mr. lew, welcome to "fox news sunday." >> good to be here with you, chris. thanks. >> chris: before we get to the new budget and i promise we will i want to clear up

with respect to the question of mr. lew's statement of budget requiring 60 votes.

mr. lew, welcome to "fox news sunday." >> good to be here with you, chris. thanks. >> chris: before we get to the new budget and i promise we will i want to clear up lingering questions about the president's policy about providing health insurance coverage for birth control for religious institutions. the president now says that the catholic institutions don't have to provide the coverage but the insurance companies do. the question, where does the president get the power to tell a private company they have to offer a product and offer it for free? >> well, chris, just to be clear. the president has the authority under the affordable care act to have these kinds of rules take effect. and the issue with this being for free is quite an interesting one. if you look at the cost of providing health insurance, it actually doesn't cost more to provide a plan with contra contraception coverage than it does without. >> chris: why not? >> look at an actuarial coverage it costs nor provide a plan withou

and until it finally got to the point that mr. lew as the director understood that we were going nowhere, we finally had a meeting of the minds between omb, the white house and the congress. >> let's make sure that we continue those dialogues. >> very good. all right. i want to ask you about housing. we have tried a bunch of programs. we have tried the home affordable modification program, hamp. we have tried the home affordable refinance program, h.a.r.p., and then the hardest hit fund. what makes this most recent attempt to help homeowners different? >> this is a hard problem and the housing market is starting to stabilize and it's a mix. it needs a lot of work. i think the settlement last week is an important settlement. that will get the money out to approximately 2 million homeowners to help with modification and refinancing. the program that the president just announced which takes advantage of one of those charts that we talked about earlier, the historic low interest rates, we have too many homeowners paying interest rates abo

but i would say that mr. lew, on his cnn program, said you can't pass a budget in the senate of the united states without 60 votes. mr. zients, isn't it true that the current law which included the budget control act, the legislation that passed as part of raising the debt limit, that your budget spends more money than congress proposed to spend through the budget control act process over the next ten years? >> as i showed earlier, we have $5 trillion deficit reduction. >> you proposed to spend more money over the next ten years than the budget control act current law would cause us to spend. >> i think we have a much more honest baseline. a baseline with sgr, amt, not patched year over year. >> you don't way for the sgr, that's not paid for. let's go back to the simple question i ask you. does your plan spend more money over the next ten years than the agreement in current law that we reached just last august? >> the baseline -- >> yes or no. >> i think we have to focus on the bottom line and we're taking defici

mr. lew, now the president's chief of staff, made another false claim this week saying the democratic senate is not doing a budget for the third straight year because it requires 60 senate votes. the law is clear. it only takes 51 votes to pass the budget. and for republicans given the honor by the american people to lead this chamber next year, we will pass a budget and will be an honest budget and change the debt course of america. by contrast, the president uses accounting tricks to conceal the budget's true cost. the white house repeals $1.2 trillion in the budget control act cuts we made just last summer and doesn't count that as new spending. repealing the cuts we agreed to, in law. they rightly -- your budget rightly stops the planned cuts to medicare providers, doctor cuts, but without any money to pay for it. the budget gives -- takes credit for discretionary caps, spending limits that are already in law, not part of this budget. and the budget present tends that war spending will co

. >> i brought up with mr. lew, the idea a lot of conservatives have it's beyond the religious freedom issue, and it's the argument of you and others. you believe the president is dangerous, and re-electing the president would unmask a hidden plan that he has for a second term. this is what you said recently on fox news. >> i suspect it will be back down here rather shortly, but it's a lesson learned of what this president would do if he has another term and not have to worry about re-election. >> what is the secret plan? >> it's not a secret plan at all. at the time he was promoting obamaca obamacare, it's a program of cap and trade where he wants to control the ability to use energy and charge you for the energy in a way that, again, the government decides the allocation of the resources. the pretsident's agenda is clea, he believes that they should make decisions for you, whether it's health care or dodd frank and the board that will tell you what kind of loans they can get, it's government taking over choices f

