happy birthday mr president as obama rings in the big five zero the american people are left with very little to celebrate as the economy is seriously over the hill record climate so will a new year bring a wiser president. wants ever wonder what you could do with a trillion dollars well for the military that's easy just by roughly twenty five hundred fighter jets so why then are those jets not even being used. some men say there is a crown but when it comes to marriage in russia many men are saying more lives the merrier and some women agree so should the u.s.

jump aboard the polygamy and right here. it's thursday august fourth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for and watching our team. today is also the day our president president obama turned fifty it's a big day for him after the stressful couple years he's had he deserves a great birthday and some wonderful presence but the reality is the president has been given quite a few gifts he probably wishes he didn't have to open an unemployment rate that continues to hover above nine percent a stock market that plunged more than five hundred points today and close down for the ninth consecutive day its worst one day slide since two thousand and eight also a federal reserve that seems to be stuck in the mud a cloud of uncertainty and extremely slow growth that's according to some new

numbers released by the commerce department that during the second quarter the economy grew by just one point three percent making just eight tenths of a percent annual growth rate far less than the two point five percent pace that is needed to keep unemployment from rising but i guess it's no wonder that even president obama's own former director of national economic council larry summers says the u.s. appears extremely vulnerable to another recession a one in three chance in fact he says so what should we make of all of this well earlier i spoke to dean baker co-director of the center for economic policy research here is his take on the debt ceiling circus. it's absurd it ever escalated to the extent it did because this is always been routine passage congress we've raised the debt ceiling i think was ten times in the last decade i forget the exact number i mean this is we're arguing over sending in the check you know if you want to argue over whether you should buy the car you know you know buy a house that's fine but we already bought it so that this is simply pain pain bills

so it was really kind of ridiculous and the real tragedy of it is that with the economy basically stagnant the unemployment rate rising recreating very few jobs congress and the president were locked in this ridiculous debate which was not to do any good offer the economy the real question was how much harm would it do absolutely and i know we had you on this show here on our team just a couple months ago and you laid out sort of a predicts sense for how this would play out i want to play this next year and then think about it. you envision those two two series basically one is that they come to some sort of deal in the not too distant future they'll turn it was you actually get to that stand alone august second i know it's a hard and fast deadline but somewhere there are about and at that point secretary geithner personally make some statements saying look we owe x. tens of billions of dollars have to be paid in three days there's no money in the bank i can't pay that and at that point the financial markets go nuts so be just like what happened when the charge was voted down the first time it happened to

wall street people are scared to do this sort of speaker boehner and cantor mcconnell so you better pass something or this is it and my guess is appoint people running back all right so what do you think what was how it ended up playing out what you expect is always pretty close to that because there are a lot of reports i don't mean inside access for a lot of reports the weekend before the green and a lot of wall street people were calling boehner and other top members of congress and saying you know we need a deal and you know they did come to one so so yeah i think was pretty much on schedule you know the exact timing you know you could say but it was pretty much on schedule let's kind of look at some of the main arguments in the nuts and bolts of these discussions over the last few months regarding the debt ceiling i know of course you know spending cuts were absolutely on the table revenue increases were also on the table as we know those didn't end up happening just the spending cuts i know that you have argued in the past that what this economy really needs is more demand and more demand what has to come from our government spending and that seems

to me just to be a very unpopular idea congress would have to get involved and it just seems very unlikely so your suggestion seems very unrealistic what's what how do we actually do this how do we actually put this into place how do you get around it well i mean it would be great if you know president obama's really bad and i give him a lot of blame on this because it really began when the argument for stimulus you got his bill back in february of zero nine to step he got in office and he knew. you know secretary summers or national is the national security economic adviser larry summers you know has said this christina romer is chief economic advisers they also they knew it wasn't enough so rather than going out and saying hey great first step we're likely going to be more we have a really big hole and everyone who was in his five point has been off just one month this isn't big enough you instead say no green shoots a recovery we're on the way and he should have known this was the numbers to show that right if you look at when the stimulus went into place and sort of when the money started running out there was you know some signs that the economy was

