STEPHANOPOULOS: We've got to start out with this detail. I think, George, it was the first time that Congress was in on January 1st since the Korean War. And you say the deal -- and this is kind of a contrarian view -- was actually a triumph.
WILL: In this sense, I think people will look back on this deal as where liberalism passed an apogee and went into decline for the following reason. In the Bush tax rates were passed in two tranches, 2001 and 2003. In 2001, only 28 Democratic members of the House voted for them. In 2003, only 7 did. And they did it to make for only 10 years, they were to expire.
Under this deal, 172 House Democrats voted to make the Bush rates permanent for all but 0.5 percent of American taxpayers. What that means is, is that they can no longer tax the middle class. And we have here an endangered species...
(CROSSTALK)
REICH: He's pointing to me. I don't know why.
WILL: I'll tell you why. There are only about three liberals in the country -- and you're one -- who aren't actively hostile to arithmetic. And therefore, you know that you cannot fund a state that liberals want, the entitlement state, without taxing the middle class at least. And now you've given up that -- with the locking-in as permanent law the Bush tax rates, that's off the table.
REICH: Well, let me first...
(LAUGHTER)
Let me, first of all, say in a slightly more -- more nonpartisan approach, I think that the problem really with the deal is that what we needed most from an economic standpoint is, number one, a stimulus in the short term, number two, serious deficit reduction in the long term, and, number three, some stability and some certainty about the future. And we got none of this.
And that really is a major problem. We are going to be up against continuous trench warfare, and we have not dealt really at all with the deficit, the long-term deficit problem, and in the short term, we've got a huge employment issue. I mean, jobs should be the number-one issue right now in the country. It's still is -- we saw that unemployment report -- it still is a terrible jobs picture. And yet we have virtually no stimulus. In fact, you know, the Social Security taxes are going up.