people in certain behaviors and really get down to the long run holiday you know in this town the senators and members of the house of representatives spend between thirty and seventy percent of their time that's that's the spread i mean it's actually been analyzed depends on the state that they're from and how tight the race is but it's between seventy and thirty percent of all their time while they're working in the city inner office offsite dialing for dollars that's insane and they're down for dollars from people who want something in a do you know in exchange for those dollars it's not just you know so it out there you should tax people more suggesting taxes well i'm saying public funding is the only other way to pay for campaigns if you don't get it from private donations and at least what i have exaggerations people can support who they like or you could do like mccain feingold did and limit the amount of the nations just say you know five hundred bucks no independent about expenditure limit list of nations but complete transparency well that's a possibility and that might and that might actually work if you could enforce the transparency the problem is you've got like the chamber of commerce where you know

even their offshore subsidiaries can can can launder money through them and you never have any idea where it came from i just think that you're going to bundling money right now he'll say hey it's my money he's got two hundred million bucks but how do you know we're really came from this what i'm saying like i think with all the regulation just like with the tax code it's complicated so people hire these fancy boyer's to find loopholes and we get it right crazier system than if we just had a flat tax or just something much simpler say with elections and they still buy loopholes from legislate i think a limitless well it's a little donations ok limitless. so you're in favor of the billion dollars if you want to get all in origin to somebody you should be free to do that and therefore the the ninety five percent of americans who don't have a fortune are just out of work well i'm just saying be hard for somebody to own somebody then if you have donations coming from lots different sources then you know you can have one point one super pac whatever demanding that this i think if we do it your way that car. christmas should be required to wear nascar patches on

the congressmen house so i'm the one from exxon you know that many of polls out of florida now show that gingrich is in the lead national polls show that there's actually a dead heat between romney and knew something that was. but at what costs newt is calling the president the food stamp president in you know which has a. pretty clear i think a racial undertone to a plus here's this exchange with juan williams from last week's south carolina debate. speaker gingrich you recently said black americans should demand jobs not food stamps you also say poor kids lack a strong work ethic and propose having them work is janitors in their schools can't you see that this is at a minimum as in so think of all americans what particularly black americans. you know. why don't you. just say. black americans should demand

jobs not food stamps would be like my saying you know whether you should demand. to point this out you know you should demand jobs not food stamps and it implies that you're demanding food stamps and not jobs and that's a that's a pretty harsh thing to say and many would say a pretty racist thing to say so is race baiting i mean nixon called this is southern strategy he was going to go after after the the the old dixiecrats the democrats who were the racists and reagan perpetuated that his first speech was in philadelphia mississippi were mississippi burning where the three civil rights workers workers were murdered while to say this i'm not a gingrich apologist. i can't believe we're in the situation that we're in and if he's the nominee i think their public and party is toast are going to vote democratic no. i'm not going for i don't feel i'm definitely not that discouraged. but i do think though that you could argue that his claim about obama being the food stamp president is actually saying that more americans are on food stamps as

he has always had a greater problem sees as as a result of his continuing some bad policies in creating he went away going to have a sense that is just not true when he came into office we were losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month that's expanding the demand for food stamps we have had twenty two straight months of job private sector job creation that's diminishing the demand for food stamps but our unemployment is higher and the truth of the matter is that obama came in making a lot of promises and a lot of promises to the black community and you know what fifty percent of young black men are unemployed so they're not demanding food stamps they are demanding jobs but he's giving them food stamps instead of jobs and people need to wake up and say you know what this guy made a lot of promises and you ladies are lawyers and they are now you say government can't make jobs but you just said that he's not giving them jobs he's not even not creating the atmosphere for private business to come in he's picking winners and losers with the tax code. he's stopping things like keystone pipeline that would

have been private sector jobs what what can the president eliminate that's going to cause businesses to want to go into a poor minority area and set up shop well new york city they the city council prohibits businesses from opening unless they promise all these things that they are not in a financial position to deliver and you know what i mean when i say food no i mean like twelve dollars an hour minimum wage i mean like certain benefits where you're talking about people who have no job and they could have a job or somebody else so so if they're poor people in a minority are they should work for three bucks an hour not three bucks an hour but whatever the national minimum wage is instead of jacking it up to the new york level so it's better to be on welfare newly found to have a job making ten dollars an hour winds. it's better to be on welfare than make then make a job get a job and have no what i'm saying is that is that that government is not preventing

