to be an outstandingly good president but a year in can you safely say that he turned out to be an outstandingly bad one. i would say yes i think the terms of how he's presenting the us to the rest of the world it's been a miserable miserable display of. authoritarianism reeses. and a lack of real focus and understanding of what the country needs now. you can see this in the health care. area we had really a good back roll with respect to the republicans proposing things that the country really doesn't want the country really once. universal health care not fifty million people uninsured and the republicans seem to not want that but the people do so that's just one example of many things that have gone wrong this year having read many of your articles i assume that you have generally very negative opinion

of the american electoral system how it works. if you compare for example mr trump to let's say the obama administration which contributed a great deal to the american government dadt on substance do you think he so far has been really so much worse than the rest well doing nothing. is not good either when it comes to fiscal policy because you have this true debt of the country which we call the fiscal gap which takes into account all the debts that are off the books and those are growing every year. because the baby boom generation which is very large number is getting closer to collecting its benefits from pensions and health care and as it gets closer to the present value cost the cost in the presence of those future benefits gets larger so we have a debt that's growing around six trillion

a year actually our fiscal gap is about two hundred trillion you said that that is you know because if that's not because the terms but. they got worse under obama they're got a whole lot worse under bush so every administration for the last six decades has contributed to this problem but the situation is that is such that if you don't address it is. just keeps growing on its own so you're faulting time for not correcting somebody else's mistakes in fact the mistake is all the previous administrations but isn't that a bit of a high order for all there's only a few of you have to you have to take the economic situation the fiscal situation as you find it in if you've got something that people left you well they did a bad job but you have to address it you can't just let things continue to get worse because the bills are getting bigger and bigger for our kids this is also the case in russia that you have a fiscal gap we measure that as one of the early studies we've done here at the guidance institute we measure the fiscal gap it's not quite as big as

a share of g.d.p. as it is in the u.s. but it's quite substantial so it all unless you get on top of these problems. they get worse but you know very well that every time you want to get on top of major structural issues there are some you know temporary issues that come into play on some very clear focus and one such thing would be. the wrangle over at the budget that we saw in the american senate i know that you. long been critical of the american political system its partisanship the bending habits and i think all of that wasn't display in that argument do you think the primary issue though was money or was it something else let's say the political ambition i think both sides are trying to make political points. up to a point they don't want to really shut down the government and lay off all these people who are working for the government it's

a very big work force so i think the. the democrats were trying to make a point that we're standing up for immigration and for people that are have come to our country we're more humanitarian republicans are trying to push the point that you have to have secure borders it seems like there should be a good compromise but. you know both sides are. each other's throats i mean trumps disposition is to fight as opposed to you know come to a compromise agreement but you know who to show that he's really in charge he has the need to say he's one what strikes me about this whole argument is the naked politics of it because both parties use the funding for polities policies that they it really upon to get concessions on the issues that they disagree so nobody argues that the military or the public servants have to be paid but everybody is ok with

making their salaries subject to political bargaining do them or a complete will see that is a fair game. no i think the i think the public is very unhappy about this this is exactly what they don't like about politicians that they you know there's a sensible middle ground and. you do have people in the democratic party that are pretty far to the left and people to the pretty far to the right in the republican party and those two wings of the parties have been. very dominant in determining who gets into congress and who becomes president so you know you have somebody in office right now who's six who's. really appealing to the extreme right and president obama was i think more of a centrist but he was also kind of left of center and people i polo see are pretty far to the left so we don't have most of the public they represented who are much

more in the middle that's why i tried to run for president because i felt that neither. candidate that was coming forth was really focused on the middle ground and. undoing and actually going to get anything accomplished in terms of real policy reform but you mention president obama as he also had his own government shutdown and i think for a person who is not familiar with the american budgeting process it's really difficult to understand why somebody who would. sub the system in the way that would allow the government to leave paycheck to paycheck is that part of the of the checks and balances because here in russia we do have an issue of death too much power invested in the executive but it seems to me that this is perhaps the the negative sides of the excess of checks and balances yeah it's not a good situ i think that you know the democrats have in the senate the ability to block legislation certain legislation with just forty percent of the senators and

they have more than forty percent of the senators there are fifty eight percent. about forty eight out of the hundred senators so they have a more than. forty percent of block there's a rule in the senate that you can block certain kinds of rules laws with more than forty percent. vote so you know how that law came into being is kind of a historical curiosity it wasn't in the it's not in the constitution so you know i think both parties feel that they should if they're out of power they should still have some power and maybe it's you know a good thing but anyway the democrats are trying to exercise this ability to have some influence because otherwise they're just sitting there bet you know just complaining for four years and then i mean exercising some influence at the expense of the military and the you know your park service as a setter i mean that's not they know it's not a very you know it's not a noble way out of the politics it's not necessarily in their interest to try and

