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| Source:Thom Hartmann talking to right-wing blogger Tom Pauken. |
"Thom Hartmann talks with Tom Pauken, Former Reagan White House staff member / Commissioner-Texas Workforce Commission / Author-Bringing America Home: How America Lost Her Way and How We Can Find Our Way Back Website:Tom Pauken who advocates a Value Added Tax or VAT Tax as a way to bring jobs back to the U.S."
From Thom Hartmann
"How did the United States go from having the strongest economy in the world to facing the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression? What happened to an American economy that once was driven primarily by manufacturing companies, agriculture, small business entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class, but now is dominated by Wall Street investment bankers and financial engineers? A country that once prided herself on her strong manufacturing base producing good-paying jobs for American workers has morphed into an economic system in which American jobs are “outsourced” overseas. Our manufacturing base has been hollowed out, and middle-class Americans are sliding downward economically.
Over the past decade, there has been zero private-sector job growth in the United States. The only growth in jobs has been in government (and in sectors—such as health care—in which government is heavily implicated). Government, of course, does not create jobs—if by jobs we mean employment that contributes to the overall production of an economy—only the private sector does that."
From Tom Pauken
Thom Hartmann started off this conversation by criticizing Tea Party populist wing of the Republican Party and talking about how crazy he thinks they are and then trying to get Tom Pauken to respond to that. With Mr. Pauken basically just pushing that aside and going to David Frum, who Hartmann also mentioned and Pauken talking about how bad the Neoconservatives have been for the Republican Party and in America in general.
Thanks to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other Neoconservative Republicans, the 2000s was the Neoconservative decade, not just in the Republican Party, but in America as well. They won two presidential elections and had complete control of Congress for four years from 2003-07. That's obviously changing now. Two unsuccessful wars, a lot of debt and deficits that were piled on by the Bush Administration, the Great Recession, and the Republican Party losing complete control in Washington thanks to the elections of 2006 and 08.
But now thanks to the Tea Party movement, the Republican Party has been combing back not just in Washington by winning back the House of Representatives in 2010 and retaining a smaller majority, but not that much smaller this year, and all of the state governorships and state legislatures that the Republican Party won in 2010 and retained in 2012.
As far as the value added tax: two of the biggest middle class tax increases in American history, if they were ever passed, would be a flat tax and a value added tax. A value added tax would be on foreign goods, if ever passed in Congress and signed into law by the President, but that tax would get put on American consumers, mostly middle class consumers, who can't afford a tax hike right now, because foreign companies would raise the prices on their goods, to pay for the value added tax.
