well i'm john marvin in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. there romney's off the cuff remarks are continuing to make waves as he proudly stands behind them tripling down saying he has no regrets but who exactly makes up romney's forty seven percent working class americans screwed over by three decades of reaganomics or the romney level wealthy elite also you know it's bad in washington republicans can't even pass their own bill why do republicans leave america's veterans in the dust today

if you conservatives think it's ok to send americans to war and then not help them come home that and more into that sloan little rubble and during a time when democrats or republicans are too busy arguing with each other to heal our country with a third party just what the doctor ordered well as green party candidate presidential candidate dr jill stein. you need to know this the mitt romney campaign is still in crisis after a leaked video showed romney deriding the forty seven percent of americans who he claims are victims who don't pay taxes and who are dependent upon a government for everything romney says his job is not to worry about those people sure someone could come to romney's defense right now and say that even though he's written off forty seven percent of the population he's still focused on the rez the

fifty three percent of americans but that's not exactly true either now it is romney not give a damn about forty seven percent of americans we claims don't pay taxes even though they do pay sales taxes state taxes payroll taxes romney also doesn't give a damn about ninety eight percent of americans who he's preparing to give them as a tax in. increased as this chart from the tax policy center shows romney's plan would give massive tax breaks to all americans making more than two hundred thousand dollars a year roughly two percent of the nation individuals making over a million dollars a year would bring home over four percent more after tax income unfortunately for those americans making less than two hundred thousand dollars a year they will on average see their taxes go up in other words the romney plan is yet another reaganomics ploy to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the millionaire billionaire classes he doesn't represent the forty seven percent he doesn't represent the fifty three percent he represents the top two percent he represents people like him but here's the irony of all ironies the tax policy

center also uncovered more than four thousand american households with incomes over one million dollars last year who paid zero nada zilch in taxes in two thousand and eleven another fourteen thousand households that made between a half million a million bucks also paid zero taxes in two thousand and eleven. still you have the same people that mitt romney plans to give even more massive tax breaks but they're part of the forty seven percent so one has to wonder who exactly mitt romney is referring to when he calls out forty seven percent of the nation who don't pay federal income taxes is he talking about the lower income working class americans have been screwed over by thirty two years of reaganomics or fiscal disaster in two thousand and seven under george bush and now don't make enough money to pay federal income taxes or is he talking about the super wealthy like himself the few at the top who profited immensely of reaganomics got bailed out under when wall street one hundred hope romney clarifies this suit in the meantime was asked and it's rubble

panel what they think. are you ready to rumble joining me for tonight's along liberal are marc harrold libertarian commentator and as he robinson director of the paul revere project thank you both gentlemen for joining us to get right to mitt romney's comments my first question romney says forty seven percent of the nation doesn't pay taxes the tax policy center found four thousand millionaire households that didn't pay taxes last year how many people in that room move paid fifty thousand bucks for the dinner belong to the forty seven percent or don't pay taxes my guess is five ten percent because that i has been a lot of talk about percentages in this election you get the ninety nine percent you get one percent now you get to fifty three percent to forty seven percent but more interested in is ninety four percent ninety four percent was the top marginal tax bracket when ronald reagan was at the height of his movie making career and as

he said when he was president and the economy was stable and the middle class was the following if i'm going to make if i'm only going to get six percent of the income from my next movie why should i make a movie right on the important only one hundred series for i'm somebody else to make up what will be the important point is that the people who would be working on that film the people who would be employed as a result of that film those are the people who didn't get work because we do you consent to are you trying to tell me by that punitive tax are you trying to tell me that when one business goes away another business doesn't fill that empty space no i'm trying to tell you with that when the government creates incentives that discourage people from engaging in economic to make it to their second area dollars right no no no what it does is it creates opportunities for a lot more years that's why the period of that that period of time look go back and look at the forty's fifty's sixty's seventy's and early eighty's that was the time of greatest a printer ship literally in the history of tax cuts no i don't have after waiting x. right reagan stop you force a sherman act and reagan cut taxes and if you look at it on the mall sermon and

