that's how it is in the news culture in this country now that's where i come in. i'm michel. martin. you don't get railroaded if you'll get the straight talk in the straight news. questionable. well john harshman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture is the republican tax reform plan just an excuse for donald trump to give himself his family and the oligarchy billionaires in his cabinet a tax break i'll ask economist michael hudson in just

a moment and even though poll after poll shows that the majority of our nation supports net neutrality republicans are dead set on selling off and corporate ties in our public internet why are they so out of touch with real americans last chorus cooper and me in tonight's big picture panel. if there's one thing all republican politicians are really really good at it's straight up lying through their teeth about how their tax cuts for the rich are actually tax cuts for the middle class reagan did it george w. bush did it and now that he's officially unveiled his own so-called tax reform plan donald trump is doing it to we're going to cut taxes for the middle class make the tax code simpler and more fair for every day america is and we are going to bring back the jobs and wealth that have left our country and most people thought left

our country for good this is just flat out not true populist rhetoric aside the people who are going to actually benefit from donald trump's tax plan are the same people who benefited from every single report. wiccan tax cut plan ever people like trump is kids the oligarchy joining me now to explain why is economist michael hudson distinguished research professor of economics at the university of missouri kansas city and author of the brilliant new book j is for junk economics professor michael hudson welcome. could be here great having you with us so we're still short on details i think so far it's just a nine page outline whatever but based on what we know so far is the trump tax plan really the pro middle class tax plan that he's selling it as who really wins if this thing passes well you have to realize what trump means by the middle class you

and i are not invited to his parties but if he's giving a party for him the middle class or people who earn between one hundred million dollars and five hundred million dollars a year they're not the upper class the billionaires that he likes to hang out with their one hundred million dollars and up so yes it will help the middle class that gets in his group that makes over one hundred million for the ninety nine percent of the population the tax and taxes are not going to get a break at all they're actually going to go up for the poorest donald you mentioned in the lead in about donald trump is going to be the benefit of all of this but trump has said he's not going to make a penny from the tax reform and he may very well be right because if he already pays zero income tax being in a real estate then his income tax rate is going to go from the zero to zero and most of the biggest american companies are going to have their tax rate go from zero to zero amazon companies that have their big things

abroad google alphabet what trump said that is wrong he said that all this money that is kept abroad in countries that don't have much of an income tax like ireland that only has fifteen percent he said that money's going to come back to america that money never left america that money is not in ireland that money has been here all the time but it's registered under an account of a small tiny little office that amazon or alphabet or or google. are going to have in ireland or the cayman islands or somewhere in all of this money that's avoided paying taxes for the last decade since about two hundred four two thousand and four all of this is going to simply be changed the name of the account from our tax tax avoidance affiliate to the parent company account so all of this is completely fictitious and when trump says it's the reform

what this really is it inverts the whole meaning of reform everything you know the one nine hundred twenty s. people said to reform is going to be a more progressive income tax it's going to benefit the wage earners this reform is going to absolutely crush any incentive to invest in factories or making goods and services it's the reform written by wall street it's benefit the headphones the oil and gas companies the real estate companies whole sectors of billionaires they're not going to have themselves almost tax free and the biggest giveaway is saying if you invest your money in sort of new investment then you can write it all off for the whole year the pretense is that companies are going to buy factories machinery and stuff but what's really going to happen is companies are

simply going to buy stocks in other companies there's going to be a merger mania there's going to be an enormous borrowing to buy out other country companies industrial firms all without paying any income tax at all and essentially it makes corporate raiding wall street hedge funds tax free so that's the accelerator depreciation you're talking about can be used acquired not only accelerated model right off total write off it's mind boggling one thing that stands out to me about this plan is that it calls for the repeal of the state and local tax deduction which is a fact only upon. moment for particularly the blue states that have robust tax systems what effect would that have on the economy as a whole. it's going to mean that wage earners in new york new jersey california maryland are going to have much less. take home after tax up pay because in the past they could always subtract the money that's taken

out of their paychecks for the state and local taxes off their declared income no all of a sudden they can't do this anymore so their tax rate is going to be if you're earning a wage and you're living on one of the coasts your tax rate is going to go up very sharply you know but if you're in louisiana no no the riddle. for that i have it has it has no state income tax because their states don't spend very much on the people but if you're in a state that has a good social conscience and spends money on social programs you're going to be punished and in a way you can look at this what comes doing is a one two punch against the economy punch number one is you vastly increase the government by un taxing. the wealthy who do pay most of the taxes because they make so much of the income and the number two punch will be oh goodness gracious just

