all the success how can individual success propel an entire team and conservatives can argue all they want to about it all they want but the fact is billionaires do little to nothing to help the american economy this is time we got rid of the billionaire class and reece redistributed that wealth so that all americans have a chance to live the american dream. was in the year take my take live our phone lines are now open so if you want to share an opinion make a comment ask question live on the air give us a call the two a two nine zero four twenty one thirty four so for first caller of the night laura

. hi tom i just have a question i watched your segment about the. time for i'm nervous see on contraception and not being allowed by these corporations if somebody gets pregnant are they going to be are the will they have a job when they get back will they have a leave act child care assistance. you know i don't know. with regard to hobby lobby or any of these in the the dominoes the tom monaghan company i don't know what their policy is on that if they're taking the kind of official catholic position then i would guess that they'd be all in favor of the pregnancy and but whether there would be a. in for them when they come back that's a tough one because a lot of the very libertarian worldview folks on this are saying well you know we

can say no you can't have birth control pills you can also say no you got the job. done in winnipeg canada don thanks for calling. thank you dom. during the presidential elections. mitt romney mentioned that the federal right to corporations and corporate tax rate in canada was fifteen percent. up what do you next because the mention was that into the south was snipped was twenty eight percent so it's been virtually the second half well in the last ten years or so than in the year two found our little employment rate was six point but our national unemployment rate was six point six percent today it's seven point two. well below you. kafirs up the corporations the unemployment rate did not go down in fact line up there. still it is

a. mix of both without a job creation through tax reduction there is simply that myth. thank you don for that call and for giving us a reality check from from canada by a canadian. you're absolutely right and all you had to do to look at it during the reagan administration reagan basically was going to see in the economy was stimulus he was doing good old fashioned keynesian stimulus he borrowed three trillion dollars and spent it and it created jobs and he left the debt for i mean you are still paying off reagan's death he left the debt for everybody else but bush. cut taxes also and everybody thought oh cutting taxes during the reagan time that most are created some prosperity because there was you know. the economy kind of grew during the reagan presidency although there was a pretty severe recession in the early years but you know as i said it turns out it had nothing to do with tax cuts it had to stimulate

a spending bush was unable to do that stimulative spending as the as the market was disintegrating and then we saw a you know tax cuts don't do anything you're absolutely right betty in staten island new york betty thanks for calling. yes thank you oh i'm sorry i'm in and i wanted like you know to enjoy your show. the reason is i mean how. could you all preach i mean. you really. ought to go right in needed and. look into everything going on fuels even burns it's not. there for you. he could be what the president and only him you know that he's not wouldn't go off and how can you say your country i'm not to say that one should not even their. own yeah i find it i

find it amazing and thank you for the call and for making that point fox news for example has been basically saying that the failure of congress to appropriate legislation appropriate funds for the survivors of hurricane sandy and you know just dealing with hurricane sandy the failure of congress to do that john boehner failure somehow barack obama's failure all presence all because. this is this man or didn't take it up for a vote the story that i'm reading and nobody knows i mean what the truth is but that vote was scheduled for that night as peter king the republican from new york pointed out he had been assured that that vote was going to happen that night and it did suddenly at the last minute and the buzz is that eric cantor voted against the for. school clips legislation banner voted for a ban was very offended by that eric cantor had been helping shepherd through the

sandy legislation and so they're polled and i don't know if that's the case or not whatever it is it's graeme it's bad politics chris christie call the palace intrigue michael in orlando florida hey michael thanks for watching thanks for calling. tom think of taking a call i just want to make a quick point i live in orlando florida i live in probably one of the worst neighborhoods definitely one of the worst neighborhoods in the city if not the whole state of florida on hills if you want to look it up it's commonly referred to as crime. and i just want to argue the n.r.a. people come to my neighborhood on a holiday like new year's eve when everybody wants to take the time to casually shoot their firearms in the air and you hear gunfire going off everywhere around you for easily thirty to forty five minutes. you really just wonder are these killers going to come down somewhere where are they going to come down here and i just want to know if they never come in that kind of area and they experience on my back how safe. is that in that in those moments i literally did not want to be

