and we, the locals, found delight again. that's the power of all of us. that's the power of all of us. that's the membership effect of american express. good morning from new york, i'm chris hayes, we're going to break a little news about mitt romney and stay at home moms later in the program. in the midwest overnight, a series of powerful thunderstorms ripped across the midwest, spawning a large tornado that killed five people in oklahoma. and in kabul, afghanistan, reports of large explosions and automatic gunfire near buildings, the u.s. and the uk embassies and the world barng office appear to be part of a coordinated taliban attack.

with a text message to reporters, a taliban spokesperson took responsibility for the attacks, the u.s.-led military coalition said on its twitter account that attacks were under way in as many as seven neighborhoods in kabul. joining us from kabul, nbc news producer, suheil mudin. what's your information? >> reporter: it started with small arms fire that we could hear a half-mile from our compound. according to nato, the assaults took place in possibly seven different places the our contacts close to the scene and on the ground, told us that these places included as you said, the u.s. and uk embassy compounds, a four-star hotel used by westerners and definitely a supermarket, which is used by ex-pats. there are also reports that the afghan parliament is under attack. but no further details about that. these compounds are all within the same area. and this is basically a hub for western officials. witnesses again on the ground who we've been talking to on the phone say that attackers used a

combination of small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades in their assaults. and so far, we haven't been told about any casualties. but u.s. army convoys and afghan police soon arrive to try to take control of the situation. as far as local reports are concerned, the attack is still continuing. we just heard some gunfire behind us, because this is only a half-mile from us. and we can still hear sporadic gunfire. with the odd explosion. sources on the ground say they saw the rockets landing on both the u.s. and british embassy compounds. apparently one on the ambassador's residence. and the supermarket that i mentioned earlier had a couple of rpgs fired at them. and also partly related to this attack -- yeah, go ahead. >> am i mistaken that this is the most audacious frontal assault on kabul that we've seen in quite some time? >> reporter: it has been, yes. i've seen many brazen attacks

that have been taken place on you know, the ministries and on other government buildings. you know, the u.s. embassy and the uk embassies have been attacked before. but this is very brazen. and the taliban, you know, the taliban spokesman told us especially, nbc news, that this was deliberately targeted at the u.s., german and uk embassies and it's the start of a spring offensive and it's been in the planning for months. chris? >> nbc news producer, suhei suheil mudin reporting from kabul. we'll bring you any further developments as news warrants. right now i want to bring in my guests this morning, university of pennsylvania wharton school professor of business and public policy, betsy stevenson, a visiting economics professor at princeton and former chief economist. and "reuters" writer, david k. johnson, who has been on the program remotely. the author of a number of great

books, one "free lunch: how the wealthiest americans enrich themselves at the government expense and stick you with the bill." and pulitzer prize winning author and former congressman from virginia, now president and ceo for the center for american progress and action fund. and heather mcgee, vice president of the think tank dmos. so taxes on people's mind, you have until tuesday, april 17th to get those in. president obama realized there was no better time to push for congress to pass the buffett rule, which senate republicans are expected to block from a straight up-or-down vote tomorrow. the rule would establish a tax rate of at least 30% on federal income above $1 million. the president and his team released the president and first lady's tax returns friday. the first couple paid a federal income tax rate of 20.5%, on a reported adjusted gross income of $798,674. it turns out according to the white house, that's slightly higher than the rate paid by the

president's own secretary, who makes $95,000 a year. the premise of the buffett rule comes from the fact that warren buffett pays a lower effective rate than his secretary. on wednesday in rhode island, mitt romney criticized the buffett rule as an attempt to cut the country in half. >> the new source of division is to say, let's find the very most successful in our country and say they're bad guys. go after them. and let's divide america. look, this nation is one nation under god. dividing america is not the right way to go. >> romney will not file his return by tomorrow. he requested an extension. the official statement from the campaign is, sometime in the next six months and prior to election, governor romney will file and release the 2011 return when there's sufficient information to provide an accurate return. he has already released his 2010 taxes, which showed he paid an effective rate of 14% on income of $21.7 million. all right. let's talk about, let's talk specifically about the buffett rule first and we can sort of zoom out to tax fairness and

taxes as a foundation for civilization. we'll get to that in a little bit. there is, i feel, a number of people wrote about this yesterday. bryant boyler had a talking piece memo on precisely this, that there's a jaundiced cynicism among the campaign press corps as they watch the buffett rule be proposed. that this is an election year gimmick and nothing more. they point out that it will not solve the deficit problem. it won't close the gap and that this is essentially demagoguery. this is populist posturing in an election year. i'm curious what you guys think. is this nothing more than empty theet ri theatrics or is there something at stake? >> this didn't arise in the context of the election year. it arose in the context of the deficit reduction conversations last summer. and i think everybody, including the president, would agree this is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of it. but it's also important to talk about the fact that there's real

money involved. while the conservatives have talked about $47 billion being the figure, you're really looking at as much as $264 billion compared to the plans being put forward by, by conservatives in terms of the tax rates at the high end. >> that means just to clarify, that is if we were to extend the bush, bush tax cuts. then if we implemented the buffett rule, there would be more revenue that we're getting because there would be a much bigger difference at the high end, right? >> that's right. micro and a macro level. at the micro level, you're talking about the person in danville, virginia, working hard to make $35,000 a year and they're paying a higher tax rate than someone who can hire an accountant to find loopholes and has a lot of their income from capital gains rather than earned income. there's a basic fairness level on that and on the macro level you're looking at how do we reduce the deficit the and on both levels, this is an important place to start. >> do you think it's gimmicky?

>> ronald reagan put in a tax rate of 28%, 30% is somehow confiscatory. we're did he troying the economy and making the country poor because we're not putting enough money into the basic services that allow businesses to operate and create a prosperous society. and mitt romney, his tax rate is much lower than we've been talking about. he pays the taxes for his five sons. in their $100 million trust. get their money tax-free from dad. so -- >> the american way. >> that's right. >> betsy, what do you think? >> first of all, to criticize this as not solving the deficit, is absurd. if we do that, nothing solves the deficit. we're not going to come up with the one thing that solves the deficit. we're going to reform taxes in a way that's going to give us a better tax system. something that's fair for everybody. and at the end. day, it's not about a 30% rate. it's about the fact that these guys get all the tax expenditures. we're mailing them huge checks

for things like expensive houses. why on earth are we giving millionaires checks for their homes that are 25 times larger than what a middle class family gets? >> i want you, this is an incredibly important concept in budgetary talks. it's an iceberg that sits beneath the surface of the discussion. and it's part of what one political scientist has called the submerged state. because unlike other social, i shouldn't say other social democracies, genuine social democracies, which tend to be transparent about you being taxed at a high rate, we have a whole bunch of ways we distributing money we take from taxes and giving back to people through the tax code itself through what are called tax expenditure. >> or welfare for the rich. >> what are some tax expenditures. >> mortgage interest deduction. the fact that health care is tax-free. both for the employee, but also for the employer so you sort of

get a double-bang there. your state and local income taxes are tax-free. now, you see, people might think, that sounds fair. why on earth should i pay tax twice. but if you say it this way -- should the federal government do a matching program where every time the state wants to raise $1 of revenue from you, the federal government says, hey, don't worry, i'll click in 20 cents. that's essentially the way our system currently works. we get to deduct all sorts of things that, that are become tax-free. >> as chris at the state level, this is why states, one of the of the reasons states are in so much trouble. oregon has the shortest school year in the country. i don't know how we're going to produce the educated workforce of the future. they gave so much more this year to tax breaks in companies in oregon, state-level tark breaks, they could have extended the school year by two days. >> wow. i want to talk more about tax fairness and heather, i would like you to weigh in a little bit about the politics of this

