He loss his objectivity and any belief in his thinking when he stated that the bush tax cuts helped the middle class not the ubber rich along with his Reaganomic’s thinking.

Remember Capital gains rate is 15% on hedge funds managers far less than the middle-class.

Any tax cuts with justed be saved by the rich 20% is normally the #

This rich guy is a jerk! Don’t waste your time on him Tom.

Reworded trickle down garbage by John Mauldin. Capital is only interested in return on capital. Manufacturing used to provide that, but recent decades financial paper has only provided the desired returns. Tax the paper trades to make real production attractive again and perhaps we will listen to him….

John Mauldin said at the beginning of the show that the Republicans are responsible for starting this massive debt due to overspending. Does the guest believe that this was stupidity as he said or was it idealogically driven? Grover Norquist conservative is well-known for saying government should be drowned in a bath tub. What better way to do this than to bankrupt it? Was this a chance for people who don’t like government to have done something about it?

Also, what about the productivity question? Americans have become more and more productive every year but this hasn’t been reflected in their wages, hence people taking equity out of their homes and running up their credit cards.

Thinking back to the Great Depression, I remember that in 1937 they increased taxes to fund the deficit and it plunged the economy back into recession. It took World War II to bring the economy back.

Speaking of hitting the reset button…

We just tossed $27 trillion at “too big to fail” institutions. However, for a “mere” $11 trillion, we could’ve paid-off the debts of every man, woman, and child in the U.S.

Think of the economic “reset” we could’ve had for the people, instead of the banks, and at less than half the price! It’s time to find out where, and to whom, that $27 trillion really went.

Edith
Republicans are responsible for starting this massive debt due to overspending. Does the guest believe that this was stupidity as he said or was it ideologically driven?

They know what they are doing. Spend the money on their friends, cuts taxes for their friends, run the debt up so the Democratic president has to fix it and can’t spend on the people.

Look at the pattern since Reagen. It’s clear as day.

Tax cuts for the middle class? Oh wait was that the $300 or so we got as a tax break?

Wow thanks a lot Bush. Meanwhile the top 10% to 1% had their wealth grow by leaps and bounds. At the same time the middle class has seen their income falling, a lot.

John Mauldin is so full of bull dung that I can smell him through the speakers.

Take a look at Mexico if you want to see your future America.

Rich behind gated communities and the rest of the people struggling to get by.

We are already half way there.

No gate reaches to heaven, though.

Edith states – Also, what about the productivity question? Americans have become more and more productive every year but this hasn’t been reflected in their wages, hence people taking equity out of their homes and running up their credit cards.

When Regan fired the striking airline workers, he signaled to the private sector that unions no longer had support. Poof – wage stagnation for 30 years, resulting what Edith has stated above.

Hmmm – who made money off of stagnant wages, middle class equity drain and consumer debt?

Accidental? I think not. By design? Yes, and by those who espouse the same economic ideology as Mr. Mauldin.

Tom, I really wish you had Krugman on to debate Mr. Mauldin.

Interesting conversation. I’m wondering where Jeremy Siegel is in rebutting John Mauldin’s points. Quick example: in one minute Mauldin’s lamenting the choices made in the housing bubble in selling houses to people who couldn’t really afford them. 5-10 minutes later he’s talking about the quicker ascent out of the last recession in part because we had a housing bubble. Mr. Mauldin, you can’t have it both ways! I will agree that we should come out this one one slower than the last recession. however, the choices we make are important. Coming out with bubbles in like drinking or other self medication as a solution to large problems.

I could go on but the show’s almost over.

The good thing is that Americas aren’t buying this B*LL anymore.

The rich should start planning to move themselves to China.

They won’t be welcome here with their private jets, and helicopters and limos and 10 million-50 million dollar homes for too much longer.

Let me understand this … your guest, Mr. Mauldin, proposes to make the rich richer? They’re not rich enough? From my naive, uneducated perspective down here in the trenches as one of the unemployed, my experience tells me that “Trickle Down” does NOT work. Money from the rich does not trickle down. Their money stays in their own pockets and only leaves when it’s used to advance their own standing at the expense of us down here in the trenches. I believe in the “Trickle Up Theory.” Make us poor people rich … we’ll spend some of our disposable cash as we also pay down our debt and pay our bills and this, in turn, will drive this economy!

Mr. Maudlin is merely playing with the numbers by drawning the TAX line at a different point.
The extreme wealth of the top 1% compared to every other class-strata is undeniable. Corporate Taxes? Either off-shore or passed to the shareholders (the 32% means little)… Considering the tax rate of the upper class during the Eisenhower administration compared to NOW — Fell during JFK, more with Nixon, way more with Reagan, then Clinton and W! A Disingenuous, shameful and informed position for a professor.