like reagan and bush quadrupled the budget deficit and the debt know all of a sudden we've raised the debt now we have to roll back social security and we have to cut back medicare and we have to cut back social spending and so the whole idea is to force the government into so much depth that they're going to have to cut back the social programs this is the most right wing tax program. in any country outside of the post soviet states where the neo liberals had a free hand that's remarkable probably the biggest selling point of this tax plan is that it cuts the corporate tax rate i don't understand the logic behind this the effective corporate tax rate is already at twelve percent corporate tax revenues have been declining for decades should we actually be raising the corporate tax rate or at least closing loopholes so effectively we raise. well when you say it's twelve percent in reality the biggest corporations don't have to pay any taxes at all very important to realize that in all if you look at the national income and

product accounts there are whole sectors of the economy that don't pay any income tax real estate is tax free because all of their earnings they can write off either is debt service as interest or they pretend that the building's depreciating even though it's soaring in value so it's just pretend fictitious accounting and fictitious economics oil and gas doesn't have to pay mining doesn't have to pay forestry doesn't have to pay so basically if you're making money not by employing people but by getting economic rent that is a free lunch if you're getting a free lunch by just exploiting the economy you don't have to pay tax only the factories have to pay tax only the workers who work in the factories have to pay tax only the middle class the working class in the industrial sector has to pay tax to begin with so the whole idea of you know adam smith and every one who the republicans talk about is you want the landlords and real estate to pay most of the

tax you want mining and other public domain people who get a gift from the government you want them to pay tax you want monopolies to pay tax but the monopolies are exactly the companies that don't have to pay any tax and it's really remarkable tells you your new book is called j. is for junk economics what are the junk economics that you're debunking we even got it going to war well it sort of like the tax plan the junk economics is the fact that the whole vocabulary of our economics is orwellian it uses words to mean exactly the opposite for instance when the financial sector when wall street siphons off money from the economy all the money that wall street. goldman sachs and citibank make that's cold in addition to g.d.p. to gross domestic product even though it's a transferred from the people at large to wall street. and i deal with

if you have a correct vocabulary you can understand the theory itself you don't have to take a course in economic theory if you just know i can look through the orwellian words in the vocabulary and sensually the advertising and public relations that the rich people use to hedge funds used to pretend that their gains are actually the gains of the economy as a whole and when they don't add anything to the economy they take money out of the economy this book explains how the financial sector and real estate fire sector takes money out of the economy instead of putting it in and why were the rich are getting so much richer without producing anything and without hiring more labor right so what are the alternative economic models out there to the junk ones that you're calling out in the book or is it just a matter of cleaning up what we have and stop stop using phony baloney language.

well believe it or not the classical economics of adam smith john stuart mill. thorstein veblen all in the nineteenth century they had a very clear idea of how to run an economy you want to provide you want to manufacture more you want to protect the environment which they did discuss but you don't want people to get a free lunch but today's economy is all about getting a free lunch and it's about really making capital gains rich people don't make a profit that's leona helmsley principle only the poor people pay taxes rich people make capital gains trumps give tax giveaway means that these capital gains that do not stem from new investment but stem basically from debt leverage ng are made tax exempt so it's unbelievable he's he's promoting parasite as them instead of promoting the economy the host economy as a whole you know well it makes perfect sense given the you know that has been how

he has made his fortune his inter life professor michael hudson it's great having you with us thank you so much good to be here again thank you coming in coming up donald trump's tax cut isn't just a handout to the rich it's also proof that the predatory billionaire oligarchy finally sees major control of our government more on that with horace cooper and tonight's big picture panel right after this break. we don't. really know if you read it. and you'll get it on the old the old. old according to jeff.

for the. we. don't put. all the world's a stage and all the news companies merely players but what kind of partners are in t. america playing r.t. america offers more r.t. america offers. in many ways the news landscape just like to see the real news fake news good actors bad actors and in the end you could never hear all. the parking. from all the world all the world's a stage and we are definitely

a player. you guys and i made a professional ish power point to show you how archie america fits into the greater media landscape our team is not all right but we are a solid alternative to the. liberal or conservative and as you can see his bar graph we don't skew the facts either talking have left these talking head righties oh there you go above it all so look at world r.t. america is in the spotlight now every lead must have no idea how to classify as it actually took me way more time than i cared to admit. and. if you want proof of the oligarchy that hijacked our democracy look no further than donald trump's tax plan for more on that let's turn things over to tonight's big picture.

