welcome very very much to conversations where i'm i'm pleased to welcome to the program this evening mr seymour derse and mr sewell will be well known to many here in new york city he's been the finding light in the direction of the organization a major real estate development firm in new york city and perhaps is best known if i may at the outset for calling attention to the unconscionable growth of the of the national debt is the one who is behind setting up the clock on th avenue which kicks off this national debt which is known not only in new york but all of the country in all of the world and mr durst walk a very very much to conversations thank you very much i'm very happy to be here well it's a pleasure welcome you to the program this this this plot this idea of calling attention we want to talk about that right at the outset you've been interested in the fact that the the national debt and the deficit has been growing at such an alarming rate for a considerable period of time it's about four hundred billion dollars a year to meno one billion a day in and we pointed out it's thirteen thousand dollars a  nd and the worst part of it is that interest on the national debt is now two hundred and ninety two billion dollars so more than half of or of the federal st of income taxes goes to pay interest and cannot be used for all these social programs in education and it's growing the debt continues to grow korea dextre extremely extremely rapidly and it becomes  towards that yeah and this is been this has been growing i wonder from your perspective or maybe we do want to zero in on this is we will be talking a great deal about that but i wonder from from your perspective maybe we could talk a little bit about about yourself if we could you but you were born and raised in new york city you're a new yorker and you've been here i wonder maybe we could go back and talk a little bit about your own background and then would bring it would want to bring it into this question of the of the of the current fiscal situation of our economy nationally but i want to believe you could share a little bit for the viewers your own back you were born in new york city been involved in development projects here and in new york over  york and worked to the counting for a while and then went into the family real estate business which was just trying to survive and recover from the depression in the mid thirty's it was a terrible time the great depression and i think that what we call depression babies people who had experience in the pression went through the bad and that's one of the problems that we have now in real estate and the economy in general is that people lack that coercion during the and eighty s and there was a huge over development of debt so it's not just the government that is hurt so badly by excessive debt but it also affected real estate particularly commercial real estate where there was over borrowing we now see some of the major corporations reacting to their over borrowing  e reason was that so many people were unemployed and i felt that in accounting at the best chance of getting employment as a matter of fact i worked at accounting offices during all the vacations while i was out there and i got a job with a large accounting for him as soon as i came back to the city  i recall because at that time there was twenty five percent unemployment you know and people who'd been working all their lives i remember i had a uncle who lived a couple blocks away and two o'clock in the afternoon i walk by his house and he'd be sitting on the front steps with his head in his hands and me and who'd worked its entire life and he had no chance of getting back into the economy so that employment was very much in people's thoughts and coming out of that great depression economists and others and many responsible people have tried to understand because i've tried to understand the business cycle and have tried to understand what in the world caused the great depression of one thousand nine hundred and twenty nine into the thirty's and attempted to take measures then franklin roosevelt and some of the things that were done attempted to take measures that could create conditions that could assure that such a catastrophe would never happen again it was a great deal of attention given that good part of that attention likely was prolonging it because the ups and downs of the of the cycle probably goes according to human nature and we're government gets into it and tries to overcome it i think government has that influence and probably what they did what they do causes more harm than otherwise and i keep reading about how the roosevelt administration turned things around but actually i came across a paper think it was too long by that because over ten million people were unemployed which is higher unemployment then than now and now the population is twice as big as it was then so i think all those government projects and the alphabetical projects probably prolonged it rather than assisted it and i think that's true today of government involvement in the economy the thing that really brought us out of huge the commercial vacancies were huge and during the war with what was going on everything tightened up by one thousand nine hundred and forty three they put on rent control the new york because the vacancies went down from twenty five percent to less than zero and in that time so it was the war activity that did it but i don't think that government just by security six change commission you know the enact one of social security well certainly all of the regulations for for social improvement is certainly a function of government but where they try to become deeply involved in the economy and move the economy around through governmental actions i think that usually is detrimental and all in these things in a certain sense as you say exacerbated the conditions rather than helping to meet them they they of course have now been