What a load of bunk. Increasing taxes on the rich will decrease jobs? He seems to have have conveniently forgot about the years after WW2. Between the late 40′s 60′s we saw a huge rise in the middle class and growth in just about every sector. During the Eisenhower years the wealthiest 10% were taxed at about 80 to 90% and this did not stop growth at all. Of course there were a lot of loop holes so anyone with a good accountant never paid at that rate. Mr Mauldin and the conservatives of his ilk always use the tax card to say it effects small businesses.

The average small business in this country is about 4 to maybe 100 people and the taxes Mauldin is talking about are federal taxes we all pay. Not the taxes a business pays which is a separate thing. I don’t know what a small business person makes and I’m sure it’s a huge variable. I can look to an electrician who I think is a good example of a small business as his company has about 6 to 10 employees. This man makes a modest living, good solid one, he is busy as he’s a good electrician. I suspect most small business owners do not make over 250k a year. I think this mans economic ideology is not only faulty it’s morally bankrupt.

Totally disingenuous guest in the form of John Mauldin, who went basically unchallenged. This show won’t get the evening replay as I have run out of item to throw at the radio. What Tom Ashbrook needs is to add a raspberry/applause button to his site so he can get a quick feedback in response to his guests.

Thanks Tom for having him on though. It was comforting to know these guys are still going to try the tired and dis-proven economic theories they have used in the past. Loved his closing comment of accepting lower wages while you send your child to get their PhD required for employment in the exponentially increasing tuition costs of said. No irony at all in his voice.

People are catching on about the rich in this country.

I don’t believe that’s true. In almost any other western nation it would be true. If a European country had the kinds of income disparities we have combined with the utter disregard for the low-income and unemployed represented by our lack of universal health insurance, for instance, they would have riots and barricades in the streets!

But not in the US. US liberals and progressives consistently don’t “get” how utterly conservative Americans are. Since the 1930′s the left has been predicting that any day now the poor and downtrodden would rise up against their capitalist overlords. It hasn’t happened and it won’t happen.

Do you think it’s a mere coincidence that we are the only major industrial democracy without universal health insurance _AND_ the only one that has NEVER managed to sustain a political party in their national legislature farther left than the US Democratic party? Name me some other major western democracies that has never had the equivalent of a social-democrat or socialist party, or even a Green party, large enough to have a voting bloc in their national legislature.

I’m open to suggestions about why this is. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re also the most religious western industrialized democracy – perhaps Americans think that God will look after them so the government doesn’t have to. Fans of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Rush lose their jobs and their health insurance, too, or have no insurance to begin with. And they get cancer or heart attacks or major trauma with a few hundred thousand dollars in medical bills, wiping out their lifelong savings just like liberals do. But it doesn’t move them to say, “maybe we should do something about this”.

US political culture is unique, and persistently so, and the liberals don’t “get” how unique it is.

You can find a lot of rich people in Barrett-Jackson car auctions. These rich people purchased car for $25,000 to a $1,000,000,00.

That’s where their money goes plus 13 extra marital affairs.

The Citigroup reports (linked below) reaffirm what most of us already know, that the rich are getting richer and vice versa. What’s strange to me is reading this as an industry report from one of the biggest contributors to the crash, and that in plain language they’re banking on the trend continuing.

I may be prejudiced because I’m a C shareholder (I just bought it recently as speculation because it’s cheap), but I totally agree. I don’t see any trend or force in US political culture that would reverse this.

Betting against the trend continuing may not be quite the same as betting against the sun coming up in the morning, but it’s close!

Let me address your question as well to the collection of wannabes and partisan underacheivers who pack this board with their thinly-veiled hate speech day after day…Great program, Tom; I love hearing what smart rich people have to say.

And your not a playing the partisan game by supporting this mans point of view? Please, give me a break.

“Thinly veiled hate speech”. Really? So having an opinion that differs from your own is hate speech? Nonsense, and I might counter that your comments are thinly veiled and partisan as well.

This down turn may be the best thing that could happen to some people. as they lose the jobs that they should have quit. More people getting back to school or back to basics or back to family.

F. William Bracy I agree with you, however I think 2010 is going to be a wash for the Democrats. They are going to loses a lot of seats to the Republicans due to the economy.
I for one don’t think it matters much giving how poorly the Dems have preformed. In days when the Republicans held sway in the Senate a Joe Lieberman would have been put in his place in no uncertain terms. In the last few days the Dems and the President has let this man dictate his terms. They should have shown this man the door. Obama is a smart man, but he’s no LBJ. In times like this you need a man like LBJ to twist arms and to use every political hard ball game on the books. I would mention FDR, but that’s just plain unfair, Obama does not even come close that mans political prowess.

Putney, you said: I think 2010 is going to be a wash for the Democrats. They are going to loses a lot of seats to the Republicans due to the economy.

