you have two familiar faces from the obama team. eric holder and david axelrod. tom selleck has one, too. not many. tomorrow starts the 60th anniversary of the korean war. north korea is demanding a for $65 trillion for the united states. yes, that s trillion. for a perspective, by the way, the america s gdp is exactly $14 trillion. north korea calculates they owe it $65 trillion in compensation. tonight s absolutely insane crazy big number. up next, last week it was congressman joe barton. this week, general stanley mcchrystal. why are so many public figures saying i m sorry these days? you re watching hardball only on msnbc. the future.
everybody loses. he won t renew them. sue writes, let them expire asap. deficits and tax cuts for the wealthy are mutually exclusive. hey where are all those jobs created by the bush tax cuts? the only thing most of us gained from the bush tax cuts was the bush recession. kent in new jersey says, obama needs to raise the top tax rate to 90%, like we had during the roosevelt, truman and eisenhower administration. we have a $65 trillion debt when you count medicare and social security ious. it s time for obama to declare a fiscal emergency. what s happening in greece is a joke compared to what s in store for america. mark writes, the tax breaks shouldn t have been done in the first place, it was done by bush to satisfy his neocon crone nist. i have to admit, even though i am an obama supporter, my opinion of him might be altered if he supports continuing them. janelle in kansas, even if the bush tax cuts are about to expire, the people they affect will have much more
steady. our stock portfolios jumped. remember we had that big run-up on wall street last year so that helped. we also cut our debt. but one caveat, our debt fell largely because so many people defaulted on their mortgages and other loans, not because folks were paying down credit card bills. for a lot of people it was a really impossible situation, fred. i see. so is our net worth back to where it was before the recession began? reporter: like i like to say, dreams are free. no, we re not there yet but we are moving in the right direction. we re not nearly back to those levels. before the recession net worth totaled $65 trillion. then we hit rock bottom at less than $50 trillion but ended 2009 at $54 trillion net worth. one analyst says we could regain all our losses by 2012 if the recovery stays on track, but that s a bet not a lot of people are willing to make. on wall street, however, stocks are holding steady today. pretty much like they have been doing all week long. we saw su
really adds up. take a look at the 2009 numbers for net worth. more than 54 trillion dollar, that s our net worth overall, it has gained over the last several months which is what we want to see, but compared to pre-recession levels, what we were seeing was net worth way over $65 trillion. so we have to see our net worth increase by 20% to even get back to these levels. something else is when it goes up, it doesn t necessarily go up because we re earning more. what it could be is we re cropping some of our dropping some of debt. yes, our stock portfolios look better, but we re also seeing we ve defaulted on a lot of debt, so we ve had some banks forgiving some of our debt, so our net worth looks better, but that means we definitely went through some tough times to get the banks or lenders to write down some of our losses. jane: jenna, thank you. jon, back to you. jon: this just in, the state department is holding a briefing
we don t want that to happen to our country. it isn t a matter of republicans or democrats, both parties, the leadership over the last several decades has contributed to this but it is fair to say president obama and the current congress have made it exponentially worse. bill: and you said some of these numbers you point to are staggering, federal government spending has grown seven times faster than median income since 1970. at $12 trillion, the debt is more than 80 percent of gdp. that s enormous. debt per household is $600,000. that s just staggering. but you argue it doesn t have to be this way. you could just turn off the fawsel. how so? well, there s a number things we can do but just one other fact that stick necessary my mind, the federal government takes in for all revenuesources, about $2.2 trillion a year, the total unfunded liabilities of our country are 65 trillion, federal