downtown's if you would if you looked at absolutely it did if you. i look at a mall or a downtown area in america pre reagan they were all locally owned businesses you look ten years after reagan at the consequences of the tax cuts it's a small handful of nationally known chains and that's what we have today we have monopoly capitalism crony capitalism we no longer have entrepreneurial capitalism like we had before reagan cut those taxes mark your first problem and all that you've got to remember jump into this ok first thing you've got to remember is any time you got we need all this taxes because we have this huge spending the government's doing too much we have this huge spending so you get this feeding frenzy on who's going to pay it how we're going to distribute that massive amount of money that we need to keep these tax rates up for all of this spending you know as far as this there's not going to be i missing though we are going to have misunderstood what you were what we're talking about here is who should pay more or less taxes who should the burden should fall or should it be on the rich should be on the middle class who share the burdens are important to the cost of entry into the civilized society is if i'm paying a higher tax rate because i'm making a lot of money it's a good thing to know you're not necessarily paying

a high tax free because you're making a lot of money you're paying a lot in taxes because you're making a lot of money if there is a fair tax flat tax you'd be paying a lot because you're making a lot but you're seeing a lot of these and your work at wal-mart as a greeter absolutely i don't know what i'm saying is that sucks no no why does what i'm saying it is one of the things we have to look at is why do we need all this tax money why is this huge burden there because we're talking about as we need this huge amount of money for all the spending all right now you know we can only percent of our g.d.p. canada's government is fifty one percent of their g.d.p. canada is doing just fine thank you very much the canadians like it a lot that i don't know that i think they can who's doing well in some ways and not in others they're not in there but first of all there's not forty seven percent of this country not paying taxes they claim i think was about income taxes and that's not true either though as i want to explain you want a payroll tax you pay sales tax everybody's pay and tax ok that's a misnomer to that he said that these are unfortunate comments and i think they're going to hurt him but i think we're getting away from the crux of the matter which is that taxes are not a vehicle for well redistribution they are for no they're for raising revenue for

governments or read the constitution and write one of the end of the jobs that in government is. wealth distribution not sure if you under obama george washington took money from tariffs for interstate commerce and use that money to build a poor house here in washington d.c. has bands and i'd do and provided medical care and housed poor people he redistrict george washington or redistributed income and virtually all of congress motorhomes this point when i was in colonial america were successful probably because george washington a great american founder was right there administering them but the problem is that it wealth redistribution it's not part of the american idea it is not part of the an idea it's absolutely as we look at what abraham lincoln did in one thousand nine hundred two abraham lincoln instituted in income tax that started if you were making in today's dollars the equivalent of about twenty twenty five thousand dollars a year at one percent it went all the way up to three percent if you're making over about three hundred thousand dollars in today's dollars you know what to do with that amount of x. was it what are you going to do with that link and he absolutely joined what did he do with that money he used that money to say if anybody wants forty acres west of

the mississippi you can get it and created this huge land rush which occupied you know before and i mean i'm talking about a mandate of americans voted on then i think we can maybe move past this no this was i'm going to talk at all about race and he said anybody who wants like i did was the so i can vote now to lyndon b. johnson so we decided it was the biggest federal program in history it was the biggest giveaway of federal land in history were they not willing to self meet in a minute i mean i you know i really couldn't imagine getting a congress to understand what you're saying but i mean it was bigger than just lincoln we can't give lincoln all the credit of the blame for income tax and that's a lot thing a lot of people don't know is that income tax is a fairly new concept to this country at least it wasn't around at the beginning of this country so when you talk about george washington there's no income tax that i clarify there i said is use the terrorists from interstate commerce a little bit in the lives that we can hold with holding tax i mean when you when you get back we thought it was government the from when your hands on your money the government has your hands out there on your money before you do i mean i think that's a it's a big problem look at that look at the states where most of the people you have the

highest percentage said we've got a chart here from the tax foundation the those. in red are the states where you have the highest percentage of that forty seven percent you know that's what i mean by these comments arc and here and this is that bad with the electoral college you reached it was your religion it would but if you read this if you look at these states and i don't think there are going to be a lot of people in the states i don't like these comments but there's going to be even more people i think romney will carry a majority of those states he's trash these people i mean what actually did if there's enough people that are going to vote for me going to vote against obama that's why this was a general election if it was a popular votes this would kill and i think it's really hard to look at them all with these states in the electoral here's here's the here's the headline just you know from this from today's press conference they headlined romney apologizes to nations one hundred fifty million starving filthy beggars right first and foremost i would like to offer the heart felt apology to all the horrors junkies bombs and grime covering derelicts out there will make up nearly half our nation a visibly contrite and solemn romney said outside a campaign stop at a local high school let me assure you that i in no way meant to offend any of the