You could be right. I don’t know what to expect out of the upcoming general election, nor in the next several election cycles, to tell you the truth. Republicanism may not be dead altogether, but I can hear the death rattle coming from its windpipe. We are going to begin voting in big numbers in this country, and what I do know is that Republicans cannot withstand a vigorous suffrage movement, which is precisely what is in store for them. Prost! Skol! Bottom’s up! And I’ll drink to that.

Republicanism may not be dead altogether, but I can hear the death rattle coming from its windpipe

I think this is a redonkulously optimistic viewpoint. As I said above, the idea that plutocratic conservatism in the US is waning has been a popular bit of leftist mythology for over 70 years – - sort of like religious fundamentalists believing that Second Coming is imminent.

The US is conservative to a degree and in ways that are unique among western industrialized democracies. I agree with “Truth and Soul” Putney Swope that the Dems will lose seats in the next election.

That’s not a death rattle you hear – it’s the sound of lots of GOP’ers chuckling as they count their campaign contributions.

Somehow these wide view discussions seem to overlook foundation issues that would make the big picture possible. Jobs is the main problem… So what steps should be taken to insure that US employers hire American labor? Various workplace efficiencies put into effect over the last 40 years have realized the directive that the way to lower costs and improve production dependability is to replace human labor with sophisticated machines. The lessons of the recent past show that work can be performed anywhere in the world as long as information networks provide immediate connectivity.

Each businessman makes an independent decision as to where to go to get the most productivity for the least cost. The cumulative effect of finding relatively inexpensive educated foreign workers is that one has to grapple with the political and social implications of asking why anyone would ever put money into hiring another American?

Protectionism has not been a popular position in this whole debate. Too much isolationism is credited as one of the important contributing factors driving the Great Depression. But now for the first time we are seeing how it is possible to drain the money out of the economy to foreign interests. What’s left after our economic sea is empty? What can be done to keep capital in country? Without capital who can fund projects for workers to complete?

The notion of spending on domestic projects is attractive for the short term, but important tasks, such as engineering and steel production, may still be performed overseas because companies building infrastructure have to mind their costs, too.

I have never heard a businessman admit that by eliminating workers he also eliminated consumers. This is a recent phenomenon in my opinion because only recently has it been possible to lay off so many employees that one by one companies are finding that they cannot sell the very products they saved so much to make. Businesses by giving workers money in the form of wages scatter dollars randomly through the economy to other businesses. The ability for business to break out of this pattern to use foreign resources is a strong contributor to the current job crisis and the economic crash it brings with it. Money flows to foreign companies instead of domestic ones. Jobs will not come back to America until it makes sense for businesses to hire domestic labor again.

One is tempted to make the point that insofar as domestic enterprise can own part or all of foreign companies themselves they can get some of their own capital outflow back in the form of profits. This will show up as income on their corporate ledgers that will please stockholders and may even reach an amount that would appear to be economic growth.

The economy is stratified into layers like the branches on a tree. That some limbs are bigger than others has a positive effect on the statistical measure of how big the tree is, but it does not mean that all the branches are doing equally well. In the economy, just as with the tree, there is no truly effective way for the largest limbs to make smaller ones elsewhere grow too. The whole tree has to get the energy it needs grow everywhere at once.

The inequitable distribution of wealth and resources in this country is our greatest problem. All other problems spring from or are linked to it. I’d like to see the wealthiest 10% of Americans get HAMMERED with taxation. I mean blast ‘em. My entire life I’ve heard that doing so would be a catastrophe and destroy our economy. The rich would all pick up and head off to some friendlier country… I guess I’m willing to take that bet and see what happens.

The great lesson of the last decade has been, if you’re going to steal, steal big, and contribute to the key politicians who can provide you legal and financial cover when your theft comes to light. Any veil of transparency and fairness in the financial arena, has now been lifted, and the average taxpayer can now see how the system truly works. Unfortunately, we are presently confronted with a severely toxic and corrupt political structure that is supporting the power of a sanctioned financial mafia. Your congressman, and senators, must raise vast amounts of money for every new election cycle. The financial mafia owns all of the key players, regardless of party affiliation. As long as “campaign contributions” are legal, no real change will be probable.

In 1994, John Meriwether, along other investment “quants”, formed an innocuous, low profile hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management. They were the self described “masters of the universe”, and were trading securities using 30 to 1 leverage funded by $125 billion in loans from the banking system. The proprietary, “fool-proof” trading system, of course, blew up, creating a fiasco that nearly destroyed the entire financial system. The New York Federal Reserve, barely prevented the banking system from going over the brink into a full blown panic.

This should have been the shot across the bow that inspired tighter regulation of highly leveraged non-bank entities (private equity and hedge funds). The exact reverse happened, as the rescue of LTCM instigated the formation of yet more unregulated investment funds, 8-10 thousand at the top of the bubble. The casino economy was now in full bloom, and lusting for complete deregulation.

