arthur brooks, thank you for joining us, much appreciated. >> thanks, stuart.umer confidence numbers out, a lower reading than expected and we come down a little on the dow. well, we were up 50 of 60 and now we're up 35, 36. charles, that's not a big impact from consumer confidence. charles: that's not a big impact. and the consumer confidence numbers out of sync for a while. stuart: i'm sorry to jump in. but what does it tell you about the economy going forward? if consumer confidence is declining now? >> the about and real new paradigm in consumer confidence. we've peaked in 2000 along with the stock market and the stock market came back in 2007, consumer confidence did not come all the way back. this time the stock market's at an all-time high consumer confidence is even lower than it was in 2007. the reflection is that people are spending money that they make, but they're not borrowing money. credit card debt went down three months in a row, so this is why we get the slow-growth economy. people haven't bought into anything. automobile sales, the easy compar

let's ask arthur brooks, president of the american enterprise institute. . they've been rising all the way through the recession, all the way through the crisis. the problem is that these numbers always tend to rise and never tend to fall. so we're going to come off the cliff, people are going to start going back to work, we hope. the trouble is we're not going to have people coming off these unearned entitlement benefits and that changes our nation permanently. >> in what way? >> well, what's happened in europe basically is that we've created an entire class of people who learned helplessness, who have gone away from the work force, who actually don't know how to be part of the work force. the problem with that is not the economic cost. that's bad enough. it's the human cost. it's a real moral problem when people are so divorced from a productive way of life, we can't afford that in america for moral reasons. that's not the american dream. >> so 49 million social security. 49 million got food stamps. 13 million lived in public or subsidized housing. what d