those businesses in jeopardy they are saying the structural racism is is is participating in that and the government could actually fix that lyndon johnson cut poverty among minority communities in by fifty percent do it states and create with affirmative action programs of the great society and what he did was he established the foothold for a great middle class the same way that before him harry truman with the g.i. bill created a huge middle class among white the largely white that want to establish themselves in harlem but the city council says no because they won't pay above the minimum wage that those businesses are discriminatory i'm saying if you can't run a business in a way that benefits the community you have no right to run the business then those people won't have jobs thanks to you in the liberals and that's sad and and that's i just don't think that that's the case i think with the where's there's demand you know people had money to buy things somebody will figure out a way to open a store and deliver it to them but the people don't have the money anyhow we have to go to our court for our quick for a question last question in an interview with c.n.n.

nancy pelosi said this about newt gingrich's chances of being president of united states. are going to be president of the united states this is and that's not going to happen now let me just make my prediction and stand by it isn't going to happen why so sure there's something i know they were public hence if they choose to nominate him and that's their prerogative i don't even think that's going to. there's something i know so the question is what does nancy pelosi have a new gingrich. possible answers a she knows that he asked his second wife for an open marriage with fannie mae before he discovered the fannie mae was a mortgage lender or he knows that when she knows that when calista said she was bringing home tiffany's new thought he hit the jackpot was going to have a threesome or c. she knows newt pays alimony to his ex-wives in food stamps do you think or other possibilities i think you know newt is jonah goldberg wrote today in its new villa

and the way that he disappears is he self destructs i mean i think that he's his own worst enemy and. self up well i mean i'm just saying regardless of what she has i think that he cannot survive krista nancy tell us now tell us now what you know that's not new to say yes please we want to know ok well and i think that it might have are again my theory as you know pigeons are actually spies sent here from the planet xenu the robots right you never see a dead pigeon if the baby pigeon obviously and nancy has newts real birth certificate he was born on the planet xena that's how i believe it ok. there's always both being with us tonight much appreciated. crazy alert it's time to get creative in handling budget deficits and debt city a bond germany has found

a new way to help out its debt problem prostitution taxes the city is introduced a system of curbside a stations from which sex workers are required to purchase tickets or permits in order to work the streets at night while taxing prostitution is nothing new in germany creating sex meters for those who work the streets and i definitely is. prostitutes a charge a flat nightly rate in order to work all night long the city collected nearly twenty thousand dollars in the machines in the last year and over thirty thousand dollars for all forms of prostitution taxi to accompany the machines the city built wouldn't garages around the machines or prostitutes can conduct their business and his pain for security guards to protect the prostitutes and in america oddly rumor has it that one of the most outspoken critics of the tax on prostitution in germany has come from the united states none other than disgraced senator from louisiana david vitter. after the break everyone knows eliminating the capital gains tax can help our economy grow and prosper don't conservatives want this for

a nation to ask our capitalist gains expert. let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here and. i think. he'd want to well. we never got there but says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you're going to their freedom.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture .

welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour spent trying year for the occupy movement and especially for the journalists covering it how have police actions against journalists affected freedom of the press in america also president obama talked last night about a critical trade off between tax rates and investment in our nation was he specifically referring to and how could doing away with that benefit our economic wellbeing and the future really lot of person star just assist us who is starving because we just continue to go hungry bless the approach behind one of our

allies economic decisions i'll let you know why they're wrong and what they should be doing. it was that is the end of the union address president obama talked about a critical choice that we as americans need to make about taxes and investment here in our nation here's what he said. right now because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates then millions of middle class households do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest americans or do we want to keep our investments in everything else like education and medical research a strong military. and care for our veterans while president obama was referring to

there is the tax loophole known as the capital gains tax or what i call the capitalist gains tax it's how mitt romney can make twenty one point six million dollars and yet only pay a thirteen point nine percent tax rate far lower than most middle class americans right now the capitalist gains tax is at the lowest it's been since the great depression and as the president pointed out this low tax rate on capital gains is sucking money out of our nation's ability to pay for everything from schools to the military to our nation's infrastructure so should we have more capital is gains tax financed with debt or tax cuts rather or should rich people pay their fair share so we can educate a new generation of scientists engineers and doctors here to offer his take on this is david selleck a federal tax practitioner and pro-business advocate david welcome. thanks for having me on i really appreciate the opportunity to discuss this issue ok great