As an investment advisor the past thirty years, and great fan of a capitalist system that should reward the small business risk taker, I have looked on in horror as the politicians have systematically dismantled the legal framework that protected the integrity of our financial institutions. Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of dismantling the essential financial firewalls that protected commercial banking from the investment banking thieves. Reagan passed the Garn-St.Germain legislation that led to the wholesale failure of the formerly sleepy and safe savings and loan industry a few short years later, at massive taxpayer expense. Clinton’s 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagal, and Bush’s subsequent ignoring of all regulatory transgressions in the entire financial marketplace, led to where we are today.

The repeal of Glass-Steagal allowed commercial banks to engage the risky activities of investment banks and hedge funds. Suddenly, Citibank became an underwriter and trader of securities, two activities most responsible for its current huge book of non-performing assets. Yesterday, Citibank was awarded a $38 billion tax deduction to offset losses, essentially a reward for miscreant deeds. Your tax dollars at work.

Where are we now? In essence, the banker mafia have destroyed trillions of dollars in credit availability, that will take many years to replenish. Our economy is starved for capital on the most basic main street level. Do not expect a quick recovery. The smart money is not investing in America as it has long since moved on to Brazil, China, India, or where ever the highest and quickest return can be made. Your kids are now in direct competition with vast pools of educated labor around the world, who will work long hours for modest wages and life style improvements. Your retirement will be exposed to inevitable inflation, higher taxes and low quality health care, as 76 million baby boomers begin to enter the vastly underfunded Medicare system. The banker mafia has “transferred”, or as they like to say, arbitraged, a vast amount of wealth to the top, with the financial support and political backing of your government. As Mel Brooks once said, “It’s good to be King!”

I can’t believe what I am hear today.
The White House has come out blazing against comments made by Howard Dean, and has nothing, absolutely nothing to say about the obstructionist BS being conducted by Lieberman.

I’m done with Obama if this was a parliamentary system he would be gone in matter of months.
What is going on here with this administration?
They are worse than Clinton and Bush. They seem to be a combination of the two. Ron Emanuel is turning out to be a complete idiot.

If this was a parliamentary system, the number of elected representatives would have something to do with the number of people represented and a winning vote in parliament would be 51%, not the 20-25% of population represented by 41 Senators. If this was a parliamentary system, Obama would be able to accomplish much more.

While this man is overreaching when he states that the Bush tax cuts helped the middle class, if the middle class income is considered from 50k-250k, and those taxes went to, lets say, 100k-250k, then technically he’s correct. However, since I don’t know what is considered middle class income, that puts me at a disadvantage.

On the one hand, not having this info prevents me from properly dispute his point(even though in my mind, I believe he is dead wrong). Conversely, not having the info, prevents me from restraining myself when about to jump to a conclusion.

I use this as an example to illustrate my point:
What got us in this mess, was strictly lack of knowledge. Specifically, lack of knowledge about a particular subject or claim…

If we begin to TAKE responsibility(which doesn’t mean absolve the other actors of their part)…we can step back to see the full picture. Let us assume the real problem is lack of knowledge. How is this OUR fault?

Housing? Owners not only did not understand what they were signing, they did not fully understand the resources available to them.

CDS(Credit Default Swaps)? Had the public educated itself about these things, it might have been clear as day that there would be a problem renegotiating your mortgage when its bundled with other mortgages, instead of carried by your local bank(although I’m sure they weren’t perfect resources during this crisis either).

Financial Discipline? Many Americans have NO idea what their credit card does, or can do, to their account. I’ve experienced this first hand, after working as a credit counselor for 5 years. Many fell for the borrow and spend Discipline, which of course only works if you are borrowing to buy an appreciating asset or an asset that has a cash flow.

Education? The core of my argument. With education on the decline, we have not taken it upon ourselves to determine, in the information age, how we improve the curriculum, especially at the grammar school level. Its not just enough to teach kids how to measure flour, or open a bank account. They must be taught, even if they NEVER intend to use the knowledge, about things like the stock market, day trading and investing, and what the differences are. The goal is to graduate kids who are, for lack of a better term, jacks-and-jills-of-all-trades, before they move on to a decided career.

Politics? For the last 20 years or so, all I ever hear from Republicans are stubborn corporate business protection schemes and tax cuts for ‘the rich’. But I also hear the masses of people who would be affected by such schemes and cuts supporting these themes to their own detriment, only to have them rant and rave when the services THEY use are cut? For example, the kids in California, having a sit in at the school. Wonderful that they were spurred to activism…I did the same thing in high school when budget cuts forced our high school to let go of teachers with only 1 day left to acheive tenor. When the school board had a town meeting, EVERYONE was there. We all ranted, raged, gave board members the finger. But in the end NOTHING happened. I was confused? wasn’t my voice heard? Why are they just saying, “Oh well, thanks for coming, the cuts will happen anyway.” It happened because the cuts had been approved and put into the budget… though I wasn’t old enough to vote, I realized what the problem was: I and my father had not participated in government, we did not rally our neighbors to point out, “Hey, they want to make these cuts…and that can’t happen because it will affect the education system.”