putrid smelling barefoot masses out there my campaign is not about dividing this nation but about bringing all sides together the rich elegant members of the upper class as well as the forty seven percent are covered in flies and he directly from back alley dumpsters. so i think he's going to the best place on you and i mean i'm just saying that more quality journalism from the way you know all i was saying is that this one have a much greater effect with the electoral college i don't think these comments will have that great an effect on the ultimate election because the company that makes that go with it backed away from the susanna martinez she said you know scott brown that's not the way i view the world bill kristol arrogant and stupid i mean you i don't think i want only people on the right agree with electrons it's not say people all have their own reelections and if they're looking out for themselves and they believe that they need to decide to do it and then it breaks you know the thing is yeah well that's true but david david david brooks also isn't a conservative david brooks has been you know trying to dismiss the so-called conservative movement conservatives there's always been a number of these really don't create the seven percent of this kind of this is these are horrible statements forty seven in this country are not victims i don't

think they view themselves as victims i say we're bad guys and they got it. it was a member there's speculation now that it was not actually one of the people who paid fifty thousand dollars to be there videotaping that it was a member of the staff the wait staff is not a surprise this you know we all know the people who can afford to donate to mitt romney don't have morals as the c.e.o. you're right because even is this evokes the movie the help you know a book which was about the african-americans who were were the help for the for the white folks and they knew what was going on i mean i did i'm not familiar with that movie but i'll tell you the one thing that i thought was truly outrageous about mitt romney's comments i think you underestimate the number of people that are dependent on barack obama vastly i mean i think i think they're going to include people who are economically dependent on him and you also include those people who might not be economically dependent on him but are depending on him for their side to get in his of their entire salary from the government you know i'm going to vote i'm going to talk about our brave and noble congress that i'm talking about people who voted for mitt romney i mean who voted for barack obama the first time around because they thought it was the you know the good the politically correct thing to

do and now they don't want to cast a vote for mitt romney because they're afraid you know of the self-contradiction and i mean i guess my message to them would be it's ok to admit that you were wrong the first time around ok you believe it will leave you with the last word on that part of the rubble more rubble right after the break. here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call i don't know. i'm sorry i'm just a guy here and. you sir are you know what that is my other terror cells that i want to give us a defeat terrorism. and the christian public. can really just. you know the corporate media distracts us from what you and i should care about

because they're a profit driven industry that sells a sensational stick garbage because it. i'm having martin and we're going to break that. the first. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture. the from. the be.

named. in the. well american liberal well well joining me are marc harrold libertarian commentator and s.e. robinson director of the paul revere project let's get to it the romney campaign is trying to shift the focus away from the forty seven percent comments toward comments that president obama made in one nine hundred ninety eight the president back when he was not the president he was at was you senator then he was a state senator is right in the illinois state senate he said i think the trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources and hence facilitates a redistribution because i actually believe in redistribution at least at

a certain level to make sure everybody's got a shot and of quote a new study by the national bureau of economic research shows that america is now more unequal than it was during colonial times a previous study found the u.s. was more unequal than ancient rome and by the way if you look at the at the all the nations in the world in terms of the in the o.e.c.d. nations the thirty four richest nations in the world we are number we are third from the bottom in terms of the class that you were born in being the class that you die and we're the one among the least socially mobile countries in the world up until the reagan administration that was the we were the opposite we were the most socially mobile nation from the found in this country until the one nine hundred eighty s. now we're one of the least socially mobile should we do something about this well i think the problem with this is you get into this redistribution thing and this is you know carter has a higher tax but there's a there's a smaller pie reagan has reagan lowered it gave me a look carter has a higher tax rate but he spoke right now seventy four percent right it's going to

reagan takes it down but it's so it's less of a it's less a slice of a much bigger pie and the idea of course is what we worry about is that it might equalize you know you can have the very rich outpacing everybody else but if the idea is that brings it with you brings it with it's a locomotive the idea. here is that if you start to and i don't know that it's just about parenting opportunity i think one of the problems is this is really about guaranteed outcomes it's not just about opportunity it's not what obama said he said everybody's got a shot that's that's opportunist not just about a shot because the problem is everybody has a shot before they have a shot here so every time you get this poor people have a shot and they start up and some fail and some succeed and then you get to a certain point then you say wait a minute we've got to even things out again it will redistribute the problem with it is you say the stagnation where the rich might outpace but it doesn't work if you don't do this if you have this redistribution what you do is you do a stop so i mean what's the alternative just just didn't always work and i think we saw the alternative under ronald reagan he came in and he found you know ninety four percent top marginal tax rate was so tax rate so it was ninety four percent at