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if you raise taxes, i wish they weren't called the bush tax cuts. they're called some other body of tax cuts. they're probably less likely to be raised. >> thars george w. bush acknowledging that his name appended as an adjective to anything sort of taints said thing. it's a very sort of funny self-aware moment there talking about the bush tax cuts, of course the bush tax cuts, two rounds of tax cuts passed. extended famously in the lame duck session in 2010. they're set to expire at the end of this year, in 2012. a lot of revenue on the table. but i want to get back to this question and the politics of this and social polling heather

and get your thoughts, a poll see unfairness in the economic system. 52% see unfairness, 37% say no. and also this is polling on the actual buffett rule. that the president and congressional democrats have proposed. 60% favor, 33% oppose. how, how strong or deep do you think that kind of -- is this polling that's sort of surface polling? or is there an actual constituency among the american populace to actually raise taxes at the higher end? >> i think it's sbymbolic, but it's important. i think a lot of people do feel that the economic system is unfair, obviously a feeling that's heightened by their own actual deprivation, whether it's housing or jobs or health care. but what the president is doing by really going after not a gimmick, but a sort of symbolic fairness piece, instead of going after something that would say, we're going to fund early

childhood education or fund our needs for the furlt. that's not his message right now. his message on taxes, it's a fairness thing. it's a message for the conservatives as well. that's why they've been trotting out the idea that the core unfairness in the tax codes is that 46% of americans don't pay any tax. we know that's not actually true. lower income americans actually pay about 16% of their income in state and local taxes. payroll taxes. >> sales taxes. >> exactly. >> i think it's important to note this conversation didn't come from the white house, the conversation from the economic fairness really came from the people. you saw over the last year after a very political debate for two years in the middle of the economic crisis about the size of government, which was really an r versus d debate. what you saw was people rise up in their communities to talk about economic fairness. this came from streets in wisconsin and ohio and maine it came from the occupy movement. where people who saw maybe their kids who had worked hard, played by the rules, and what did they get for it? $50,000 in student loans and no job. this was a conversation about people who continue to be under

water on their home mortgages, saying, hey, we're sick of this. we want a real conversation about economic fairness. and i think the president's responded to that. i think the other side has not yet. >> let me ask you a question as someone who represented a swing district in virginia. and one i think somewhat improbably, lost narrowly defeated, i was down there on election night reporting on the race. i think there's a sense that the american disposition, the body politic of america, is just doesn't like class warfare. it doesn't like these tax the rich messages. and republicans are very confident about that. i mean that's why we're seeing the mitt romney clip we saw, right? they're trying to divide people. as someone who had to go door to door in a district that was a swing district, does the kind of message the president is saying right now, is that something you could take to the doors in your district in virginia? >> yeah, i couldn't disagree with you more, chris. i think this is the scaring the bejesus out of the conservatives.

i think the conversation about economic fairness is deeply rooted in the american psyche and it's almost as strong among conservatives in my district as it is among liberals. don't like the idea that the system is rigged and they've been dealing with a rigged system for decades. they've seen it with the outsourcing of american jobs. they've seen it with all the tax expenditures going to the top 1%. they don't think it's fair, we don't think it's fair. they want that system and i think it's put soifrs on defense in some of their reddest areas. >> you saw the romney campaign say they're trying to divide the country in half. the buffett rule is not about half the country. the buffett rule is not even about the top 1%. it's about even a sliver of the 1%, those are the guys who literally got all the income gains over the last year. >> and continue. >> in a bad economy under obama they're getting all of the income and they're not paying taxes. though top 1% got $250,000 back from the government in these subsidies through tax expenditures. i mean -- it's, they're able to

defeat our top tax rates and that's what the buffett rule is all about. >> chris, two numbers that should really explain why people feel this way. in 2010, we came out of the recession. 37% of all the increased income in the whole country went to 15,600 households. 37%. to this tiny little number of households. the bottom 90%, their income fell on average, back to the level of 1966. 1966. you know, china was red, cars didn't have air conditioning. automatic transmissions were not standard. 1966. >> here, let me press you on this. because what you're saying, what i'm hearing is yes the game is rigged. people sense that the game is rigged, right. then the question becomes, can you unrig the game, right? there's a certain kind of cynicism that i don't intellectually agree with, but has an emotional appeal to me. which is any time we're going to have tax reform or start to get into the system that the structure of our nation's

political economy is so irdeemably corrupt that it will simply produce more loopholes, more special breaks, who deals and even if we pass the buffett rule that 10 years from now, 20 years from now we would view it as we view this alternative alternative tax as this meddlesome thing we have to deal with every year. >> it depends on whether we want to live in a democracy or not. that's all it boils down to. >> i don't think it's redeemable under the current campaign finance rules and under the current sort of norms we have in our country. where, you hear all of these lawyers saying if we enact the buffett rule, you know, what will happen to my clients is they'll just shift to this, that and the other and i actually think that the, that the buffett rule and all of this desire to actually sort of bring the wealthiest americans back into our country and back into investing in our country is sort of the exact opposite of what romney says. it's like he says it's trying to divide us, i think he's actually trying to unite us. he's trying to bring the

wealthiest, by he i mean the president is trying to bring the wealthiest people back into some sense of a shared nation, shared contribution. people who actually -- >> a binding social contract? >> exactly. >> i think there is sort of a, a cultural shift that would need to happen in addition to obviously public financing of campaigns and all of that. a cultural shift that would need to happen, where people wouldn't think it was okay to just do anything they could. to minimize their own personal tax rates. >> romney said about his taxes, he said i pay every dollar that is legally due and not a dollar more, proudly. more on that after we take this break. [ male announcer ] this is the at&t network. a living, breathing intelligence helping business, do more business. in here, opportunities are created and protected. gonna need more wool! demand is instantly recognized and securely acted on across the company. around the world. turning a new trend, into a global phenomenon.

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the, inside the machine that i was just calling possibly irredeemably corrupt. and so i want to ask you, you know, where, because to me, here's where i, how i see the buffett rule thing. i actually see it as an important red line of do, does american, does the american democratic project in 2012, have the wherewithall to be able to tax the rich? it is an open question whether we have it within the system's power to do it. we have not done it since clinton did it back, you know, back in the '90s. and it's been tried a bunch of times, close the carried interest loophole, raise the top rates. obama said he was going to do it, he didn't do it, when the bush tax cuts expire. cut the deal. and now we're set up with the big confrontation over the bush tax cuts expiring. that's the open question, does the system have it within it to tax the wealthy, when the wealthy are able to mobilize such disproportionate force

inside the halls of congress. >> first you start with your motive. i don't think the motive is to tax the rich. >> it is for me. >> we need to invest in america's competitive advantage. we need to invest in the working and middle class, we do need to deal with the deficit. the money has to come from somewhere. b, it's about a fairness principle. it's not so much about taxes the rich, it's to make sure they pay their fair share. they've completely rigged the system. people across the spectrum don't think it's fair. the question is what are we trying to do. right now for example, the buffett rule income can go towards making sure we not cutting benefits to seniors. it can make sure that those who are struggling right now on the edge of economic insecurity get a chance. that we continue to allow the american dream to be real. i don't mean that as a sound bite. i'm serious here. like we're talking about college being less and less affordable. we're talking about the kind of jobs that are out there, being a lower and lower and real consumer purchasing power sense. and that, we're not going to outcompete china with a race to the bottom. we will not win a race to the