I knew my right to vote had been secured decades earlier. I knew that men and women had died in foreign lands so that I may continue to have my freedom. But I wasn’t using it. I’ve changed that now…and I see the American people have to do it too.

We need to watch these politicians like hawks. We need to understand their policies, and know what rhetoric is, in order to understand how a politician, like say, Liebermann? Can SOUND like they are for something, but take action against it(if you parse liebermans buy in statement, he was NEVER for a public option; but his statement was prepared because it was an election/debate..so he knew EXACTLY what he was saying and hoped it would be interpreted exactly as it was…another lesson for Jill Q. Citizen.) We have to understand that even after we vote for someone, they may turn right around and do exactly what we don’t want them to. Vet your candidates; check out their histories…intellius.com is a great resource for this…not free, but, pooling together money as a group can give access to the info, and make decision making a little easier.

Basically, it all comes down to this:
“We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for…”

America, when you decide the fault is yours and not your Congresspersons, you’ll have started the first step in the greatest resurgence of the American democracy we have ever seen. But it starts with educating yourself. Not with opinion pages, but hard news with out opinion. Reading government statistics…using wikipedia…yes, I said wikipedia. The resources is well managed, despite claims to the contrary…but even so its a starting point…verify the info. This is what the computer is for…and librarys have them too.

Yes, I’m oversimplifying…but thats what Americans want right now…still. Gimme gimme gimme.

Until we re-learn that repairing this mess is not just with corporations; its with an apathetic populace. And that apathy, even though it was thoroughly engineered with the help of Republicans and anyone else willing to slash taxes and cut education, was the fertile playing ground for the forces at work to bring us to this point. Had we understood rhetoric, and how to parse it to properly interpret it; had we all(me included)been fiscally responsible; had we all been educated about cashflow, instead of ‘consumer spending’…we might have averted this crisis…heck, the stimulus package would have been the right size, because real Democrats and Republicans, not the neo-con right and wolves-in-sheeps clothing ‘blue-dog’ Democrats, would have fought for our interests, and not against them.

I hope this post reaches the American people, and spurs them to action. Informed action. Voting for a candidate just to ‘send a message’ is stupid.

Republicans are right…the proving ground is 2010. But it will NOT prove Barack Obama’s worthiness. It will show the mettle of the American people…

…and might even determine if I want to move to Canada…

Addendum to my previous post:
In that post, I pointed out the students of California who did the sit in at the university; but I didn’t finish why I brought them up.

I brought them up, because it was interesting to see them active in the sit in, but, where were they, when Gov. Schwartznegger was running for office? Where were they when their school board positions were being filled? Where were they when their Senators and Representatives were running for election. I guarantee you, that if those kids had been paying attention then, they might, just might, have understood the implications of not voting in the election, and how it would affect them. If they did vote, then I’m proud, and the blame lies with the rest of the state as well(actually, it does anyway, of course).

But their reaction just brings to mind not a disenfranchised portion of the electorate, but a disengaged portion of the electorate…

I hope this message gets to them, and spurs action in the direction of government, instead of at a school which has already made its decision.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
NJ is the canary in the coal mine…LOWEST VOTER TURNOUT IN STATE HISTORY. The state is about 226 years by the way. When the incoming Republican claims he doesn’t know how he attained the governorship, he is flat out lying. Lowest voter turn out was key; misinformation was the other part…because I’m sure many of those voting for him, thought they were either protecting their own interests or that they were doing it on behalf of the rest of the state…the truth is, they’ve only helped out big business.

If you think Christine Whitman was a disaster(and one of the main reasons Corzine was forced to raise taxes), wait til this clown gets hold of the reigns.

If you want to learn about, recognize, parse and interpret rhetoric, Governor Elect Chris Christie is going to be the perfect example. The only way he could possibly get his Republican talking point agenda to work, would be to use rhetoric at its fullest.

Of course, there’s always the chance that he’ll actually do the right thing(keep taxes at the right rate, and borrow as necessary until the state gets on its feet); but don’t hold out hope for that.

NJ is a fairly educated state; look for Gov.Elect Chris Christie to slash taxes and gouge education…because his goal will be to dumb down the state and make it Republican for as long as possible…NOT facilitating the recovery of the state during this economic crisis.

I am afraid if anyone has been left behind it is Mr. Mauldin. He is a nice person but he keeps reading out of an old playbook. The game has changed.

Lower taxes, less regulation, and free trade do not ensure prosperity. After 30 years this should be obvious. We have built an economy that values greed, predation, and changes faster than humans can adapt through retraining, etc…and still called it good???

