jonathan weisman of the "new york times" got a couple republicans to go on the record about this today. cethen mccarthy, the number three house republican said, quote, the president said if you pass a stimulus, unemployment would never go above 8%. we had a 41-month experience that that isn't true and hasn't been effective. republicans said they want a form of accountability. that's just a string of nonsense right there. it has nothing to do with the question. whateveria want ia ia you to say about the stimulus and it's clear it worked and the 8% thing has more to do with how bad the recession was than how bad the stimulus was. you cannot aurlg for the tax cuts because they worked so well. that's not the grounds you can use. we spent the 2,000s living under the bush tax cuts and it was one of the worst economic expansions we have ever had. the 1990s with our higher taxes, the democrats want to go back to, were inurgably better. as thigraph shows, the very best periods of growth we had have been under high margical tax rates. i am not saying we should go back to those, but that's what m

the article by jonathan weisman says it extends the 3.4% interest rate on stafford loans for one year financed by changes in pension laws and a restriction on the length of time students to get these lots. it increases premiums and requires people living near levies to have coverage. we will talk about that as well. tell us what exactly this student loan does for interest loans. why was it so important to get this thing passed this week. guest: it would have gone from 3.4%%. what this means is that people will be able to keep their student loans at the same rate they are right now without a doubling. this is welcome news. host: this cost $6.7 billion. is that correct? guest: it does. if the rates had gone up to 6.8%, the government would have collected a lot more revenue. in order to keep the rates lower, we had to find it somewhere else to offset it. host: where we find it to offset it? guest: companies will not have to put as much money into their pension plan as they originally thought. this will keep the pension plans safe. this was money that wasn't necessary. when companies do n