joining me for tonight's big picture panel are horace cooper attorney and senior fellow at the national center for public policy research and any journalist at the intercept thanks guys for being with me tonight great having you both at its core donald trump's tax reform plan is just another tax cut for the rich and big corporations this obviously makes it popular on wall street with the chamber of commerce but it's a war a out of touch with the kind of tax reform everyday americans want to see according to a recent gallup poll sixty three percent of americans think rich people actually pay too little in taxes sixty seven percent of americans also say big corporations pay too little in taxes so that gallup poll is any indication americans actually want to see taxes raised rich people and corporations what they get instead is tax cuts for rich people and corporations doesn't that speak to how fundamentally broken our democracy is so. yeah i mean i think unfortunately what we're seeing with donald trump who campaigned as sort of you know

a breath of fresh air different kind of republicans were saying a lot of the rehash of the ideas that we had seen under george w. bush under his father and there are no reagan where there publicans are telling us that basically the problem is that the rich are not freed up to have enough money which they will then distribute to the rest of us although unfortunately with several experiments of this having happened under previous presidents we know that isn't the case but horace bruce. wrote reagan's tax plan to bruce bartlett yeah ok did you read his piece in today's washington post did not see that today he came around he said i wrote the reagan myth he said it's a tax myth there's absolutely no evidence for it you know i was there at its inception it has failed he points he pointed out how you know the reagan tax cuts actually led to three economic failures in the eighty's as a result of well you know exploded the debt he said in fact he said the only reason that the economy got better during reagan is because he spent a trillion dollars in infrastructure and military it was

a huge keynesian stimulus every projection where there was a limby or sebille indicated that if he made these tax changes we would bring in x. amount of revenue and what we did instead was bring in about a third more it is true that we had a expanding deficit but it is also true that during that same period of time we spent dramatically more of the all the other point the report with makes and i think it's a really important one is i mean iraq now and i'm guessing you would agree with me both of you would probably agree with me on this that that the one of the reasons the stock market has been continuously going up is because companies can borrow at one percent right now and they're literally borrowing billions of dollars to buy back their own shares to decrease the share pool to drive up the share price so the executives in the us and the stockholders you know make capital gains for it no it's not making more. roddick's it's not you know so basically the fed is running this thing so the point that bruce bartlett made was that when reagan came into

office the fed said the fed funds rate at eighteen percent a year and a half later it dropped to nine percent he said you drop you cut in half the fed funds rate particularly from eighteen to nine percent and you're going to see massive economic stimulus it had nothing to do a tax cuts ok. the stimulus by the federal reserve was a tool that buttressed the growth of the economy but also having the government shift the burden that it placed on the tax payer also was something that helped to give space to the economy we're just not sealing terkel in our national debt was a good thing we know simo i wish congress and the president had work together not to spend cripple what they had planned to spin in light of the dynamic changes that occurred in the one nine hundred eighty s. and also again in the ninety's this is been a problem it wasn't until you had a republican congress and a democrat president that we got on

a glide path towards an actual limit that led to jimmy carter jimmy carter had a balanced budget and had a completely democratic congress the economic able to fire mitt controlling the. virus and that's through the going to environment that he supervised was horrible because of the way i'm lee has the arab oil was not the arab you know it's the work of the and it was a regulatory nightmare it was a tax nightmare every single aspect of it you want to toss any more into this well i mean it's curious jimmy carter is actually a great deregulator i mean i think you know airlines and i'm from other industries so i'm not necessarily share that was so much the issue i mean i think the main point is this you know do most people think that the problem with the economy is that you know we have too little any quality or we have too much money in the hands of too many people i mean that's the sort of bigger picture issue of course we want there to be competitive markets we want entrepreneurs to be able. prosper but when corporations are sitting on a bunch of cash and they're just going to use tax cuts to do just as you said stock

buybacks which is a lot of what they did under the bush tax cuts that's not going to create a more competitive environment that is going to let more entrepreneurs floor and i want to test this on every time so that was more than ninety percent when the when what did the repatriation during and during bush and you know hundreds of billions of dollars came back in the united states for investment purposes over ninety percent of it was used for sure but i want to test this thesis let's let bernie run openly and fairly in this time not let the democrats cheat him and give him let him get the nomination let him present these arguments and these ideas to the american people and let's see what i think it's already been tested you know f.d.r. did it and it worked in a built a great country and eisenhower continued it and then reagan's right his experiment and sam brownback have been a general out of the war and it probably was helped a lot and where and when sam brownback said you know we're going to turn kansas into the great proof of reaganomics he destroyed kansas i mean you know he's destroyed he has already left it he's slinking off to be his predecessor bassinet

