welcome back to the night's big picture rumble and joining me are kyle peterson and chris allman let's get back to it and let's talk about the bridge fiasco in new jersey so back in september a few lanes on the george washington bridge were inexplicably shut down which created this traffic nightmare for this small town called fort lee which is right next to the on ramp of the bridge here they begin this story has just leaked and leaked and leaked it's drip drip drip and it slowly was revealed that there was no research being done on the bridge as was originally claimed there was no reason why these bridge lanes were closed it was then speculated that maybe it was political retribution coming from governor christie's office against the town the mayor here and then ultimately there's a there's

a e-mails e-mails were released in all of chris christie's been saying no one in this office was responsible for choosing to close down these bridges in one august thirteenth e-mail though a deputy chief of staff for chris christie told the port of ported port authority official david wildstein that quote time for some traffic problems in fort lee which whilst i responded by saying got it other documents and text messages in fact show kelly in wild sign joking about the bridge shutdown and calling its victims the children of bono voters a reference to christie's opponent in last november's gubernatorial election so someone within christie's staff ordered a bridge to be closed down in what looks like political retribution. should christie resign the spoiler is really going off that we were going to be disrupting interstate commerce we heard of four ambulances that might have been delayed we're looking at people's lives who might have been put in danger by this decision you know normally when states or political organizations get

reputations they're not always one hundred percent accurate but there's always a little bit of truth in there somewhere and you know new jersey has a reputation and chris weird and chris christie is shocked we're all shocked where you know i'm not that shocked i mean chris christie is the tory asli dictatorial i mean he came in to bad mouth the unions he's come in badmouthing everybody if someone wanted to cross him some local town mayor then i mean this is straight out of house of cards i mean this is a congressman frank underwood sort of a move here and yet you're right it is what we expect from the boisterous governor . of a state like new jersey the big thing here though is it's getting this traffic bridge moniker and it's actually one of the few times when a scandal is actually it's right to get a date because the similarities between this and watergate are actually really profound much like in two thousand and twenty thirteen chris christie was able you know was running away with the election much like nixon was running away with the

election in that race and then all of a sudden he goes too far once to guarantee a mandate and it gets him self in real trouble i wouldn't be surprised if we see chris christie resign after this especially if we see the drip drip drip continue to this him resigning blizzard no authority there for him to resign even though it hasn't directly connected him to the staffer but it's his deputy chief of staff who is ordering this no i don't think there is and there's no denying that this is a bad situation for christie there's no way that he gets out of this looking good he's either the guy who lied or he's the guy who didn't know what his deputy chief of staff was doing that said i think we i owe him a little bit of but if of the doubt i think there's nothing directly timing him to it he has. this staff member lied to me and told me she knew nothing about it and we will we'll just have to see about holds up i think the reporters investigators will to continue to pull that thread and we'll see if it stands you know people have political amnesia of this country where it's something seems like a really big scandal right now but in three months six months they'll be another

scandal that you know i don't think he's going to resign over this is governor christie basically canceled all his public events over the next day and he released this statement and he says what i've seen today for the first time is unacceptable i am outraged and deeply saddened to learn that not only was i misled by a member of my staff but this completely inappropriate and unsanctioned conduct was made without my knowledge so he's basically throwing his staff under the bus we were told to sit up or the want to say oh it's wonderful let's hear what i mean this is a this is a guy who claims to be in power claims to be in control where does the buck stop for someone who's a decider why isn't the staffer already fired i mean we have a clear paper trail saying she did it and if and if she lied to you why isn't she gone already chris we were talking over the break i mean is governor christie the type of politician who can fall back on the republican base for support and get i don't believe the fellow i personally don't think so i think that you know chris christie plays really well in new jersey but i really don't think he's going to

play well in the rest of the country and i think there are other republicans that i would support. for president over him i mean there are you know name half a dozen and i just think it's great for where he is but i just don't think it's going to play across the country i think his style is perfect for his home state and maybe not too many others that said i mean i agree we're about political enemies and we misuse like a big deal right now because it happened today and we forget that twenty sixteen is a long time down the road all these other candidates who are being talked about have their own problems and the just the simple fact is that nobody gets on the air force one without a little bit of baggage i'm told me if stories come out of people who were going to the hospital ended up dying or i know there's a delay. search for a missing girl i mean these are pretty serious things that. we'll see if it just goes away let's move on fifty years ago this month the surgeon general luther terry released a landmark report on the health effects of smoking tobacco it prompted huge government

