LIESMAN: But, Rick, if you have a government that is taking steps that most economists believe "“
SANTELLI: They're just taking. Forget the steps.
LIESMAN: No, no, no, the Sequester is real, Rick.
SANTELLI: Right. Right. Created by Jack Lew, your Treasury Secretary.
LIESMAN: Your Treasury Secretary too, Rick. Hold on, these are steps that were agreed by republicans and democrats as far as I could tell from the sequester.
SANTELLI: And created by mostly the president's people and, yes, voted on by everybody, okay. And it was a bad plan. Okay.
LIESMAN: But it's the law. It's the law.
SANTELLI: If that's what it takes to lower spending, it's a good plan.
LIESMAN: And what I'm trying to say is general agreement; this will reduce GDP
growth by 1.5 percentage points and result in 500,000 to 700,000 fewer jobs.
SANTELLI: Why is that so important? If you pay for growth by taking and then you stop taking and stop paying, it goes up, it goes down. What you want is some self-sustaining growth we don't have to pay for.
LIESMAN: Rick, there's a couple things. We do have a choice. We have a choice, Steve. When an earthquake happens and a hurricane happens, there's nothing mankind or woman kind can do about that. But sequester.
SANTELLI: Right, but $65 billion which is all the contention for every policy.
LIESMAN: I was on vacation last week and I made up my mind I was not going to talk over you, rick.
SANTELLI: That's good. I haven't made up my mind. I will talk over you.
LISEMAN: That's fine. So my point, rick, is if you have a choice as to whether or not you want to put 500,000 or 700,000 people on the street looking for work the at a time"”
SANTELLI: You know what, if you want to put those people to work, put pro growth qualities, not socialism in place. That's where you're going down the wrong road.
LIESMAN: My point is, rick, even if I agree with what you're saying and I pretty much do.
SANTELLI: I could care less if you agree.
LIESMAN: It's better to create a job in the private sector than in the government sector. If you have a choice right now over a transition period not to put people on the street to, by the way, compete with the large number of unemployed people and people coming t of school, why wouldn't you do that?
SANTELLI: The unemployed are going to keep growing if you keep paying for phony growth in the economy. It'll get bigger and bigger and bigger until it pops and then the poor people will be way worse! Way worse!
