our society to such a degree it will take much more to successfully fight back. my next guest exposes the seedy industry in his new book broke usa, how the working poor became big business. gary rivlin joins me now. thanks for being on. hi, chris. this is a fantastic book. i want you to talk us through how this industry kind of went from the mom and pop pawnshop to a multibillion dollar business. you know you start off with old line businesses like pawnshops which is been around for centuries, check karchers since the 30s. they were essentially attacked by entrepreneurs who got money from wall street and the biggest banks and now you have businesses like cash america, 650 pawnshops booking a billion dollars in revenues, $150 million in pretax profits. but at the same time, you saw in the last 25 years all this innovation, subprime credit cards became big huge business in the 1990s.
gary rivlin exposed how seedy the business is and joins me next. oh, phillips col health probiotic plus fiber. how s it work? ok, she s gas. he s constipation. why am i constipation? .he s diarrhea. and our special fiber helps our probiotics so that you can show those symptoms who s in charge. this isn t even floor. [ elevator bell dings ] stop it. hello? you spotted a million dollar accounting error that no one else noticed. that was pretty sweet. but you did have eight layers of sweet crunchy back up. what can i say? you re the man. or you know, the little dude. that s me.
known as the republican party attempting to push the nation back over the economic brink. after several weeks in which new jobless claims stayed steady at 460,000, today the labor department announced new claims had jumped up to 472,000. economists are now bracing for a bad monthly jobs report tomorrow. and yet, somehow senate republicans and nebraska democrat ben nelson teamed up last night to filibuster an extension of unemployment insurance. it s roughly akin to voting against funding for sandbags in the midst of the worst flood in 30 years. after doing it, they left town for recess. this is compassionless and idiotic and terrible macro economic policy. as a recovery tapers off and job growth begins to flat line, we face the real and terrifying possibility of a double dip recession. so far the history of the economic crisis has gone like this. first there was a financial crisis. then things started to go very badly very, very quickly. we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. t