welcome back to the big picture i'm tom arbonne coming up in this half hour president obama is adamant about making the top two percent of americans pay more in taxes to support the nation but how far is he willing to go to make the wealthy elite pay their fair share and in the one nine hundred sixty s. america was all about finding and embracing personal happiness and rooting out anger and violence how can we bring those ideals back. to the nation approach a fiscal cliff at the end of the year president obama is taking a tough stand as reported by the washington post today according to administration officials the president will veto any legislation to block the fiscal cliff if that legislation doesn't include tax increases on the romney level super rich president has made similar veto threats in the past only to cave at the midnight hour when

facing a republican party that's willing to crash the economy for their political gain but this time with an all or nothing election looming the president can pull it a clean afford to take a tougher stand and demand that the rich pay their fair share share in taxes again so how might this all work and is a really worth it to take the american economy off the fiscal cliff is to make sure just provide tax cuts the wealthiest two percent of americans here to offer is take on this is anthony randolph so director of economic research with the reek research reason foundation anthony welcome thanks for having me tom thanks for joining us you know there's three ways to reduce or cut a deficit you can cut spending you can raise revenue or you can grow the economy so that your tax collections actually go up without either of those two things happening and the deficit goes down why should we completely take off the table raising taxes or for that matter growing the economy. well i don't they we should take up the table growing the economy one of the biggest problems with the tax

debate right now is worse than that where we're at is somehow too low or too high you know taxes were at fifty percent marginally then i'm sure you know going down to thirty nine percent would be fine for the republicans and it taxes were fifteen percent right now i'm sure the democrats would be happy to have taxes at thirty six percent what we should have on the table is real legitimate tax reform and that means getting rid of the whole idea of taxing people's income and taxing people's consumption. so only so if somebody spends in your in your opinion if somebody spends one hundred percent of what they earn which is probably eighty or ninety percent of americans certainly all of the working poor the middle class if they spend one hundred percent of what they are in one hundred percent of their income is taxed but if they are new millions of dollars a year and you know they spend just a couple hundred thousand dollars a year on their lifestyle they put the rest of it in a checking account someplace or you know offshore sweats swiss bank account they don't pay any income tax and they don't pay any tax on that money it seems crazy

well yeah you structure it so that people at a certain income threshold get a credit so they don't wind up paying anything i think you can structure a consumption tax so that the wealthy actually pay more than they do right now if what you want to do is play class warfare i don't think that people who are making twenty thousand got last year should pay well it's you you're playing it's caused warfare to say that the rich should pay more you right now is that right now is the right amount of tax that the rich for the wrong amount of tax that the rich are paying i don't think that we should have a consumption tax that taxes one hundred percent of the water why don't we go work on rationally what has happened in the past you know if you look at the history of all of the of the last century if you look at the last hundred years what you find is that and not just in the united states by the way you find this in european and south american countries as well that whenever the top marginal tax rate that's the money that you earn after you've earned it roughly somewhere between five hundred thousand and one and a half million dollars when the top marginal tax rate goes above. percent you end up with a stable economy we saw that the united states of the forty's fifty's sixty's

seventy's when that's and back in the one thousand nine hundred when this when the top marginal tax rate goes below fifty percent then that extra money that marginal money that second million and third million the fourth million is so cheap that people are gambling with like crazy you see bubbles and bursts why don't we just look at the experience of the united states and other countries and say this is not the top ten we need to roll back the reagan tax cuts go back to a stable economy well i think you can draw all sorts of correlations between where tax rates are at and how people use their money you probably want to look at the regulatory structure that's you know intermixing in this had nothing to do with right to know that's how to do science how people wind up spending their money but you know tom i think you and i would probably agree that if the tax rate did going up for the wealthy to thirty nine point six percent you know if we if the wealthy were sort of had the bush tax cuts taken away from them that's not going to be the worst thing that impacts the economy i would agree with you on that front i think

that actually what would hit the economy more is what actually already it is a middle income it would actually i think hurt things more is if the middle class had their taxes go up which is the biggest problem with letting the bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year because those are the people that are going to wind up adding to their household and obama is not going to if obama is elected he's not going to raise taxes on the middle class taxes on the middle class eighteen times and the end of ramadan is about is that you know you know that obama. is going to get hit in the middle look at what romney did when he was governor of massachusetts he just screwed the middle class he didn't ever golub taxes it was all let's double the fee for having a car let's raise the sure yeah you know obama added taxes to sit international cigarettes and he didn't call that a tax and that primarily that i mean it is. what you're suggesting yeah i want what is yes what i'm saying is obama is raise taxes on the middle class to both of these guys are problematic with their tax plans i don't think we should get behind either one. them but i do think that we should be aware that politically the tea party is

