February 2 – Obama Urges Parents to Vaccinate Their Kids; The President’s Four Trillion Dollar Budget; After Five Years of Cuts, an Increased Defense Budget

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the president urging American parents to vaccinate their children in the face of a measles epidemic that is spreading across the country even though measles were declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000. Arthur Caplan, Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center’s Department of Population Health joins us to discuss the irresponsible remarks by Republican presidential candidates Rand Paul and Chris Christie who apparently feel they have to challenge anything and everything the president stands for including Obama’s seemingly uncontroversial advice to parents that “you should get your kids vaccinated”.

Part 2

Then we examine the President’s four trillion dollar budget proposal to Congress that like everything else sent to the Republican-controlled Congress, is dead on arrival. Scott Klinger, the Director of Revenue and Spending Policies at the Center for Effective Government joins us to discuss the president’s six-year $478 billion infrastructure plan to revamp and modernize out highways, airports, bridges and mass transit systems to be paid for with a one-time 14% tax on the $2.1 trillion corporate earnings stashed abroad, instead of the 35% corporate rate that nobody pays.

Part 3

Then finally, we look into the president’s $585 billion 2016 budget for the Pentagon that reverses a five year drop in military spending. Mandy Smithberger, Director of the Strauss Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight joins us to discuss the extra $11 billion for the overpriced and under-performing F-35 Joint Strike Fighter while the Air Force continues to try to kill the A-10 which is popular with the troops in order to find another $3.5 billion for the problem-plagued F-35 program, and the extra $821 million for 29 MQ-9 Reaper drones.