this country, most of it due to poor diet. we spend $200 billion a year associated with health care because of poor diets. if we spent more time making nutritious foods less expensive and are month accessible, we can take care of the issues that people care about like health care, the environment and even national security. there are big commercial interests involved but it is not, this has the potential of being bipartisan. everybody would agree with what tom just said. unless you re in the business of big food. the point i would make, yes, it should be bynipartisan. let s talk about the farm bill, food subsidies. why we have now probably more than 70% of those subsidies are going to the super big companies. and why are we not once and for all using the farm bill to make sure every single american has the same opportunity every
particularly food subsidies and those food subsidies are spent at the one place you can buy cheap groceries which is walmart walmart. your money is coming back around to you in this way that i do think people find appalling. this idea of paying people working full-time poverty wages, wages so low that the federal government and taxpayers put the floor underneath them. we are subsidizing them. 70% of our economy is a consumer economy. we need. people to be viable in that economy. it s unacceptable. we find it appalling because it is. and the fact is we re long overdue for a conversation about wages in this country. we have had 40 years of wage stagnation. productivity has been going up, wages have stayed flat. do americans feel that? if we are going to have a free market push towards imagining we work hard and because we work hard we get to have homes and
being contained. so a lot of the apocalyptic predictions aren t coming to pass. and what creates jobs is, in fact, things like energy, things like demand. and this is an economy fueled by people buying stuff. they don t buy stuff if they don t have money. so food subsidies end up putting dollars in their hands. the provisions of health care puts dollars in their hands and also makes them healthy. we don t want to miss the moral argument, it makes people healthier and more able to work. when we come back, i ll talk a little bit more about the kind of shaming of the lazy. there was also a shaming of the mommies, a blaming of the mommies, a strategy which backfired on the ceo who linked 401(k) cuts to difficult pregnancies. he sent a new e-mails to employees last night and i want to tell you what he had to say. so you re telling me your mom has a mom cave?