germany is one of our largest trading partners and we discussed how to keep our economies growing and create the jobs that our people need well sure we can work well together why is germany's economy thriving as the u.s. is barely surviving the good spending less cash on the wars and more on people with a key to economic success. i'm only going sixty thousand dollars student loans and the un education of america has the price tag of college left us broke when it comes to being able to compete with the world. and in the final hours before blast off the international crew of the soyuz spacecraft takes a look back and a lot love them into the abyss of space.

welcome back on this tuesday june seventh i'm lucy capital porting live out of washington d.c. and you're watching our t.v. . the german chancellor chancellor on glo merkel is in washington today where she's meeting with top u.s. officials as well as receiving the medal of freedom from president obama now both leaders are trying to project a close working relationship glossing over recent differences between the two countries over the u.s. led in libya invasion not to mention the starkly different approaches to tackling the global economic crisis now the u.s. economy continues to stagnate unfortunately we're dealing with bare bones growth of just one point eight percent consumer spending is down home prices are sinking jobs and wages well they're heading nowhere now germany on the other hand well it's not doing so bad take an employment for example when it comes to unemployment germany

they have a rate of just seven percent thanks in part to policies that encourage companies to keep folks on the payrolls during tough times here in the u.s. meanwhile the unemployment rate continues to hover just over nine point one percent not to mention the fact that nearly fourteen million americans are looking for work almost half of whom have been unemployed for at least half of the past year and with comes to taxes germany is also one of the country's worst with the highest tax burdens across the globe so it's average tax rate and this is including social security contributions is a staggering fifty eight point nine percent that country to spend generally on social welfare programs health care and this actually to take care of those who are less well off meanwhile here in the u.s. we enjoy one of the lowest tax of tax rates in the world at an average of just twenty nine point four percent but the fact is that meeting khana me budget deficits and staggering that the united states is still number one in military spending germany spent forty six billion dollars on defense and twenty ten just one

point four percent of its g.d.p. meanwhile here in the u.s. despite the stagnating economy we continue to beat the rest of the globe combined when it comes to military spending shelling out a staggering six hundred eighty seven billion bucks last year nearly five percent of our g.d.p. now germany managed. find some way to thrive and survive despite high taxes lots of social welfare benefits and high wages now these are things but here in the us many folks would scorn us business killers you know those lazy europeans they work less than we do and and get paid more than we do and have the social safety nets i mean a lot of politicians here in the us accuse that of socialism they say that it would destroy our economy they say that americans can't learn from their economies but we ask whether in fact germany has some lessons to offer and that's in fact the question i posed to the big picture tom hartman if you had to say. well with regard to trade germany has some very very colorful carefully calibrated trade policies particularly have to taxation that effectively work like tariffs so they're protecting their their trade economy but with regard to the short workweek and the

unemployment which i think it's you know it's a bit more to the point of what we're talking about here they have a program called curt's are but. kurtz's german for short it is work so it's kind of short work and what the german government did there while the rest of europe was having eight a half percent unemployment and i think still is in that neighborhood right now. during the recession germany never won a loeb's seven or above so unhappy senator my recollection is correct and they did it with this program where they took five point one billion euros the government did they said to all the employers ok you don't have so much demand for your products you know we have in a recession but don't lay anybody off instead cut them from say thirty forty hours a week down to thirty hours a week and but pay them the full forty hours a week so slow down production give people some time off and then we will pay the remaining ten you know ten hours whatever it is per week through you so the

government gives the money to the corporations corporations pass it out as pay and so the net effect of this is that the money in the pockets of workers never changed and what the germans understood and dusted this is what by the way it's a very similar program in the netherlands although it's a little more optional it's not so optional in germany for the companies but what the germans understand is that what really drives an economy is demand and that the real job creators are people spending money and it doesn't matter where the money comes from as long as they're spending that money whether it's social security whether it's welfare whether it's kurds are by money or whether it's actual i've got a job money if you're spending money you're creating demand in the economy so as soon as the real shock of the economic shock wave finished wiping across europe german germany had an economy where the demand was still there because all of the workers. still had money in their pockets and they were still buying things and sleep on spec for it quickly and contrast that with what we did here in the united states i mean congress passed employment benefits like even extending those you