outside because you just have no idea where this is coming from and mind you i make sure also people in there that the majority of these guns are probably the legal gun just want to make up with that on. this is not like is law abiding citizen standing in the front yard just now but it still is still a point that an armed society isn't necessarily a civil society and it's certainly not a a safer society michael thank you for your call thanks for making a point it's a good one philip in kingston new york thanks for watching. thank you. first off you mentioned before the word is absolutely correct. we use the term reich much too frequently right is take a right turn. do something it's the correct way to do it multiple choice you either have a right or wrong there's no place for the trick question of

a comma says oh you then have the correct answer in your misinterpretation of the question but you are arrived at the correct answer according to the way you interpret it ok ok well regarding the my apologies go ahead. i wasn't sure your point is this semantics lesson and you know that's a that's sematic to us in. terms of our language properly being used i you know philip i thank you for that and i think that using language properly is an important thing to do i try try my best thomas in blackville south carolina thomas thanks for watching thanks for calling in what's on your mind tonight. great. you know you're you're in for. and for each very very very is it

really what it is because three days and four book was at worst a. i want to apologize i'm from south carolina my family been a three hundred fifty year. my family came from the grave and family could want to progress the problem there a lot of them for that was the united states but i think being about got a right to speak so after south carolina i do and i gave gabler blood and family all in trade for it at the back of the problem apologized for south carolina taken seventy four percent of the federal government getting back a dollar sixteen a dollar twenty four one and not in not one out of our delegation to stand another player for the people that are in the code and are

our brothers and sisters in a hurricane only function. but. when i was there one group didn't want any of those this or protect. the all of the. grover norquist people and they just this people are the people they won't raise taxes or. burning slanders. game though. burden examples of the corporations. exaggerate. but not panic i. rewrote and rewrote yeah i think you're absolutely right and point well made thank you very much for calling making an excellent point anthony and willow springs missouri and what's on your mind and they mr herman longtime viewer first time

caller this is actually the first of three days of been watching your show on the television very big fan of you tube channel firstly i want to say every single time that i've listened to your show heard your radio show just about every time you mention iceland in comparison of their politics in comparison to where we are handling our we did our show live from there last year for a week and it was quite illuminating and they quite and i i've seen a few of the radio interviews that you've done from iceland yes and i believe mr sex with your understudy here and of the ton. and just want to say is certainly would think that more americans got on to the idea of the danish you know who got the philosophy i think would have a lot more better options for you know putting ourselves in more of a meat we society situation and certainly that last bit i would consider iceland's been considering revamping their constitution as amendments they're going to crowdsourcing right now actually over again so they're crowdsourcing that there's

they're having this giant discussion on the internet about how the constitution should be put together it's fascinating well it's well overdue for a whole and plenty too old to be dealing with the financial systems we're in now and obviously when we run in this situation on freedom of religion freedom from religion you know secular atheist you know christian democrats christian republicans you know with people across the religious spectrum i think maybe that's something that we could consider i mean certainly that's that's a long shot but at least being able to. at the time to you know about rebuilding our constitution. if you know it and you know i think there were at the very least and we're out of time here i'm sorry we can't continue the conversation but at the very least we need to amend it to say corporations are not people money is not speech and for that you can go to move to amend or thanks a lot for your call and words that's it for your take my take live thanks for all your calls if we didn't get your call tonight triste back next week coming up i'll tell you why we should say bye bye to billionaires and spread their wealth around

so that all americans have a chance to prosper not just a select few. something . lies beneath. thousands of meters of ice drawn. for men. but dangerous even to those who keep it to distance. it's.