Enough. I agree with Nassim Taleb on this. The economic experts have been exposed as clueless frauds. We need entirely new economic ideas and dump the failed religion that is the “magic of the market place”.

i cant believe anyone is still discussing the promise of the american manufacturing sector or the promise of a healthy livelihood with only a high school education. i dont know where americans have their heads when it comes to anything. also, lets assume safely that the ‘rich’ decide the direction of our institutions then i propose that they will make choices that raise their position, wealth, and stability and they do it at a cost to the ‘public’ and majority. its a devestating cost. i mean an affluent person has to eliminate some facials and hair removal appointments and trade the mercedes for a prius a common person has to lose their home. the formula does not balance

Over the past year alone, the public debt of the United States rose sharply from 41 to 53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Under reasonable assumptions, the debt is projected to grow steadily, reaching 85 percent of GDP by 2018, 100 percent by 2022, and 200 percent in 2038.However, before the debt reaches such high levels, the United States will almost certainly experience a debt-driven crisis. Lets keep on blaming the rich for the problem,the ones creating the jobs, and look away at the ever increasing people wanting to hang off the the teats of the government.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it.” Frederic Bastiat

To those who think NPR leans too much to the left…

If you flip to the AM band it is a good bet you’ll find a legion of conservative voices to suite your tastes. Excercise your freedom to choose. Why gripe about the tone here? Just go elsewhere.

I brought them up, because it was interesting to see them active in the sit in, but, where were they, when Gov. Schwartznegger was running for office?

The Governator was elected in 2003 so they were probably in Junior High School.

I hope this message gets to them, and spurs action in the direction of government, instead of at a school which has already made its decision.

I’m sure that reading our penetrating insights on OnPointRadio.org is the high point of their day.

We need entirely new economic ideas and dump the failed religion that is the “magic of the market place”.

China currently has an 8% GDP growth rate; India is at 7%.

The “magic of the marketplace” works fine for countries where hard work, a fanatical devotion to education in science and technology, and a culture of savings instead of debt is in effect.

Don’t blame capitalism and free markets for problems that Americans brought on themselves through sloth and lack of self-discipline.

Obama is an incompetent and failed president, enough said.

I am pleased to know that China’s economic success is not due to slave wages and a falsely valued currency, but instead to “hard work, a fanatical devotion to education in science and technology, and a culture of savings instead of debt”.

I think I finally get it. Thanks.

Who is this guy Mauldin? He thinks we should maintain tax cuts for the rich so they’ll save us? Did he miss the 80s and how trickle down doesn’t work? Yes we need to distinquish between high middle class and truly rich. Maintaining tax cuts for the rich just ends up with more in their investment accounts. Where does he think the money comes from to make jobs? If you don’t give the working people, the average consumers, the money to spend then even if the investors want to invest they don’t because there’s no market to sell to. Did he also miss the 50s and 60s when we had much more progressive taxes AND a booming economy? And his definition of “progressive” taxes, that the wealthy pay a large portion of the TOTAL income taxes? That’s progressive? You could have the wealthy pay a LOWER rate than the middle but if they’re just so darned rich then their total income taxes would still add up to a big chunk of the total. But that says NOTHING about how progressive it is. What’s progressive is when the INDIVIDUAL wealthy tax payer pays a higher rate than the middle. Our income taxes are only a fraction as progressive as they used to be. And if you add in that most areas have sales taxes and the low income folk have to spend all their money while the very high income folk spend only a small portion and re-invest the rest we have regressive taxes overall. We’re supposed to take this guy as an economics expert and that’s his definition of progressive? Either he’s completely inept, or he’s completely in the camp of do everything to make the rich richer and they’ll save us. He has zero credibility in either case.

Natalie and her ilk “get” American political values a lot better than the liberals do.

No I get it. You bet I get it and the events of the last year have cemented my conviction that this country is a not only conservative to a fault but that it’s also a dangerous path that can lead to a a lot of problems such as civil unrest and and other social ills.

I get it. I get that the insurance corporations have basically told us that they own us. I get that the pharmaceutical corporations also own us. So does wall street who don’t contribute anything to anyone except themselves. Sure they make a lot of money but what do they build? Nothing they actually do more harm than good as recent events have shown.

That the Natalie’s of the world “get it” does not mean that it’s right or that it’s a way forward for the country that is positive. I have no illusions, I never did. I only wanted decent affordable health care.
I only wanted us to get out of wars we can’t afford.
It’s not going to happen, why, because we live on one of the most dysfunctional countries on the planet and the real danger is we are heavily armed and are unable to come to any consensus on how to move forward.

kye asks:

How can we grow if we’re not producing tangible goods that add value

Apropos this, NPR reports that City Center in Las Vegas, a new gambling and tourist mecca funded by investors in Dubai, just opened today. According to NPR it is the largest privately funded construction project in US history.

I think it’s interesting that “the largest privately funded construction project in US history” is a casino complex, and not a factory complex, r&d center, or university.

