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 pullet

a cli 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 it 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 the anthony window as a 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 off the table growing the economy one of the biggest problems with the tax debate right now is were assuming 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. that 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 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 in 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 you know 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 consumption taxes 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 last year should pay well it's your plane it's possible or fair to say that the rich should pay more the 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 rationally at what has happened in the past you know if you look at the history of the 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 america as well that whatever 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 fifty 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 their fourth million is so cheap the

people who 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 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 is right if you want to know if that's how the designs 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 would actually help what it is a middle income it would actually i think it would 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 debt 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 end of ramadan is a battle that you know you know that obamacare and seeing it will have eyes is going to get him 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 that is. what you're suggesting yeah so 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 of them but i do think that we should be aware that politically the tea party is getting weaker and in the end this selection and even if the republicans when both the house on the side and i think that they're in a position to cave on their. their current stance on the bush tax cuts and i think

romney's 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 the george w. bush when he don't think that it's going to solve the economy his first state he ended up in the going to the entire debt with the surplus with no political left i mean literally said that should now and that is a ridiculous but the idea that we could raise taxes on the wealthy to use for tax our way out of this you know this dismal economy is absolutely ridiculous it's only word or five times and they have it yet 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 thus 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 lunch so 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. 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 how 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 the 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. just. it's the good the bad of the very very high a tell us lee 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 most of the members the focus group 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 that it's 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 and if i am a grandmother the goodness wrongness of this morning ok i'm going to have a lot of other things in the show how dare somebody call out the hidden agenda of the far right how dare somebody go up against the misinformation machine that is so called news goes to you mr whipping for standing up to those kelly 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 an article yesterday spearing 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 to you and the left men more than women. and the very very ugly ohio secretary of state john huston two different federal courts have said that ohio republicans. efforts to restrict early voting and 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 lasted as skirting 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.

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our first comments and i come so michael posted on the thom hartmann 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 adores romney and scrubbed mormonism as a cult off his website and there's that whole thing about you know romney 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 today collins which is singer songwriter and author enters her new book is titled sweet judy blue eyes my life in music city college welcome to the show oh thanks i just stepped out of my binder and hung it up with hot cocoa. 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 it 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 beautiful it's 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 in. not really knowing what they could do and she'd she. settle herself in and get her feet settle on the ground and then she'd say this little law. and. then 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 to hear yours if you say you know i got up by the way 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 honor to talk with you tonight thank you so much you know honored to be here to thank you.

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 adelson 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 employees 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 put in place a constitutional amendment that says money is not is property in 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 movements 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 is 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 his union rates have declined the share of wealth in the hands of the goober rich 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 he acts to added step of an election and without an opportunity of 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 to 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 pastorate was part of the employee free choice act known as the ca 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 close that store which is why

today it takes one wal-mart employee making an average of eight dollars an eighty an hour he 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 in a good actor. and that's the way it is tonight thursday october eighteenth two thousand and twelve for more information any of the stories we 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. hulu at hulu dot com slash the big picture also check out our two youtube channel is there a link to thom hartmann dot com also thom hartmann dot com check out all the

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