getting weaker and in the end this is a selection and even if the republicans when both the house and the senate i think that they're in a position to cave on their their current stance on the bush tax cuts and i think iran is in a much better should be obama's in a much stronger position to force the republicans to accept taxes going up for the wealthy back up to where they were and bill clinton was president and we ended up with such a surplus that george w. bush when he don't think that it's going to solve the economy his first state of the enterprise said i'm going to the entire debt with this surplus with no political left i mean literally said i'm sure now i made it out of the ridiculous but the idea that we could raise taxes on the wealthy or tax our way out of this this dismal economy is absolutely ridiculous it's only worth five times and they. know they're we both know that innovation and entrepreneurship are what boosts economic growth taking money from whether you want to call it that i got actually people who spend money you don't like taxes like you know i guy we will stipulate

that anthony thanks a lot for being with us tonight backstop. it's thursday time to get geeky on the powers of a good breakfast you probably heard it from your parents growing up and from your teachers back in school breakfast is the most important meal of the day it provides you the energy needed to get you through your day previous research has shown that if you skip breakfast you're more likely to eat a larger lunch and dinner and as a result end up gaining weight in the long term but no one is really understood why that is until now scientists have discovered that by skipping breakfast you're actually priming your brain to crave unhealthier and higher calorie foods which more than make up for the calories of the skipped breakfast and does cause you to gain weight researchers at imperial college in london scanned the brains of people

who skipped meals and found various mechanisms at work that could help explain the weight gain after analyzing the brain scans the researchers found that prolonged fasting prime certain regions of the brain to lean towards choosing higher calorie foods when the individual chose a meal in the study the researchers scanned the brains of twenty one men and women who were all around twenty five years old on two separate days while they were shown pictures of food and asked to rate how appealing the foods were the pictures of food included everything from pizza to chocolate even fish and one of the day's study participants skipped breakfast before their brain scans on the other day they were given a seven hundred fifty calorie breakfast of cereal bread and jam after the scans on both days participants were allowed to have a watch or they could eat whatever they wanted it on the participants were fasting and therefore hungry they rated the higher calorie foods more appealing than when they weren't fasting and when the persist one skipped breakfast they also ate about twenty percent more food at lunch while their brain scans showed that activity in

the orbital frontal cortex region of the brain located just above the on. it was very responsive to higher calorie and more healthy or less healthy foods the researchers believe that the orbital frontal cortex part of the brain the region of the brain plays a role in determining how rewarding a pleasant and how tasty a particular food is another words the more you like what you're eating the more active that part of the cortex becomes so what's the bottom line in all this new breakfast bugs eating a good breakfast doesn't just provide you with energy for the day if you're trying to lose a few pounds or just eat healthier you good breakfast could also be a great way to start achieving your goals. it's the good the bad of the very very high a tele sleep ugly the good bernard whitman on fox so-called news yesterday talking had meg and kelly hosted

a focus group to talk about candy crowley's handling of the libya question at the debate and to blame croly for romney's shortcomings of the debate on most of the members the focus groups went on to bash probably one member democratic pollster bernard whitman did it alone. but can i talk about a larger point which is you know what about i want to say on any sort of amazing that in the face of a relatively poor performance by romney all we're talking about is the moderator can i leave that sort of understand where don't start with me grandmas what mitt romney ok all about and then you have a lot of other things in the show how do you or somebody call out the hidden agenda of the far right how dare somebody go up against the misinformation machine that is fox so-called news goes to you mr whipping for standing up to ms kelley and her so-called focus. the bad the washington free beacon the conservative publication decided yesterday to personally attack one tuesday night's presidential debate questioners you may remember katherine fenton twenty four year old pre-kindergarten

teacher who asked a question about equal pay for men and women in the workforce the free beacon publish it. article yesterday spearing fenton including using her past tweets to discredit and shame her the fact that the free beacon chose to publicly attack ms fountain is deplorable but there's a larger issue here by the fact that we live in the twenty first century pay equity is still a very large problem in america the conservatives are doing all they can to ignore the issue they're perfectly content continuing to let men earn more than women for the same work. and the very very ugly ohio secretary of state john huston two different federal courts have said that ohio republicans efforts to stricter early voting can not go forward and yesterday the supreme court even weighed in rejecting another attempt by ohio republicans to go ahead with limiting early voting state that's not enough for hostile we still determine to go ahead with limiting early voting posted is in the various rulings and limiting early voting in ohio to just

sixteen hours over the course of three days so why is huston so intent on limiting early voting in his state and typically those who participate early voting are more likely to vote for democrats lost it is now openly defying the orders of three separate judicial bodies including the supreme court and his drive to silence the votes of thousands of ohioans and rig the election in the buckeye state for mitt romney and that is very very ugly. after the break what would be one of the best tools in the american people's arsenal for taking on corporate america i'll tell you it's about stealing to.