I would have expected such a statement from Natalie or Louise, slapped on so flippantly and so grossly oversimplified, but not from you, mr. nelson; you generally have more measured and intelligent comments. (Are you trying out for a Dickensian play?) There is some truth to that so crudely worded sentiment, but a half truth is as good as a lie.

And I would have expected you to include the full context, so I’ll repeat it here . . .

China currently has an 8% GDP growth rate; India is at 7%.

The “magic of the marketplace” works fine for countries where hard work, a fanatical devotion to education in science and technology, and a culture of savings instead of debt is in effect.

So I repeat: the current crisis is not a failure of capitalism:

Western Europe have capitalist economies but they are somehow still able to provide universal health insurance, social safety nets and a more equitable distribution of income.

China and India are capitalistic and have very strong economic growth.

The US problems are, as I said above, a result of our peculiar culture. Our bizarrely uneven wealth distribution reflects larger societal values which are unique to America among major industrial nations. Our addiction to debt cuts across all strata from government to individuals and from poor to rich. There’s very little difference between homeowner’s buying more house they can afford, and borrowing the rest, and private equity firms doing the same when they buy companies. And the sloth I refer to is from my direct observation in 20 years of working in the high-tech industry, looking at resumes of US and foreign engineers and scientists. Today only THREE of the top 10 patent holders in the United States are US companies. (and many of those patents are actually purchased from foreign companies because Americans think they can buy whatever they want and don’t have to produce it)

Mr. Nelson,

I wonder if the poorest of Chinese and Indian citizenry are impressed with the 7 or 8% growth rate?

Should anything be more important than growth and profit?

I wonder if the poorest of Chinese and Indian citizenry are impressed with the 7 or 8% growth rate?

Living standards in China have increased faster than almost anywhere. According to the Economist Magazine, even poor Chinese have cellphones now. According to one poll I saw in the Economist, poor people in China are more optimistic about their future than poor people in the US, even though they are way poorer than poor people in the US.

But I’m not sure I get the gist of your question- are you suggesting they’d be more impressed if China had, say, a 3% GDP growth rate? I think they’d revolt if that happened, and the Chinese government has made it clear that this is their biggest fear.

Should anything be more important than growth and profit?

It costs money to bring electricity and running water to Chinese villages. Where should that money come from if not economic growth? There are millions of former Chinese peasants who now have factory and construction jobs which might be hellish by US standards but are heavenly compared to what their parents had, thanks to China’s economic growth.

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
Posted by FJB

FJB

But what is happening is the wealthy have been regulated into prosperity and the middle class has been regulated into poverty by our government.

You need to look at what is really going on and not just repeat what you read in Atlas Shrugged.

There is much more social mobility upward in Europe than there is in America.

It’s a little more complicated – it depends on whether you mean relative or absolute mobility, and also whether you subtract downward mobility, and also whether you mean for individuals or across generations. In terms of pure upward mobility the US is pretty good, which is why so many immigrants want to come here. But a big problem is that because we have weak social safety nets and no universal access to health insurance we also have lots of downward mobility . Millions of middle class people are one job loss or major illness away from poverty. Some European nations, e.g., France, have a tide that rises more slowly, but far fewer boats sink! So the net effect is that overall upward mobility is higher there (and in most other EU countries) than the US.

But don’t tell this to the conservatives because they hate it when you confuse them with data!

There’s an ongoing mobility project here . . .
http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%20Dream%20Report.pdf

. . . BTW, I’ve been yakking about productivity improvements as the 900-pound-gorilla in the room that no one wants to talk about, and the above study has some great charts on that!

Peter Nelson, you are so right. American voters are confronting complicated issues unforeseen by the founding fathers. I think American voters are manipulated into voting for things that benefit the manipulators but not necessarily the nation or the planet, and therefore something needs to be done.
I recommend less centralization of blame. I recommend that the weight of each senator and representative be taken seriously by National Public Radio, district by district, and state by state, so that not only experts such as yourself can understand why any “representative” in Congress is taking a position, and what that position is. Clearly the presidency is not in control. Under Bush, I think his interests were pretty much in line with Big Money to begin with, so the tectonic forces didn’t threaten an earthquake. Under Obama, I feel the heat.
I am begging the media to focus where the power is exerting itself, which is, in my opinion, more locally. Fovus not on who skidded into whom on the interstate, but what is going on where the laws are made, not a Senator 2,000 miles away from the voter’s district. Then people like you might deign to help explain.

Maudlin drops some good truth bombs here. The entire entrenched political establishment bears a lot of responsibility for the financial fix this country is in today – both Democrats and Republicans. They all tried to buy votes with one crazy moral hazard inducing program after another. For example – the GOP used Medicare Prescription drug coverage and the Dems the Community Reinvestment Act.

Now you have a choice – keep buying the garbage that Jeremy Siegel, Ben Stein, Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman are selling if you wish. These are the same guys that have been wrong every step of the way through the financial crisis; they have no credibility. Or you can start listening to the guys that have gotten it right and predicted the crisis. Go Google “Peter Schiff was right” and start getting real.