improving right now so it helped i don't think there's any doubt about it when you look at the numbers and some people have done some carefully kind of metric research it definitely an impact they produce to create somewhere in the order of two to three million jobs that seems very much in the ballpark of problems we need someone the order of ten to twelve million so two to three millions are great but when you need ten to twelve it's clearly not enough but again let's talk about today and moving forward i mean that's just not feasible we have the republicans in many ways winning the message war saying that we need to prevent tax cuts or tax increases on some of these larger companies because after all they're the job creators if we give them tax you know a boost in taxes nobody's going to create jobs so that argument seems to be kind of what you hear across the board when you kind of look at it is funny because most of them seem like they're old enough for a member of the ninety's you know we had higher taxes and we're creating three million jobs a year and we should remember the last decade when we cut taxes and include any jobs but they have a side so you go ok so what are we going to it's

a simple one you can create spend but there's a number of things you could try to do and you have to try to do something one you could try and follow the path that's been very successful as for most importantly germany works here it's actually part of the unemployment insurance program and i think it's twenty states now president obama could try and promote try and push it did doing that instead of companies laying off workers they reduce work hours every month we have two million workers that are dismissed from their job they're laid off or fired if you can reduce that by ten percent that's the same thing as creating two hundred thousand. i don't know if that's a realistic target but the point is that there's a lot of jobs being watched that is also going on i mean are we seeing certainly when we talk about government workers we see things like furlough days and things like that but aren't a lot of people also you know what we call underemployed they're full time hours of switch to part time you do see a lot of that i'd like to see a lot more in the sense that if the alternative is going to person or if you're much better off going to part time that someone's going to be happy if they're counting the paycheck for forty hours a week but if they get a ten percent cut in hours and

a five percent cut in pay i think most people consider that much better than being laid off altogether and you pointed germany and many ways they seem to be a country that a lot of people are looking at as setting a lot of good examples i want to look to two currencies around the world and so it's weeks from the global economist nouriel roubini today he said it basically q e three has already started in japan and switzerland but the fed will eventually get to it too but it may be too late so i want to talk to you about your thoughts on the swiss and the japanese devaluing their currency against the dollar and if you think that another round of quantitative easing here in the u.s. is necessary and if it is necessary when the timing should pay well i understand both japan and switzerland doing other currencies have been rising especially switzerland certainly hurt their trade situation the u.s. is the country of course with the big trade deficit so we have solution b. we can get the value of the dollar down and part of that story would be q e three that will have some impact that by itself is going to do it this again is an area

we're really going to drama for being just horribly negligent he's got a concern in the federal reserve board he doesn't even have a nomination now i understand republicans are being obstructionist to wherever he puts up unless you know maybe if you put up john boehner you know you point go did prove him but you know who every puts out they're going to give a bad time no doubt about it if you don't even put someone out there you can't blame the republicans so he should be having in his nominees out there and he should be leaning on the fed the conservative certainly leaned on the fed about q.e. two my god they're blaming it for everything. in the world you know there is always blame just for the earthquake in japan i mean you know so they put a lot of pressure on her not invaded difficult for him not to be more aggressive he should be out there you know they had this idea that said being independent or not the fire going to the point is to say here's what we think the state should be doing laying out the case for the public which he's not done it all and that was dean baker co-director of the center for economic and policy research when it comes to making decisions about how to dig this economy out of the deep deep hole within

there are fewer of suggested making p.c. cuts to the area that make up more than half of the total discretionary budget and twenty percent of the total budget i'm talking about dissent spending despite involvement in three wars even secretary of gates during his time in office said you know there's no need to return to a cold war levels of defense spending still i can tell you one person who hates the idea of cutting defense the new secretary of defense leon panetta he spoke today about the broad and growing range of challenges our military must be prepared for he also spoke about the dangers if congress fails to enact other measures to reduce the deficit if it did happen it would result in a further around the very dangerous cuts across the board. defense cuts that i believe would do real damage to our security our troops and their families and our military's ability to protect the nation and this is