you know 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.

here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that many americans call a donor. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about my country uses our own are a fool you know what kind of mind their terrorist cells in your neighborhood all want the usa to feature a sunny day on limbaugh and the christian point you. can see your beliefs about it because it's going to school for you to distract us from what you and i should care about because there are profit driven industry that sell the sensationalistic garbage because of breaking news i'm not me martin and we're going to break that.

our first comments and i comes to michael post on the tom hartman facebook page he had this to say about mitt romney's mormon faith i have a question for you and i'm not being mean here but i keep thinking that there is an elephant the room and nobody's talking about it so really your take on this would be great the very people that are for romney that are christian right preach against mormons and basically all the other religions as being false but now they're side stepping in being for that person that is not even a believer that jesus is the son of god how can they do that i'm for the separation of church and state big time and for freedom of religion but how are they dealing with the hypocrisy in their choice in romney it blows my mind thanks well yeah there has been a little kerfuffle in the religious right i believe was billy graham's son has come out now and endorsed romney and scrubbed mormonism as a cult off his web site and there's that whole thing about you know from he does really good he gets his own planet when he dies and all that stuff but frankly the

thing that concerns me the most is that mitt romney was raised according to his mother being told that he was a miracle child that he has a great destiny and that according to the white horse prophecy in the mormon church a mormon will step forward to save the republic when the constitution is hanging by a thread and that his father talked about this when he was running for president and mitt might actually believe that his destiny is to become president and save america that creeps me out a little that's it for your take my take tonight if you like your comments and questions heard on this segment the big picture and would like a chance to get one of my books listen up. we want to know your to send us your comments by visiting the tom hartman facebook page by a twitter at tom underscore her or in the chat room on the message boards or through the blog at tom hartman dot com you can also leave a message on our rant line by three six fifty. six agree disagree sound off it's

all welcome but remember that your comments may be used on the year. i moderate now to be joined by a special guest in new york city truly columns which is a singer songwriter and author enters her new book is titled sweet judy blue eyes my life in music because welcome to the show oh thanks i just stepped out of my binder and hung it up with hot coat. of it so i love your show i love you you're terrific thank you you're an activist in the sixty's do you see parallels to. well there certainly are parallels although we've never seen anything quite like this in the sense of the liberties july called the liberties that have been taken with the truth. i think we've got it's gotten seems to me more and more and more slippery about the truth i don't like misspoke at all i think law i would be a better way of putting it. i'll tell you though it's exciting to watch this

wonderful man who is president. begin to take the role that he is in and use that that all the things he's done and show us once again what he has accomplished against almost insurmountable odds i mean i think coming into this it would have been highly unlikely that he being gable to get as much done as he had has gotten done and i'm of course all for him i adore him and i want him to be our president again yeah you you work to uphold voting rights and segregated mississippi fast i did ask forward to the day and voting rights are under attack all over the united states you know with these words suppression idea was your thoughts i can't i can't believe it it's very hard to believe i i don't understand it and i mean i do understand it you know i understand that. eliminating

the ease with which we vote that is breaking the law i mean the right wing breaking the law and putting barriers in the way of people's votes you know i went to mississippi and sixty four during the mississippi summer i traveled with fannie lou hamer who was such a what a powerful woman and she would come out on the in front of a neighborhood where people were kind of hiding and not really knowing what they could do and she she. settler self and get her feet settle on the ground and then she'd say this little. people would start to come out of their houses i mean we need more that you know this little light of mine i'm going to let it shine and don't be afraid and this fear mongering is is unforgivable really it is so wonderful here's here's you saying i got up. and the minute we have left there we had a lot of dreams and visions back in the sixty's what do you think is going to

endure as we go forward well the dreams and visions are still here and the seriousness about adhering to human rights and civil rights and and paying our fair share and i think when we make millions of dollars we we have a an obligation to help out and make sure that the the people of the forty seven percent who apparently are being. let's say neglected in one half of this election are taken account for and that the the war on poverty should never have ended and it should continue with the glorious goal in sight is to get people taken care of and to get the well shared as it should be in a democracy like ours absolutely so very very well said judy collins an honor to talk with you tonight thank you so you know honored to be here to thank you. i.