bottom with them. we can win a race to the top and that requires having the best infrastructure and the best workforce, so what i think people are excited about is a vision that's going to get america back on top again. and i think that to the extend that this is seen as primarily a romney versus obama thing, people are going to be cynical, because they're cynical about politics. to the extent this is seen as the american people coming together to demand a better agenda, then i think we're talking about something that's real. >> but the american people aren't going to come together for anything in nation in which when you win one major party's nomination, you get 45% of the electorate. there is no sort of unifying consensus on any of this, right? >> here's where the buffett rule, the rubber hits the road on the buffett rule, which is not just the passage of this rule, which the republicans are not going to let happen, unfortunately, it would be an important step forward. this is obviously setting the table in part for an enormous conversation we're going to have in the lame duck session in the first 100 days about the overall tax rates. >> in which we'll get sold down the river again. okay -- we're coming into this,

right. we have the same situation we had in 2010, okay. the bush tax cuts are going to expire, okay. if you say as the president of the democratic party, we are fine with letting all of them expire, you wield all the leverage, because it means all the rich are going to go up. if you however, say we're committed to making sure they do not expire on the middle class, then it means something has to get passed. once it means that something has to get passed, the most likely thing to get passed will be the extension of all of them. am i right, betsy? >> yeah. >> thank you. so that i think is the worry, right? what is it about the tax fight that's being set up for lame duck 2012 that will be different from the tax fight in 2010, which resulted in the extension of the bush tax cuts? >> it's just a republican house, it's a worse condition with which to play this game. it's going to be a serious problem. that's why i think you saw importantly today or this past week, credo and moveon, a lot of the progressive groups going out at the same time as the democratic party was trying to

make it all about the buffett rule saying don't forget about the bush tax cuts, make sure that the democrats don't quote-unquote sell us out on the bush tax cuts, as an organization, demos we're supporting letting all of the bush tax cuts expire, all of them. even for me and for middle class and working-class families. then we can start over with tax reform. >> i do think there's some important differences between now and when we extended those. >> please. >> the first is that the economy is doing better. and as long as that continues to be true, we continue to have stronger economic growth. unemployment is coming down. we don't need those tax cuts the same way we really needed them the last time. >> from a demand side perspective. >> from a demand side, we didn't have enough stimulus, we didn't pass enough stimulus to begin with and the idea that we were going to let taxes go up, which would be contractary fiscal policy was -- >> it wasn't just taxes it was the extension of unemployment. >> the second point was we needed the extension of the unemployment insurance benefits.

they were really crucial. and in terms of you know having bang for your buck, nothing beats unemployment insurance dollar. because you put money in the unempl unemployed's pockets, they spend it that week. we needed the extension, we needed the tax revenue. there was no way to bluff it. >> betsy what do you say to the conservatives, if you raise taxes you're going to put us back into another recession, our going to stop the expansion of the economy. how do you make that argument to people that it's not true? >> i think part of the question is we do want to continue to invest in the economy. this goes to chris -- >> you keep going to what's the money for. >> it's this question that the republicans have now had a chance. i think president obama genuinely believed that if they were invited to the table, and in fact if there was a sort of damacles holing over the head, there would be a grand barngen. they were given chance after chance to do it. they blew it, there was

discussion whether it was obama or boehner and ever agreed it was cantor. if you've now tried that and then you say, and again, would not have been my approach, i would have taken a different president's the president. belief over and over was if we give them a chance to rise to the occasion and be bipartisan, then we'll get the kind of deal the country needs. he's all out of that. there's no more plays to make and this is a chance where the senate democrats need to take a stand and say here's what we think it is. if the republicans continue to compromise not at all, things will fail and january 1, we get to have a conversation about the economy. >> david, i find your question ironic, those are the same guys who are telling us the stimulus didn't work. if they're going to tell me you can't raise taxes because that would hit aggregate demand, well -- i welcome republicans telling me that the stimulus works. >> let's be clear here -- >> it's not stimulus. >> the conservatives, tax cuts are not stimulus. >> they're savings. >> it's dead rabbits and bunnies, right? >> tax cuts are an ideological

principle and they are good economic policy and they're not keynsian demand-side management. often the tax cuts is made in the language of keynsian demand-side management. >> we joked about having a live twitter session for people doing their taxes right now. it didn't get clearance. i'm going to talk about why it's so frustrating, annoying and complex just to do one's taxes. the mechanics of the code and what it means for how we go about funding the government. oooh, what's her secret? [ male announcer ] dawn hand renewal with olay beauty. improves the look and feel of hands in just five uses. [ sponge ] soft, smooth... fabulous! [ male announcer ] dawn does more... [ sponge ] so it's not a chore. how they'll live tomorrow. for more than 116 years, ameriprise financial has worked for their clients' futures. helping millions of americans retire on their terms.

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just to be clear, if this committee were to adjourn today, and the congress were to adjourn for the next ten years and go away, we would actually achieve greater deficit reduction than if we went, took this simpson-bowles advice and went big, is that not right?

in other words we would get over $4 trillion over that ten-year period? it would be more than the $4 trillion that a lot of people talked about, right? >> yes, that's right. >> it's a great byte. chris van holland from maryland making an important point. is that basically because of the way, because of a number of things, the expiration of the bush tax cuts, but also changes to the alternative minimum tax, which congress is constantly passing patches to, the so-called medicare dock fix which also is a way of avoiding what are statutory diminishments in the amount of pay that doctors gets from medicare, which are also habitually fixed. which if congress didn't do anything, if you took it away, if you let it expire, the deficit fixes itself. which is an important grounding, that sound byte for all deficit conversations you hear. about taxes, what i was saying before about filing them. why, why is the system feel so complex? the conservative argument for this is because governments

screw up everything it gets its hands on. this is the tried and true post office arguments. the dmv argument, terrible service because it's not the competition of the free market, blah blah blah. i could imagine a better, simpler system of doing taxes and tax simplicity in the code and how we as citizens interface with it is something that everyone in the abstract is behind, right? whenever you hear someone say simplify the tax code. everyone wants to simplify the tax code. what are concrete ways that could happen that would mean that people don't spend april 16th -- tearing their hair out. >> we could do two things, we could eliminate 100 million tax returns easily. >> wage or verified income like a pension. all you need to do is tell the government your marital status your age, how many dependants you have, and your government can do your taxes for you.

people like grover norquest want people to be in fear of the irs. at the high end all of us are itemizers, that's about 1-3 taxpayers, we shouldn't be getting all of these little things and if you're in the a.m.t. -- >> which is what? >> the alternative minimum tax, which was wrongly described in the media constantly as a tax on wealthy people, as an anti-family tax. it taxes you for owning a home, being married and having two or more children and it raises your taxes if you get seriously ill. and congress raises your taxes, it's used to help hold down tax rates for the richest people in america under the 2001 bush tax cuts, we tax the sick to help the rich. it's symbolic. it's not substantive money. >> betsy? >> first of all, one thing i have to say about the a.m.t., people get confused about this. it's -- it adds complexity to our system because it's

literally an entire separate tax system. it's like do your taxes under tax system a, do your taxes under tax system b and pay whichever is the higher amount. why on earth do we have two completely different tax systems. it makes no sense. and when people talk about complexity. they start talking about tax rates, you can have five tax rates, there's nothing complex about that. >> you can calculate a tax rate across a curve. >> it would be super simple. we have to stop hiding spending through the tax code and congress loves to do this. because once you can get some spending into the tax code, it doesn't have to be re-authorized every year. it doesn't get revisited. and nobody asks, is this efficient spending in are we getting bang for our buck? we just jam our spending through the tax code and then we get an increasingly more and more complex tax code that people hate to do. and then we, end up having these conversations are we having class warfare, are we taxing the wealthy too much? these are absurd. simplicity could happen