know well there's or and there's it is a giant hand grenade embedded in those i mean president obama this this i think is going to be a real disaster for him because in order to get a a an extension of unemployment benefits that's just going to run to the end of this year he gave two years of an extension of bush's tax cuts which is going to make the budget deficit worse they're cutting social programs but what's going to happen is when you know first of all you get the ninety nine er's super old off and now that the people with the extension those people again they have money in their pocket so they're creating demand they're helping support our economy but that's going to run out of steam at the end of this year and there's no way congress is going to give him another year so he's going to be going into the election with more and more people rolling off the unemployment rolls having that the economy will rebound when it probably won't and i think it's going to be a real mess for him which is truly horrific but on the issue of taxes you know one of the republican talking points that we hear mentioned so often is higher taxes will stagnate growth that will not be any more jobs no more economic growth in this economy if we raise taxes that's the big rallying cry meanwhile nonsense so let's

break it down for us what the what does germany have to offer of these republicans in terms of the less well we don't even have to look at germany let's look at the white eisenhower i mean the republican president during during the time of him america's arguably greatest growth right after world war two eisenhower's president from fifty two to sixty three my recollection is right and during that period of time we built this great country and we came and we were coming off world war two with one hundred twenty six percent of g.d.p. debt so when eisenhower came to the presidency the debt i mean we we were as or more in depth and we are right now as a percentage of g.d.p. so did he cut anything you know i mean no country has ever cut its way to prosperity and say what he did this is threw money into programs like the eisenhower highway system schools hospitals and look at all the buildings around in every city in america that were built in the one nine hundred fifty s. and and the g.i. . bill the bees sent people to school they sent people to. well schooled they actually paid them a stipend they backstopped home there was

a housing program or you can buy a house and the consequence of this was that we grew our way out of that what is the basic building blocks that were at that other countries are now and the end during that time the top tax rate in the united states was ninety one percent so you know if anybody said and corporations were paying thirty five percent of the total tax load it would total tax input into the federal government right now is about seven percent has been paid for by corporations during the eisenhower years it was it was in the high thirty's and thirty's and i mean a very over that period and so anybody who says that high taxes kill an economy has you have to ask the question where when how did we get where we are you know how did america from from one nine hundred forty to until you know basically reagan reversed all this stuff build this great industrial powerhouse in the sixth floor very country with all this incredible infrastructure that was working so well when reagan came in and kind of reversed all well what happened to that i mean it seems like the real building blocks of developing an economy is investing in infrastructure investing in innovation research and development focusing on job

creation and we're not really doing that anymore what's changed what changes reaganomics reagan came along and said you know government is bad and government does is bad so if government is investing for example in infrastructure that's bad one of the most important infrastructures the government used to invest in the united states and did hugely in the one nine hundred fifty s. and one nine hundred sixty s. in the late one nine hundred forty s. is intellectual infrastructure we you know my dad went to college on the g.i. bill you know he was paid two hundred dollars a month to go to college and college was free and that's the kind of think that that's what built america and when reagan became governor of california california had a completely free public education system people did anybody go to college there it was what thomas jefferson had in mind and created with the university of virginia a free education system let's invest in the intellectual infrastructure of a country where reagan bill. that up when he was governor of california and then when he became president he put in charge of the education part of bill bennett the guy who when he had in his one attempt to run for the presidency had run on the

campaign platform of abolishing the department of education of course he was the guy reagan but charges so we just basically stopped with reaganomics and we're almost out of time if you could sum it up what is the biggest or. some of the biggest takeaway lessons that we can and we can take away from from germany's operation and its economy and well i here in the last number one the demand is not supply is what drives an economy and the demand is money in people's pockets we have to figure out a way to get it there whether it's unemployment benefits or or whatever number two that we need to really reconsider our trade policies which is a conversation we haven't had but it's an important one and and number three that government taxes really have no impact on whether government's going to grow or not or an economist if you like that the floor is about to open up and there has to be followed that's just a look at american history you see all right well a lot of great points there especially the education one which of course we will be getting to later in this program as we talk about college thank you so much time that was tom hartman host of the big picture. well one area where the united states

