That resulted in 122,000 american casualties, how political and Business Leaders are using Digital Networks and the executive director of the author on how they represent authors. Thats just a few of the authors on book tv this weekend for a tweet television schedule, booktv. Org, book tv, 24 hours of nonfiction authors, television for serious readers. Steve forbes appeared last week indepth program, the editor in chief has rung twice for president as the United States and his most recent book, reviving america. Host steve forbes, are the issues you talk about and write about, are they being discussed, you think in this election . Guest actually not the way they should be. In many ways this is the most contentfree campaign weve had in decades. Take the republican side, most of the caund candidates have nice position papers but how many led like i did with flat tax. Whatever you think of donald trump, he led with a diagnosis, prescription and diagnosis, he put it out there and what is amazing his 16 opponents didnt realize what he was showing them. If you lead with an issue, lead like you have conviction, you can get peoples attention. Its amazing and thats why sometimes i shouldnt say this specially on the air, i fantasize that maybe get joe stalin for five minutes and shoot Political Consultants because they really dont understand how you get a message across in the way that the American People can grasp anday say, yes, this is the way we should go. Host but youve been talking about the flat tax for a long time, in fact, your second book was flat tax resolution and second book reviving america,oo replacing the tax code. What exactly is a flat tax . Guest what it would do get rid of the current code, a couple of years ago the Tax Writing Committee in congress before retired put together after several years of real effort a bill to try to rationalize the current code, the bill came 997 pages which tells you all you need to know. Bury the tax code but the epa may not allow it, its toxic, throw away the code, put in a single rate, we recommend in the books 7 , generous exemption for adults and children so nobody gets a tax increase in this thing. So, for example, a family of four, your first 52,800 of salary is free from federal income tax, no tax on your savings, no death taxes, aye always believe that you should leave the world unmolested by the irs. Not the rate down to 17 , have immediate expensing of capital expenditures, so say on the personal side above that 52,000u you only pay 17 cents on the dollar, we could literally do your tax return on a single shiet of airplane or a few key strokes on the computer. By the way, 40 countries jurisdictions around the world, i say jurisdictions because places like hong kong, theyre not a country but selfadministrationing have variations of the flat tax. This works in the real world. Host how has it worked for the other countries . Guest it has worked very well. What it does it not only creates more growth because you can spend your time working on the thing, doing real things insteag of coping with the tax code but also much easier to administer and collect, so the tax evasiont becomes that much more difficule. Host one of the complaints that we have about our system that not everybody pays taxes . Do you believe that everybody should pay taxes . Guest well, i take a little difference with some of my colleagues on that one. Everyone who works pay taxes, you pay taxes on sz for sz and medicare, the socalled fica taxes, the government pretends thats not a tax but a contribution for the future retirement for pensions of healthcare but in the real world its a tax and its from your first dollar of income, so you take a typical american, he or she is working, yes, they are paying income taxes to the feds and on the state levels many have income tax with low levels of thresholds so they are paying on that level as well. So no no one is get get away from paying taxes unless theyra not part of the economy. Host are you a one percenter . We can discus in the subject of money is when you have unStable Currency, you do get more sharper social divisions because of the economic stagnation, you have the 1 versus the 99 . All of these divisions. People start to turn on each other. So, yes, in america at least until recently before we had the stagnation is what was remarkable is how fluid our situations were in economic life, our 400 richest list, youre off of it the next. My father liked to say n this economy if you think youve arrived. Be ready to be shown the door. Nothing stays. Am host repealing obamacare replacing the tax code and reforming the fed will restore hope and prosperity. In it you write that our Healthcare System is like a patient who has been misdiagnosed and treated time and again with the wrongngand medicine, he just keeps getting sicker, six decades of growingde government involvement has distorted the Healthcare System . It has, indeed. We point out in the book, nobody is on the system we have today. S by the way, i dont think what political persuasion you are, no one is happy with the system we have today. Ha all right now medical costs are starting to really go up again, you go to a hospital, most people, you know, bad enough to go to the hospital, but the experience leaves them really shaken. You wondered does the specialists talk to each other, do the socalled hospitals talk to each other . Ation yet somehow she ends up being administered the medication, its an unnerving experience and so the system grew out of world war ii that wage and price controls with millions of people gone in the armed services, you have labor shortages here at home, you werent allowed to pay people more cash so companiesed started to pay in kind, benefits, Healthcare Benefits and the government during the war allowed it and then after is the