This week's edition of the Stossel show on Fox Business News hosted a mock debate on budgets that cut the deficit for the almost the entire hour. Five sets of budgets put out by five different think tanks were the focus. Two supposed liberals (from the Roosevelt Institute and from Demos), two conservatives (from American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation), and one bi-partisan (from BiPartisan Policy Center) (the Center for American Progress would not participate with their new budget because of bias on the show).

The Stossel show also included a panel of Bob Beckel, David Asman and "neutral" Fox Business reporter Sandra Smith. They were asked to question each think tank and then vote for one of them, but the audience would have the deciding vote. Bob Beckel is a longtime "liberal'" on Fox News who believes in the flat tax, and first he apologized to Hillary Doe for putting up with the crowd and then said he was the only liberal on Fox, so he's used to it. After Stossel told him there were others on the network, he said this:

Beckel: I want to congratulate you for putting up with this (audience booing), and with all due respect... being the only liberal at Fox, I can get a pretty thick skin.

Stossel: Well, you're not the only liberal at Fox!

Beckel: There's damn few of us, we all of us can caucus in a phone booth, let me put it that way to you. ...

Alan Colmes is a featured liberal on FNC, but Beckel is right on the overall truth of his claim that the amount of real liberals on Fox can barely fill a phone booth. I wonder how Roger Ailes will take that bit of honesty since it bucks his "fair and balanced" slogan?

Hillary Doe of the Roosevelt Institute was a good sport after she was repeatedly booed by the audience for proposing taxes on banks and was against the 'too big to fail' mentality. She also said that if their health-care pools didn't rein in costs after ten years, they would force in a public option -- which was also booed heavily by the audience.

Can you guess which think tank won the debate? The Heritage Foundation. I know, what a shocker. Asman has ties to the Heritage Foundation and he voted for the BiPartisan Center budget. Sarah Smith, who's supposed to be an impartial news reporter, voted for the Heritage Foundation because it's the only plan that balances the budget in ten years. See, she's non-partisan because details don't matter. She's a reporter?

Here's Demos and the BiPartisan Center debate section of Stossel:

[oldembed src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DcZhay1wbdk" width="400" height="269" resize="1" fid="21"]

John Stossel gives the last word on the budget debate and of course he just wants to cut government spending almost entirely because there are too many pages in a budget plan.