and germany are collaborating along potential new sanctions against iran now at this morning's joint press conference with the german chancellor president obama threatened to slap more sanctions against iran over its nuclear activities but despite fresh warnings from the united states as well as israeli officials about tehran's quest for the nuclear bomb pulitzer prize winning journalist seymour hersh says the obama administration is actually exaggerating the iranian threat not to mention ignoring its own intelligence because latest piece a new yorker magazine has sent shock waves throughout washington and he sat down with me and r.t. to discuss what's behind the hype on iran there is based on the notion that you know that somehow iran has a bomb or is going to get a bomb soon that's ridiculous because every bit of evidence they have from their own intelligence community the the the people in the top of the bad government know there's no weapons there we've known that for years we've been looking for years after years after years we support the sanctions program that's designed to stop the punishment is. aimed at stopping the iranians from doing something you know we

know they're not doing for me and as i wrote in the article the analogy between what they're doing with obama's doing with iran is very close to what bush and cheney device president then did to iraq no evidence of that weaponization there's no evidence anywhere i went you could go to london you go to you go to you go to the french you go to the germans they also they say they we thought we still think they might want to go but we we don't have a thing it should be open and shot we should move on but we're not instead what you're seeing is their mom knowingly and what i wrote and they're ignoring it up to a point there's always a group that doesn't ignore stuff but the mainstream press basically they have their narrative has united states taken the right course of responding to the so-called arab spring look if you're an iranian or you know middle east and you know what's going on in bahrain and you see the white house down. iran. and criticize iran at the same time everybody in iran and everybody in the middle

east is watching what's going on in bahrain and we say nothing oh how do we think that in fact going to be a partner see there's no love for us in the middle in this not my gulf anymore because we so they betrayed the trust and in the seats of egypt when obama finally came in support of them they was there was hooting you know they were done with us they wanted him so it's aboard early and so. we've missed the boat on that those movements were probably the best tools we've head certainly better than the use of force that we've been using the night raids and all that stuff in it you know the renditions and yet he's you know we've backed that up and you can watch my full interview with seymour hersh either talking dot com or stay tuned later today on our team. now i mean this is a cover he is still far off the horizon something not helped by the unemployment numbers creeping back to over nine percent job recruitment is at its lowest point

in eight months which is bad news for college grads who are entering the workforce the summer archies marina partner reports on the college kids who forked over big bucks for their future and very little return on their investment. america is home to the world's most expensive and prestigious universities yet paying for them has created a nation where the majority sign on to lifetime payments of loans are probably of like sixty thousand dollars student. over like nine hundred thousand easy. yet i make you nervous yes that makes me terrified every american graduate is launching into a dwindling job market saddled with at least twenty four thousand dollars in student debt is that really led to a great job or start a great company are going to be seriously in the hole according to the economic policy institute the us economy currently has one job for every five applicants meanwhile business for bankruptcy attorney ninety lipman is surging half of his

clients are unemployed degree holders drowning in debt anyone going to college essentially is gambling once again from an investor's point of view right now the way the dollar is the way inflation is going and the way the job market there's a college education just isn't a good investment and not a good return on your money even economics professors on the inside like richard wolfe say enslaving students to banks is a disaster for america's economic viability the future of any country in the world economy these days depends first and foremost on the quality and the quantity of skilled craned new young workers and the major institutions that produce that are the colleges and universities you're pricing them out of being able to do that today a diploma no longer serves as a guaranteed passport to prosperity for americans in the meantime the number of foreigners studying at u.s.

colleges and universities has reached record highs according to the latest statistics nearly seven hundred thousand international students have flown in from all over the world to study it. america and the majority are transplants from america's economic competitor according to the institute of international education chinese students studying in the states surged thirty percent in two thousand and nine most foreign families reportedly bypass financially and pay full tuition since one nine hundred seventy eight the cost of u.s. colleges and universities has reportedly increased more than nine hundred percent while household income rose just one hundred fifty percent what you're seeing is american universities particularly the elite are happier to have foreigners who tend to a their own way because they come from the very top of those societies. will forgo the americans for caring afforded much in the way anyway according to the pew