a really important topic and joining me now to talk more about this is lawrence korb senior fellow at the center for american progress tactic or thanks for being here you served as assistant secretary of defense under president reagan you know a great deal about this i want to get your take on what we heard today from secretary of defense panetta well the secretary took france panetta is trying to basically keep the spirits up of the organization who took over what is former director of o.m.b. he knows that the defense budget now even if you control for inflation is higher at any time since the end to world war two it is higher than it was at the height of the reagan buildup so yes we can afford to cut it but and then of course he's playing the family card well we've got to take care of military families nobody's talking about doing any and anything anything like that those of us who work in you know with the bowles simpson deficit reduction commission and all the various other groups that have looked at looked at that so how you can do it without really

hurting military families i know that president obama has said before that he's not opposed to cutting military spending. you know that this is some place that could be looked at and we did hear from him back in april joining us pete on fiscal policy let's listen to a little bit of what he had to say so just as we must find more savings in domestic programs we must do the same in defense and we can do that while still keeping ourselves safe over the last two years as secretary bob gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending saving four hundred billion dollars in current and future spending. i believe we can do that again i believe we can do that again this is back in april have you seen anything that shows that we are going in that direction first of all that secretary gates didn't say four hundred billion dollars he pretended to save it by you know announcing that weapons were already going to

be cancelled he was going to cancel they weren't even in the program he found one hundred seventy billion dollars in efficiencies but he proud one hundred billion back into other other other new new programs. not president obama said back in april is very similar to what they agreed is the first part of the deficit deal that the fence will actually security spending will be cut by three hundred fifty billion dollars over the next decade security spending also includes veterans that includes the state department it includes the foreman of homeland security so it's very similar to what he said that but i think the key thing to keep in mind is that when they talk about cuts up until now they talked about we do seeing the project that level of increases not cutting when you and i talk about cutting means we're going to get less hour that we got last week well in that if i'm surprised that it means we won't get as much as we thought we're still going to get more i think that it's risen every single year at for at least the last thirteen years or two years

has gone up in real terms you know when i worked for president reagan it went up for years but then we had the big deficit so we cut it the next four years so you can you can do that in this idea that somehow you're going to have all these apocalyptic scenarios it normally happens where people say that but we've done it before and you know what g. we won the cold war you know what when richard nixon left office you can't call him soft on the feds we were spending in today's dollars three hundred fifty billion two hundred trillion plus the responder now what you need is good management and put out a lot of good get some people who can keep up with systems growth under control and not buy weapons we don't need the speaking of weapons we don't need i want to take a look at the specific. the grand our defense budget spends money on some of the most expensive aircraft in the world i'm talking here's one example the f. twenty two one hundred eighty seven were purchased at a cost of seventy seven point four billion dollars there's also the effort thirty

five the government purchased nearly twenty five hundred of those with a cost of one trillion dollars now something unique the reason i point these two aircraft out is because both of them i know the f. it twenty two has been grounded for a while i think yesterday the f. thirty five has been grounded so these are aircraft that are not being used in the most expensive talk about that as it relates to wasteful spending well what happened is after the events of september eleventh that sense a problem didn't have to make any hard choices and they did not pay attention to the weapons programs that they had their own business board to find support and has won the points by the secretary of defense said you have four hundred billion dollars in cost overruns you spent fifty billion dollars on weapons that you've already canceled so no they haven't been managing the department and you know it's interesting if you go back and look at our history when richard nixon came in he appointed a.t.f. to the secretary of defense and that's the key position david packard for beulah

tucker the whole example to cut the budget and get the weapons systems done and get them done on time you know who was a great secretary of defense boys preservation up and say dick cheney because you quoted gone out with some general motors and they got spending under control. you know a lot of companies that the u.s. pays big bucks to manufacture these weapons these are not competitive in the global market these are not weapons that we're selling to other countries or even equipment that we're selling to other countries lie is that the u.s. makes so many things that we're not able to then make money off of well we do sell them and i think it's important to my we're the world's largest arms export i mean we sell an awful lot of weapons around the world and the defense. i would like to do that because that you reduces the unit cost to a good weapon so that we buy for example that you have thirty five of the joint strike fighter is going to be poured so coldly by about fourteen you know there are other countries we sell the f. fifteen around the world but you have sixty that's that's really not the not the