regulation of the industry according to the american medical association fifty years later that regulation has been a success tobacco control is estimated to be associated with avoidance of the million premature deaths an estimated extended mean life span of nineteen to twenty years pretty simple question chris i'll start with you here could we have expected the free market to make the sort of day to save eight million lives. of people who would have died from smoking should we have just waited for for people to just be enlightened about cigarettes and stop smoking them and save all these medical costs well you know i think that the government can be very good at educating people about the dangers of certain products but let's face it what the government didn't do and i worked for senator john ashcroft during the whole tobacco litigation debate and that is we didn't ban the product the government actually makes a lot of money off to tobacco taxes and when my boss suggested let's just ban it

because how how moral is it for our government to get rich over something we know is killing people. republicans and democrats alike said all no that's a cash cow and you know with the legalization of marijuana that's another great cash cow to that don't that we don't think has any health benefits unless you are undergoing chemotherapy we should have been to rather than playing in the dirty money well i'm saying that yeah if it's if it's that bad then maybe we should have what's called a what is the next tobacco i mean we're we've had mayor bloomberg banning high fruit toast corn syrup drinks the. medicine scientists coming in on the health effects of high fructose corn syrup trans fats being banned and yet each time that movement is done in this regard they're criticized as the nanny state backed big government is coming out and they're not they're not actually not banning these products as you're talking about chris the really way they're lowering the size of

what drinks you can buy obviously that's a sort of reform but. it really sort of want to get a little stronger clearly not to say it is bad but yet it's so bad that we'll take all this extra money for it i mean that's a look i want a carbon into this debate too because the science is coming out about the carbon pollution and the health effects of that does government have a role in regulating these things and seeing that positive results as we saw with tobacco regulation i think to some extent things that are boy beyond the pale for me you know crystal meth cocaine stuff like that i would agree the government should ban i totally disagree about cigarettes i mean we're talking about regulate should and should have been about let's focus i mean i'm a libertarian to share i mean that's that's the reason a large part of why i why a lot of conservatives oppose the collectivization of health care because of a certain individual knows the facts as long as the product companies are being forthright about about the health concerns that exist is long as a person knows the facts and is paying for his own health care and will if it gets

to that pay for his own casket let him serve as a libertarian are you opposed to the actions that were taken against tobacco do you think that this is not a success story that eight million people's lives have been saved as a result of this clearly it's a success story i don't smoke myself but i don't think that it is the government's role to tell everybody what they can put in their bodies to a large extent and i think you're hitting it right on the money but health is the next you know the next rubicon that's going to be crossed because if we collective eyes health care to the point that like all of europe a sickly doesn't ever develop. all the developed nations of the what are we going to get to a point where you know you can't have that. but we're going to dig into salsa and trance fats and all those other things that you know some have even suggested well we'll just tax them we'll have a sugar tax on the soda and we'll have all this and if you have details if we have if we have data which suggests that salt sugar and fat are bad for us just like we

had data back in the fifty's and sixty's that smoking was bad for us we didn't ban it outright we regulated it and made sure that that tax money went to fixing some of the health care costs that come out of these to us i think that's the smart approach because beyond just being bad for you it's direct links to cancer and direct links to diseases all right well let's move on to this next topic colorado pot dealers they're raking in the green and by that i mean a lot of money they say seventy seven legal dealers made roughly five million dollars the demand they can't even hire people fast enough to keep up with the demand and now the conservative editors at the national review have endorsed colorado's legal marijuana market saying it has become the first state to make the prudent choice of legalizing the consumption sale of marijuana that's dispensing with the charade of medical restrictions and recognizing the fact that while some people smoke marijuana to the effects of chemotherapy most people smoke marijuana to get hot and not it's not the worst thing in the world pretty sure we can come to near universal agreement on that it's not a good thing right chris. legalization of marijuana. what's going on in colorado in

terms of people not being arrested for this stuff in terms of jobs being created the economy. going nuts and you know i'm a little bit about what you're about to look at your whole ization where people aren't getting arrested and going to jail but you know quite frankly i don't see any good that's going to happen to society from this legalization i think we'll have more kids abusing marijuana we're going to jail and out we're going to find out that the chemicals that are in street marijuana today are much more dangerous then say twenty thirty years ago people are going to get addicted they're going to get cancers they're going to get you know i don't know who they are so you've got to you want to be cigarettes a little bit you know i didn't want to ban them but i said it was hypocritical for the government to say this is horrible but yet it's so horrible that we'll just get rich off it however let me say this about marijuana if anyone wants to smoke

marijuana great but when you lose your job and you flunk out of school don't come to me for your unemployment and everything else because it's a choice you make and you will live with whatever consequences that marijuana economy has and we have just as a country we we stepped back when prohibition and legalized alcohol alcohol is a substance which you know when a lot of people's lives is tremendously destructive at the same i'm sure in some instances could be said about marijuana we did the right thing there were we we regulated it made sure it was controlled and made sure that we limited access to young people that's important but i agree i mean i think the position is totally consistent if you want to smoke that cigarette smoke that cigarette as long as you're paying through health care if you want to smoke that joint smoke a joint healthier sendhil sort of chris uhlmann but you all for joining me things will be right back.