an act and we have this vast governmental organization of the  their activities are supporting the twenty million people that work for government but government involvement is primarily in education and in the military and police force and  support the government are all coming out of that private sector business activity and we sometimes lose sight of that and where the taxes are too high they hold back the move in the economy i think the worst  movement of government was good for five years ago one thing roosevelt did when he came in the banks were closed so he reopened the money guaranteed  ten thousand dollars of deposits in order to have people leave their deposits in the bank apparently sometime that was increased to twenty thousand dollars but for five years ago and i think the result of that is largely responsible for economic problems today because the banks without that risk attracted huge amounts of deposits and then they had to find out what to do with it so i know this and in real estate where it used to be that you would value a property of one hundred thousand dollars in the bank would say well it's really anybody with any sort of play and their idea the bank would just flood them with money in order to get rid of the excess of deposits that they had knowing that they were going to be backed up by the government if they were and then the f s a you know the system for the savings and loans all systems of government guaranteeing the deposits deposits of up within within the banking system it was an act that was a good idea in and of itself to economy you don't think some people say we look at the world economy that we're in now we have we have in a certain sense among some people they see a certain sort of adversarial relationship between the government and the private sector we see ourselves in competition with the japanese situation miti and the system that they have in japan where they work in what is called an and perhaps something that would work in japan with with their customs and culture it would be different here but here in our government i don't think our governmental system  is functioning properly or it isn't organized properly because now as soon as someone is elected to the legislature there's sole interest and their conscience doesn't have a chance and that's why i think the movement for one term is so important to remove this whole idea of career ism in the legislature and the government was started way back the feeling was that people who were successful and competent would move from what they were doing and go into government for a while and then go back to what they were doing now it's all career and that controls every movement that's made and i think that is  problem with with government today they're not using their judgment and i think this idea of term limitation to try to bring a halt to this career is a pressure one state passed a year ago the state of washington rejected it this year it was and in the recent election it was came up in fourteen states and all fourteen voted for term limitation and this was despite great opposition for it as an organization that was pressing for it and they said of the fourteen they thought eight or nine would accept it but some would not because there was such lobbying against it but actually or fourteen passed it and some by very wide margins so i think there's a growing realization of the miss direction and this organization of a governmental system and a movement towards term limitation that would really take a a constitutional amendment to bring it about but certainly there now fifteen states that have and acted laws as a result of popular votes yes and this would reflect the sense on the part of a great number of people within the society it became manifest in the last election of one thousand nine hundred and ninety two that there were vast numbers of people who felt a sense of vom i don't want to know alienation perhaps is too strong a term but disconnectedness or a sense of being left out of the governmental process the phenomenon of mr ross perot of finding great numbers of people who supported him earlier than that there was an insurgency of within the democratic party of jerry brown who had a great number of people who took this view that the government has been established with incumbency rates of ninety eight percent and these professional people but there was a sense of being left out of the political process by a great number of american citizens and as they watched again the debt growing and the deficit and these problems which weren't salt and it's public is finally becoming involved which is not their custom because of conditions and that's really what it takes  for such public involvement when we when we erected the debt clock it was about three years ago it was on washington's birthday and i looked for a quotation that would be appropriate   st one i found was that washington said that the great problem of the democratic system is that people don't feel until they see and trying to exert themselves and improve direction of government i see they have to feel it before they begin to really react to the to the to the appropriate government i think they have been in the beginning to busy with their own affairs yes of course you know really become involved and it's hurting them and it is hurting we've always had people within our society who have been hurting we had inequities within our society is also societies have inequities and so forth but it's now getting to be where there are great numbers of people who feel not only hurting as you put it one large reason for that being this out of hand deficit and debt problem and so what but it's hurting to the point where they are in not only let's say our least advantaged people they are the ones that are controlling the government rather than the voters and you know a lot i think that's a term that should be perhaps picked up you had a number of additional new york