massive national debt created through the wars obviously and the medicare part d giveaway to the drug companies and the voting elderly. joining us now mike lappin. donates his tax refund each year to the organization directing it to fight for tax policies that benefit all americans. nice to see you, mike. how would you define a fair tax policy for america? well, you know, a decade ago or in 2001, george bush came into office inherited a $5.1 trillion ten-year deficit or surplus, excuse me. and he decided to give a lot of that away in tax cuts to people who didn t need them, didn t ask for them. well, some of them did ask for them, but we didn t. those tax cuts have cost $2.5 trillion. about half of that went to people, like me and the top 5% of wealth earned income. and we don t think that s good policy.
it s funny money. they had no capital to back up their lending. but that did not matter because they also had no risk in the lending. get the lending paid off, they win. and they won big when they did that because they did it with leverage. top manhattan executives alone paid themselves $121 billion in bonuses over the first part of the decade. now, mind you, when the bank loans failed, they knew they were too big to fail. so the rest of us, you and me, would have to bail them out. ignorant electorate, if you will, the patsies who had no idea, and really still don t, understand how badly they are being conned by our government and our banks. once the banks, however, realized there was no losing, the question was, how do we make the con bigger? how do we get more money through this crazy machine so we can get richer? the question or the answer, i should say, is simple, make more loans, more credit card loans. think of all the credit card applications sent to you over the last ten y