Charlie Rose

DLJ  02/04/2012 02:52 PM Report

Brooks is always interesting, often informative and sometimes persuasive. For me, his outline of ideas here was especially thought provoking.

When it comes to feeding the poor versus teaching them to fish, I follow Brooks regarding a need for "family policy" and the impact of a growing underclass. What I cannot get my mind around is "giving men an income" so that someone will marry them. Who is going to marry a guy on the dole? Who should? I think that is big government nonsense that Moynihan would quickly dismiss.

ShalomFreedman  02/02/2012 10:11 PM Report

The gap between the top and the bottom in the educational and income scale does not define the situation between them, in the middle. Is the bifurcation too simplistic? I note that David Brooks often cites some study to say that there are two kinds of this, or two kinds of that. Reality most often is more or other than just two kinds.

On the whole David Brooks is informative and pleasant. His word on the improvement of the younger generation is encouraging, if again not completely persuasive.

The Kagan book he refers to affirming the place of the United States as world's major superpower still is too encouraging if not completely persuasive.

It is interesting to note the change in tone toward Romney who after Florida is getting more respect.

Brooks was totally, and to my mind mistakenly dismissive of all foreign policy issues as having influence on the coming Presidential elections. The Eurozone crisis still has the potential to turn the world economy, and with it Obama's fortunes down. It now turns out the recent explosion at the recent Iranian missile site was in regard to their longest range missile which would be able to reach the United States. The Iranian nuclear program continues to make progress and Defense Secy. Panetta speaks about them having a weapon in less than a year. The Iranian situation could thus too , however it works out, have influence on the election. The sanctions put into place to this point have nt stopped Iran and they are far from as strict as those which forced Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait.

CarolJ  02/02/2012 10:09 PM Report

Question Charlie, do you have your Super Bowl Tickets for Indy?????

Good program as usual.

efeinbe2  02/02/2012 04:27 PM Report

Interesting that establishment conservatives are totally open to the possibility of anti-Mormon sentiment playing a role in '12, but were shocked at any implication that there was anti-Black sentiment in '08. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

Ellen_Dibble  02/02/2012 02:31 PM Report

Brooks is upbeat about the coming generation, wow, looking at statistics of out-of-wedlock births, divorces under 30, high school graduation... I want to believe it. And I flat out agree with what he says about industry as it used to be, rooted in community, anchoring community, and about residences best when woven with multiple strands into as many different cohorts as possible, not abstracted into independent units. He described the 1960s as moral independence/selfishness, and the 1980s as fiscal independence/selfishness. Oh, those ideas can seep through my understanding of our nation for a while and add a lot, and I don't care if these points are mathematically correct; there is a validity to it which is almost artistic, more shaping what we see than necessarily capturing it exactly.

winter  02/02/2012 02:13 PM Report

Funny how that Reagan signed The Tax Reform Act of 1986 that set capital gains taxes at 28% equal to the earned income top bracket, escapes commentary. How can Newt claim to his rightful heir when he delcares advocacy for reducing capital gains to zero?

tabs  02/02/2012 02:05 PM Report

During this discussion Mr Brooks cadence was slower and his tone was more somber and reflective than usual. It seems that Mr Brooks has embarked upon a path of introspective self reflection as evident by his comment that as a boy he always wanted the house in the suburbs with the big yard. Now that he has the house in the suburbs he realizes that he is a city boy at heart. A bit later in the discussion Mr Rose commented that President Obama during his speeches seemed to have a disconnect between his intellect and his emotion. To which Mr Brooks replied, "That is probably a good thing as it keeps him human." NO MR BROOKS it is the INTERGRATION OF INTELLECT and EMOTION that allows humans to soar to the heights and write things like the Gettysburg Address, Shakespears plays, paint the Mona Lisa, Guernica and sculpt Michelangelo's David.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/02/2012 01:19 PM Report

David, on your move to the suburbs and "be careful what you wish for you may actually get it".