tomorrow. >> the fact that it's invisible. fact that all of our basically, all of our spending on most people, is invisible, is why we have most people in this country thinking that they don't benefit from government. >> when of course, they do. >> the other irony here is that when all of the republicans line up to take grover norkwist's pledge to say they won't raise taxes, what they're doing is protecting government spending. because all of these things once they're written into the tax code, if you get rid of that subsidy for corporations, he's able to then call it tax increase. which then has the perverse effect of -- >> what i find more galling than this is the fact that people talk about they hate the health care mandate. do you know what happens if you don't buy a house in this country? your taxes go up. you don't get the deduction. if you don't buy health care through your employer, your taxes go up. we already have mandates. >> the mandate which gives people a tax penalty if they do not purchase insurance is simply a different set of letters

strung together in the english language to describe an identical mathematical fact that currently pertains to people that choose to rent as opposed to buy, right? >> exactly. >> and we have a whole variety of government insurance programs for wealthy people. there's flood insurance for people with beautiful homes on the waterfront. there's crop insurance, there's airline anti-terrorism insurance. there's a whole host of government programs for people at the very top. one of the most -- >> the flood insurance was great. >> one of the most important parts to understand is that the people who make $100,000 to $1 million a year pay the highest tax rates. the people above them, they assume pay more. once you get up to a certain level, it falls off very claumt draumtically. if you look at people, the rules on what's called realization of income. warren buffett's $6 million taxes against $50 billion of wealth in one company, he has a lot of other wealth elsewhere. has nothing to do with his

economic gain. >> and it's politically expedient to have the upper middle class be angry at their tax rate. because they can get mobilized and have a lot of political power. we're going to break news about mitt romney and what he thinks about stay at home parents and the dignity of work after this break. today is gonna be an important day for us. you ready? we wanna be our brother's keeper. what's number two we wanna do? bring it up to 90 decatherms. how bout ya, joe? let's go ahead and bring it online. attention on site, attention on site. now starting unit nine. some of the world's cleanest gas turbines are now powering some of america's biggest cities. siemens. answers. ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 let's talk about the cookie-cutter retirement advice ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 you get at some places. ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 they say you have to do this, have that, invest here ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 you know what? ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 you can't create a retirement plan based on

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when you were young. ♪ how much i love you [ humming ] [ female announcer ] children's tylenol, the #1 brand of pain and fever relief recommended by pediatricians and used by moms decade after decade. [ humming ] you've probably heard all the faux outrage on the campaign trail about ann romney and her role as a stay at home mom. the manufactured controversy was prompt paid stray comment on cnn made by an analyst who is no way affiliated officially with the obama campaign. but the theatrics obscured a much deeper and more fundamental problem with the way our government and society values the work of women either inside the home or out. when mitt romney responded to the controversy in a speech to the nra friday, he said quote, i happen to believe that all moms are working moms. all moms are working moms.

but that hasn't always been the tune of republicans on this issue. an entire massive sea change in federal policy, the welfare and reform act of 1996 was predicated on the fundamental notion that mothers on welfare needed to get out of the home and go to work. and that staying at home and caring for their children did not count as work. in fact, as recently as this year, mitt romney himself campaigned on the proposition that meaningful welfare reform should require parents with children to get out of the home and into the workforce, listen to how he talked about work and stay at home parents just this january. >> i also like the idea that people who are receiving assistance, welfare assistance, have a responsibility of working. in my state, we made good progress in that regard, following the days of the welfare reform act. but then while i was governor, 85% of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state, had no work requirement.

and i wanted to increase the work requirement. i said for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. and people said, well that's heartless. and i said no, no, i'm willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. it will cost the state more, providing that day care. but i want the individuals to have the dignity of work. >> all right. just so we're tracking exactly what mitt romney is saying here. just three months before he said stay at home moms are working moms, all moms are working moms, he said he wants to make stay at home parents of kids as young as two, mom or dad quote go to work so they can have quote have the dignity of work. see that part again. >> i said for instance, that even if you have a child two years of age, you need to go to work. and people said, well that's heartless, and i said no, no, i'm willing to spend more, giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. it will cost the state more, providing the day care, but i want the individuals to have the

dignity of work. >> yesterday, we emailed the romney campaign for a comment, but we haven't received a reply. shockingly. you know, i'm going to be honest, i don't like do a lot of raging on this show more or less. but this really angers me. it genuinely angers me. not just because i felt like we just got caught up in this -- we had one of those weeks in cable news, in the business in which like everyone is aware that the entire substance of the thing at the heart of what everyone is talking about is made up and manufactured and yet we're all doing it. you feel like you're being controlled by some invisible cable news puppeter. but because there's a genuine substantive principle here, a substantive principle that was the heart of a policy that was enacted which was, it wasn't just rhetoric, it wasn't just a stray cable news comment. it was the fundamental belief that caring for your child at home was not work. that in fact, it aculturated you

to be lazy and dependant. it aculturated you to not be part of the normal mainstream society, so you had to be pushed out into the workforce. and whether it's good policy or not. it seems to me like there's a double standard about what we call work. that when it's a very poor mother with three kids at home, it is not work. she needs to learn how the dignity of work. but when it is an extremely wealthy woman with five kids at home and again that is work. being in the home with kids -- as the father of a 4 1/2-month-old, there's no question, that's work. i find the double standard that has crept into this conversation and not been identified, really. >> it's a bad mom/good mom double standard. that's the subtext of it and that's what's so galling. for poor moms, single moms, your kids are going to be better off in day care, you're just not that good of a mom. so you should go to work. if you're a rich mom. you're a good mom, rich married mom, you're a good mom. we want to you stay home. so we're going to subsidize that through the tax code. it's not just that we're pushing

the poor moms in. but we're cutting the taxes and families that have stay at home moms. >> do we subsidize that through the tax code? >> absolutely. if you are a married couple if you're a person who gets married to someone who is not working, your taxes are going to go down. if you're somebody who is working and you get married who somebody who has a similar income to you, it's most likely your taxes will go up. it's like this idea if you think you're going to have the gall to be working and married, well, maybe we want to make you pay a little extra for that and we want to give you a huge incentive to not make that choice. >> so in the middle and upper middle class there's a tax incentive, there's a tax penalty for dual income earning households and a tax incentive for a stay at home parent which is usually in our society, a mother. >> it's across the tax code, what's surprising. in the bottom 20% of the income distribution and see married couples that are facing a penalty, that might be because they fade out of certain programs like the eitc quicker or get disqualified from other

programs quicker. but you can see this sort of penalty for marriages of equality where both people are working. and this subsidy for the sort of traditional family where one person stays home. and that that's sectiessentiall saying we want to encourage these good married moms to stay home and raise their kids. and these bad single moms, need them and their kids to go to day care, so they'll get a little better parenting experience. >> one of the fascinating things about the program known as welfare. one of the interesting things, there's things that qualify as work. one is child care for someone else's children. when what you've seen in poor neighborhoods around the country, is everyone in the village being employed by doing the next villager over laundry. this phenomenon where women are

caring for the children of another poor woman and vice-versa, that constitutes as work under tanf. i want to talk about women who are getting temporary assistance for needy family or not getting it in the jaws of this recession. impact wool exports from new zealand, textile production in spain, and the use of medical technology in the u.s.? at t. rowe price, we understand the connections of a complex, global economy. it's just one reason 75% of our mutual funds beat their 10-year lipper average. t. rowe price. invest with confidence. request a prospectus or summary prospectus with investment information, risks, fees and expenses to read and consider carefully before investing. with investment information, risks, fees and expenses water was meant to be perfect. crisp, clear, untouched. that's why there's brita, to make the water we drink, taste a little more, perfect. reduce lead and other impurities with the advanced filtration system of brita. right? get. out.