war in 1950s this could be Tax Deduction for businesses and not count as income to employees. So nobody design it had system. It drew higglypigly. The Real Companies are Health Insurance companies. They get the revenue by how well they negotiate with Insurance Companies, and the government not how they satisfy patients. He we cite in the book, it sounds prif louse but very telling where a the patient really lies in this food chain that thel crumbiest motel in the world wouldnt dare put you in a room with another guest with a curtain in between, a sickck guest, no one does that. The crumbiest motel wouldnt give you a robe by sl Salvation Army that goes in thel dumpster. Turn what looks like a hopeless liability in terms of financial liability, costs keep going up and up into the most Dynamic Growth industry ever. Host does the Forbes Company offer Health Insurance to its employees . Guest slut sli. Host that a good system . Guest it grew. It was equivalent of Health Savings account, we give our people or media 2,500 cash during the course of the year, you are in charge of it if you are blessed with good health yo choose not the spend the money, you get the keep, if you find that a generic prescription is better than the prescription,pt that savings is yours. Not mine, not the Insurance Company and not the government. Its in their benefit to do so. Our cost over time when you compare apples to apples we havent had quite the problems that other companies had but we are a small outfit compared to the rest of the economy. Thats what you need more and more where patients are in control of the resources, so if you move to another company, that policy should go with you, what they call portability so youre not chain to a company, i want to leave but i cant because im going to lose the benefits and what i i do i do. We want to have liberation. Again, patient control. Free market. Itll do so in health care and get more safety nets from thee crazy system we have today. We do it in food. You know, government run agriculture, we would have no more obesity because we would all be starving. Companys process the food. Sell food everywhere, supermarkets, grocery stores, hotels or whatever and you have problems, you have food banks and food stamps to deal with it. Why cant we do the same thing with health care . Real enterprise, real patient control and more effective safety nets whether highrisk pools or you will be covered in the catastrophe hits you. Host back to reviving america and taxes, the last thing we need another halfbaked solution and not simply enough to tax cat rates, think about what happened in 1986 after the code was somewhat simplified, numerous tax shelters were eliminated and the number of brackets were reduced to 2. But no sooner was the ink dried on that legislation than washington politicians picked up their old habits, there had been more than 15,000 changes to the code as congress at the behest of the swarm of lobbyist snuck in clauses and amendments to favor individuals, companies, industries, nonprofits, causes. Guest yeah, hopefully next year we will get serious tax reform. Thats why you have to have a single rate. In 86 we had two rates. Putting two tax rates together is like putting two rabbits together. They breed, they multiply. When they have a single rate, you want to change it, everyoneo sees it, everyone knows theyll be affected by it so its a real insurance against what happened 30 years ago when we last try today simplified the code. By the way, this also shows trying to deal reform with thea code as we have it today impossible. , that 86 act, came to 800 pages or something. Again, just throws the thing out and start all over, by the way, those who worry am i going to lose my reduction and mortgagell and all that sort of thing, do a variation what hong kong does, give people a choice. You can go with the new system or if you lack selfesteem and stay with the old, go ahead. But this way you lower the temperature, you say to people dont trust me, see for yourself which one is better. I think 99 . By the way, when we talk about taxes we get all hung up on gdpp and revenues and crossing lines and all that sort of thing. Think of an opportunity cost. The irs estimates we spend s 6 billion a year filling out tax forms. Experts we spend 200 billionn plus complying. Think of 20 years. Tens of billions of hours, trillions of dollars, immense brain power, very bright people are involved in this thing, imagine all the resources gone to products, new cures for diseases, how much better off we would be, what economist call the opportunity cost, that is the real immoral travest, what is taken away from us, the corruption of it, but what weve lost because we spent our resources on something totallyas unnecessary. Host my guest is your taxes are most complicated for most people. Have you figured out how much time and money has been spent doing your taxes . Guest yeah, its horrific. 40 years ago i could actually do my return. 