There is a movie you should see: http://www.endofsuburbia.com/

There may not be a choice in the future to even move to the suburbs.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/02/2012 01:13 PM Report

Yes David, we are having a bifurcation of America.

Completing a College Education and having a longer Life Span are related to family income.

PBS had a great show on the difference in life spans in a hospital setting. Those who work at the top of the organizational chart live the longest. You mentioned 26 years which is a huge difference, a generation of difference.

You also said with a family making $36K a year there is a one in 17 chance for their child(ren) to graduate college. While making $96K a year in family income the odds are one in two the child(ren) graduate college.

So with $60K more a year in family income the odds of completing college are so much greater that this bifurcation is screaming for a remedy. (Universities sit on huge endowments, States cut funding and tuition increases every year.)

A Life Span that is much, much lower and the chances of completing a college degree being much, much lower. These two indicators alone do not speak well for America David.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/02/2012 12:52 PM Report

David, getting companies to pay their fair share of taxes would be national service.

Getting individuals to pay their fair share of taxes would also be national service.

Start small my friend--we do not need more expense but rather more revenue.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/02/2012 12:38 PM Report

Yes David, Obama was big and bold in the beginning because he had a Congress he could work with on the big and bold issues.

So your own question back at you: How David would you think the President can be big and bold with the brick wall he faces everyday? Climb over it? Go around it?

War and foreign policy is the direction many Presidents seem to head when there is little hope of getting anything through Congress.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  02/02/2012 12:30 PM Report

David, the answer to Super-PACs is to get rid of them.

Please watch "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show" illustrate how stupid they are on their respective websites.

Here is a Super PAC list for you to review: http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/superpacs.php?ql3

The end of Super PACs should at least be on your list of five.

By the way, despite a growing population, approximately 300,000 fewer Republicans voted this week than four years ago.

I think Super PACs had something to do with it.

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/769245/romney_does_great_in_florida%3A_gop_not_so_much/

REMant  02/02/2012 12:17 PM Report

When Brooks and Rose get together idiocy reigns. It is clear they are both for Romney. CBS is for Romney. The New York Times is for Romney. Bloomberg is for Romney. All Charlie's friends, who are not Democrats, are probably for Romney. He is either afraid to to have anyone of a different opinion on the show, or he simply is going to thumb his nose at them, regardless of PBS (although they may be for Romney, too). Quite frankly the attitude qualifies as typically elitist, ignoring the country at large, made all the more obnoxious in Rose's case, because he married into it.

I think I made it fairly clear yesterday that Romney's was not a RESOUNDING victory. Florida is an anomaly, and a state in deep trouble, through no one's fault but it's own. No doubt it will favor anyone promising to bail them out.

Indeed many of the early votes were cast before the ad onslaught, but also when it looked like Gingrich would lose in South Carolina, tho the timing was close. And no one polled those voters.

The admin's current strategy was made perfectly clear when the new ppl were brought in. The thought was to show they were getting something done. Doing the possible. I imagine also something to pander to core constituencies and other electoral soft spots.

Brooks just gets touchier and feelier. Maybe it's male menopause. Childern will lead us. If that's not pessimistic... And, as I said several times, psychologists exhibit the biases of ordinary ppl. If they aren't in favor of Whiggish neuroticisms, then Tory narcissisms. I am not sure which category David falls in.

I'm sure, incidentally, Facebook will have a great IPO. But I am just as sure the whole thing will prove as essentially worthless as Google. Socialist types who years ago complained bitterly about advertising's power over public perception did not begin to conceive the half of it. Journalism, which has all its existence pimped for monarchs and corporations who can stick their monopolistic or oligopolistic hands in everyone's pocket with impunity, grew wealthy off it. Newspaper stock was better than regulated utilities. That power has migrated to the Internet, and heads swelled with it, they have stepped well over the privacy line. I am going to delete everything on my account except my name and bogus email, and I'm not sure I even trust them enough to use it for messaging.

Americans do not vote for ppl who will not pander to or humor them. It is the essential problem with popular government. That BTW is what the 18th c called corruption. Tho no politician or corporation is going to tell them so. And surely no journalist.

