Transcript for Roundtable I: Election and the Economy

this explosion of debt is unconscionable and unsustainable. Mr. President, we won't let you bankrupt this country. When your country is in a costly war and when our nation is facing a debt crisis at home, being asked to pay your fair share, isn't class warfare, it's patriotism. Rand paul and cory booker fired up their respective conventions. They join our roundtable this morning. Rand paul joins us. Author of a new book "government bullies." Newark mayor cory booker. The co-chair of the democratic platform committee. Joining george will, cokie roberts and paul krugman. George, let's talk about paul ryan. You saw him jump right on that jobs report, probably the best news that republicans had in weeks. The two numbers that he stressed deserve stressing again. 230,000 dropped out of the job market. For every job created, four people quit looking for jobs. What this means, if the workforce participation rate today was what it was in june 2009, when the recovery began, we would have an unemployment rate 11.2%. I think from here on in, on the basis of these numbers, the romney campaign slogan should be the title of paul krugman's book, which is "end this depression now." Because these are depression-level numbers. If the republican party can't win in this environment, it need to get out of politics. I think that the thing that you need to bear in mind, this is not president obama's policies at work. He had a bill, american jobs act, that analysts said would have added 1.2 million, 1.3 million jobs by now. You have this amazing two-step, where the republican party blocks all of obama's proposed policies. That says, look, his policies aren't working. It's a fundamental disagreement where we should put the money in the government sector. Or put it in the nonproductive second so, the government sector. Those who want to have a government stimulus, they don't understand what milton freeman said, nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as they spend their own. That's where you want the money. If you want growth. The private sector is creating jobs and the public sector -- one of the places where the private second -- where the public sector is losing jo big time is in education and that really is so shortsighted. If we're not educating our kids, then our future economic growth is really at risk. So, it's just dumb. Let me echo that, look, the eisenhower campaign, with the eisenhower highway act, those are great jobs that produce a return on investment, Whoa. That's a house, guys. Jim: Now on the eyeopener, not one but two tornadoes touch down in new york city. The damage and how the same storm system moved through our area. Emily: The search for a missing kayaker off the north shore underway right now and the one clue police have to go on. Jim: And another loss for the red sox tonight at fenway and the dubious distinction they may face for the first time in 20 years. The eyeopener starts now. Good morning it is sunday SEPTEMBER 9th. Better known ashe day the nfl season kicks off. I'm jim lokay. Emily: I'm emily riemer. We had bad weather and mike wankum a great stretch ahead. Meteorologist: You can see what's happening to the west the skies are clearing way however to the east a lot of cloud cover. There are holes in the cloud cover but also a few sprinkles of rain and that's more of an issue through the cape. Here you see what's showing up on radar and it looks more impressive on radar than on the ground. It's evaporating before if gets there. You get the idea this is working its way through and in line for the cape and that's why I say there's going to be scattered showers in the cape and probably a lot of clouds down that way as well. As we get later in the day the clearing in the west works its way eastward and we clear out and the last place clearing is the cape and that may not be until sunset. Some of it is also aging. This is a president who created 4.5 million jobs. 30 straight months of jobs creation. We're on the road to recover. We were losing 750,000 jobs when this guy entered the office. Roads don't create business success. It's the other way around. Business success allows us to build roads. I'm not arguing with that. We need both. Right now, mitt romney has an ad blitz where he's accusing president obama of defense -- of cutting defense spending. Which isn't really true. The romney campaign's position is government spending can create jobs unless it goes to defense akron tractors. That's an inconsistency. It's pretty measure. And it's wrong. George will? With regard to the education cuts, for several decades now, we have been expanding education employment and that's not just teachers, there's enormous administrative overhead, we have been expanding them much faster than enrollment has been expanding. Second, bill clinton took 50 minutes because he needed every one of them to give all of the excuses as to why these programs haven't worked. Someone once said, proof of his farsi sighfarsightedness, that none of his predictions have come through yet. President obama gave a lot of hostages to fortunes about how it would work. One of his economist, early we were all serious about the numbers. Me, for example. From the beginning that it was going to be inadequate. This has come out pretty much the analysis underlaid the program, it was going to turn out. You know, obama had a filibuster-proof majority for a few months in 2009. Ever since -- but there's a reasons that they lost in 2010 is, the people weren't happy with what was going on. You cannot run -- but it's also true that the reason -- one of the reasons we're seeing this slowdown is that businesses aren't sure what's going to happen because of this fiscal cliff that we're facing. Okay, but who created that cliff? You're arguing that the government structure is struggling? Are you arguing that there are fewer government employees under obama than there were under bush? That's a fact. It's enormous under president obama. We would have more than 1 million employed. More or less people employed by government? The certainty for small businesses. This president has cut taxes on small businesses 18 different times. He's done enough to target incentives to small businesses. In addition to the fact giving them breaks for investments. I think it's more important. I really want to call into the question that paul ryan left wide open, how can you call for $5 trillion worth of tax cuts, give us no specifics, this paul ryan who used to be a man of substance, who put up plans with great levels of specificity and increased spending in defense and not dig us into a deeper budget -- bill clinton and arithmetic. This is always who he was. The governor of virginia said, the final strategy for romney/ryan is bolstering the credibility of their plan. Can they do that? Without more detail. I think it ultimately comes down to who's better for the economy is romney. I just finished the forgotten man. She talked about how business was terrified of the president. Another writer about the great depression, in that, he said the continuing disquieting utterance of the president is, that's what we have is a president who vilifies businesses. I'm sorry. You can't have a president that's going to get elected on just trust me, you need to see the facts. Right now, they have given no facts. I'm going to cut loopholes. Wait a minute, are you going to cut loopholes on carried interest? Are you going to cut my home mortgage deduction? Or are you going to cut my earned income tax credit? Who's going to get tax loophole cuts? That's the questions they should be answering. Before it never works. Because, when you start to get into those kind of tax deductions, there's a reason they're still there. Any time you start to tax them the public starts to go crazy. It's individuals who have home mortgage deductions. You're going help the middle class? Tax cuts benefitting the wealthy. There's an argument that, one of the reasons the new deal failed as the great objective putting america back to work, employment never came to 14%, until we geared up to the arsenal of democracy, as the senator said, because of uncertainty. But there is uncertainty surrounding the romney/ryan tax cut plan. Because they haven't specified the deductions that will be closed and we know where the big money is, mortgage interest deductions, charitable deductions, employee-provided health insurance. All of those, you either, hit only the rich, or you hit the middle class. The other thing is, during the great depression, we raised taxes five years in a row, and it was disaster, it expanded the depression. It made the recession into the great depression. What does president obama want to do, raise taxes. Take money out of the productive economy and give it to the nonproductive economy. In the bush years, the percentage of gdp has gone way up. This is what we have heard over and over again. This is the thinking that got us in the problem in the first place. We got to take a break.

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