use that power very much so they stopped the government for a couple days but in the end they folded because if they exactly what you're saying which is that this is not a good use of power it's not productive to say hey the military in order to protect illegal immigrants are going to be speaking about the illegal immigrants or rather children her abroad illegally or state illegally in the united states we're talking about eight. hundred thousand people there at this point can the american economy afford to lose them because i would assume that many of them would be entering the labor force and they're speaking english why do you think trump doesn't see the practicality of making money over those of those people for the economy. i think he probably does see that taking children or people who grew up here has as children there was no fault of theirs that they were brought to the u.s. and then throwing them out eight hundred. eight hundred thousand is you referring

to. that would be very unjust and unfair but we also have another ten or so million . adult illegal immigrants who work in the u.s. for quite a while and the idea of acts of deporting them is also something that really you know some people want to do that but many people in the u.s. and myself included say that if you're here you should you know you made it you got through the hurdles of getting into the country illegally or whatever. if you've been here and you don't have a criminal record and you're contributing to the country you should be allowed to stay and then we should secure the border so that we don't have this as an ongoing problem and you know making at moral or social arguments there are now asking for an economic question because from what i understand the american economy now experience is full employment if your child wants to give it an additional push i assume you would need labor force in the country these people are here because they can make a better living and they're there contributing to the economy so yeah if they let

if they were thrown out some americans would you know take their place and have a higher living standard but i think. i think the moral of the economic arguments both tend to say let's leave them here let's and i think the democrats strategy would be better if they just said look this guys you're in charge you make the decisions and we'll discuss what you did if you want to throw out a million other million people and cause all that human suffering and misery and that's a very human inhumane thing to do at this point. you know we'll talk about it in the next election so i think. you know they're really pretty much in charge even the senate can walk things a little bit but the democrats but not much politically it's not going to work to keep the government shutdown it's just not a strong enough lever to try and get the republicans to do what you made in july

and economically rational having. covered tom for a while i think it always comes down to a money issue for him whether it is let's say the middle east or any other. policy issue as far as you know has anyone done any estimates so far on how much money it would cost to the american economy if you deport all all those people well it's probably about five percent of the workforce we're talking about. a million illegal immigrants if you threw them all out of the country. yeah it would have a big impact in the short run over time the growth rate of the economy would probably come back to work or otherwise i think it's you know i'd like to say it's . that the economic argument would carry sway with him but he's looking at people that are not his same color you have to realize this person is racist at a very deep level so for him he'd say well i'll probably take the cost of throwing

out eleven million people don't don't look like me and like me and come from places that he things are miserable icicles a cafe have to take a very short break now but maybe we'll be back in just a few moments stay tuned. here's what people have been saying about reject. the only show i go out of my way to you know what it really packs a punch in the yampa is the john oliver of r t america is doing the same we are apparently better than nothing. and see people you never heard of. jack to the next president of the world bank very. seriously send us an e-mail.

this is kentucky. boy you can find the. money c.g. with no co mines left. the jobs are gone all the ones that. love to see these people the survivors of disappearing before their eyes. remember. thinking when i was younger that if anything ever happened to the coal mines here that it would become a ghost town but i never thought in a million years i would see that and it's happening it's happened. welcome back to worlds apart with laurence kotlikoff

a professor of economics at boston university professor kotlikoff we were discussing the. difficulty with funding just before the break and chum for his part accused democrats of trying to steal the limelight from his much vaunted tax bill and i get it from your writing that tom's bragging about how good the tug's bill is is not entirely unfounded correct me if i'm wrong but your cultivation showed that it is likely to expand the economy and real wages by about five percent over time there are lots of people who are very critical of that bill of what do you like about it well i think to begin with we should realize that it didn't start with trump it's not even clear the trump understands the bill or the economics underlying it the bill actually was kind of half a democratic proposal to have a republican proposal innocence a sense that the business tax part was partly designed by democrat

leaning. academic economists but anyway over time this pretty good tax reform proposal which was initially called the better way plan evolved into the tax cutting jobs act which i give it about a b. minus as a professor for tax reform it's not something that is one of the most is not best for trying to it's not better for his this administration but it's. anyway what it's going to do is increase the incentive for companies to invest in the u.s. for american companies not to leave the us and i think that's going to lead to more capital staying in the u.s. and coming into the u.s. and higher real wages and we were kind of high relative to other countries with respect to our incentives to invest in the u.s. so that's good the the personal tax reforms are basically kind of revenue neutral and make some sense there are some. decision here to go

