well on to our bit of washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture tonight we debut a new segment the bigger picture or we'll have an in-depth discussion on how to address some of the most pressing concerns our nations facing in tonight's edition will discuss a variety of issues with our panel including the role taxes play in american society the amount of taxes the wealthy elite american wealthy elite should be paying to help the economy also last week a bombshell came out of hollywood with the announcement of tom cruise and katie holmes were divorcing but how would cruise's connections to the church of scientology affect their divorce and homes life after tom and how do you shut down

wall street's big banks you take all your money out of them so they have no business it's exactly what one city is doing and it's the best way to make sure big banks stop arming the american economy explained i still take. it we debut a new big picture segment meant to cut through the talking points and distractions we hear day to day on the mainstream news networks and get right to the heart of the big issues facing our nation right now calling it the bigger picture of the point is to have honest discussions and debates so that we can come up with real solutions that are obviously it often politically impossible and even some solutions that are outside the box this isn't about democrats versus republicans let's face it both parties have let this nation down in many ways this is about trying to get america out of a crisis and frankly the best way to start finding an exit out is to begin talking about it which is what we'll try to do right here tonight now to introduce our panel for the inaugural bigger picture michaele is labor journalist and staff

writer for in these times colonies the senior online editor at the daily caller and sam sax progressive commentator and writer welcome to all of you tonight we begin tonight with the issue of tact. today president obama called on congress to extend the current tax rates for all working americans are earning below two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year in this call for action the president also argued for letting the bush tax cuts expire for those making more than two hundred fifty thousand dollars effectively increasing taxes on the wealthy to where they were under president clinton i'm not proposing anything radical here i just believe that anybody making over two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year should go back to the income tax rates we were paying under bill clinton back when our economy created nearly twenty three million new jobs the biggest budget surplus in history and plenty of millionaires to boot. currently the top income tax rate in america the rate where the wealthiest among us pays is thirty

five percent looking all the way back to one nine hundred forty five when the top rate was ninety four percent other than appear in the one nine hundred eighty s. when president reagan cut the top rate down to twenty eight percent and by the way the richest people like mitt romney actually are paying twice what they are now because capital gains were also at twenty eight percent today's wealthiest americans are enjoying historically low tax rates and looking at the economics of it all our current top income tax rate hasn't really paid off at the top income tax rate of thirty five percent g.d.p. growth has been the slowest it's ever been compared to other top income tax rates so too has job creation our thirty five percent top income tax rate has produced the least number of jobs of any other income tax rate this is certainly going to be one of the top political debates heading into november what will be lost in between the accusations of class welfare and wealthy freeloaders is exactly what the purpose of taxes are to begin with as in what role the taxes play in a society a nation like ours and just how much should the very wealthy contribute in taxes

while still keeping our nation competitive in the global economy not only that is it even possible to raise taxes in america anymore so these are some of our questions vince i want to start with you what i see two roles for taxes one is to modify behavior the other is to pay for the cost of government what do you see as the role for taxes and you see them going beyond those two things or would you even dispute those two modifying behavior you'll have to elaborate a little bit on that paul for example you want you want businesses to invest in new equipment so you give them a tax that if you buy a new right you want people to buy a house and see a let them to act to deduct an interest on their income you want people to have kids so you give a tax break for it right it yeah i think most people see taxes as a as a means of having a government that works right so we expect that we are going to contribute taxes so that our government can efficiently use that money. in order to produce the goods and services that we expect and there are infrastructure associations with that i mean there are some very basic elements that most people i think at a bar

a bipartisan basis expect to be taken care of the roads should be taken care of the the ability to have access to adequate utilities should be taken care of there are police fire there's definitely elements there with the emergency services that should be taken care of so that's sort of what we agreed to as a community when we pay our taxes that we get those basic services in return and one of the the biggest issues of course is when people think that government inefficiently is pursuing the use of our tax dollars that's an issue people don't like to see their money wasted inefficiently and additionally people want to know why they have to pay more in taxes because taking tax money from citizens is a big deal to anybody that have your tax bill go up and that doesn't matter what income bracket you fall in people are concerned when the government says i want more of your money so it sounds like what you're saying is that. we all agree that we need to pay for the comments the disagreement is two is in two pieces one are we