times or a page ad let's see if we can get the camera give me a nd to come in on that but this is an ad that you took out that's a considerable advertisement take out to actually it was an was now coming very close to the to the federal debt limit and they call it the permanent that limit except they've changed it fifty times permanent i mean to get a list of of the savers just about fifty and the last time they increased it was up to four trillion about two hundred billion and it's about sixty billion dollars below that and we usually increases about thirty five billion dollars a month so in about two months congress is going to have to reenact that and probably go over five trillion for the debt limit mazie and that means that interest will be absorbing that much more of all the federal income taxes so the letter to the congressman stated that that they have to increase the debt that they don't have a choice because sometimes there been some battles and increasing it were a few congressmen who would hold back and sort of blackmail getting some of their favorite legislation introduced so that they can increase the debt limit because they stop all federal payments when the when they close the close the market for more we're talking about now it's on the government as the federal debt increases by a one billion dollars a day we're witnessing the leveraged buyout of the country with junk bonds with junk bond another one is politics as against democrats or republicans i support the monarchists when we had king george in taxation without representation the tax rate was one of the quarter percent now we have representatives but we cannot afford them and i'm not a fan of planers and i say on the history we've gone from pilgrims to puritans to players architecture building design and sixty s we stopped using our heads altogether perhaps the last one was central planning has been discarded in romania soviet east germany now embraced on the in cuba new york city and albania greatest and this is what i feel is a need for balance between emotion and reason yes or if you could that's the greatest worldwide need is for balance between emotion and reason between feeling and thinking sentimentality and rationality emotion provides a motivation reason provides a direction power and the steering one cannot steer with the accelerator without thoughtful direction the most humane effort will lose its way and i think that's what is needed is this balance scale as far as the city of new york is concerned or that certainly certainly as far as the city of new york is concerned you know and i know some people have said that they're guided one hundred and seventeen percent emotion and minus seventeen percent reason but i think so much that we have such housing problems and we have so many minor efforts that we make that makes the housing situation much much worse in the building planes and the environmental limits and the needs to the regulations planing and to feel this is to such a great extent that there's a terrible terrible shortage of housing which affects all sorts of things economic and social directions of the city and yet they keep bringing obstructions to expanding the housing supply last year there were six thousand five hundred age of the median age nationally so that we're losing housing very rapidly and have all sorts of obstacles towards  seeing people on the street but the shortage is actually about six hundred thousand people according to the state housing department and just two hundred thousand on the waiting list and the authority housing and more than here for their apartments families are illegally doubled up and there's still two hundred thousand apartments in o planning and various regulatory interference with overall housing development and it's only the government only gets involved in  areas that have heavy emotional impact well emotional impact that we've had some people have said that back again to this you know let's say you take it back again to the days of the great depression where there were things that were being done or how what responsibility does the government have to help establish a social order that is going to be able to address that so do the needs of the less and we've had the government involved in housing for fifty years it's been accepted that where there is not adequate housing adequate supply of decent housing government should be  involved having made that decision they for fifty years have been going in the wrong directions and they say who should we build for or he build affordable housing and there's only eight or nine percent of the population that can afford the cost and support of new housing so that you can't build affordable housing we have these terms of affor whom but if you had if there's an inadequate supply then people are going to be ill housed and they're going to and they're going to be sick and they will suffer and the need is an adequate supply so that the government's efforts should be divided directed towards expanding the supply well it isn't there also a problem you have a demand side i mean because if you if you have people that do not have adequate income in order to purchase that which the economy is capable of producing and you have a shortage of consumer purchasing for what can be produced by the appropriate utilization of human capital instruments and so forth isn't that also something that could lead to misapplication of a lack or an under under utilization or of our of our economic but in the realization that the problem is shortage and the solution is an adequate supply has more production and if there is an adequate supply then low income families would have would have good housing when there and they say all the trickle down theory doesn't work it's a move up reality if you have enough supply whoever moves in the one apartment moves out of another where the median rental of apartments is around four hundred dollars a month that means that