I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear.

Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglis says tax reform is the key to our future.

Taxes are one of the ways we shape markets.

If our tax system says if you keep your money abroad, you don't have to pay taxes. You're going to get more

money abroad and you're going to get less job creation. If your taxes say we want to encourage

real investments in America, then you can get more investment in America. So I'm an economist

who believes that incentives matter, but I also believe that you have to shape incentives and that markets on their own don't necessarily shape them the right way.

Thanks for joining us.

The Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz says the situation in America is grave.

That's his exact word for it, grave, inequality too great, unemployment too high, public investments too meager, corporations too greedy, and the tax code too biased toward the very rich.

Strong medicine from one of the world's most influential thinkers. Stiglitz

has been the economist most cited by his colleagues in the field. But don't despair, he says,

the barriers to solving our problems are political, not economic, and we can change what's wrong,

if enough of us insist. Our tax code, for example, wasn't handed

down from the gods on Mount Olympus. Human beings devised it, and they can revise it, this

time getting it right, as Stiglitz said on our broadcast last week.

We have a tax system that reflects not the interest of the middle. We have a tax system that reflects

the interest of the 1%. And I want to do is create a tax system that has incentives to create

jobs. And if you tell the corporation, look at if you don't create jobs, you're taking out

of our system, you're not putting back, you're going to pay a high tax.

But if you put back into our system by investing, then you can get your tax rate down.

They're willing to take, but not to get back.

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