doing a good job of administering the collins and you know i remember senator proxmire as golden fleece award there are people who call that out to say you know yes or no and then the other is where the comments begin and mike where do you see the comments beginning then do you know it's well i mean i think it's you know the german here vince was talking about taxes money being spent and efficiently you know if you look at g.e. paying a negative forty five percent tax rate so obviously negative negative there was they're getting their forty five percent of the you know they're getting the i'm feeling but looking back he saw that paying is effectively a negative forty five percent tax rate general electric the largest corporation in the world so this is certainly an area where we're not spending money efficiently and you know we've got to do something about taxes some of it is reason to have some of it is closing the loopholes on the type of things that mitt romney and general electric and only the other rich guys have enjoyed where they can get out of paying taxes. but if you look at the crisis confronting this country you know president obama was right when he was saying the private sector is doing fine i

don't argue for most workers in the private sector is not so great but in terms of hiring it has picked up the big drag has been consistently in public sector every months were losing tens of thousands of public sector jobs where we're getting tens of thousands of. private sector and this is the real drag on the economy it's all the layoffs and you know i saw an interesting story yesterday out of scranton pennsylvania joe biden's hometown where they're going to lower the pay of cops and firefighters and the minimum wage. and so now we're going to have guys that are cops and firefighters in scranton making as much emberg person in america scranton said why they simply don't have the money to pay anybody anymore so i think we're looking at a real crisis we're in are unable to do these taxes he's on and he's trying to get the city council to raise property taxes i mean his hands are sort of tigers the only things you can raise are property taxes and garbage taxes really parking meters and stuff like that he doesn't have the broader discretionary powers of the

state of pennsylvania does sam wasn't there a federal effort to help out cities and states they got shot down yes i mean the rule of hiring cops and teachers is normally been left in a state level but once the economy went into meltdown mode in two thousand and seven the federal government said well we need to provide some aid to these states to stop the you know the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs that was done through the stimulus in two thousand and and nine. you know that was just the bare minimum that needed to be done for state relief since in the you know the president proposed american jobs act which provided a lot more money to the states but that has been able to pass congress i mean if you you know you could argue that that what isn't even enough to do what needs to be done but you know it's been said we need governments we need we need revenue coming in and government to be run more efficiently well here we have in scranton. cops and firefighters i mean those seem like critical elements of government that can't even be paid for because there is not enough revenue coming in because for

the last several decades you've had republicans and democrats being forced to run on a platform of tax cuts which is fairly irritants listener is there a point were were you get negative official season in scranton i think is a great great example is if you look at other countries germany has a much higher tax rate than we do brazil has a much higher tax rate than we do they're both growing like crazy and doing just fine thank you very much what are we what are we missing what are we missing in terms of and terms of our governance compared to europe is i mean terms of our tax dollars are america i was you know yeah you're right about that at all but i mean these are two countries that where you know where the marginal tax rates are much higher than are right and and in fact one of the you know just this iconic moment i think it was on. there was a guy out of singapore i think it was bloomberg news was interviewing a wealthy german industrialist and kept saying don't you want are you concerned about the fact you pay more than fifty percent in income taxes and the third time this guy was asked if he kept blowing the question off the third time he was asked

he said i don't want to be a rich man a poor country. is there's something to be said for. maybe i mean that's the guy's personal opinion what i do know is that the united states has to take on i think this is kind of a watershed moment i think for the united states any time that you have economic struggle it causes people to reassess politically and just across the board so what you have now is states and localities who by the way can't spend money like the federal government they can't build up these massive debts they have to actually play by their policy they can float to bonds to to an extent but what you're left with is a town like scran that's come under such a budget crunch that they actually have to assess how much for paying for essential services and in order to make sure that those services continue they have make decisions like do we bring down wages in order to continue that i think that that's a terrible place to be but i would i would say as somebody i tend to be more conservative i would say that there are free market solutions that exist that specifically result if you don't revolve around improving the economy in order to bring bring in more revenue what's the solution for screen the solution first rand

