value-added tax, we were europe's worst night mares. that's a progressive tax that literally allows the left to continue to increase taxes the rest of our lives. i've said they're trying to europeanize american. the value-added tax, anytime you want to increase it, they'll be able to increase it. it's another thing to say, but we're not going to cut any spending, we're not going to get spending under control, we won't live within constitutional mandates. we won't find any way of trying to make this system work. we're going to at least 25%, and more than 25% of our gdp in expenses in this country. the nermal rate is somewhere around 20%. it's just awful. >> well, scott rasmussen's latest poll out yesterday, he says people feel like they're overtaxed. interestingly, sir, 75% according to the poll say the top tax rate should o

money because we were in a very deep hole, and everybody said if you didn't, all economists, marty feldstein said you need to put more money back in the economy. we didn't have any money. you have a $5.6 trillion surplus. we had a deficit. we didn't have any money. your administration spent it all. you didn't pay for your tax cuts. very nice to give tax cuts, but if you don't pay for them and they create deficits, then who's going to pay for them? our children. and that's what happened. we went to war. one was absolutely essential. we went to another war that some say was a choice. that is in iraq. we somewhat abandoned afghanistan. we went to iraq and we didn't succeed in afghanistan. well, we didn't pay for either one of those wars. who were you expecting to pay for those wars? our children. you adopted a drug prescription program which frankly we made better in the health care bill. we made seniors more secure in getting their prescription drugs, but you didn't pay for it. your economy that you left us, very frankly, is responsible for 38% of that deficit to which you referred. 90%-plus o