research center fifty seven percent of americans say college is not worth the price but with a widening workforce of untrained and educated many wonder what the u.s. economy will eventually be worth. r.t. new york so what do people in new york city think about the cost of college and whether it's actually worth it or harkness of the resident decided to pose that question to some new yorkers take a look what she found. with today's tough job market is it worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for college education this week let's talk about that how much does college cost in poland and college for free. any this day it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars . leaves a problem. and and young people from all over the world of

bought off on it and it needs to stop now i'm not going to say that the government needs to pay for it but i think young people need to wake up and look around them and say you know it's not an accident that bill gates was so self-taught maybe if kids took two or three years before they went to school and had a little life experience and then had some purpose to their study might make more sense. but it's only worth hundreds of thousands of dollars even at that point i don't think so i live on one year of accounting i took a undergraduate. i very millions of dollars on that one course which i only paid two hundred dollars for i own a business i hire the best people i can get if you're not if you have a college if you don't have a college education don't even come to my office and apply you where did you go to college i went to college in texas and he's right you learn there every day absolutely you think it depends on what field you're in possibly but let me tell you this with an education you just have

a whole lot tougher time in life but we're all told that we all have to go otherwise we won't succeed. but often i chose not to go to duty as you call it. need to go i mean you can use known to be way out of range and if you go to the top schools and you the rich people can afford it why is that dip don't you think that would let us back over the long run in terms of what we can produce really is i think if you look around at your economy and the rich are getting rich and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is falling away people are seeing this in your real estate in the due to new economy i think the american people are suffering the bottom line is that most employers still think a college education is important and ultimately it's their opinion right or wrong that matter.

well if you buy the idea that college is just a costly waste of time well you'll find me just me well ahead of the curve we'll see vince is the man behind the un college movement a program that essentially aims to contradict the conclusion that college degrees equal success and to connect students with other options for real world experience he joins us now live from san francisco california thank you so much for being here so why why why is college now worth it. we've got people wanting too little and paying too much the cost of college and increasing right first rate of inflation and academically adrift a report that was released by richard armitage what you found and facts thirty six percent of college students over the course of four years showed all group critical thinking complex reasoning or or writing which may be true but at the same time in the society we value our college degree is you know if you don't have the prestigious little piece of paper and employers not even to look at your resume so how do you overcome that obstacle though i think that's changing and increasingly

in the tech community here in silicon valley. hiring history has come to be much more about what you can do not where you went to school and that's why we're building form to allow everybody to develop and demonstrate their talent nontraditional ways but we also don't want to do is that all of a lifelong learning experiences because learning happens everywhere and everywhere whether it's on the trip that you took to florence or the wedding that you organized for a thousand people there are valid learning outcomes but they may just not happen in the classroom i mean i agree with getting up to that point we do learn from a much broader array of experience this is just what school has to offer the same time you give silicon valley as an example i mean there's a reason why there aren't that many mark zuckerberg who also famously dropped out of school and because it's difficult to come up in these kinds of innovations everyone can't launch of the only successful dot com site so considering the fact that people do need to make ends meet we can't just live an optimism often an ism

doesn't pay the bills what they have turned up for for folks grounded in reality. so. then pink wrote a book a few years ago called the free agent economy which basically hypothesized that in the future those with great brain skills emotional intelligence creativity etc will rule the world as opposed to left brain skills which were popular in the last century and i think we're moving into an economy where it's not just about value creation in terms of our lot you know you can sure you can point to parks are preferred and big tech startups to talk about and point to well successes but the fact is not is that you know dropping out of school is not kill and to relegate you to a life and asking would you like fries with that it's perfectly possible to be. a happy medium life between work is october and working at mcdonald's where you can earn a respectable income and contribute to society by being independent ok are you talking about you know these articles and these books and you know what you need.