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a double standard of what counts as work. heather mcgee wey ju cgee, we w talking about that bit of mitt romney sound, women who were receiving welfare needed to get out of the house and join the workforce because they needed to know the dignity of work. which is in stark contrast to him saying all moms are working moms, what's your take. >> i deeply wish that this could have translated into a debate about child care and day care in this country. which i think is one of the biggest sort of sleeper issues that as my generation particularly you know, gets more political power, we're going to have to force onto the field the debate. we've got a system right now where most, the vast majority of the american people are facing

this privatized cost of figuring out what on earth you're supposed to do when you go back to work, if you're lucky to be able to stay at home for a little bit while your child is an infant. what are you supposed to do. you know, are you rich enough to afford a nanny? are you able to do child, you know, center-based child care? are you going to join some sort of waiting list that is interminable for head start. even the vast majority of poor families are not able to get into subsidized child care. we're the only industrialized country that just doesn't think it should be a public concern. >> it's interesting, even though we think of it in class terms of affluent moms staying at home. the growth in the share has been largest at the bottom of the social pyramid, because the replacement wage is purely an economical congratulation. if you can only get $9 a wage and you have to pay $9.50 for child care. it doesn't make sense to go back into the workforce and learn as mitt romney told us, the dignity of work. i want everyone to marinate in

that phrase. what it says about what he thinks of people who are working at home caring for their kids lacking dignity. more on that, we'll talk to someone from philadelphia who works with mothers on tanf and what they faced in this recession after this. everything that i've gained in life has been because of the teachers and the education that i had. they're just part of who i am. she convinced me that there was no limit to what we could learn. i don't think i'd be here today had i not had a wonderful science teacher. a teacher can make a huge difference in a child's life. he would never give up on any of us. thank you dr. newfield. you had a big impact on me. guys. come here, come here. [ telephone ringing ] i'm calling my old dealership. [ man ] may ford. hi, yeah. do you guys have any crossovers that offer better highway fuel economy than the chevy equinox? no, sorry, sir. we don't. oh, well, that's too bad. [ man ] kyle, is that you? [ laughs ] [ man ] still here, kyle.

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hello from new york, i'm chris hayes, quick update on a story we reported earlier in the program. the u.s. embassy in kabul is now on lockdown after a series of coordinated attacks on afghan government and western targets in kabul, including the u.s. and the british and german embassies, the taliban claimed responsibility in a text message to reporters. saying quote, the fighting is still ongoing, and so far, there has been a large loss of the enemy. nbc news has not confirmed any fatalities, but we will bring you any developments as news warrants. right now this morning, we're talking with former obama labor department chief economist, betsy stevenson, "reuters"

columnist david kay johnson. and former congressman, tom perriello of virginia and heather mcgee from the demos think tank. we were talking about the definition of work for women that with a sort of in the news this week, maybe you noticed and played some sound from mitt romney, in january in a town hall in new hampshire where he talked about welfare room and the temporary assistance for needy families passed in 1996. it's important, the rationale for that program wasn't a dollars-and-cents rationale, it was about social engineering, basically. it was about the fact that a feeling that there was a culture of dependency created by this assistance, and it was producing a cast of people that did not know quote to quote romney, the dignity of work. now those people were largely single moms. moms working at home with kids. that was largely the group that we were talking about. and so i want to talk a little

bit about what has happened in the wake of the temporary assistance to needy families. that was hailed by everyone has a success story. and when i say everyone, the beltway consensus, president bill clinton, people on both sides of the aisle said look, it was passed right before one of the largest sustained economic booms and tighter labor markets we had in a long time. unemployment went down to 4% and the roles dropped like crazy. they dropped for two reasons, one people were kicked off, and two, because people were able to find work, there was incentive to find work and they were able to find work. the question about the program was, what would happen when there was a recession, when there was a slack labor market. we have some stats on this. this is a graph showing the widening gap between families with children in important tpov those who receive tanf benefits. the welfare rolls continue to drop, the states have all sorts of ways they can use the money for other things, aside for cash

assistance for poor. there are lifetime limits. what we're seeing is the top line is, poverty is not going down. it's going up in the recession, but those receiving assistance has gone down dramatically, there's a widening gap between people who need the assistance and are getting it. here's a dramatic statistic from georgia. look at this. this is the percentage of people poor families with children receiving temporary assistance to needy families cash aid in 1996. we're defining poor, really poor, the federal poverty line, is really poor, okay. in 1996, it was 98%. tu those in 2010, it was 9%. which means 91% of poor families with children are not getting tanf cash assistance, we have seen a result of this policy, which essentially says, the safety net no longer exists for this portion of people that are occupying the bottom of the social pyramid, right.

tom? is this something that democrats should be talking about? >> it is. and i think it's something that the progressive movement needs to be talking about. it's something that i think faith leaders need to be talking more about. poverty is a moral crisis, as well as an economic crisis. i think we need to understand that both in a compassion sense of taking care of those particularly children, where we see mall nourishment and hunger levels at shocking levels for the united states, we also need to look at it as a jobs issue. which is that the beltway will sometimes think about the poorest of the poor in terms of assistance and they'll think about the richest of the rich because they're the ones writing the checks. but what we have a lack of are living wage jobs. the kind of jobs that can you support a family with. that you can move out of poverty. the dream here is social mobility. the dream is to move into the middle class and up. that's an american dream. my family was able to live with my grandparents coming from italy and my dad coming from poverty into a great public education at the university of virginia. and this is part of that dream. and i think people in the older

generation don't realize just how challenged that, that promise has become. >> i want to bring in someone who is on the front lines of this, mariana chilton. social professor at the drexel school of public health. director of the center for hunger-free communities, welcome, doctor, it's great to have you. >> thanks for having me. can you tell us you work and among a lot of women particularly who are very, very poor. either on tanf or no longer on tanf or can't get it or make more than slightly -- what have you seen as the effect of the great recession, the economic crisis as it intersects with this policy sea change that was passed in 1996? >> well certainly we've seen that the tanf program has not responded to the recession. the only program for low-income people that's been responding to the recession is the food stamp program, the s.n.a.p. program and unemployment. and tanf did not respond. and that's because they're over the years there's been an incentive to get people off the rolls of cash assistance.

