glenn hubbard. he's known as the guy that brought us the 2003, ignore the two wars, tax cuts. after leaving the white house in 2003, glenn hubbard moved into the private sector. at the time wall street was starting a game of gambling with risk. they were lumping mortgages together, then selling them to each other and making big profits for themselves along the way. the risk any one person would pay back a loan was divorced as risk itself was monitorized and sold and resold in an increasingly complex but increasingly insane anti-common sense game that drove the housing bubble, of course, and that made wall street very rich. who was one of the great champions of that game? glenn hubbard. hubbard teamed up with chief economists at goldman sachs to write about how wall street's new gain was enhancing the stability of the u.s. banking system. as for the impending threat of economic calamity, according to mr. hubbard, recessions are less frequent now and milder when they occur. so if you're wondering what

if you talk to republican economists, if you talk to glenn hubbard who is advising mitt romney, he'llyou the real types of taxes you have to worry about are marginal rate taxes. he'll also tell you it's not a bad thing to clean out expenditures and loopholes from the code, things like itemized deduction that perry's talking about. things like all the many, many, deductions we spend trillions of dollars on every year. but the part of the tax -- the type of tax increase that is popular is increasing marginal tax increases on the rich, a type that is unpopular is going after deductions which my colleague, laura montgomery, pointed out in this weekend's "washington post," benefited a lot of middle class households. republicans are going to end up getting the type of tax increases they like least and have the best argument for being economically damaging and going to be able to block the type of tax increases we should be doing which create a broader, flatter code and encourage economic growth more aggressively. >> the "washington post," ezra klein. thanks for joining me tonight, ezra. >>

. >>> greg mancue and glenn hubbard former advisers to president bush and jim talent and jim webber inonomic model rooted in he said the believe that government cannot create jobs. cut regulation and cut taxes and he says, quote. the president gives his jobs speech thursday. perhaps not surprisingly "the wall street journal" this morning has low expectations. william says in his op-ed for the journal he expects the president to essentially try to pass off another stimulus package as a jobs plan. quote, the truth is there is practically nothing mr. obama could do to gin up better job numbers before next year's election without increasing the difficult set and republicans won't let him do that. even with the word stimulus banished from his remarks this week, no one will be fooled in new calls to invest in roads and bridges and flnks or other hodge-podge of other proposals from extending the payroll tax holiday to tax credits. >> it is simply we have got to decide as a smart nation not to make stimulus the bad word. you may not like it. may not think it's the right thing to do but if you

a copy of this proposal made with tow authors allen boyce and glenn hubbard's is a test of my testimony plan every homeowner with a gst or fha or viejo mortgage can refinance at a current fixed rate of 40% or less with the rates subject to changes in the marketplace of bonds. fha borrowers would face slightly higher rates. to qualify the homeowner must be current on his or her mortgage or become so from least three months. this plant rewards responsible borrowers. these must be low cost, minimal paperwork refinancings. no appraisals, income verification, tax return, and a minimal title insurance policy. after all, the government already guarantees these mortgages. issuers of new mortgages would be indemnified against other reps and warranty violations, a critical part of this program. under our plan that gses would charge a guaranteed fee of 40 basis points per year, more than offsetting any loss that could be faced. the gses would also benefit c-span.org defaults with borrowers with lower mortgage rates. our plan would pay for the basis points making it possible for originators and pur

americans will not -- >> i do think this refinancing idea that is a republican be idea or at least glenn hubbard -- >> no, i understand that. >> a thing to do because it's allegedly rewarding the people who did the right thing, kept paying. taking advantage of cheap money. i think that's good. once we mark down which one of these days we're going to have to mark down the value of this real estate for banks, we are going to have a huge, huge fiscal problem in this country because we all thought if we closed our eyes, it would go away. and now the market's still falling. >> i would say i do think it's, um, just this is briefly and what off point, but i do think it's interesting that mitt romney gave his jobs speech in north las vegas, las vegas and nevada in general hit as badly if not worse than anywhere in the country by the housing crisis and foreclosure crisis. and mitt romney literally never stops talking about the economy, jobs. you know, last night in the debate i found it amazing, i thought, golly, this couldn't have worked out better if mitt romney had scripted it. you have rick perry bei

two, i think, is what glenn hubbard and his colleagues talked about and what the president has tonighted, i think, is an important way forward, and finally these government contracts that allow government to use the private sector and the government to use private financing to rehabilitate public entities and pay for the cost is a good way forward. and i think gene sperling, i won't repeat it, laid out pretty moderate ideas about things that i think seem reasonable to do, and at least i would say a very provocative set of choices that the country needs to make about how we're going to pay for them. in the long run, though, i just want to say this to answer your question. one is we have a health care system that's irresponsible. we spend 5-7% more than any other industrialized nation in the world. every country in the world, industrial nation, has a national health care system. not single-payer. ask newt gingrich about switzerland. all of them cost 5-7% of gdp less. that's $700 billion a year to a trillion dollars a year, and in the washington budget speak that's $7 trillion to $10 trilli