Welcome to the Best of the Left Podcast with clips today from Tom Hartman, The Young Turks,

The Onion Radio News, The Rachel Maddo Show, and NPR.

But I want to start out with just this whole issue of this Republican war, this economic war,

because it all ultimately boils down to economics.

This is the bottom line, this is where it all goes.

Let me just share with you some news stories as starting points, I think, and see where we go with this.

This from today's Financial Times, Abu Dhabi considers an end of the dollar peg.

Right now Abu Dhabi is tying their currency to the US dollar.

And the problem is that because of 30 years of Republican policies, conservative economic policies,

because we have replaced old-fashioned, demand-side economics that was the way that this country was run for 300 years, 230 years formally,

but arguably goes back thousands of years, because we have replaced demand-side economics.

And economics that says there are people out there who want to buy things, I think I'll start a business to sell it to them, with supply-side economics.

This invention that came along during the Reagan administration that says, let's take the public money and give it to wealthy people in the hopes that they will build factories,

and they will get more wealthy.

And in the process of buying more yachts, there'll be more jobs building yachts.

And in the process of they're buying new Gulf Stream aircraft, there'll be more jobs for Gulf Stream and hopefully they'll build a factory and make something that it will cause us to want to buy it.

This has been a disaster.

It doesn't work.

So, we have that, piece number one.

Piece number two, because traditional demand-side economics said, oh, by the way, I should say welcome to our program, my friends.

Tom Hartman here with you.

Because traditional, and welcome back from the Fourth of July holiday, boys, I've been writing all week on this book I'm working on, and it was a nice and useful break, and a tip of the hat and many thanks to Mark Marin for filling in the two days he did, and I hope you had a fine Fourth of July.

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