1970s. I always have an accountant look over it but i could semiunderstand the thing. Onethird of that and subtract line 7a, you have to go to 8c, by the way, let me point out in the book, i have Good Software to help me do it. Well, we point out depending on your circumstances, Different Software packages will give you different estimates of what your Tax Liability is. Even they, the gods we worship, the Software Must have it arent getting it right. Nobody can. Host in host in 1999 in your first book, a new birth of freedom, the dirty little secret inin washington, what the politicians really fare from tax relief is not a loss of revenue but they s really fear is a loss of power. Guest complexity is power. Here in washington where we are today, if youre a member of the house and ways and means committee, youre a member of that committee, youre set for political life. I think i will have a reception tonight. Every lobbyist comes with a check, yes, i need access, contribute to your camp own or whatever you want and this way they have power. You have to go to them. Either to protect yourself or try to shaft an opponent or something the code is being its hurting your industry of business. So you always have to come to them. Thats what they like, you always have to come to them which means checks, be blunt about it. Host from reviving america, our nation seems myered from a malaise from the 1970s is this uncertain polarized and economic stagnant america the new normal . Guest no. Some people, i think former secretary of treasury talks about the new era as if its from aliens from space. Something the new forces of history. Of its absolutely nonsense. What we have gone through today is as result of policy errors. The nice thing of errors that can be corrected. Thats why we did the book. We focused on big three reforms, get those right and by golly this economy will come rooring roaring back. Th same thing in the 70s. We can do it again. Host now your friend ron paul has written in the fed but youre at reforming the fed, here is what you write, we may be in awe, but they can no longer guess the need for money than the central days of the soviet union. Guest absolutely. That the fed can determine what Interest Rates are, how banks should be run, what the money supply should be is preposterous. The soviet union fell and weoo point in the book what the feded has done, weakening the dollar which started under republican administration, this is bipartisan nonsense here. In the early part of the last decade, started weakening the dollar, thats why commodities prices went up and housing prices went up and led to the disaster in 2008, since 2008 the fed has misbehaved. I take for example zero Interest Rates, should they raise Interest Rates . R controlling Interest Rates is like price control. The fed should be out of it. They can set the rate theyll lend moneys to banks at, discount windows. Theyve always done that. But in terms of trying to set the price of borrowing andhe lending for the rest of the economy, its like the soviet union, distort of the market. For example, bonds. I dont know whether they they did this, they created a credit market where the favoritism goes to bonds. Corporate bonds, government bonds. Who can issue bonds . Usually Big Companies, obviously governments, what has happened, if you look at the credit where credit has gone since 2008, since the fed started this nonsense, the Small Businesses, new businesses, household, tinyn killing the creation of new businesses, killing theli expansion of Small Businesses, which is a key reason whydi addition of overregulation, for the first time in history Small Businesses arent created. Since 2009 the number of creation of Small Businesses were a fraction of what they were after previous recessions. We know, Small Businesses, newes businesses, where the innovation comes from and where job creation comes from. Not from the biggie, but from the new ones. Its not happening. You have periods where businesses are Going Companies are going out ofne business at a faster rate than new companies are being created. That is brand new. It goes against what one of the great strengths of the this country, the ability to come up with new and greater companies. Back in the 70s, whoever heard of microsoft, whoever heard of fedex and apple, they all started as little companies in the 70s, biggest of the 90s today. Thats the flow, kind of rot that i think people sense but cant put their if i thinkers on. Host arent low Interest Rates politically popular . Guest low rates today, yes, they favor that, but how much real Home Building has been done . Again, they say its better than 2009. I would hope so. In terms of the needs of this economy, still not where it should be. You try one of the reasons you y dont have mobility the way you used to. You want to move from here to texas or oregon or whatever, can i get a mortgage there . Can the person who wants to buy my house here can get a mortgage . Very, very uncertain, so the rates are low. Its like having a rentcontrolled apartment if you dont mind the lack of upkeep,ey the landlord wont give you much upkeep. Us in terms of creating new apartments, housing, it doesnt work. They give one statistic. I hate to do this, but in the last five years, credit to government has grown 37 , credit to corporations 32 , credit to Small Businesses and households only 6 . Devastating figures, specially when compared to the past and thats one reason why our labor market is to bad. Even putting aside how many people have dropped out, people are not getting the jobs they should, a lot of part time jobs, people dont want them. We saw lousy job report last month and was bad enough the Establishment Survey where they go to existing companies and they have to call the household surveys which is better at picking up new businesses that havent come in the governments radar yet. So across the board, we are still stuck in second gear like a baseball player, maybe we raised our average from 18 to 2020 but it aint going to help the world series. Host 90 Million People are not in the u. S. Job market. Guest yes that came out with that labor market report, you see it in what they call Labor Force Participation rate, lowest it has been since in 1970s, it was the 70s where you saw a real surge of woman coming into the work, really ramped up, so we are going back to the dinosaur age and not because people of sudden dropped out because i dont really want to work anymore because they dont have the opportunity. Host from your book, how capitalism will save us, alan policy undermine free markets, ayn rand would not have succunbed to the temptation to believe that a go