after states taxpayers in states that didn't vote for trump blue states as opposed to red states so that's pretty mean and nasty and may undermine public education the way it was set up. but the. the basic story is this is a you know quasi i.d.'s and some i decent reform it's going to help the economy but it doesn't. produced in our simulations we actually have a we're simulating this tax reform in what we call the global gaidar model a model we developed here the guider institute with russian economists and directing this team over the last three years so the russian a russian simulation model if you like was used to help pass this refinery you know given the current political context and i'm not sure that russian experience. would be paid what would be there my ten times and then the washington it's solid

economics of it's based on modeling methodology was developed in the us and by myself and i hope we do long be labeled as some sort of malicious interference but this all started before trump was even on the radar you also pointed out that the bill would not address the projected explosion in the american government debt relative to g.d.p. from seventy seven percent now to one hundred fifty percent in two thousand and fifty and i think your partially explains where would that come from but can you elaborate a little bit more on that so we have you know the true debt which we call the fiscal gap because it incorporates all the off the books liabilities for example paying for my social security benefits i'm now sixty seven collecting starting at seventy well that's a true obligation of the federal government's not recorded as official debt but it's it's has to be paid same with my health care benefits from the government so

unless you start dealing with these this problem the country is going to fall off the cliff fiscally speaking and we're we're bankrupt given our current policy or current policies a path to bankruptcy sky high tax rates to an economy that's not going to grow and i think you see signs of this in so far as it's very hard to fund many things in our government like basic research there are cutbacks because the country. he's already understanding with the politicians that the government's broke that it can't. and so we need to really a major tax increase we didn't need a policy that's revenue neutral which is what i. think we have based on the simulations we've done with the global gaidar model we needed something would significantly raise revenues and we also need to cut spending so we need to have reforms that fix. in the spending reforms have to come through fixing our pension system fixing our health care says system so everybody's covered but we don't go

broke i think everybody knows about the american government debt and yet lots of foreigners are still eagerly investing into american securities and bonds doesn't that mean that at the end of the day whatever are the obligations of the american government be its economic commitments they will be bankrolled by a by the foreigners because everybody has a stake in not letting them merican economy go bankrupt well i think i think through the market the traders out there that are setting the interest rate on long term government bonds which is really what you're referring to which is that if things were so bad why would we be able to borrow at such a low long term rate i think those traders don't. either that i don't think they understand all the off the book liabilities or they do understand those liabilities they understand we're bankrupt but they think the other traders don't understand it so that we have this kind of curious. equilibrium in the market where everybody is

kind of trading on the basis of everybody else getting it wrong or at least not trading because these traders. they can lose their jobs if they make a move that is based on a reality but the other traders don't come along if you lose money by yourself you can still keep your job but if you take a position where you you know we really base it on the underlying realities and nobody else comes along in the market then you lose in the marketplace and then you lose your job but you know it's not a rational what i'm saying is that the marketplace is not rational but over time people will get the truth it will it will come out and we will see the market crash lead on purses crash and he discussed irrational politicians policy is all fine and have a clean light i mean not only in washington but also more broadly i want anybody economics doesn't you know the underlying reality is that some users have to pay my

my benefits you know and it's his are not making enough money to do it that's the basic game over problem here we face and the american economy is not. isolated i mean it's a i think it's the unique economy in the sands of how much exposure for and there is have to it i wonder if there are real hitch here is that while the united states is preaching liberal economics and free market at the end of the day it managed to create the conditions for itself when it is not operating within the frame market conditions because everybody is treating the united states the american economy as something. unique partially because of the value of the role of the dollar and. i think that's really the role the dollar helps you. you know think that well gee the if the u.s. isn't bad fiscal shape it can print a lot of money and the rest of the world will keep taking it but there's a limit to that you know there's a limit to how much many countries are gotten into trouble in the past and printed

money to try and pay for their bills but ultimately obviously it's too to inflation and we saw this with the british pound you know the british empire was dominant and at some point. it became less dominant broke up and then the pal no it was no longer the currency the world dominating currency if you look at the long term projections again coming from this really terrific guide our model that is a global model so you have all the demographic changes and all the regions of the world that were seventy regions in the world all the fiscal policies if you simulate. the rest of the world catching up in terms of productivity with the u.s. in this framework you see that over time the u.s. is going to become a minor player in the world economy because it's going to be dominated and this is very interesting by china by india but also by the middle east and sub-saharan