dramas that come to be ignored. stories others refuse to notice. the faces changing the world writes now. to picture of today's new. homes or from around the globe. local. t.v. .

i would bet that. a society that i think corporation kind of convinced that to go. to. the bank or try to get all that money all about money and i'm a national effect for a politician writing the laws and regulations that. there is just too much. today's. topic that.

fifty years ago today this man lyndon johnson declared a war on poverty in his first state of the union address as president. there's hundreds gratian today here and now the players know war on poverty in america. and i urge this congress and all americans to join with me and that after. i was part of his war on poverty johnson oversaw the creation of social welfare programs that we now consider part of the economic lifeblood of our country in one

nine hundred sixty four he signed the food stamp act which created the federal supplemental nutrition program with food stamp program which forty seven million americans now rely on that same year president johnson also signed the economic opportunity act which created the jobs corps vista program and volunteer based community action program and one year later in one nine hundred sixty five you signed the social security act which created both medicare and medicaid another program tens of millions of americans rely on but fifty years later johnson's war on poverty is still a controversial topic pointing to the obvious fact that poverty still exists many conservatives argue that it was a failure in fact a republican of florida senator marco rubio said as much earlier today in a speech outlining his new anti-poverty plan. five decades and trillions of dollars after president johnson first announced a war on poverty. the results of the big government approach are in here's what

they are. we have four million americans who've been out of work for six months or more we have a staggering forty nine million americans living below the poverty line we have over twice that number over one hundred million people who get some sort of form of food aid from the federal government now according to conservatives like rubio this whole war on poverty concept it was just a ruse an excuse to push through expensive and unnecessary social welfare programs that were more about winning votes than helping people move up the economic ladder that's what conservatives say and then there's what empirical data says which is the opposite a new study out of columbia university looked at the legacy of the war on poverty programs and concluded that thanks to things like medicaid and food stamps americans today are better off than they would have been without such programs according to the study without taxes and other government programs poverty would

have been roughly flat between one nine hundred sixty seven and two thousand and eleven at twenty seven to twenty nine percent while with government benefits poverty has fallen from twenty six percent to sixteen percent that's right the war on poverty reduced poverty by ten percentage points these programs so now fifty years old work they just work it's common sense if you give a family that can afford food some assistance and they can go out and buy food which helps that grocery stores sell more products which creates demand for the farmer food producer and soon new people have to be hired and one of those new people hired might just be in that original family that you gave a little assistance to to buy some food that's why for one dollar the government invests in food stamps it creates about a dollar seventy three in economic activity and that's according to moody's. the same logic applies when you help people pay for their medical costs with medicare and medicaid that means they'll have more money to spend elsewhere in the economy

and stay on their feet long enough to find a livelihood these programs work unfortunately they're being kneecapped first it was president bill clinton's embrace of so-called welfare reform in the ninety's that through countless families off the benefit rolls and today there's the ongoing assault from austerity as claims are made by the government just can't afford to fight a war on poverty anymore look where the wealthiest nation in the world with more billionaires than anywhere else we can most certainly afford to lift americans out of poverty but it is true that back when the war on poverty began tax rates on the wealthiest americans were upwards of ninety percent there's a lot of revenue coming in from america's fact cats and now after the reagan revolution of the one nine hundred eighty s. those top tax rates are considerably lower now in the upper thirty percent range and government deficits have grown in coffers supporting social welfare programs

have run dry. this fiscal imbalance combined with this i know randian ridicule of poor americans emanating from republican politicians and their media mouthpieces are the underpinning of the conservative assault on the war on poverty fifty years after its inception and while it might be difficult to change this cultural phenomenon which is demonizing the poor in america today it is relatively easy to fix the economic imbalance that's bankrupting efforts to alleviate poverty in america and the easy fix is to just roll back the reagan tax cuts and make america's billionaires pay their fair share in the war on poverty once again and that is the subject of tonight's daily to. for the past thirty two years americans have been living a lie it's a lie that helps rich people and screws working people and it's a lie that needs to be called out the people promoting this live most of them rich people themselves have been so good at promoting this lie that pretty much everyone

believes it it's even asserted as a fact without contradiction in the mainstream media it's a line in the us the lie is that raising the income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies somehow hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. the truth is that raising income taxes on rich people and raising income taxes and hugely profitable companies actually helps economies and causes companies to hire more and more people bus and lowering unemployment. but makes this live particularly relevant right now is that the french constitutional council there are court like our supreme court that decides what's constitutional and what's not has just agreed with the new socialist government that it's totally legal to raise the very top income tax rates on very wealthy individuals and hugely profitable corporations to fifty percent affectively seventy five percent when you add in