thursday let's get geeky on becoming successful ever notice how when a basketball player starts draining shots the rest of the team seems to step it up or when a baseball player goes on a streak his teammates try to follow suit well according to a new study success in baseball and other sports may be contagious according to researchers at a software engineering firm in california a baseball player who is i getting strake seems to lift the reforms of his other teammates researchers analyzed the baseball statistics of teams it was someone got at least one hit in thirty consecutive games or more says nine hundred forty five there have been twenty eight of these streaks in major league baseball on average teammates of players who went on thirty or more full game hitting streak raise their own batting average is the teammates raise their own batting averages by eleven points during the streak when compared to the rest of the season. the researchers were quick to note however that their research did not take certain factors into account like the strength of the pitchers that were phased to the

teams that were being played but despite the variables that might have been overlooked in the studies other realms of sport seem to back up those successes contagious argument take for example roger bannister and his miraculous achievement back in one nine hundred fifty four of running a four minute mile breaking the four minute mile barrier prior bannister's feet everyone said that a four minute mile was impossible doctors to scientists everyone in between the belief was the same for minute mile you can't do that no human being is capable of it in the decades leading up to banister's nine hundred fifty four achievement under this umbrella of negativity thousands of runners tried to run a mile in under four minutes and they all failed always but then something funny happened in the days weeks and years after roger bannister set that mark after he broke that four minute mile but had been unattainable for so long suddenly became commonplace lots and lots of people started running for many miles so what happened

apparently more and more people began to believe their running a mile in under four minutes was possible after bannister did it they began to do it to may not be possible to physically catch success like a catch a virus of the common cold the story of the batters and the foreman of miles certainly goes to show that belief in success can be highly contagious. it's time we as a nation have a serious discussion about outlawing billionaires this week we learned that two thousand and twelve was one heck of a year for the billionaires the one hundred richest people in the world got two hundred forty one billion dollars wealthier this year bringing the total net worth of not one point nine trillion dollars these one hundred people have more combined

wealth than the entire g.d.p. of nations like italy or mexico or spain and australia but one hundred seventy other nations and billionaires just in the united states also had a field day as the annual forbes four hundred list of two thousand and twelve showed america's richest billionaires saw their wealth increase by two hundred billion dollars last year bringing their total net worth to one point seven trillion at the same time the economy here in the united states which is staring down a year of impending austerity is stagnant despite moderate unemployment and g.d.p. growth forty nine million americans still live in poverty forty six million americans are on food stamps because they quite literally don't have enough money to feed their families the economic situation in europe continues to deteriorate and even emerging markets in asia are slowing down so if it were true that the

world's economies rely on the super rich to do well as today's all of our conspired right wing economics and. in the end frontman for them argue then why are the world's austerity economies doing so poorly. well there's an answer it's because the billionaires are not the job creators you can told there's somewhere between symbiotes and parasites not meant as a personal insult against billionaires many of them are very good and decent people but it's meant as a statement of common sense if vast fortunes are being a hoarded in the hands of a very few people people who couldn't possibly spend that much money in their lifetime or their kids a lifetime or even their kids' kids kid's life time and that money is essentially being wasted. this is the point that billionaire nick hanauer was making in a recent ted talk explaining why rich people are not job creators. there could

never be enough super rich people to power a great economy somebody like me makes hundreds or thousands of times as much as the median american but i don't buy hundreds or thousands of times as much stuff. my family owns three cars not three thousand i buy a few pairs of pants and sure two year like most american men occasionally we go out to eat with friends i can't buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed americans can't buy any new cars any clothes or enjoy any meals out wages are a key point too it's no coincidence that the explosion of billionaires in america has corresponded with the flat lining of workers' wages for most of american history workers' wages grew as their productivity grew as was virtually considered a law of economics so much so that at nineteen sixty six time magazine in an article titled the futurists looking toward eighty two thousand predicted

a coming leisure society in which workers would benefit from increased productivity as a result of automation and technology and see their wages increase continue to increase despite working fewer and fewer hours because they were being more productive in those hours but right around the time the corporate leaders saw their income tax rates slashed dramatically by the reagan administration and began looking overseas for cheaper and cheaper labor a giant gap opened up between productivity at red line going up and workers' wages their green line flat flat lining their productivity went up considerably as time magazine predicted but wages flattened out the leisure society for the middle class began to die and in its place the billionaire class came into being as corporate leaders sucked more and more wealth from their now far more productive workforce