the corporate state today is stronger than it's ever been thanks to the supreme court our elections are up for sale to the highest bidder be it a billionaire casino mogul like sheldon eight olsen or a massive transnational corporation like koch industries and employers can now use the power of their position as the holder of the paycheck to implicitly coerce their employer. ways to vote or lend support to whichever politician the c.e.o. wants or face consequences on the job many companies are doing exactly that including murray energy in ohio westgate resorts and the koch brothers georgia pacific corporation and mitt romney himself is encouraging employers to use this tactic it was june two thousand and twelve conference call with the national federation of independent businesses revealed and here it is i hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of of your

enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections and whether you agree with me or you agree with president obama or or whatever your political view i hope i hope you pass those along to your employees nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business . because i think that will figure into their their election decision plain and simple the mechanisms by which we the people can control our democracy are being destroyed one by one so the question is what do we do to get them back how can we wrestle back control from corporate c.e.o.'s in the super rich who have now become kings in our so-called democracy now of course there's overturning citizens united and putting in place a constitutional amendment that says money is not is property and not speech and the corporations are property not people. going to get involved that fight go to

move to amend or great organization but many amending the constitution might take years might even take decades so while we fight that long battle which we do need to fight we need to find ways to take on the corporate state in the short term as well and the best way to do that is to breathe new life into the labor movement to bring democracy back into the workplace and hit the c.e.o.'s hard on their home turf in the offices on the factory floors at the construction sites. it's no coincidence that the rise of the oligarchy and the corporate state have coincided with the decimation of organized labor as this chart shows rates of unionization have steadily declined over the last thirty plus years right alongside the share of national income held by the middle class and as union rates have declined the share of wealth in the hands of the goober wretch dramatically increased there is a direct correlation between wealth inequality and plummeting unionization rates

and today we have record breaking levels of wealth inequality in this country and c.e.o.'s who used to make forty times that their workers make now make up words of three hundred times four hundred times in some industries thousands of times more money than their workers and with all that money these c.e.o.'s can control our democracy by politicians threaten workers and live in a completely separate society safe from the rot that's taking hold in communities all across the nation as a result of the policies they're pushing with unionization rates at historic lows for modern america it's clear labor needs a new weapon to fight back against the corporatocracy that's that's why we need something called card check. under current law if workers want to form a union and thirty five percent of the workforce has to sign a petition or a card stating that they agree to be unionized from there the national labor relations board will set up an election and if half of the workforce votes to

unionize then they have a union but under this current procedure employers have all bunch of tools both legal and illegal but there's not much prosecution to disrupt the organizing process including intimidating or even firing employees spreading lies and misinformation about unions threatening to close down stores delaying union elections all kinds of stuff it's an uphill battle to organize which is why union busters have been so successful breaking up unions while organizers have had so much trouble starting new unions the card check would level the playing field with card check there is no election and employers never have to catch wind of what's going on basically if a majority if over fifty percent of all the workers sign a petition or card indicating they support for me union and that unionism immediately recognized by the n.l.r.b. with out the extra added step of an election and without an opportunity the us for employers to twist some arms would carjack unions can reverse the tide in the war

against labor and actually start chipping away at the corporate state demanding better wages and benefits limiting political coercion in the workplace and funding political candidates who will continue the fight in the halls of congress in two thousand and eight when democrats took control of congress there was a huge push by labor to have card check pushed or pastor it was part of the employee free choice act known as the f c a unfortunately those efforts failed and ever since then card check has been absent from the national debate a testament to how successful the corporatocracy has been in crushing organized labor. but now is as good a time as ever to bring card check back slowly but surely the wal-mart workers strike for example is spreading earlier this month in a dozen states nearly one hundred wal-mart workers held demonstrations outside their stores and before that as about sixty wal-mart workers went on strike outside a store in southern california in wal-mart's fifty year history only once have

employees successfully unionized and so wal-mart closed that store which is why today it takes one wal-mart employee making an average of eight dollars an eighty an hour you dollars eighty cents an hour more than seventy six million work weeks to accumulate as much wealth as just one of the wal-mart areas for example tim walton is worth twenty seven billion card check would help tremendously in the effort to unionize wal-mart and if the world's largest employer could be unionized than any corporation can card check if it were passed into law would be one of the best tools we the people have to take on the corporate state look it up learn about it and get active. and that's the way it is tonight thursday october eighteenth two thousand and twelve for more information any of the stories we've covered visit our website to tom hartman dot com free speech dot org and. if you missed anything i'd show you can now watch an h.d. of hulu at hulu dot com slash the big picture also check out our two youtube

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