as a strategy he have in this case you know john the administration he definitely does any of moving along and yet another example of the huge. excuse me a study out of princeton you know that yeah. and yet another example of a huge gulf between what americans want and what their government ends up doing on behalf of large corporations a new consumer reports survey has found that the majority of americans fifty seven percent support the current net neutrality regulations the ban internet service providers from blocking or discriminating against lawful content on the internet donald trump's of c.c. wants to repeal these protections and in effect turn our internet into something resembling china's always with corporations blocking websites instead of the government why are republicans so out of touch with real americans i asked that question again this time to start so if the only test of good policy is it's popular then the fact that the american people overwhelmingly by greater numbers reject this idea of football players kneeling you ought to be coming on this

program and telling me democrats get in touch with the american people what you do is you measure policy on its merits not on his popularity what we want is an innovative creative and dynamic world wide web and the way that that happens is that you don't have the government in gage in these kinds of restrictions because they place limits and they end up costing people like my mother who have a hard time getting access to the world wide web because the the cost structure isn't allowed to be dispersed in a way according to the muslim to chattanooga or the city provides high speed broadband pretty much everybody for almost nothing said this is an arrow you're very familiar with yeah i mean it's interesting actually marsha blackburn it seems like she's going to run for senate to replace bob corker she's opposing she's been a very strong advocate for the telecommunications industry and against net neutrality when it's curious that you mentioned chattanooga has

a municipal broadband system it's something that she tried to get banned which is something a publican's unfortunately don't believe in local control and things like that but it's been a. huge successes rejuvenated the entire city and honestly a lake we've had net neutrality the entire time internet's around and it's not a problem so i don't understand why i didn't. see guys trying to propose a solution for a problem that doesn't exist i mean we don't need to let people start discriminating on content when the internet seems to work fine as it is right now import of the problem is that the innovation comes through investments by varying types of activities if you're going to have low use limited activity them the amount of resource that you can bring to bear on that is less if you're going to have high quality how they access activity take place then the resources that follow are greater and therefore broadband providers definitely need to steer and advantage to those that are going to bring greater resources and come up with

a way to accommodate those it's better not let jibberish that's a variation on trickle down economics you know if we just you know have five internet service providers around the whole country and they decide what we can see and what we can't how much they're going to charge us for every little website that everything will be wonderful yes that's innovation but is is it construct i mean waste i mean if the providers say that's such a great idea there's a point somewhere in the world where it's worked out and yeah you know right now that neutrality is what's working out for the united states and all over the world so i said i'd change it except china you know and you've got a couple of countries that are that are planning increasingly people are priced out because the lower use users know they're priced out because of monopoly and you know that's not at all surprised because there's not serious competition but in any case i mean you look at france where the. we've we've had this debate before i want to get this last question a new study published in science argues the magazine science the journal that we as

a civilization need to move rapidly as in almost immediately toward a carbon emission free future if we are to have any chance of holding off runaway global warming and. just a few weeks after another study concluded that there's a one in twenty chance that climate change wipes out the entire human race by the end of this century so dick cheney once said that we should go to war with a country if there was just a one percent chance that country was helping terrorists get a nuclear bomb should we apply that thinking to climate change a one in twenty of the apocalypse that's five percent that's insanely high that's five dick cheney's ok part of the problem is that the science keeps moving today's washington post had them in a three piece where they describe a new study saying that it turns out that in brazil the forests themselves or no major climate carbon create contributors and that that was something that was not predicted and in fact protecting that area was thought to be a way to mitigate against it this study comes out and it says something that we

need we're talking about alpha and here and here and you're giving me and no i'm just telling you don't flee about it and let it anecdote this was the year that the polar ice caps are supposed to be completely melted according to the former vice president and what we see as mass reporting do you know in thirty seconds well you know wouldn't it be terrible if we cleaned up the air if we clean up our streams if we didn't have caught you know people dying of coal ash and you know lung cancer and things like this and then it turned out we were a little bit too alarmist about climate change you know that you know even you know the bible and every major religious text says we have to protect our earth and the way that it's being destroyed right now is that we're seeing some record high temperatures we're seeing record you know melting of ice caps we're seeing some entire nations like the male dives off the coast of india disappear because of rising sea levels you know we have to steward this earth it's the only earth we have every single person's you know spiritual religious background says we have to do that and you know it's not about arguing about one or two percent changes in

a scientific study horace great having you thank you and that's the way it is tonight and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there. to tag your it. in case you're new to the game this is how it works now the economy is built around currency corporations run washington or washington controls the media the media over the voters elected the businessman to run this country business equals power you must it's not business as usual it's business like it's never been done before . look. look. look at least some.

low plug. plug. plug. if you. want to go to sleep your street looks like the trails attributes would be analyzed it came from the bottom six feet just like the would it be like you not i got. it would presumably be. subject to the limits are the book.