issue the issue is can we get the weapon systems on the controls with the american taxpayer has without the paid war for them just we are out of time just a little notes bloomberg did some number crunching and they found that the spending on missile defense over the last twenty seven years including the next year is one hundred fifty billion that's the same as the apollo space program kind of interesting when you put it all in perspective dr lawrence korb senior fellow at the center for american progress. so i had your honor are to you for the expression happy wife happy life so what happens when you have more than one credit even more the merrier i'll take you to russia where the odds seem to be working out a whole lot from. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through get through to me who can you trust no one who is you know if you were with the local mission

would see where we had a state controlled capitalism it's called satchels when nobody dares to ask you r t question more. my . now.

well in russia women outnumber men by about ten million leaving many worried where this will leave the country in terms of the future birthrate and population growth many single bachelorettes there are often left to clamor over just a few eligible bachelors so some men are found solutions of us especially to those women throwing all them themselves of their feet polygamy r.t. correspondent maria finish and shows us why some men are saying the more the merrier. eat and drink a father of three and husband of three another years ago and dre got married two years own pace again and then again. why should i reviewed any of them if i love them all really why the country's demographic realities and resigned according to the latest census there are ten million more women in russia and there i mean the shortage of supply leads to the need for sharing a concept and raise right say they've made peace with the earth but i thought he

was getting there realizing he wasn't i never expected something like this happening to me and it was how they used to you know if you love me you'll understand we never fight for underway i have a quarrel but there is no kind of competition either. and reconsiders himself and i are going to christian yet to his wife who brought up muslims but distribution of duties and conjugal delights within the household also lies in the islamic traditions. of what i make them all feel equal if one wants me to buy her something i will but i'll buy something of the same price for the other two as well we're going to build three houses and bought three apartments spare isn't it daughter as extraordinary as it seems andres example is not that train russia i mean a man our innovation sheets with several women at the time of course my sick e.p. their extramarital affairs secret. know in the morning as this may look strange i

agree which we consider it better to be a second or third wife rather than think you are the only one and be bitterly mistaken this can city of man is also be down to their propensity to need it was described as unhealthy behavior alcoholism and reckless driving is cheap in a way at the country's gene pool let me tell you my story twenty eight years old reasonably smart fella pretty and very compassionate yet i'm still single and right off of trying to. not to get in flea might add re year according to recent poll here in russia a reverie single man over thirty thousand of single women through on the lookout for their dreams then who is true love became an statistically challenging no wonder i don't want to ring abroad and then from russia who block east to go in strong. regional t. moscow so it's going on in russia and guess what and also going on here in the united states according to some figures there are as many as forty thousand

underground polygamists right here and who knows if all that includes the people who are i knowingly sharing their husbands with other women but still it's worth talking about all of us especially with the baby boomers and with so many more women working there's been a drop in the birth rate in this country over the last few years at times by as much as four percent so should we consider polygamy as at least one idea to stimulate the population by not earlier i spoke to death there at a family and criminal defense attorney i started off our conversation by asking him to lay out the legal arguments of his pro polygamy position take a listen well it's basically it's based on the right to contract which is in the u.s. constitution and family law in the united states this is run by the states each state does its own family law and family law and crew just contractors if there's settlement agreements so this really is consistent with the american tradition of contract law. and family law contracts but the army of legalized polygamy it starts