david in one nine hundred eighty six ronald reagan equalize the capitalist gains tax with the ordinary income tax the he set them at the exact same level and in doing so he said his words this is fairness this is about fairness the people who are in their money with money pay the exact same rate as people who earn their money with their sweat now reagan is gone and that's all gone to hell they were both the twenty eight percent the capitalist gains tax was twenty percent when george bush came in it's now fifteen percent why should paris hilton only pay fifteen percent income tax on the money that she earns from her inheritance while she sit on her bottom around the pool in her bikini and and you or i or anybody else is working for a living should pay up to thirty six percent. why was ronald lazar address the real issue. ok ronald reagan he was a great man was wrong on this one particular issue and i have to tell you something

i take great exception to this misleading argument that the wealthy are paying a lesser amount it's just simply not true there is absolute equality in our tax code now if you had a ditchdigger supermarket clerk or a harvard law professor and they had the wherewithal to invest their money and the patience to keep that investment for longer than one year they would all be taxed at the same rate of fifteen percent and that is equality but the polarizing politics of our president would lead you to believe that equality is unfair and it's sad to see my way out of first well sure not all war is peace not all tax to fifteen percent as you know the capital gains tax is a graduated progressive tax just like the ordinary income tax so if you only earn five or ten thousand dollars where the capitalist gains you only pay you probably pay zero or less than one percent you've got to earn

a couple hundred thousand bucks or even a couple million dollars in capital gains before you start paying anything close to that fifteen percent i mean you know your tax credits you know this. so how to go out of the. i don't want to be pedantic with you but it is capital gains tax and if these people and that's not capitalist gains tax although we are a capitalist society like it or not we're actually not fewer than one percent of us our capital is david if you were to take this money out before a year it would be taxed at regular income rates now i know it's a popular argument because you've got a lot of people who feel there's an equity many of these people or largely hoping for a handout from mitt romney from from david let me just say that we just have a marriage because that's not going to just let me just ask the question one more time a very simple question why should somebody who makes their money with money pay

a lower income tax rate than somebody who makes their money with the sweat of their brow or their arm. but they don't because if they were to go out and get a job they'd pay the regular income tax rate on their earning harris health care is this is a fifteen percent money on the investments that she inherited i don't understand why she's safe when there's a drawl and the woman the gives us a month so that i can answer it you have fifty us like saying that's like when you hold up an example of the government paying four hundred dollars for a toilet seat ok it's just not the right using file investor the rank and file investor is a senior citizen who is dependent on those capital gains and you're going to end up putting them out on the dole if you're going to strip these elderly of their dignity ok david david we're out of time but i got your point you made it very well thank you very much for being with us today appreciate my appreciate it one of the few occasions in history ronald reagan in my opinion was right when he pointed out

the absurdity of capital gains taxes let's hope republicans revive reagan soon at least on this issue. not only did we hear the president's take on the state of the union but we also heard the republicans take on it when indiana governor mitch daniels gave the official republican response we also heard mr nine nine nine himself herman cain who had the official tea party response and yes cain did look right at the camera however less unexpected was the response from the occupy movement from washington d.c. in their response the movement's quote financially the state of the ninety nine percent is not strong that is an understatement never in our lifetimes of so many hardworking americans face so many difficulties so many uncertainties so many indignities it has been a very tumultuous year for the occupy movement and even more so for the reporters

and journalists who have covered the movement and its principles throughout two thousand and eleven reporters covering the movement were beaten arrested and ultimately prevented from reporting on police actions against occupy protesters we all remember mayor michael bloomberg says midnight raid on zuccotti park which more than two hundred peaceful protesters including dozens of journalists were arrested by police in riot gear as a result our nation's press freedoms have suffered a setback we like to think of ourselves as the most free nation in the world when it comes to the press but in reality we're not even close joining us to discuss more about the treatment of journalists in the united states today is delfina haugen the d.c. bureau chief for reporters without borders delphine welcome to the program thank you thanks for joining us you just released your press freedom index for two thousand and eleven where is the united states said how if we change from previous years and and why they us fell twenty three then play fifth here so in one year you have twenty seven nations intervene between us yes so no the u.s.