LET’S TELL THE TRUTH ALREADY ABOUT TAXES.
By that I mean let’s talk for a moment about something called the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, or CAFRs- ie. the second set of books that is kept of our government’s accounting that the public doesn’t get to see. The CAFRs are the set of books that tells the truth: that our government, though it may cry poor- and we all believe it because, after all, there are numbers to prove it and economists and pundits to say it- IS ANYTHING BUT BROKE. This is what really needs to be reported ANY time the subject of taxes- or our economy AT ALL- arises.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that EVERY NEWS NETWORK, no doubt NPR included, gets a copy of states’ CAFRs annually, due to a 20-plus year media blackout on the matter (ie. networks being threatened with total shutdown) it is hard to find someone willing to talk publicly about THE ACTUAL budget of our federal, state, and local governments as opposed to THE REPORTED BUDGET. If the real numbers were made public, every American citizen would see that the argument for needing tax dollars to do anything is a total farce and we would all listen to these types of segments and laugh. Or revolt.

According to our own law, per US Code TITLE 28 > PART VI > CHAPTER 176 > SUBCHAPTER A > § 3002 Chapter 15, the very definition of the United States is “a Federal Corporation.” And so is every municipality down to cities and townships a corporation. Corporations, by their definition, exist for profit.

In the official annual Budget Report around which our common knowledge and media revolves, the numbers reflected are the amount of taxes supposedly needed to justify having schools, fire trucks, roads, etc. The revenue reported is merely a fraction of the actual revenue brought in by our government and does not even begin to account for the massive amounts of investment income (including profit from investing OUR tax dollars) and income not generated from tax dollars at all. It has been well documented over the last 25 years that our government operates, not at a deficit at all, but at an OBSCENE PROFIT at the expense of the American people; that the reported numbers are only used to continually justify our current tax system. The income-reporting policies (written by a private company hired by the government to oversee its income reporting- conflict of interest, anyone??) allow for the actual income to be excluded by a variety of ways and means. Without taxes we will still have roads, schools, fire trucks, and social programs. The only thing our tax dollars pay for is the interest payments we make to the Federal Reserve on our National Debt- debt none of us actually agreed to, but got saddled with and then continue to call it our own because of the criminal amount of misinformation we are fed.

I challenge NPR to start talking about the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports. As a public radio station, with enough public demand, you may be able to get away with it. A good place to start researching would be The Biggest Game In Town (www.video.google.com), or anything by Walter Burien (of course there are now many others) who pioneered and has extensively studied the accounting practices of all of our municipalities for more than the last two decades. Furthermore public awareness needs to be brought to the fact that a lot of the so-called “government entities” that we commonly believe are federal are also private, for-profit organizations. Here’s the short list: The Federal Reserve, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the US Postal Service, and the Department of the Treasury.

Time to wake up! We need a lot more reform than we think. And NONE OF IT has to cost ANY OF US in more taxes. Shame on you, NPR, for not having the courage to report what our other networks won’t. I don’t expect that you will talk about banks’ second set of books (a whole other rabbit hole to get lost in) as Bank of America is one of your major sponsors after all. But keeping us all in ignorance, running on the treadmill to pay our taxes when you know more than you are saying is not helping the American economy, its people, or your listeners whatsoever.

Disappointing show. Nothing about jobs lost to China and outsourcing. Nothing about the huge overhang of bad house debt that still hangs over banks.

Bush tax cuts ending are the problems? LMAO. We’ve got the Bush tax cuts now. Look at where we are.

More education, more training is Maudlin’s answer? LMAO. We have more college grads than ever. How much training does a person need? Twitter and facebook are the reason people need graduate degrees? What is this guy smoking?

Abraham Lincoln
- You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
- You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
- You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
- You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

Winston Churchill
- The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings.
- The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.

Listened to Tom’s interview with Jeremy Siegel and John Mauldin. I would like to believe Mr. Siegel – and yet found John Mauldin’s presentation more believable, more factual. I was disappointed in Mr. Siegel’s brief argument.

Bloomberg reports that 12% of mortgages above $1M are 90 days past due, more than 2X the national average. 40 % are underwater. The so called rich are a house of cards about to come crashing down and they figuratively they will come crashing down on the middle and lower class in terms of the taxes that they will no longer be paying and the jobs they will no longer be providing. Perhaps maudlin is right and the rise in taxes will be the death blow to the upper middle class (because that is who we are really talking about, the real rich will be immune from the higher taxes due to their various tax avoidance strategies) but I think that the upper middle class are done for the most part anyway and the taxes will just be the coup de grace. Hopefully when there isn’t the upper middle class to beat up on anymore a flat tax will be considered with no deductions so that all pay their fair share and people are not penalized for being successful.