the height of his movie career and i was that was back then when he when he came into office there's i mean there's no getting around the fact that he cut taxes people were incentivized it became more you know to the capital gains tax i mean ronald reagan and i quote it he should know no he raised it had already the game is the jimmy carter he raised the capital gains tax rate from fifteen or twenty percent up to twenty eight percent so that it was the identical to the regular income tax he said and we've got the tape of that i can't play right now that was not what we said do you think that a bus driver should pay a higher tax rate than a millionaire that's crazy that's a verb and quote from ronald reagan and today we've got a fifteen percent tax rate for the millionaires and billionaires capital gains rate and we've got a thirty five thirty six percent rate for everybody else i think that's crazy and i agree with ronald reagan we should be taxing millionaires the same at least the same as we tax everybody else no what do you make in thirty thousand dollars a year ever get me a job that's all i'm saying so if a millionaire has a little bit extra money because uncle sam is not sticking their hand in this walk it and he can give me a job or anyone else

a job i'm happy with what about and though you're only. going out and being an entrepreneur or. because i'm not you know going out and you know making me go i don't i'm not criticizing you for not going to hear what i'm saying not a lot of people have to get to me and we could all be successful top. should we all be depended upon million years though i mean is that what that will i mean that many telling you that it would be dependent on the government seems to me like that's the alternative the left would provide are having them be the arbiter of your administration on class i mean mitt romney's dad was not was not a multi-millionaire until the very end of his life most of the time when he was running american motors he was making in today's dollars maybe the equivalent of three or four thousand dollars a year if you were al gore's lawyers and rich you were gardeners if you didn't have some government he didn't look to the government they always wanted welfare check out when he offered a lot of raw of dollars a year he said give me more ok after this i want to pay ninety one percent income tax i think i'll just stop here and that left a lot more money for the middle class for american motors to actually pay their workers well i know there's no doubt that

a progressive tax code makes sense but when you start talking about rates and comparing rates between the classes i mean that's as it obscures the discussion i don't think it's very helpful it was going to the robin hood tax this this week occupy movement celebrated their one year anniversary one of their big demands has been historically for a robin hood tax for a small tax on every single stock trade and wall street and there's a you know thirty some odd forty some odd nations around the country that have this keith ellison just introduced to yesterday or today again and he keeps getting reintroduced we had it in the united states it was put into place in one nine hundred thirty five by by franklin roosevelt to fund the securities and exchange commission and and and in one thousand nine hundred sixty three sixty two or sixty three j.f.k. got rid of it because it was producing such an incredible surplus it was it was generating more money than the s.e.c. needed but what it did was it's slow it put a little bit of see it in the gears and what it would do if we went back to that is

all this high frequency robotic trading that some are suggesting is responsible for twenty percent of the cost for gasoline you know maybe fifteen percent of the of the actual stock market all that would go away and we'd see a real economy isn't this a good thing is it yeah for some time to grieve you but i need to set a high. gas prices are because of you know the failed energy policies of the obama administration but. more i think well wells than any other president in history he's also added more regulations on energy companies and they they frankly so you know you don't care or companies are going to reason the year a lot over the tire just as many liberals voting against bills that would restrict mercury emissions and peter de fazio is one that i know for example he's a far left liberal lion and he's voted against harsher restrictions for if it makes me voted against one of those bills i guarantee you there was a good reason that didn't have to do with the mercury i know i'll take i'll take your word for it but i lived in oregon for five years so you know i'm sure in order to hold on or lawmaker is one of the rockies one of the best for us is in the house

oh i'm sure but i would say that. if the robin hood tax is going to it's not even going to become law first of all maybe it's a good idea to tax these wall street transactions i don't think i thought because these are really arizona wall street is a lot of like a lot because the democrats aren't serious about introducing it they're just dangling out there look at these the red meat for the auto you guys the democrats i mean you get up out of your squaller market you know you've got all you've got democrats who are just in debt to wall street as you have republicans should we say no more money in politics well i don't think we should say no more money in politics i do think we've argued about this i do think you need full disclosure about where the money's coming from no problem that part of what you're talking about these two parties have been bought and paid for and that's one of the reasons that i agree with third party politics and think that it should be an infused into politics we have too few choices the first of all the robin hood tax isn't really name that well robin hood was basically a quasi libertarian tax protester robin hood really didn't like any taking a private property by the government was really a tax protest that being said as you sideline well that being said as