what i would love to be doing is making sure that we can bring the dialogue back to empirical evidence and research. our research with children's health watch across the country shows that when families were cut off of tanf assistance, that it made an increase in child hospitalizations. so we have to think about tanf as actually a child health program. most of the recipients of tanf are children. >> there is of course the argument about tanf being very successful social policy and about the previous system of welfare, which was grounded much more in a right to assistance than the current. as producing this culture of dependency. has there been the cultural shift in the work ethic of poor women as a result of tanf? that was the promise of the policy and when there was a surge in employment among the population, which still exists today against the baseline when you consider the recession, that was the great crowning achievement that people touted for the policy. >> i have to say there's been no

cultural shift in the desire to work. there's no woman that i've been, that i've spoken with in my research that doesn't really appreciate the value and the dignity of work. and when welfare reform happened, women were excited about that, they thought they might get some good job training programs and be able to find jobs with a living wage. now that didn't happen. what we found is that women are getting pushed into low-wage jobs and that child care subsidies, those kinds of programs that are supposed to help women get out of the home, be able to have child care so they can actually earn a living wage, that didn't happen. child care subsidies don't particularly match with pushing bem into work. and what happens is we have found that when women get pushed into low-wage jobs, or into jobs where they can't be able to pay for their basic needs, such as rent or for child care, for transportation, what happens is when that little increase in income happens, they may lose some of their assistance through the s.n.a.p. benefits or through

cash assistance and that causes an increase in child hunger. so what it shows you is it's complete completely diametrically opposed to what's supposed to be happening. >> the critique of the old system of course, was that it disincentivized work. if you -- and we've come up with a whole bunch of programs with the idea being that there is no cliff at which if you get a job or get an increase in income, your actual net gains go down, right? you do not want to create a system in which a job or a raise an income or a raise at your job because you're doing a really good job, duly means you're getting less assistance for you and your family. and yet what you're saying if i understand you correctly, is if you take the totality of programs, s.n.a.p., food programs, day care subsidies and tanf, we do have that system, you get a job and end up with less money for your kids. >> that's true. and the research on this

concept, the cliff effect, has shown that when mothers report that they've had a minor increase in income, and they've lost their cash assistance or their s.n.a.p. benefits, again it's increased child hunger. we know that child hunger is is a major public health problem. it causes an increase in hospitalizations. it has a terrible effect on child development. and this creates this cycle of toxic stress. which affects a child's ability to learn well in school. to arrive to kindergarten prepared. we know that when children arrive to kindergarten under prepared, it's unlikely that they'll be able to catch up with their peers without a major investment in their education. >> i want to talk about the practical and economic effects of poverty on childhood cognitive development and general development and job capability later in life after this. cold feels nice on sore muscles, huh?

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last year the house of representatives passed legislation to build on the successes of the 1996 welfare reform law. they did so because they want more americans to know the pride and success that come from hard work. the law passed the house, that passed the house requiring 40 hours of work each week. >> the first stage of welfare reform brought unprecedented success. millions of americans now knows the rewards of work. welfare mothers have found their long-lost self-esteem. >> he want to stop the dependency that government has created with all of these entitlement programs. we want to give people the opportunity, the dignity to work. >> in welfare reform we reached the conclusion that giving people money for doing nothing is a bad idea. >> doing nothing. meaning raising your children. just so that's clear. betsy stevenson, i wanted you to talk a little bit about there's been this amazing research

that's come out of james hackman has been at the forefront of this, university of chicago, won the nobel if i'm not mistaken for research on the value and the importance of early childhood development. you said something very interesting to me. forget about the moms. let's say we don't care about the moms. what practically are the effects in terms of investing in making sure that poor children have the sort of resources they need to thrive? >> first of all, let me say this is one of the things we do terribly in our government. we do not think about, if i spend $1 in program a, how will it affect spending in some other program. we don't do that calculation and we need to think about that when it comes to kids. we know from the research that the mounding research that if we can spend money on kids when they're one, two, three, four, five, we're going to be, we're going to be able to have kids who are more productive members of society. who are less likely to be criminals, do something damaging to society and are going to be more, bigger positive contribution. in fact, you know, i think we

should be investing in kids' education all the way down the line. but if you're going to be making tradeoffs, i'd rather be taking from 18, 19, 21-year-olds and giving it to the 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds, 5 yltds, it makes a big difference. the returns on the dollars are realry astronomical. we're cutting it right now and we're going to pay for it. 20 years from now we're going to see an economy that can't grow as fast. because we haven't invested in the new emerging adults. we're going to end up, we just end up with a lot of problems, we're going to have a generation we didn't invest in. >> the way that the american social welfare state works, is that we spend a lot of money on old people and not very much money on young people. it's not a coincidence that old people can vote and young people can't. and it's a really basic kind of -- >> i've never understood. why on earth do we pay for health care for people who are 65 and older. they've lived a long time. >> wait a second, tom -- >> i think that medicare is a

great program and i think it's been a great part of the social contract here. and certainly think that taking care and letting people live with dignity is very important. >> how about letting them grow up with dignity. >> i think we shouldn't create false choices here. which i know you're not really doing. you're talking about investing in this case in our children. i think we can really see that. i also feel like we keep coming back to this disconnect between policy makers who are often oldered and grew up at a time when there were more living-wage jobs around. i think some of this is obviously demagoguing the poor and some of it is even race-baiting, there's also a component where people are just out of touch. because 40 years ago, there really was a kpbetter capacity move into the workforce at a job that paid more, the minimum benefits. the college costs so much less. get yourself through college. we're talking about coming out with $50,000 in debt. and credit card debt and other things through that. it's a very different world than

when policy makers grew up. >> mariana, when women that you are working with, when they can get work, what is the kind of work that is available? i mean what jobs are there at that portion of the labor market? >> most of the jobs are for again, very low wage or minimum wage. which could be housekeeping, cleaning toilets in our local big businesses or working in sales for very low wages. and those wages don't include any kind of health care coverage. there's no family leave. so when a child gets sick, the mother has to take time off to be to deal with her child who has been hospitalized again because of the increase in hunger and the cycle goes round and round. she can get a job, may not be able to hold onto the job because of having children, risky health care situations, has to go back on tanf roles and tries to get into a job training program again and starts the si cycle all over again. it's important when we talk about our policy-makers being completely out of touch with

chas going on with low income moms is mothers are completely left out of the national dialogue. this is why people are so out of touch. we want to hear more from the mothers who know best about the experience of hunger and poverty. if you think about it, when 50% of the people who are on s.n.a.p. and on tanf are on children, we need to be including the voices and experiences of those low-income moms. we need to find better ways to make sure they're part of the conversation. >> they are talked about, but never talked with and their voices are not represented. >> in fact, larry bartels out of princeton says the impact of the poorest third of the country has exactly zero impact, the voices of them have actually zero impact on their elected officials. >> he did this amazing study in which he looked at voting records and he tried to match it with public opinion surveys of people in different parts of the income distribution and found that basically the poor have zero effect. and actually found the middle class have almost zero effect. it's sort of an amazing study.

>> mariana chilton from the drexel university school of public health. thank you for your time this morning, i appreciate it. >> thank you for having me. on monday, actress sashly judd posted a piece about women that i've been thinking about all week. we talk about it next. makeup artists have everything to make my skin look its best. at home, i challenge that in one easy step with olay. total effects tone corrector. 7 anti-aging therapies for younger looking skin including an even skin tone, instantly. from olay.

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♪ all right. so this week there was this, you know, we had this speculation about celebrities sometimes and you know, some pictures taken of a celebrity and people are do they have work done, did they not have work done. and there was a picture of ashley judd that precipitated all of this mean-spirited speculation about her face and her appearance. and it became such a story that ashley judd, to her tremendous credit, she, she decided to write an op-ed about what it was like to be the subject of this particular kind of gaze as a woman. and i found it really brave and

stirring and righteously angry piece. and let me just read awe quote. she said i chose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture to a greater or lesser degree endure every day. in ways both outrageous and subtle. the assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades. and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about. and it struck me that in this week in which we were having a very substantive conversation about this cable news pundit saying something and about the role of women, it happens against a backdrop against which this is the norm. the this kind of extremely intense objectification about women's appearance, and let's be honest, it happened to sarah palin in all sorts of gross and disgusting ways. it happened to hillary clinton. it happens to women no matter

where they're coming from, where they are in the sort of national spotlight. here's ashley judd actually talking about this with my colleague, brian williams on "rock center." >> it hurt me. it really hurt me. it hurt my feelings. and anger is very transformative when it's empowered and it's healthy. and i've been taught that the gifts of anger are strength, energy and motivation. i realized when it was published as an op-ed and went viral, that this really isn't about me. you know and my puffy face moment is another person's big butt moment. i want people to be invited to in their own lives and in their own way, share their puffy face moment and talk about you know, being humiliated, being objectified, being ridiculed. >> ashley judd being super bad-ass if i can say that on the news. heather you and i are roughly the same age. one of the things i find a real

conundrum. is that to me it seems the way the gender equity works in this country happened on two tracks on an economic track, a political track, on things like women's education attainment levels, women in law school, women doctors, the wage gap has closed, although still persists and is significant. there's real progress. on this cultural level of how we talk about women's bodies, how we represent them, it seems to me, regress. i say this as someone who now is the father of a daughter. do you feel that way? do you sort of, what do you think about what that, what is that paradox about? >> absolutely. i don't think there's been as much economic progress for women particularly at the low ends and i think that some of the growth and the growth of low-wage jobs had to do with the fact that those are women's jobs, the nakt th fact that we tolerate such pore wages, workers at places like walmart has do do with the fact though that those are feminized jobs. yeah, we've had an historic shift in gender roles in this country.