is that the country needs to improve scranton these to improve the i mean in terms of in terms of business across the board and does that mean more taxes bringing manufacturing because that means higher taxes and i don't think that's a that's a logical solution in order to raise taxes in order to take from a pool of money that continues to continue is being the blinded by an economy that's only treading water. you know that i mean if you look at the state of pennsylvania my home state a real big issue is that you've got a whole big industry the fracking industry that's not taxed at all and that's a bit of huge amounts of tax breaks right outside a screen right on the doorstep that if you started actually could bring in tens of billions of dollars for the state of pennsylvania. so it's not it's not an issue you know i do think we need to taxes on the ridge but i think there's a bigger issue of just getting corporations to pay any taxes at all like you brought up a good point or is and now you're if you're echoing the same point you've made before which is that there are loopholes out there that exist for corporations

across the board and what needs to be done instead of people being cherry picked my guy was having a conversation i barely. and the concept you may even know about this but that these these two like wealthy like sugar guys that live in florida are like running the corn syrup industry in the united states and just like these absurd kind of like loopholes and tax systems that we have that favors certain individuals certain companies find what needs to be done is these loopholes need to be x. and tax rates across the board need to be brought down the need to you need to invite companies into the united states with a low corporate tax rates that way we're competitive in the world i think there's any should have for dinner this is a loan up i mean people in congress or corporate tax rates have you know gone down considerably since from where they were in the nineteen fifties and as they've gone down payroll taxes especially gone up so working people who actually can contribute to corporate corporate taxes going down and besides you know funding governments taxes play an important role in making sure wealth is more you can be distributed throughout the country if you look at any you cannot make system in modern era wealth has turned aggregate at the very very top where there's little doubt and

that's right and that's an area where we would get a good debate i'm guessing from you vince but we've got to move on to the next topic more of tonight's bigger picture discussion right after. this hasn't been a thing yet on t.v. . it is to get the maximum political impact. the source material is helps keep journalism on us. we want to present. something else. down to your social implications. from the.

video on. since feet now with the palm of your. comb. go back to monday's bigger picture panel i'm joined by my calculator journals and staff writer for in these times vince collin a senior online editor at the daily caller and sam sex progressive commentator and writer let's turn to the issue of the economy in particular the role working people play in our economy to mention

a little bit last segment in scranton pennsylvania despite winning the legal battle police and firefighters unions have lost a battle with the city over their wages last week the mayor of scranton chris doherty announced that the pay of three hundred ninety eight unionized public workers would be slashed out of the minimum wage to seven dollars twenty five cents an hour the mare argued his city simply cannot afford to pay the unionized workers any more money indians are also suffering in other cash strapped cities in detroit financial managers are laying off hundreds of unionized teachers shutting down public schools and replacing them with private charter schools the paid nonunion teachers less and have a much higher turnover rate of teachers have also seen the decline of organized labor on a state level across the united states from wisconsin where collective bargaining rights were stripped from public sector unions to indiana which just this year became a right to work state there are now twenty three states in america that have adopted a right to work i call it right to work for less laws which make it a lot harder for unions to operate in the post world war two era working americans

were able to achieve a comfortable middle class life. well with a decent paycheck largely thanks to unions but since one nine hundred eighty union rates especially in the private sector have rapidly declined and right alongside that decline so has the middle class a share of national income more than a third of the workforce in america belong to a union in the one nine hundred fifty s. during the republican president eisenhower's time but today it's a rabbit out of the workforce and less than seven percent of private workers belong to a young union currently so what impact has the destruction of organized labor had on our economy and our communities is it time to begin thinking about new ways to organize labor beyond the traditional union model or conversely as unions have declined in corporate power increased is a start time to start rethinking the idea of corporate capitalism altogether like you've just recently written a piece for her i think was for these times winners about how the erosion of union