their other. taxes like our fica that fund health care and retirement and things like that. a lot of the tax increases like the one the french constitutional court just approved raise unemployment and the tax cuts reduce unemployment is widely believed because like so many big lies it has a small germ of truth at its center that germ of truth is that when people who spend all or nearly all of their income every year which is basically poor people working class people when they have a little more money in their pocket they spend it and that increases economic activity because there's more demand for goods and services and so to meet that additional demand employers hire more workers so you'd think that of cutting the taxes on poor and low wage people would cause them to have more money which they'd spend. it stimulate the economy and that's true except for one thing which is the germ of the lie that rich people use to get everyone to think that tax

cuts for rich people help the economy and here's that why while it would be true that if you cut income taxes on the poor and low and working people so they had more money in their pockets it would stimulate the economy it's impossible why is it impossible because as mitt romney and rush limbaugh point out as often as possible the bottom forty percent of american workers make so little money that they don't pay any income taxes so there's nothing to cut when republicans talk about tax cuts and i'm talking about tax cuts for working people i'm talking about cutting taxes on rich people. so what about cutting taxes on rich people when they give them more money to spend or even invest which would stimulate economic growth that's the core of course of the tax religion of limbaugh who as we reported four hundred million dollars contracted romney who was reported to have paid no taxes for years on hundreds of millions in income. rich people's taxes they

say in good times are going to roll the thing that makes this a law is that rich people actually behave differently with their money than do poor and working class people. when rich people get extra money from tax cuts they don't spend like everyday working people do after all they pretty much have everything they want or need instead as we learned about mitt romney in two thousand and twelve the open bank accounts in the cayman islands and switzerland and stashed that money away for future generations are they'll buy an american company likes and sata and move it to china where they can get cheaper labor and pollute all they want or since they got the money relatively easy and don't worry so much about losing it after all their basic needs are already covered they gamble with we call it investing in real estate of the stock market but it's it's really just gambling . and none of that of course translates into american jobs. and history backs this

up. in one hundred twenty two in republican warren harding drop the top tax rate from seventy three percent out in twenty five percent it kicked off a gambling real estate and stock market bubble burst in one thousand nine hundred ninety president franklin roosevelt fix that by raising the top tax rate on the bridge back up to over ninety percent which led to more than forty years of stability and prosperity. rich people left their money in their companies and only took thirty times what their employees did as pay after all take more you just pay more taxes economy boom middle class prospered then came reagan. he drop the top tax rate back down to twenty eight percent leading within a year of the worst recession since the great depression followed by the savings and loans crisis. bill clinton took the top income tax rate back up to thirty nine percent and presto the economy boom but then bush jr came into office cut it back

down again and we got another crash and lots of unemployment. simple point effect four times since nine hundred thirteen we've had big tax cuts on the rich to lead to major crashes the other two led to stagnation for working people all of them made the rich a lot richer. and when taxes have gone up as author larry by our points out since one nine hundred fifty we have had five tax increases on the rich four out of five times unemployment went down things got better in other words for working people. the flip side is buying our points out is that since nine hundred fifty we've had ten cuts to the top marginal tax rate cuts six out of ten times unemployment has gone up. tax cuts for the rich in other words screw working people at least sixty percent of the time and they never help working people. when ronald reagan came into office taxes on rich people were over seventy percent and the american middle class was the strongest it's ever been. ever since the reagan tax cuts however

we've been lurching from bubble to bubble economic crisis to economic crisis. the french are figured out if you want to stable economy you need to tax the rich that's why their version of the supreme court just ok to big new tax on the wealthiest people in france. the countries of scandinavia be taxing their billionaires and millionaires for more than half a century and it's worked great in places like sweden and denmark. and the history of much of the twentieth century shows us the tax in the rich works right here in america too. so if we really want economy that works then we need to do just one simple thing ignore the republican allies and roll back the reagan tax cuts. and that's the way it is tonight wednesday january twenty fourth and don't forget as always says democracy begins with you get out there get active tag you're it.

the underlying these policies there's a lot you know about. the

pleasure to have you with us here on our t.v. today i roll researcher. has a new alert animation scripts scare me a little bit. there is breaking news tonight and we are continuing to follow the breaking news. the alexander family cry tears of the warrior at your grave things rather that. in a court of war zone. is a story made sort of movies playing out in real life. coming

up on our t.v. stopping the n.s.a. california lawmakers propose a bill to curb as i say its new big the bill blocks state agencies from cooperating with the n.s.a. all of their state joined in this effort to stop government spying the latest on this push for privacy ahead. and although the u.s. war in iraq added two years ago al qaeda has taken over the city illusia the u.s. is sending drones to the iraqi government but not true. at least for now what this means for the region coming up. and did you hear about the polar vortex if you turn on the t.v. this week you've seen the mainstream media obsessing over the whole we'll take a look at how the media has.