that just happened basically a millisecond go in terms of time. >> in the history of human civilizati civilizations. >> in and it just happened and our generation is the first generation to come of age with parents who were as likely to get divorce. all of that. so the idea that we wouldn't be experiencing a lot of really complex cultural malaise, that isn't just about, obviously i think it's about a lot of sexism from unthinking sexism from the men who still are setting the agendas of our media and all of that. but also a lot of ambivalence on the part of women. about what our role is supposed to be. basically, we have to have a certain level of attractiveness in order to be heard, right? and there is a multibillion-dollar industry that you know, is very rooted in psychological studies and all of that to figure out how exactly to make me feel like it's empowering for me to be more beautiful, somehow. >> jennifer newsom, a filmmaker

behind a great documentary about misrepresentation about the underrepresentation of women in positions of influence and power and how this gaze works to keep women in their place. jennifer thanks for joining us, i really enjoyed the film. >> thank you so much. >> what was your reaction reading that ashley judd op-ed? and what brought you, because i feel like you're someone who kind of had a sort of radicalized moment at some point in which with the scales fell from your eyes about exactly what the culture, what cultural messages we were sending to women and girls. >> thank you, well i applaud ashley for this. thy ink this is a very important national conversation. and we obviously wouldn't be having it if she didn't come forward and voice her opinion and do it so eloquently. my story is really just that i was in hollywood after stanford business school about the time that paris hilton, lindsay lohan and britney spears were tabloid fodder. and i couldn't imagine raising a daughter or a child in particular knowing i wanted to have kids, in a climate that is

so demoralizes and destroys women in particular. and then i was met my husband and was introduced to the likes of hillary clinton and condi rice and really started to note the sexism that was directed at hillary clinton in particular during the 2008 campaign and started doing some research and looking at the stats. and recognized that the media world wasn't really reflecting all of the richness and complexity and power of real women. and that's when i, you know, started diving into the research and decided i needed to make this documentary. >> betsy, i'm curious, if there's a relationship between these, the way that we have these certain cultural expectations of women and the way that those roles are proscribed by the media and economic effects. what do to the ledger, to the dollars and cents, to the sort of purchasing power and stability in the incomes of women that we have these expectations? >> there's more some research

trying to look at the returns to being attractive. and one of the things that, there are big returns to being attractive. they happen to be true for men and for women. so i don't think that there's an extra burden on women necessarily to be attractive. but it's the way we talk about attractiveness in women. and so you know, male attractiveness we talk about very differently. and in ways that are much more kobe s copacetic with being successful in a career. we talk about men about being strong and aggressive and assertive and those are good things it say about with a guy and that makes him attractive. and when we talk about women's attractiveness, often the things that we're think make a woman attractive are exactly the sort of opposite things that might make her successful as say a ceo. and i think that that continues to be a problem in trying to get women into these kind of positions of power and our poe separations of how women are going to do in those kind of positions.

>> do you think things have gotten worse? that's the thing that haunts me in just watching film. it does feel like regression. there's a way in which the conservatives speak to anxiety about a sort of extremely hypersexualized and somewhat degrading culture, that liberals have a hard time articulating the language of. but it's something that i think it's very hard to watch the culture sort of chug along and not feel like there is some regress along these lines. >> things definitely have gotten worse. the tabloid culture in particular has overtaken hollywood and we're exporting that to the rest of the world. which is very damaging, there's a study, a harvard study conducted in the '90s, which basically proved that when western television, "90210" and "melrose place" were introduced to papau, new guinea, a place where the female body is historically more robust and

full, that country developed an epidemic of eating disorders never before seen. we're seeing an impact with the "misrepresentation" the underrepresentation of women in leadia. with under-representation of women in leadership in the real world if women are in 3%. you know, the stats go on and on. we're only 17% of congress. 3% of fortune 500 ceos. so despite what people think, when they see that we had our first speaker pelosi and secretary of state now, but former senator hillary clinton, running for the presidency, sarah palin running for the presidency. we haven't achieved parity and it really has gotten worse. >> i want to talk more about the way this sort of resonates in our culture and how we think about the role of women right after we take a quick break. do.

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i'm talking about the what our cultural expectations are of women and the roles they play and we have filmmaker jennifer seibel newsom on the line, who made a great film, miss representation. >> i think it's really revealing about the experience of this at a small level being a teacher. >> so you know when i was teaching and pregnant and i sort of had i guess what maybe was the misfortune of teaching around four months to five months pregnant where i was big, but maybe not screaming pregnant. but i wasn't in my standard suits because i wasn't going to buy eight maternity suits. and students hammered me in my evaluations for how i looked and what i wore, and how big i was. and -- >> that is really jaw-dropping to me that that is the case.

but it is so sort of pernicious and sort of shot through. i've had the experience, i've had the experience of being you know when you're on television all of a sudden you as a man, you you're on tv and people start to comment on your experience and you realize it's the first time that anybody has commented on your appearance and i remember having a moment about someone tweeted something about me gaining weight or something silly. and it's like psychologically debilitating and realizing that whatever age, 31, this is the first time i ever confronted that. and women face that all the time. >> every minute of their lives, women face that from men. instead of character we look at these superficial things because there's a lot of easy profit of doing that. >> and i think there's a new culture of viciousness across the board and i think the internet has exploded that dynamic and women have tended to bear the brunt of that. if you look at political blogs and other things, part of it is the anonymity. i was in tahrir square and you saw the beauty of the internet

and being able to help bring down a dictatorship. but you see the darker side of anonymity. a friend of mine a female writer did a piece about the focus on older women having, giving birth tends to be correlated about defects and what bolder men and there's new research on that. the response she got was some of the nastiest, vicious stuff on the "wall street journal" blog. so you really see this culture of viciousness. >> jennifer, do you feel -- jennifer, i want to see if you felt like the role that kind of social media plays, there is something to this culture of viciousness idea, tom. i like that term. is that something you've feel is apt? >> definitely, more women on social media, more minorities on social media and utilizing it. and hopefully healthier ways. our campaign, missrepresentation.org, we're seeing tremendous success with our online movement. to summarize the backlash and the result of this as you all

are talking about. we're seeing depression rates skyrocket, eating disorders. self-abuse, cutting and what have you. suicide. the plastic surgery culture has just gone through the roof. you know, all of this lower political efficacy in particular for young girls. i mean all of this is contributing in such unhealthy ways. i mean there's a real health problem in this country right now that's the result of this double standard and the fact that women are solely valued for our out, our beauty and our sexuality. not for our intelligence and our capacity to lead. and this is the message that young people in particular are getting and that's becoming normalized in our culture, to higher degrees. and you look at the tabloid reality show culture, the fact that we pay the kardashian family as an example, so much money and endorse them and sponsor them, what message is that sending to our kids? >> one of the most effective things about the film is interviews with girls in high