. >> chris: mr. lew this is precisely why so many people and you can argue with it the majority or minority. so many people are opposed o obama care. they are concerned about what private people have to do and businesses have to do is religious institutions have to do. >> guest: i think the notion of should we provide basic health care to all americans is not the issue. there are different issues on whether or not the affordable health care is the right approach. we think that providing coverage to tens was millions of americans and providing the kind of care they need and drive down the cost of the care is an important thing. this question of the impact on religious nusions is something we took seriously right from the start. that's why when the policy was announced we said it would take 13 months tition. i think we have addressed that and this concern is one that people can disagree on the margins about. but we have addressed the coreissue and no institution, that has religious principles violated has

with all due respect to mr. lew i have no blanking idea what he just said. i have no clue.oining us from washington, two people who may be able to straighten me out. i hope so. mary cath rib -- catherine ham and juan williams. what did he say there, juan? >> little bit of green shade of count and talk. we are going to grow our way out of this problem. he believes with the added spending in terms of infrastructure and investment in education and the like, that with the u.s. economy already recovering, he sees more recovery in sight and the u.s. will. >> bill: that wasn't the question. that wasn't the question. the request, juan was a simple question because as you know chris wallace is a simple man. here is the question. president obama said in 2009 he is going to cut the deficit in half at the end -- by the end of his first term. >> yeah. >> bill: wallace was nice. he said he didn't come close. he increased the deficit by a trillion dollars. cut it in half. here it is. the president said he is going to cut it in half and he he increased it by a trillion. this guy comes on,

mr. lew's statement is totally incorrect.n we have -- it eliminates the cuts approved by the sequester and replaces that with a trillion dollar tax increase. it's close to 2 trillion total. these tax increases are shown as reducing the deficit when all it really will do is to replace new spending and to pay for the sequestered that's eliminated. >> there seems to be -- >> it's an irresponsible budget on monumental proportions and does not change the debt course set last summer with the budget control act at all. >> this is where there seems to be a fundamental disagreement of the two parties. you brought up the tax hike. the president campaigned against the bush tax cuts. one of the reasons you are hitting him from the broken promise on having the deficit he had in 2009 but at that time he assumed he would somehow get rid of the "bush tax cuts." are any sort of tax reform plans that increase revenue into the government still off the table for republicans? still off the table for you? >> what i would say to you is we need to l

. >> mr. lewthank you very much for your time this morning. >>> and let's get more on this now with paul ryan, the chairman of the house budget committee, he's from wisconsin this morning. you heard jack lew right there. say get this payroll tax extension done, will they? >> i think we will. we're trying to cut t spending. you got to remember, george, this payroll tax holiday loses money to the social security trust fund, and if you just extend this by cutting spending you're accelerating the bankruptcy of social security. we want to make sure that social security is left unharmed. while we extend this payroll tax holiday. >> and the white house agrees with that, the point is, it seems like you're stuck on how to pay for this extension? >> yeah, it seems as if the part -- the president's party leaders aren't engaging in these conversations. we have offered literally scores of different offsets. we have taken provisions from the president's own budgets for ways to pay for this payroll tax holiday.

jack lew was on of the morning talk shows says 60 votes to pass senate and budget. it doesn't. it takes 50. there are 53 democrats. mrpresident, get harry reid, the majority leader in the senate to vote on your budget. let's let the democrats pass it? you know they haven't had a budget now pass the senate for over 1,000 days? and the democrat leader, the democrat-controlled senate said we're not even going to vote on president's budget. what kind of leadership is that for this party? jenna: take it in a different direction then. do you see any possibility here within what we do know of the budget proposal, i know you're just getting a look at it, sir, do you see any opportunity within the parameters as they have been suggested for compromise? parts that you see you can get behind as a republican? >> i want to get behind what is real budgeting. what the president has done here is use a lot of accounting gimmicks and budget tricks. i think we have to be honest with the american people. the president ignores the two tidal waves coming at us of medicare and social security and the impact those things are going it do. the