myth of american decline and the rise of a new economy. good to have you both here. hello. i want to start with the big picture. we ll get to what people are feeling on the ground. but the wall street journal today, front page. what sequester? washington booms as a new guilded age takes root. are we really about to go into an iceberg or is everything just fine? it s guilded. the use of that word alone should really make you question what s going on here. the truth of the matter is this is definitely a recovery for the rich. let s just look at the housing market flat out. let s take that first. if home prices are going up and it s a supply and demand issue and unemployment remains pretty dismal, 12 million people unemployed, almost half of those long-term unemployed, incomes haven t budged, so who s buying the homes? where s the money coming from? a lot of this is three big banks pulled off the market their more
sequester. that s only a few of the examples of people really feeling the very real impact of the sequester. and more importantly, this really is only the tip of the sequester iceberg. because the cuts of 2013 will have nothing on 2014. the sequester damage is allowed to continue, it will cut $92 billion from the 2014 budget and $35 billion in cuts allocated in 2012 will finally go into effect. these are no longer simply automatic indiscriminate cuts. next year when the sequester iceberg shows its true size, congress gets to choose which programs will be cut, including those covered by the kricritica departments of commerce, labor and health and human services. at the table carmen wong ulrick and daniel gross, author of better, faster, stronger, the
also joy reed and josh barrow, politics editor at business insider. joy, i want to start with you. if you are directly impacted by this, if you are a child on an indigenous reservation, you have already been impacted. is it that we just sort of don t care because those are the most poor, most marginalized people or we really don t see the effects of sequester. or if you are a senior relying on meals on wheels. normally politics caters to senior citizens but not in that instance. the poor do not have a lobby. there is no money to be made in lobbying for the poor so they re always the first to feel the economics of any negative economic policy. on the other side you have this ideology on the right that believe in punitive policy
that are heavier on domestic programs that hurt the poor more. obviously that s not palatable to democrats. it s not that anybody likes the sequester, it s that everybody likes the sequester better than the alternative plans. stay with us, because as we talk about this reality of sequester hitting home, i m going to talk to someone who is behind the numbers. there are real people being impacted. woman: everyone in the nicu all the nurses wanted to watch him when he was there 118 days. everything that you thought was important to you changes in light of having a child that needs you every moment.
i hope this is trickledown. i hope. but i don t know. but you know what the genius probably the most genius thing that wall street has done in the last 100 years is create the mutual fund and the 401(k). it allows corporation funds to strip away the pension, which used to be our parents way of knowing they would retire. they privatized. exactly. and to psychologically connect middle class americans to wall street. to make people think wall street is up, i m doing better. so how do you thread the needle. you re president of the united states, you ve been re-elected but your party is going to stand in the 2014 midterms. on the one hand you have to say and it s honest we re making real progress. on the other hand, you don t want to sound all roses and glory when people are still suffering. is anyone other than regular people going to lose their jobs? is there any member of congress who is going to be held to account for our current economic circumstances? i think probably not