The idea of using education to "break the cycle of poverty" is at least as old as Horace Mann, but not only has education gone off the rails, studies of Head Start have from the beginning questioned its efficacy.

The question of the wealth of nations also goes way back. It was reduced in large part to the question of how capital was to be accumulated and that answered by the idea that saving, voluntary or not, was required. Some then not liking the personal and social implications decided it could be dispensed with. All that was needed was for legal tender to be printed and distributed. But that whole scenario is likely wrong. Much more probable, it was first the possessiveness and then the permissiveness which gave rise to the need for capital rather than the other way 'round, and that all of that is a matter not of technological innovation but simply social control, or as some, like Brooks, wish to put it, cooperation - the fuzzy idea that a market is wiser than its components. If it is, then no one is responsible for anything. That might work for ants, but not humans. Certainly not for those wishing to label themselves republicans. In any case, innovation ought to be able to pay for itself and if it doesn't, then it isn't really innovative. This follows from simple equilibrium economics. The same can be said for the need for power. And that ought to be obvious to anyone who believes in better social relations.

The Kagan New Republic article (http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/99521/america-world-power-declinism?page=0,1&passthru=Z DkyNzQzZTk3YWY3YzE0OWM5MGRiZmIwNGQwNDBiZmI) defines the question of decline in military terms primarily and the argument is in three parts: that we still have the military power and economic power; that the "declinists" have overstated the position from which we are supposed to have declined; and, only the third confronts the moral issue.

While the second point is true enough, battleships had, nor their equivalent, have, I hope little to do with it. We ought surely to have learned by now that little is to be gained through the application of force. And if we haven't, then the proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons systems will surely bring it to our attention. That is I suppose why we are working so hard on disarmament.

Kagan completely misunderstands the economics of his case or how to measure it. What has propped America up is the establishment of a colonial empire of sorts based on the dollar which we have so far been able to manipulate and force others to overvalue. With the expansion of indigenous markets this is now unraveling, and the valuation diminishing as during the Vietnam War, when the price of oil skyrocketed, and Japan's manufacturing rise. It is now far worse. GDP is measured in dollars, and neither asks where those dollars come from nor excludes govt spending. It is a concept frankly devoid of value.

Britain's decline had far less to do with the loss of naval supremacy then with the increasing expense of empire. It costs a lot of money to buy off ppl especially if they are the ones doing the buying. It can't be said either that because places like S Korea, Japan and Germany are presently firm allies we therefore haven't lost anything absolutely, and potentially irretrievably, on his own terms.

The third point is argued lamely if at all, merely citing our "resilience" [my word, his meaning]. I find no evidence for any superior American virtue, except for the opportunities a new continent gave others elsewhere better prepared to exploit it. And the frontier seems to be closed on that. Americans are well-known for mania and living in a fantasy world.

Surely no one is going to argue that this country's urban areas, its roads, bridges, sewers, mains, transportation systems and power grid are in good condition; its education system first-class; its people healthy and well-fed, and so forth. Our manufacturing is gone, which arguably wasn't competitive in the first place. Our middle-class, too. We owe a huge debt. Most of our money goes into the military (being pay-go entitlements don't count). We've become the world's financiers and policemen. But this was not even discussed. Nor ironically by the president. Even candidates can't go around saying everything is fine, and needs to be changed, at the same time. Yet all this suits Mr Rose's friends just fine.

Richard_DeBiase  02/02/2012 11:56 AM Report

Dear David,

I'm sorry that the Drug War did not make your list of five big things to worry about. You should listen to former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda.

But let's talk about family policy. The local PBS affiliate is running commercials for a group whose message seems to be: if your teenager is using marijuana, they need to be institutionalized regardless of their grades or personality. This cannot be good for family cohesion. I think groups like this are fear mongering to justify their own existence. Virtually everyone I knew in high school used marijuana, and we all went to college and we are all just fine (just like Barack Obama and George W. Bush).

It's hard to form social bonds with people who want to throw me in jail for no reason.

Best regards,