labor here in the washington d.c. area contributed to the long recovery times from these awful storms we had a week ago friday. give me a give me a recap of that and your take on. what the solution should have been or could have been so basically in the in the d.c. area you had some people waiting as much as six days when i wrote when i published a story last friday it was six days later and they were still sixteen thousand people without power and there'd been tens of thousands of people without power for days hundreds of thousands you know for two or three days at a time and i talked to some utility workers at work on this and they said the big issue is in the last fifteen years the local utility company which has a monopoly on the area has reduced its number of alignment we're going to repair these lines in half so they have half the staff they had fifteen years ago to fix these things which are more people now that they're serving yeah you got more

people than the amount of people who are saving has gone up dramatically as more people who've been to the city and they've been laying off. people and then what they do when they have to do these projects in order to meet reliability standards is the hire a lot of temp nonunion contractors they're inexperienced and you know travel around the country looking for work come and go so the quality of the work has gone down as well so whatever it is pepco been showing a profit during this time are they doing this in response to losing money when the last two years pepco shown a profit of eight hundred twenty two million dollars so they're making yeah left over after last two years that's what they're looking at a profit that. spread to certainly making money and they're making money in large part because of government subsidies pepco had a fifty seven percent tax rate negative fifty seven percent tax rate in the last year so they got a lot of money back so essentially you know pepco is being heavily subsidized so why should i be passing it on to their employees and so the big why aren't they

well i mean they've they want to make money they want to make a lot of money i mean there is a fully private corporation this is not a quasi way which should be noted can be regulated by the government to a certain degree but the government hasn't stepped in in this situation and mandated that it be so many union workers and what's interesting about the pepco struggle is despite the fact that we see in d.c. as well as other countries around the u.s. how important utility is is and how much longer outages are getting they're trying to cut back on living standards so now pepco is trying to have the power. to unilaterally make any change to the health and retirement benefits during the life of the contract which you. know quite the bargain essentially a scott walker kind of situation where the company can step in and you've got to ask yourself how do you retain trained utility workers and i think the past week for d.c. residents many of whom did not have power how do you pay people if you don't have if they don't feel like they have a say in the workplace well i think one of the issues you have with pepco ease that

they have an absurd arrangement but the state of maryland they. an absurd relationship with them they have as mike noted a monopoly first of all most utilities do they do you want only have one wire coming to your house right but you don't but that doesn't you can have multiple companies that contribute power to that wire i mean you can have i mean that's why some some areas are actually talking about ways that you can generate energy contributed to the grid so i mean just yet one wired right but that's the infrastructure there there's all sort of you could bring in competition and you could have competitive enterprise when it comes to power for want for another twenty major cities in america i don't offer that man for another you can have and you have pepco who's who's c.e.o. they're just making basically what's going to become is because they are so secure about the state of maryland they're just paying their executives ridiculous amounts of money and they're not actually investing in infrastructure the way they should any official company should know that seventy mile per hour winds may come through at one point and you should have a response time that's that's effective when your neighbor isn't part of that

response time what mike was talking about having having an infrastructure a human infrastructure yes absolutely but that human infrastructure could include actually bringing in workers from other states what they've done what tepco has done is they don't even care about the timetable they're delaying the timetable on repairing because they like we don't have to rush people in which is which is why we saw is that people in from out of state but it still took them three days to get going not to the extent that you saw dominion power and baltimore power companies do they ended up they threw a lot more money at bringing people into the area whereas pepco paste itself out and said we'll do what we can and by the way that goes asking for like a fee increase from its users that like it's one of the most backward companies in america in fact i think it was business insider that said they were the worst company in america so for years you know i don't want to get too much in the weeds here i mean we've got people all over the world watching this program who don't have any idea of pepco is but the larger issue is you know is it with we're seeing this destruction of the unions is the era of unionization over and if so how sam let me toss this to you how could workers have