school. and them talking about very honestly and frank by what expectations they feel there are on them. betsy, there's something you want to say? >> i think what's important about the story, my teaching evaluations is they were wharton mba students, they wanted a person at the front of the classroom who looked like a c level executive. whether i was pregnant or not, i didn't look like a c level executive and any woman who wants to become a c level executive, you're not supposed to loob like a mom. i think that's important, what does a professional woman look like? what does a c level executive look like and how do you combine that with the fact that i am a woman and i am going to have kids. >> just to clarify a point is a "c" level executive is a ceo, a coo, a chief executive, very high at the head of the corporation pyramid, right? >> yes, exactly. >> jennifer, this is where we get to the what do you do about it section. you've got 30 seconds, you know, culture is a hard thing, culture

is hard thing to change. i don't want to start prescribing policy about what, how we change the culture. how do you go about starting to make that shift away from this culture of viciousness as tom put it. >> we recognize our power as consumer, we celebrate the good media and we basically stop buying the bad media. the unhealthy medias. as parents we talk with our kids about the media we're consuming and we have media literacy conversations and "misrepresentation" is in school ace cross the country because we don't have gendered media literacy in our schools. we need to raise our boys and girls differently. we need to raise our girls to expand the opportunities of what's available to them and we need to raise our boys to care and to not be afraid of their emotions. not to be afraid of the feminine and to really value and respect women. so it's really about parenting. it's about education. and it's about not consuming the junk food media. and then on the political side, it's really about making sure the people that we endorse and

support and vote for, that they actually value women. that they're actually taking steps per your earlier conversation, about women in the workforce and motherhood, that they're taking steps to value women. we're the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't have paid family leave. what does that say about what we think of the family and women? >> jennifer siebel newsom, writer, director and producer of a great documentary, "miss representation." really great thank you for being here. >> thank you. >> what you should know for the news ahead. i love that my daughter's part fish.

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tax day compared to other comparable days. a spike equivalent to the elevated fatalities on super bowl sunday. and that the symbolism of tax day is not lost on senate democrats, who plan to bring up a vote on the buffett rule tomorrow. the proposed change to the tax code would maze the minimum effective rate paid on annual income above $1 million a year. the republicans are expected to deny the up or down vote by filibustering it. the 400 wealthiest tax filers paid an average effective rate of 16.2% in 2007 while the average middle class rate of 27%. grassroots campaign against the american legislative council is working. it helps florida's stand your ground law has a who's who list of major american corporations as member and contributors and a

pressure kpin calling on those corporations to withdrawal from alec has resulted in kraft foods and quicken book software pulling out, in addition to coca-cola, mcdonald's, wendy's and pepsi. contrary to the narrative about america's moral decline. federal data shows that teen births are at the lowest rates in 70 years. birth rates for girls in all racial and ethnic groups are the lowest ever reported. because the news cycle was hijacked by an invented outrage last week, you may not know but you should know that last week marked the sixth anniversary of the health care law mitt romney signed in massachusetts. a law with be a individual mandate that served quite explicitly for the model for the national affordable care act. mitt romney did not mark the occasion, but the obama certainly did. >> i want it thank the med -- >> you should know that mitt romney, a man associated in the

public eye with questionable care decision fosor his family dog will be the beneficiary of fred mallet, former assistant to bush senior and former finance committee chair for john mccain will be hosting a fundraiser for romney tomorrow. you should know two things about him. one, in 1959, he was part of a group of men arrested after killing and grilling a dog in a park in peoria, illinois. the charge was dropped, but two, you should know when mallet worked for richard nixon, nixon became obsessed with a jewish kpirscy to undermine him undermined from the bureau of labor statistics and instructed mallet to count the number of jews in the department. fred mallet obliged his boss's desire to count the number of jews, submitted a memo noted that 13 of 35 employees fit the demographic criterion that was discussed. in summary you should know the man hosting mitt romney's fundraiser tomorrow is a former

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we'll even throw in up to $600 when you open a new account or roll over an old 401(k). so who's in control now, mayans?

in just a second, i'll ask our panel what we need to know for the week ahead melissa harris-perry, what's coming this up morning? >> after that epic discussion of dog roasting and the counting of jewish employees, you dropped the mike. the latest on the coordinated taliban attacks on parliament, u.s. and german embassies this morning. and an underreported administration rule that could ignite a new battle in the

culture wars very soon and we'll take a look at just how far we've come or haven't come on transgender equality in the u.s. a great panel of very impressive folks. >> i'm really quited and my curiosity is piqued. i'll be tuning in. thanks, melissa our guests back to tell us what we should know as news unfold this week. betsy? >> since tax day coming up, not all married couples are counted the same so if you are thinking about getting married this year, realize that we -- the government actually thinks that working -- that stay-at-home moms contribute nothing, so your taxes will go down if you marry somebody who is going to stay down and taxes will go up if you're in a marriage of equality, and when are you being look for tax deductions, it's -- really, i want to emphasize this, deductions, direct payments, subsidies, penalties, all equivalent. when we talk about tax fairness,

about the buffet rule, these things, these tax deductibles are untouchables. let's get them out of the tax system and make them direct subsidies so people can see them. we can stop talking about whether to get rid of them or not get rid of them, but talk about putting them on an even playing field. i want to know if we get the same bang for buck when we pay for people's housing as kids' school. >> hundreds of thousands of american workers at 2,700 american companies, every big brand name you know, general electric, proctor & gamble are having state taxes withheld and held by the company. people should be aware of this. workers are counted as if they paid the taxes, but the companies get to keep the taxes. >> the reason, because state cut tax incentive deals to lure work, and the government doesn't want to write a check, so much easier, you know, millions you

save from the tax withholding, just keep that. >> or retain that, and the second, how your legal right to a landline telephone is being quietly legislated away. at&t and verizon are pouring huge sums of money into this. we need to have a balanced policy about this, and we're not getting it. >> two quick trends. one, corporations fleeing alec for its efforts to systematically suppress voters in community of color across the country. not something corporate brands want to be part of. dozens of moderate and catholic leaders came out to condemn congressman ryan's budget on an attack of the poor. i think you will see faith voices escalating this week in calling out the immortality of republican budgets. >> have you been very involved in the faith community and that

work is really interesting. we should talk about that more on the show. heather, what should folks know? >> people should know two big parts of the republican ideology came into a great, awesome clash this week. the romney camp taken will keep trying to make the job losses obama's fault. what sparked that actually, that whole ann romneygate was about the fact that romney was trying to say that over 90% of the job losses since obama took office were women's jobs. the problem is, the driving factor behind that, the fact that as his party loves to do, as soon as 2010 republican governors got into office, the first thing they did was cut public jobs, not because they hate government, they hate public sector unions, the last big political force for democrats, and so you can't have it both ways basically is what the american people should know. you can say you want you want to

gut government or have jobs for women. you can't have it both ways. >> government jobs are government jobs. i want to thank my guests. betsy stevenson at the wharton school, visiting at princeton, former labor economist for the obama administration. author of "free lunch." tom, former congressman from virginia, currently at the center for american progress action fund if i'm not mistaken. and heather mcgee, vice president of demos. thank you for getting up. we'll be back up saturday and sunday at 8:00 eastern. i'm going to talk with former bush administrator christine todd whitman, and peter benart, about the crisis of zionism. find us on online wsd for a live web chat. up next, melissa harris-perry,

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