April 28 – Trump and Cruz’s Economic Fantasy; In the Year of the Outsider, Trump Could Win; Could China and the US Drift Into a New Cold War?

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with President's stinging rebuke of the economic plans being offered up by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz which Obama described as "fantasies". Economist Bruce Bartlett, who served as a domestic policy advisor to Ronald Regan and deputy assistant for economic policy in the Treasury Department during the George H.W. Bush administration, joins us to discuss the absurdity of Trump's economic plans that would add $9.6 trillion to the deficit in a decade while Cruz's plan would add $8.5 trillion over the same period. We also discuss a prescient article Bruce Bartlett wrote for Politico last July "A Moderate Republican's Case for Trump: Only Trump Can Make the GOP Sane Again – By Losing in a Landslide to Hillary Clinton". 

Part 2

Then Matthew Rothschild joins us in the studio. He is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the former editor of The Progressive Magazine and we discuss his efforts to get money out of politics in Wisconsin where Governor Scott Walker has benefited greatly from outside billionaire money that has financed a reactionary agenda in the state. We also discuss the presidential race now increasingly narrowing to a Clinton/Trump face off that, in this year of the outsider, could see Donald Trump elected as the next president of United States.

Part 3

Then finally historian Alfred McCoy joins us in the studio to discuss President Obama's pivot to Asia and the strategy that underlies it and the possibility of the U.S. and China drifting into a new Cold War. A TomDispatch regular, Alfred McCoy holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin and is the author of "Policing America's Empire: the United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State" and a forthcoming book on U.S. global power "Ending the American Empire".