 The phrase go big has to do with pushing the subcommittee to go beyond their mandated one and a half trillion dollars cuts to more in line with what several debt commissions have looked at. We've had Domenici Rivlin, we've had Simpson-Bowles, and several other groups have worked on the same thing. And it's interesting that most of them have come to the need for spending cuts combined with tax reform to give us some incremental revenue. I think there were some important lessons of the Bowles-Simpson Commission that the super committee should take a look at. The commission said that we had a national moment of truth so we need a big solution so go big. It's a very big problem and so it's going to take a lot of measures to actually get it under control. America either goes big or we all go home. And so absolutely it will be essential to go, frankly, bigger than even many of those who have been active on this issue have acknowledged. But again, I am very, very confident that given the positive payoffs that are possible and the unacceptability of the course we are on for upward mobility and the hope and promise of the American Dream that Americans can be rallied to a program that works and works in time. Their charge is anemic. To save $1.2 or $1.5 trillion over 10 years is an easy lift. They ought to be able to do it without a great deal of problem. And if they do just that, by the way, they probably will not have done their job because that limited amount of activity will lead, I think, to potentially downgrade by the other two rating agencies, Moody's and Finch, and probably another period of economic disruption because people will not have confidence in our long-term fiscal situation. I believe that this committee ought to go big. It ought to have, as its objective, at least a $4 trillion or $3.5 trillion target. It ought to have that target because I think in order to reinstate confidence, a short-term solution of a $1.2 or $1.5 trillion target will accomplish a short-term objective. But to really create the confidence level that we need in our economy, to create the confidence level in our government's ability to make tough decisions, to make decisions that will have long-term positive, fiscally-responsible consequences, we need to go big. The only way the United States is going to reassure the marketplace that we're serious and we've got our house in order is by going big, by going long. The deficit reduction committee has to find $1.5 trillion in savings, but that's not going to really reduce the deficit. That's going to reduce the rate of growth. It'll find us some savings. But unless they go after the big-ticket items, we're not going to show that we're serious about the long-term health of our fiscal house. You know, we tend to break things down and people want to say, well, if we just cut discretionary spending, well, there's no way you're going to be able to deal with the tremendous long-run budget problem. If you just focus on that one very small part of the budget, inevitably, any solution is going to involve cutting discretionary spending, slowing the growth rate of entitlement spending, and raising tax revenues. If you are not willing to consider both entitlements as well as revenue, you're not serious about solving the problem. Super committee has to look at everything. There can be nothing that's taken off the table. And it has to be Medicare, Medicaid, social security, health care costs, and defense. Nothing can be taken off the table. And they're going to have to look at ways not only to reduce spending, but how to make the tax code more comprehensible and more equitable so that they close some of these loopholes in order to adjust downward some of the basic rates, and that would help to spur growth. We're going to need to look at our entitlement programs, not so that we reduce the benefits for present beneficiaries, but so that we ensure that they are sustainable from a financial perspective over the coming decades. In the end, social security is in trouble, and it's in trouble because it's a system built on using the payments of current workers to pay the benefits of current retirees. And that equation is going to change as the baby boom retires, we're going to have fewer workers for every retiree, and the program as it's currently designed simply will not be able to keep up. We need to reform the system so that the benefit payments are in line with the kind of revenues that we're going to get in the future. Social security, for example, you could correct that by changing the way we calculate the COLA to a more accurate COLA by adjusting the bend points, which is a means testing undertaking, and by raising the age of retirement over 60 years, raise it by two years, which is what Simpson-Bowles suggested. If you look at any of the projections and the careful studies, you know, where are the big long-run budget deficits coming from? It's largely the growth of government health expenditures. So expenditures through Medicare and Medicaid. So I think realistically, to just deal with the problem that we're facing, we're going to need to be slowing the growth of spending in those areas. Now, social security, I think, is a somewhat of a different issue. So social security, the social security system is certainly under pressure because of the retirement of the baby boom, and we certainly are having that demographic bulge. But I think that is certainly a more manageable problem than something that we want to tackle mainly to make sure that this program stays solvent and is there for future generations. But it's certainly not nearly as big a part of the problem as rising government health expenditures. Having served on the Tax Reform Working Group for the Fiscal Commission, it was very clear to me in looking at the numbers which we reviewed at each session that some of the tax expenditures we have are just simply unsustainable. We presented our proposal, get rid of these tax expenditures, which are deductions, loopholes, we call them taxier marks, we call them everything, there should be good names for it. In particular, we need to look at defense. Now, we need to maintain a strong national security capability. America has unique responsibilities around the world, and it is in our economic interest to ensure stability around the world to the extent that we can. Having said that, America cannot be the sole arbiter and policeman around the world. The public may not know that we spend more on defense than the next 17 countries combined. If we look at how big a percent of the GDP we spend versus the rest of the developed world, it's roughly twice as much. And that gap would be enough for us to double our R&D investment in the United States. If this congressional super committee fails, they put in a proviso into the law, so there's an automatic across-the-board cut, which is probably the worst thing you can do, because it means that there's no thinking about the process. And it's an absolute cut. And my feeling is that, frankly, Congress won't accept that because they won't accept the deep cuts that would mean to the military. And they'll find a way around it, and we'll be right back to where we are today.