a say in the way. they are good is that even important an important thing and i think it's very important i mean i was briefly talking about wealth inequality before i think there's a few things that contribute to better wealthy quality that's you know stuff like progressive taxation stuff like social safety nets to help people get a start and also organized labor you need. you know if you have these powerful corporate entities then you have to have some way for working people to be able to look out for their own interests historically that's been unions that's been destroyed for the last thirty years for a number of reasons you know mike you might be able to talk to this whether or not your needs are to blame to a certain extent for that but i think you have to look at other things like cooperatives i mean new ways to organize our economy where workers own own businesses they own factories as opposed to the corporate model where all the decisions are made by a c.e.o. and shareholders in the workers don't have a say if you have a worker own model then workers all have a say it's democracy in the workplace which is kind of what the purpose behind

unions work democracy in the workplace vince there are more people in the united states who are employees of worker owned companies than there are members of unions in the private sector in the private sector the complex that though ok so you know we have aesop so they you know employee you know own companies where they have a certain degree of stock ownership but it's not a co-op they don't actually have you know they don't have democratic power they've stuck but they don't have the ok so so you would say a bit of a skewed number ok all right but there but it's still a significant i mean it's a growing piece of the american economy the ender's the embers of what you're talking about is for these for a company like pepco in this case a power company that is or is derelict on this on the job has been derelict in the way that both it treats its employees and its ability to service its users the reality is if in a state like maryland they should be jettisoned you should have a state that responds and it's in this companies in particular it's controlled at

the state level it's not in terms of its relationship it's not at the local level and that's even more absurd a local community should have some say if it's going to want stablish monopoly with some company to service wow look at i was out of state ownership or even out of country ownership as is the case with from a lot of people who are employed in the united states how do you do that without. you know if you go to another company and the company has an incentive to be efficient in both how expensive the dollars over another company in an economy were there are. people looking for every one of them are going to go on and says thirty thousand job openings and a million people would either utility companies or let's look at new york city con ed one of the largest utility companies in the country has locked out eighty five hundred you new tildy workers they lock them out last week right is the summer heat wave is about that and they brought in scabs and managers to replace them now just because you have a one you have more competition in the workplace sure we got like a bunch of different corporations you can buy cars off of the you know we have

a bunch of different corporations you can buy a lot of different goods often but that doesn't mean they treat their workers better and the big problem of this commie why it's not recovering is that there's not enough buying power folks aren't making enough to go out and buy the things they're making and that's the key to having a successful con and some of the countries that have not been affected by the worldwide recession the crash germany they had occurred are by program where the governments to the employer employers. even though you cut people back from forty hours a week down to twenty hours a week or thirty hours of pay them for the forty hours a week will make up the difference and they did and germany recovered within a year germany also requires any company with over a thousand workers to have fifty percent of its board of directors be made up of representatives of labor of the unions. canada never experienced a crash a serious crash during this none of their banks are in trouble and there's been no that they're heavily regulated banks finland has had no problem then one has a seventy percent unionization rate canada as you know almost thirty percent

germany is eighteen percent but there's that the laws are so strong in germany it's almost like we don't need unions. it seems like the lack of unions in the united states are making us more fragile. fragile as an economy yeah maybe i mean i think there's that there's definite. there's a there's a breaking point between public and private sector unions and i think it's beginning to expose itself for i think private sector union workers resent the place the public sector union workers have put them is there any trouble in the is there any pooling occurs with his opinion of the pooling i've seen on this subject is that sixty over sixty percent of public sector private sector union workers consistently support the right of public employees to close the plea bargain right and that's i mean there's not much stats that kind of back up the idea that there's an effort to create a war between the two scott walker talked with i mean a billionaire it's like that. time story what's at the some of the publisher went

out the jeans will wisconsin he said oh yeah i talked to this guy he was a u.a.w. worker and he said that he said that he hates public sector workers and then it turned out later like the guy he talked to was actually a management guy and he didn't work at the plant claimed he was never a member of the u.a.w. so i always hear this kind. of a disagreement but i there's a reality though i did my god to what extent you work with your pitch your background but there is a reality of a situation where public sector unions are making more than their public their private sector the flipside of that is that private sector employees are making a less that's right and that's not a coincidence that any private sectors will probably be right back with stay tuned for more that's bigger picture discussion. could you take three years for two years three arrangement three.

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