while refusing to share any of those gains or the fruit of those productivity gains with their workers or with their community. after all with new low personal income tax rates there's a lot more incentive for executives just keep the cash rather than pay their workers well as a result the typical hourly wage wage for an american worker has increased a measly dollar twenty three an hour over the last thirty six years after accounting for inflation meanwhile the top one percent have seen their incomes increase by two hundred seventy five percent since reagan's election today workers' wages as a percentage of g.d.p. are at an all time low yet corporate profits as a percentage of g.d.p. are at an all time high and now with the top one percent of americans owning more wealth than a third of the entire nation and the bottom fifty percent of americans own only three percent of our nation's wealth we as

a nation are facing levels of inequality that we have never seen before in american history this is the price we as a nation are pain for letting billionaire funded think tanks billionaire funded lobbyists convince us and convince congress to move to low tax rates so-called free trade policies and deregulation particularly deregulation of the financial industry this defies both history logic and sanity. imagine walking into a classroom of kindergartners and finding that just one kid has nearly all the toys follow the toys just one kid as thousands of toy cars army men and building blocks piled up like uncle scrooge his money had been fill in half a classroom one or two kids have a couple of dozen toys over the side possible and one kid has an all or rag doll that nobody could possibly think that you know one kid having all this stuff.

and then all the other kids having this. actually most of them have been just that but that's a healthy way to distribute for a society to distribute toys to kindergarten places that one kid could even play with. so why would we call that kid a toy creator why would we tell all the other kindergartners that they can only play with toys when that one student decides to share them and i think we do that but that's exactly what we do with billionaires in our economy billionaires who can spend all the money they have in are more and more reluctant to invest that money in their workers their businesses and their communities so what good are they it's time to put in place a new wealth tax in america i propose a one hundred percent tax on all wealth over one billion dollars hopefully news busters jack coleman who seemed so offended by this idea when i talked about it my

radio show didn't just have his head explode but seriously if you can't get by on a thousand million dollars you probably shouldn't have access to that much money in the first place there's nobody who can't make it on a billion dollars so any wealth over a billion dollars one hundred percent of it goes to help the rest of the country have a decent life that money can live forty nine million americans out of poverty move the forty six million americans on food stamps into the middle class they will those people now moved into the middle class by the invisible hand of human instinct and need better know how to spend the money and thus generate demand and economic activity than does the billionaire class which currently has much of their excess trillions stashed in offshore bank accounts this wealth tax would also break up jam an awful ease and open up the market for small businesses. we shouldn't rely just on the bain capital's and the koch brothers to start or buy up new businesses

the riches of the billionaire class are redistributed a word progressive should embrace by the way redistribution and more and more americans could have access to startup capital and actually earn a living as entrepreneurs trust me the billionaires can spare the wealth total of the average american family has fifty seven thousand dollars that's wealth not income what they own convert that into hundred dollar bills and it's a stack about two inches tall but the average wealth through the average wealth of billionaires on the forbes four hundred list is four point two billion dollars convert that into a stack of hundred dollar bills and it would reach over two miles into the sky it would be a navigation risk to aircraft. it's time to start funneling the riches produced by the american economy to the real job creators working class people who are spending money and the best way to do that is to outlaw billionaires with one hundred percent wealth tax on all assets over a billion dollars we call it the no billionaires campaign and just might be our

best hope to save the american middle class. and that's the way it is tonight thursday january third two thousand and twelve more information check out our website the thom hartmann dot com free speech dot org r t dot com and blue dot com slash the big picture and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport it actually begins with you you've got to show up participate occupy something get out there and get active tag your seat. let me let me respond or don't let me ask you a question. here on this board is what we're having

a debate we have our knives out. there the issue is this really just a bad thing never get here in this race will be an ideal way to talk about the name and we. will do the. science technology innovation all the least of elements from around russia we've got this huge you're covered. the. decision to. come.

coming up.