ronald reagan never would have been president. the final point is you have to have strong executive leadership. you compare where lyndon johnson was to where george bush was in 2007, it is very revealing. george bush was a lot more unpopular than lyndon johnson ever was. george w. bush had the lowest public approval ratings of any president. he had a hostile congress in 2007. and a pretty bad situation in iraq but he had a surge plan he believed in and stuck with and kept it going and now we are going to put iraq probably in the win column whereas if we did what people in congress wanted to do in 2007 including our current president and just left iraq would have gone in the lose column. but because george bush stuck it out that one is going to be a victory. lyndon johnson had more advantages in 1968 than george bush did in 2007 but he just gave up on it and that is why vietnam ultimately went into the lose column. call me crazy but in my opinion when you go to war, winning is better. in any case, just to end with a little story. in 1968, jack fern from nbc suggested they produce a program showing that while tet had been portra

under lyndon johnson and all the way up to and jimmy carr all the way up to the first four years of the reagan administration you had we had basically no deficits from george washington until ronald reagan he blows apart taxes on rich people and and david stockman comes right out and says oh we're going to do this to create a crisis so there won't be any money to fund democratic programs so you know you've got jude wouldn't be saying we write in the wall street journal to santa clause three democrats in santa clauses was so scary for years we got to figure out if he had a closet idea how to be santa clauses cut taxes who cares if there's a deficit it'll put the rich the democrats back to the well it has worked perfectly what you guys are doing and i think it's going to bite you when you say you guys i'm not a republican i'm an independent and the republicans are part of the problem they started this problem in one thousand nine hundred six when they turned away from the tax try try one hundred eighty six well when they reagan national deficit he had two recessions and he got us out of the second recession by spending two trillion dollars i'm not going to shed a tear when some of

about the lyndon johnson thing, but there is a wave of elderly who are coming up because of the baby boom generation that is causing a great deal of social security's problems. in 1983, ronald reagan and tip o'neill came to an agreement and agreed they would raise the payroll tax and the retirement age. that helps with social security's long-term problem for a while. and we're at a point now whether it's benefit cuts or raising the payroll tax, there is probably going to be some accommodation down the road toward either putting more money into the system or paying less out in benefits or some combination of that. >> something is going to be done and it's something they can't put it off anymore. everybody just wants to move that on down the road, don't they? >> as i have heard others say that medicare is probably a neitherer term problem. that, i think, probably is why you're hearing about that now in the discussions over the deficit. >> we need to take a breaking and do some business with the station. we'll be right back. all of the folks from c-span and all of our listeners here in the quad cities, this is woc news talk 1420. yeah, we got a little email from lisa from dave