money in its place. and he joins us now from washington, d.c. hill, the book, obviously part of the book is a personal odyssey. it s about more than money. it s about the level of expectation about life. and you talk about life accounts and bank accounts. explain the difference. well, you know when i talk about the difference between life accounts and bank accounts i m talking about this fundamental idea of a paper chase, where we believe that we put the bank account first and we put our bank accounts first, then we can somehow be able to purchase the type of life we want. and it s really about getting back to some more fundamental values. i mean the level of debt addiction we have in this country is astronomical. but it s we focused recently on governmental debt. right? yet it s a mirror image of our personal debt that we carry. 1980, we carried as a nation $355 billion in personal debt. fast forward to 2008 that number escalated to $2.6 trillion in
with personal debt. in 1980, 355 billion dollars in personal debt is what we were carrying. 2008, we re up to trillions of dollars. what s interesting is all the issues with the debt crisis, we re really mirroring it in our personal lives and the question is how can we sort of redefine wealth but at the same time, take care of money and finances and get rid of our credit card problem? that s a great point. and i know this is personal to you because you you re famous. you got some money in the bank. but then when you discovered you had cancer, that puts it all into a different kind of perspective. i was writing this i have a foundation called the manifest your destiny foundation and i meet with a lot of people talking about how can you live your best life? the excuses are money. i d get an education but i can t afford it. i have to do this or i have to pay for my kids so i wanted to write a straight forward financial money book about how can we return to values? get rid of credi
france 45%. germany, 45%. japan, 40%. netherlands 52%. the uk, it s 40%. most of these countries have national sales taxes that add 20% on to the burden. we want to point out many tea party activists are concerned about what s coming ahead. understandably so. the obama administration called for a tax increase of nearly $1 trillion. it includes $630 billion on people earning more than $250,000. that s a result of the bush tax cuts ending as scheduled and a hike in capital gains. $355 billion comes from american businesses. let s talk about that, talk about the raw politics, jessica yellin at the daily beast. we should point out, there are scheduled protests. it wasn t just in washington. you spent a lot of time out there today with the protess tors.
this, if we don t, they ll make films in new zealand or canada and we ll lose that business. wouldn t that be true of any business, too? you could say, yeah, if you don t give them a special tax favor they ll go elsewhere, too? yeah, well, i think, if you read through there was a summary of all the tax breaks, there was 19 single spaced pages long and i read through it new year s eve and after a while i felt like a sap. why am i not getting a piece of this action, a tax credit for walking to work and saving energy. but you know, everyone is in on it, paul. there s a 355 billion dollars child care credit. conservatives like that credit because it helps families, but there are tuition tax credits. there are adoption credits, a lot of these are pushed by the left as well because a lot of these credits flow back to community action. paul: but at least, that s true, dan, at least something like the child credit i don t support it, but at least it s broadly spread out across the popula