education to even be interested in picking up articles and books i mean isn't that what you dish logic for one could argue that if we didn't have these forms of schooling people would be i don't know partying and playing ball and and running around and in school teaches you this a plan how to read things you may normally not necessarily be exposed to how you respond to that school teaches you how to how to follow directions how to meet deadlines for the interaction people short those are things that can be learned over the course of a number of years not nearly two decades i realise i believe that people are naturally curious and if you give them the freedom to go out alone on their own they'll find something that's a passion about and be able to take that subject to much greater detail than if you were giving them material and prescribe it but they are but what about the theory that people are just settle for the easiest thing i mean if you look for example at mean stream media right we had this discussion in our editorial meeting so much why

is there so much talk about celebrities and pop culture and and fluff essentially instead of the real serious issues that matter to the world and one of the things that we've come to realize is that because that's what sells advertising that's what people gravitate to so if it's easier to pay attention to the fluff in the society what gives you confidence that folks will seek out the more complex ideas of if that's not easily accessible. and i guess what what i have to go back to is pointing out that maybe that's not for us maybe maybe there's more value in what we consider fluff than that and we traditionally give all of our educational sumption so based on the ideas that we doctors and lawyers and engineers. professions that are technical and and well we're going to actually make an impact and you know maybe it's ok if people want to listen to news. about. celebrities i guess yeah who knows maybe the next great american invention of being between lindsay lohan's legs i guess we'll have to wait and see and figure that one out but

again what about. why do you think it college is so expensive and college is so useless as you allege why do people continue to shell out this money go into debt and continue down the path that eventually necessarily bring in the kinds of benefits that are dead i don't know thirty years ago it's it's because no one has told the top people that there's an alternative to homeschooling movement. and i came out of that movement but still assume that going to college was the opposite path to professional success and what i came to understand was that i wasn't learning anything college i was learning how to turn in my homework assignments and i'd already mastered years and years ago i wasn't being able to take my ideas and there were people of course with changing ideas but they weren't taking those out and executing and i just think that if we could get people out of the class or into the world i imagine the human potential that we could not unleash it's being squandered on homework assignments all right well

a lot of human potential i like your optimism i don't know how folks pay their bills with their artemas them but if you do discover what next innovation will find in lindsey lowe hand or the celebrity culture you better give us a call back that have you back on the program who thank you so much for the health event the leader of the un college movement. well from higher learning to high above the earth about three men are about to realize their dream of launching into space after months of hard work as blast off looms here we take a look at the long road that led these astronauts into orbit or to correspondent lindsey france doesn't work from baikonur. it's go time for the crew of expedition twenty eight to the international space station in the final days and hours leading to blast off it's all come down to one thing for the team quarantine a hallmark of any space program. welcome to a little bit of the year in the way it is for motor cars or anything like that or questions we had a chance to work out with

a chance to explain that. they took a great way to get ready to go fly in space. that's right. shooting pool. working out. and playing with their custom made space suits in a fight to retain muscle mass for the six months in zero gravity physical exercise occupies a surprising amount of time and it's difficult such. a doctor wants to find new advances in medicine using outer space. volkov wanted to follow in his father alexander's footsteps as a cosmonaut but it was a secret from senior only found out by flipping through applicant files. and if you were i saw a personal file with the name sergei volkov on it but he didn't even know what would become a page and some of his pictures that's why i feel completely shocked and dumbfounded i genuinely never expected this to happen i feel very proud but it gave

way to worry because i know the space travel is very dangerous and you i would worry whenever you saw a space trip. for mike fossum as an american boy growing up in texas launching the moon landing page his way to the stars and i remember you know watching that and just my mind just exploding it was somehow a few months later through the schools we had a program where you could buy very simple little paperback books and i got a book on the first moon landing and i remember sitting in my bed reading this book at night just just dreaming about it i was twelve years old at the time and when i pulled out a pen i wrote inside the cover of this book you know you know i've witnessed all of the things that took place in here and someday i too will reach to the stars at a time he never expected it would be ross cosmos the russian space agency to be helping to take him there with nasa to wind up its space shuttle program cosmos may offer the only way to space now for astronauts but parts or us it also offers one

of the most expensive four day big patients many of them have ever taken it costs thousands of dollars to view a launch in kazakstan but dozens have shown up to do it alexander preview nischelle left russia for new jersey seventeen years ago wasn't going to miss out look it's almost like a rocket society just like. there's a lot of people and so you were there so it's really good spins back in quarantine the crews don't get to see their lucky yet they're separated from loved ones by glass waiting just hours for the adventure to finally get lindsey france r t backing off possible drone because it's not. all right well that does it for now for more on the stories that we've covered things that are to dot com slash usa and check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america and if you want to join the conversation then you can follow me on twitter it's at.