at the age of consent and i think that's very important we talk about rates a lot and people say well you're right such the tip of my nose we understand that metaphor same thing with polygamy this argument of an orthodox or plural marriage property or. stops at the age of consent even if it were legal so you're really looking at this in terms of simply a contractual obligation and certainly thirteen year old boys or girls don't really have the right to be involved in signing contracts like this. you know they don't have the capacity that's the legal term they don't have the mental capacity to contract and actual adultery eighteen in most states and washington state for example you can get married at seventeen. but you think she should have to be eighteen and that this is an issue of a contract and you know i i get your argument the constitution may be king care but i also want to weave in this i mean in this country we view ourselves as

a society and i think it would be easy for example to use freedom of expression as a great reason why people should be able to walk down public streets naked but as a society we've agreed that that's not how we choose to live there are countless other examples like this so don't you think that this should factor in you know that this should be taken into account it's not just constitution we also need to to make this not a black and white issue and weave in how we want to operate and be as a society. i don't think so you know i do think it's a right it's an alternative lifestyle it should be protected as long as it's victimless as long as there's no rape going on or false imprisonment or forcing young girls. it should be legal and. just like when you legalize something you take it out of the market the black market legalizing prostitution for example we found that underage prostitution goes out the window when you legalize and regulate it and the same with polygamy i think you see underage involvement. drop as

polygamists came out from underground they were more likely to report the message my allowance re underage stuff but when you criminalize it you force it underground and i think that's an open using to have a very you know sort of constitutional perspective that i know in the report we did show that another argument was that in russia there is simply a shortage of men and so this sort of supply leads to the need for sharing and you think there's also as a valid argument that it you know is out of necessity and you know here in the u.s. with a drop in a birth rate maybe that could be a reason too. absolutely what happened in russia is great is the free market of dating if you will supply demand men die it will live longer than men don't war they don't work and the first minute if you just keep chugging along in our lives the ratio will benefit us so there russia that's happening and looking at these very practical market based response to supply demand there let's just talk and i'm kind of a realistic ground here i mean certainly we can argue legally we can even argue

society only but you know this woman in the end the report said oh you know there's no competition between us but i don't think that that's very normal that in the united states of america that we when see you know whether it's a woman having several husbands or the opposite i mean we know that in our nature even animals get jealous and you know don't you think that this could also lead to a lot more i don't know strangling of the other wife or or anything like that i mean i just it's very hard for me to swallow that women won't you know the woman would allow this or men would allow this and i think you're right i think even if it were legalized i think culturally we only remain one or two or three percent and if he was studying anthropology you look at polygamy and polyandry spin around for every human culture but it's been kind of rare in pockets here and there. but i especially american women in their independent it's your typical american woman you with a good luck you know want to go into something like this but it's not turn of lifestyle

you would see a one two three percent. and that was death jared family and criminal defense attorney and there is much more than just the legal standpoint here sticking to the subject of polyamorous relationships earlier i spoke to mark hank all the national polygamy advocate and founder of truth bear about org he had a different kind of argument and i asked him about his take on why this should be more prevalent. mentioned the idea of a shortage of russian leading really does not just a matter of a shortage of. but actually the shortage of men and women which is actually quite a lot different than we've. created a society. where males in our society or work it into their lives but as adults. not really we're not allowing any more laissez faire in terms of what this program free choice. women choose. and we create or your.

belief is really not about equality for the men and good for the actually. the best and the jury. we want. for women. around our choice of living. we want a rational a very interesting argument there and i'm assuming that you think this should be across the board that women should be able to have multiple husbands as well. as the national. action for the consenting adults we've. been influenced and we look at every state all that is always on your wrist over unrelated to thirty dollars so whether you are listening which is one language. are we entering this. week whatever consenting adults we go from involvement with. or we will try for in

the house ocular is argument i argue we have a large following i mean a lot of people associate polygamy with mormons and i know that there are some people that are muslim that think this is ok as well but what about this as a non-religious argument what about just as a sort of societal argument are you getting followers here was the word actually because i am an even jodrell christian and not about anonymous will that work out according to the national things which i question. christian. because i come from the same area or quickly the same thing every battle or were the only solution to go forward conservatism is going to be a limited government solution so ultimately i never would think the original model didn't lucian that allows only. remember government services were going to get. sold in america are we thinking.