in or i won't index are at the forty seventh but the forty. it's not there's only thirty four countries in the o.e.c.d. you know the richest average of eighteen or index we have must know those one hundred and one hundred eighty so on the bottom of the east we have north korea for but why big change as you mentioned of course because of the large number of journalists who were arrested when they were covering the movement so as you say dozens where i arrested sometimes even exposed to. and sometimes even charged and so we think that it's good maybe just to remember that the freedom of expression and freedom of information is guaranteed by the us constitution and that as we don't have to do forget it but why the

big change so they say it's mostly because of all our rest around the occupy movements but also because all concerned were not addressed yet like the protection of services and. we used to have whistleblower laws here in the united states we no longer do yeah there is no federal shield law in the us. and that is to protect their sources and when i was there in most developed countries actually yes and when i'm i'm not talking like you like. specific cases like the new york times reporter james raisen wheezes we ask no to testify about his company don't try sources so we are talking about like real cases of thing is is the u.s. is part of this. does and does this have to do in any way i mean this this change in ranking. with the fact that the word press is blurring in the internet age

increasingly you know so. nobody gets five or ten articles published on the huffington post suddenly they're a reporter or they can be designated as such you know as opposed to it used to be you know only a journalism school graduate was a real reporter kind of thing. does that have anything to do with this it has a direct link to or you're right because reporters without borders were defending the least torah law yet but we are also defending our freedom of information which means that we will defend citizen who can be put in jail because they publish something on facebook and in the us things these kind of thing doesn't happen that we are all so alike following people who could be. in trouble if they publish an information right so so the concept of a citizen journalist is something that that you're respecting and frankly the world seems to be yeah really we we think that we have to defend

citizens they're in trouble they publish some information so when we have to defend them as if they were there when the police when or when the police are making their arrests in the occupy movement should they have should they i mean there were some reporters who had actually credentials should they have simply said ok your reporter you're not here when i write a roster is that what you're suggesting. so it's right that credential or professional journalist who are working for a well know newspapers or radio or t.v. has to be able to do their work but citizens who want to call verse. by movement as the same right and the same. fishery doesn't offer an expiration right thank you so much for being with us tonight thank you for the great work that you're doing thank you the press is the only industry specifically mentioned in our constitution that's how vital it is to our democracy and it must be protected. after the break

the united kingdom is trying and failing to use economic austerity to help its economy i'll show you why this is the wrong approach and what they should really do . let's not forget that we had an apartheid regime right here in the uk. i think the bombing is feeding on to well. whenever the government says they're going to keep you safe get ready because you

get your freedoms. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

a few days ago the indiana senate passed a law i call right to work for less they call a right to work by using the the half heartly law to exempt themselves from the nine hundred thirty five net national labor relations act yesterday the indiana governor and bush economic adviser mitch daniels and the republican did the republican rebuttal following the state of the union which in this mr w. . today the end in a house passed a right to work for less wall so now the senate the house this is the first time what makes this significant is that this is the first time

a right to work for less has come to a midwestern industrial state this represents a full out war on the right of workers to have democracy in the workplace and make money no mistake about it a workplace is not a democracy it is a kingdom. and you know with kings and lords and serfs and a union is a democracy where it is there's a majority vote to bring it into existence there's a majority vote for its leadership everything but conservatives don't believe in democracy they want plutocracy in the workers in the workplace those pesky workers who we can't have those pesky workers in charge of things tom friedman in cities new york times wrote praising workers being housed in dorms in the fact in a factory in the factory quarter so that they could be woken up at midnight to work a twelve hour shift to help out apple make their teen billion dollars on forty six

billion dollars of revenue a great idea for america you know why don't we just have our workers live right at the factories and wake them up in the middle of the night so that they can go out and make i phones by the way thirteen billion dollars profit of forty six billion dollars in revenue that's almost twenty five percent or maybe it's over they can't do the math that fast but it's in that neighborhood you would think that you know what you might make a little few billion dollars less but you could still be profitable if you made those things in the united states but that's not the idea of apple that's not the idea of tom friedman and that's certainly not the idea of mitch daniels or maybe it is from mitch daniels maybe says yeah let's make it the united states but less blood's bust these workers down to the point where they're making virtually nothing at all right to work for less is a destructive destructive institution or destructive idea law for the united states and we need to stop it.