africa if those regions are do catch up in terms of productivity levels and that's a very big if but you see at the end of the century that the biggest region in the world economically speaking is not china or india it's actually sub-saharan africa . and then it's india and then it's middle east and then it's china and the u.s. is down at about five percent of world g.d.p. from about sixteen percent now so the long run picture is one of the us lou you know becoming like germany to the world economy and that's driven by you know very interesting the fact is that the un is projecting a population explosion in terms of the world population mostly concentrated in sub-saharan africa in the middle east and this is going to produce a an increase in population of the world by one china in the next twenty years and by three china's over the course of the century so all these factors are going to through time i agree with you it's not going to be tomorrow but through time people

are going to wake up to the fact that the u.s. is in very bad fiscal shape that its economic dominance isn't eval and evidently going to decline just china alone is going to overtake the u.s. has got a bigger g.d.p. right now than the us and i think you made several attempts to get into the white house to try to change the system from within and you have very detailed proposals that took me a whole evening just to understand. simple ones well i mean they they are very detailed and you know it takes. not only time but i think it takes effort to understand what you're talking about and i think today's politics especially in the united states seems to favor people who offer very simple and sometimes very dramatic solutions doesn't mean that people like yourself. will always be poised to lose to some demagogues who have politically benefiting by the

fiscally unsubstantiated policies i think it's very difficult to deal with a democrat demagogue who demagogues. method of is to find somebody to blame and say well it's the immigrants who are china no matter what the facts or. that are causing our country not to grow in terms of living standard at the radio used to grow and it requires somebody to say well look you know the facts are different you know one of the things we saw in this entire campaign leading up to trump selection was very little discussion of the facts the politicians were just exchanging insults with each other was very good at that but nobody said look you know you may be the smartest person in the world in your area of cheating people in the real estate market but when it comes to actually understand economics you have no background but i don't understand is actually not at all useful was the campaign truly exceptional because there are i think there is always an element of that regardless of whether it's a presidential campaign a let's say congressional race there seems to be

a lesser demand for. those in flight is very entertaining. and having somebody like obama as a great speaker and just very inspirational is that's attractive. but there's also something that's attractive which is having somebody actually knows what's wrong and how to fix it i'm not saying i'm the only one who's wrong but i think any you know a good economist could possibly have won that election had the press played and attention to that person so our situation that yes pays attention to people who seem interested and exciting enough for the people and this is ultimately a question of how you run a democracy and what is a democracy i mean it's a very pretty fresh look at marathon and in france i mean you know does he have the . he's a very attractive person physically no i think he's a good speaker from what i gather but he's not. you know he basically got elected

by saying the political parties are bankrupt we need some real change and real analysis somebody who actually is thinking more deeply about how to fix things a new direction and let's go that was the name of his party. i think had the press spent some attention given some attention to my campaign it's possible that i could have taken off like work on the in in france you know maybe not maybe maybe she said you know maybe the public would not be interested in somebody who's clearly looks like an academic and sounds like an academic and you know when i tried once again that same two thousand and twenty well you know it's under the right circumstances possibly and the problem is this kind of what we call a catch twenty two would emerge it's a you know it's it's. you know if the press had paid attention i would have gotten a lot of campaign contributions and then i would have been viewed as a wobble candidate and got more attention so. but they said well you don't have any

money and i said why don't have any money because you're all writing about the so that's what we mean by catch twenty two well as a consequence we have to leave it there i really appreciate your being on our program and terrorists please keep the conversation going on our social media pages and i hope to see you again same place same time here on worlds apart. i would imagine they'll be another tax reform bill next year just simplified bringing a flat tax before you solar shop will bring in

a fifty percent tax rate across the board what's the best possible solution to the tax question in the us. prescribe medication is widespread on the us market and a frequent cause of death at the point in my life. like everything with my family was literally coming unglued i had actually planned. to commit some sight watch all who has made antidepressants so commonly used we were doing what the doctors told us to do we were being responsible and what the real side effects. was is chair likely all too when i did was done on a cocktail of legal drugs. just because something's legal doesn't mean it's saying.

this hour's top stories turkey's top diplomat the u.s. saying washington doesn't keep its promises on the if there's no trust between things. it's a military offensive against the american by kurdish militias in northern syria. donald trump meets british really prime ministers on his first day at the world economic forum in davos the u.s. leader is expected to promote his america first agenda of the gathering and look for. just one hundred sixty million russian awfully to get the green light for the upcoming winter games in a move slammed by russia is a live big committee.