a sideline friends on the road if you look at those you know whether you have it or whether you need it but the bottom line and i see on this is it's not a sales taxes it's not a profit tax like capital gains it's on transactions and theoretically i understand the motive is to slow down the market which i would never agree with generally speaking ideologically. the idea that the government is basically to say it's going to be a return to human beings rather than oh absolutely but the one thing about it is you can do transaction after transaction be losing money you get this tax because as i understand it's per transaction is not arrest so i have a problem with a market that have people who are losing money i understand why they want to i don't think will pass either i think this is being dangled out on the one year anniversary and well we see what happened is certainly work for this country for a long. walk and i'm a come close to agreeing with you i'm willing to consider this financial trackside transaction tax idea because i think that these day traders and then maybe you know it's robotic but these you know these wall street you know whiz is spending thirteen hours a day staring at computers and manipulating stock markets and trading and shorting

selling doing all this stuff it distorts free market principles they're trading on things that aren't relevant it's got nothing to do with the real world you're right they're not making any i mean it's just i'm just gambling on random numbers that they see on a computer screen but if i don't think they're manipulating it we may need to alter the rules but as long as they're not well you know if you look at the impact that they're having is that the market gets distorted that you know as he is right about just that the democrats aren't sincere about introducing this bill and they well we're going to let's let's all you know let's all agree that we hope that they will become sincere and you know i mean. let's talk about veterans right now we have an unemployment rate among our veterans of eleven percent this is horrible and the real want to play you know if if you are on a state unemployment rate for everybody else is eight point one percent the real unemployment is sixteen percent if the stated on a player for veterans eleven percent real rate is like twenty five or thirty percent home sixty seven thousand homes that's right now every day one i've seen numbers anywhere from one to eleven veterans commit suicide every day the senate tried to address this problem with

a veteran job corps bill one billion dollars over five years this is. right this is nothing to hire twenty thousand young veterans and this was originally proposed by republicans and this got fifty eight votes that they failed in the senate because tom coburn put a stop on it it was filibuster. by republicans what the hell is going on with the republicans in the in the united states senate i don't understand what i mean first off i would say my brother is to talk about her and the iraq war and i don't think that he needs the government to pass some huge spending bill just so that he can get a job i mean it's a problem i think we can work creatively if i want to have thousand people twenty thousand people to work just like that in our national parks it was basically a variation on the olds civilian conservation corps i mean the stuff that needs to be done let's hire people to do these federal jobs programs just don't work with the recovery act if you go to the recovery act and you see two hundred million dollars grants they created point three jobs it's just it's not the best way to help our veterans it's just not so you know but i think that the idea of why

republicans are holding it up though is because senator rand paul from kentucky is trying to pass a bill that would withdraw funding from foreign aid from pakistan libya and egypt which i don't necessarily think is a good idea you know not abruptly and ham fisted i just want to hear them all however i was going to put his foot down and say nothing until you guys consider it but if so that's interesting. i'd heard the angle of the rand paul but i hadn't i don't know exactly what he's trying to do i think if he's doing that it's dirty pool and i like rand paul. as far as this you know every once in while there's an issue i don't sound very libertarian on i think that there are things the government should do there are necessary things the government should do they should do them they should do them well and they should be constitutionally authorized that's my limits taking care of veterans is one of the things that they should do i take a little bit between the jobs program and the homelessness the middle healthy things the job program is fine as long as it's very narrowly tailored i don't think anybody should get out of the military just be handed

a job take care of congress yet that we are taking care of these are these your other people who put it there about i mean you know we have a volunteer military these are people who volunteered to put their lives on the line during a time when we had two wars that i opposed but two wars i mean these people when they many of them walked through hell for. and we're not going to say to them ok you know we've got a national park where the buildings are falling down we're a venture we're going to have to hire twenty thousand people put this thing back together let's hire you what's wrong with that and i think that one small limited example of veterans want to work on a national park yeah hey maybe that was helpful but how long stable employment you know it's probably where is it. you know just yet it was jobs getting some money in your pocket is it actually helping you have what we want long term jobs don't just a job that's going to appear on the labor department stat sheet and make this also the labor reports look a little less so we're a little so the alternative is leave them almost and leave them with it's not at all that's not at all the alternative the alternative is to look for ways that are not spent five billion dollars to one million dollars or so martin girls and it

obviously as we spend on other thanks guys for being with. going out part of the reason why there's so much bigger and gridlock in washington is because the u.s. government is a two party system hollowed out of ocracy be different with the major third party and could the green party be that party dr jill stein green party candidate for president right after this.

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