half the rent was above and half of below in new york city area in the metropolitan new york city area why aren't they available for low income families and i pointed out and this is one thing that's been quoted quite a bit that lots of low income apartments are occupied by higher income people if you expand the supply then the higher income people would move up to the new apartments and the low income people would move into better apartments and years of the of the economy economic growth that the the income gains during that period that something close to seventy percent of the gains of that period in come went to the upper one percent of the population in the economy we have badly had to get away from housing if those numbers are different than when i read employed they'll work forty hours a week and they still haven't got enough income from that in order to afford to be above what they call the poverty line there's even a group of people who work forty hours a week and are homeless within within our society there's not enough income distribution to the people to purchase the things that the economy is capable of doing but the income distribution problem is one or don't  you don't feel that that is a problem for sure it's a it's a major problem but on the housing there's a solution you have to build more housing so that low income people can be decently h and i noticed in the some of the of course not for profit organizations where they have more ethical than elsewhere production and distribution and that means that you can't have a democratic government because it would be efficient enough so then you could have the kind of governments that we just got rid of and they  prevented some much income perhaps going to a few people but with the result that forty or fifty million people got killed around the world you  everything at the end there's a certain interesting fact that or at least seeming tendency that increasingly technology what with computers and now robotics coming and other kinds of materials and so forth that manufacturing and blue collar work so they prohibited anything they were in a field with manufacturing in about twenty thousand acres even though ten thousand acres were used where there was a one million employment it's dropped three hundred thousand dollars or less now and despite all the manufacturing zoning manufacturing to executive office centers in the office buildings and we've lost most of that because back a ways couple of decades the ford of the fortune five hundred companies one hundred and forty had dead quarters in new york city and now it's under forty some of that is because of the lack of housing and because other reasons   retaining that occupancy because i think that supports about half the economy in the city in the city and many of those manufacturing capabilities and those kind of things historically again much of that has been lost it would seem to to the pacific basin countries which are emerging many of those countries that i wonder i don't know how you feel about nafta the north american you know the  arrangement so that there can be transfer of capital in the quitman and so forth into mexico and create a free trade zone and so forth but the point i was trying to make is that it's increasingly technological instruments which are capital intensive in the overall productive process and the ownership of capital of the capital and the technology and capital in general within the economy is not very widely held there are not very many people who gain income from a capital from from the from from from ownership of announces that that is true that is true there is that we're having these and the having these these economic difficulties now but i was just thinking of whether or not there wasn't the need for there to be just a there's an equal political democracy if there is if we don't want to have a state run socialist system with the all the power in the hands of the government and so forth if we don't need economic either that or it could be that you could have i mentioned to you a little earlier they like avis rent a car and some other companies increasingly are financed in a way so that the employees are increasingly becoming owners of the corporation and brought in on the logic of business finance in order to build up an ownership stake in a in a private property market economy to irrigate the economy and create the demand side to buy the things that the increasingly automated productive system of a private property market economy is able to produce but again to try and bring that demand side and allow say is law in the name of the in the language of the having eventually building up the same footing available to the to the employees instead of having the logic of business finance being where you make an investment that will pay for itself in reasonable profit the investment is in or own the capital instruments and our stock holders the stock holding people within our society a relatively small in number the very few most people gain income for life purposes by having a labor relationship or a job to a productive process it's increasingly becoming technological and it's real means of of production if you can follow i don't know maybe it's an aside you know it's are we still  yes of course yes you know but that's just that's a you know that's a that's a question that that's what they've been doing in the eastern european countries is  process but in the meanwhile we here in the united states trying to deal with this situation have this tremendous problem with the the growing deficit are you at all are you at all saying representing special interests of very very well placed a well financed special interest control the congress it takes tremendous amounts of money to continue in that direction or ability to stay in the congress and so forth that it is the people that have a great deal of money to contribute to that but they have the system that they're not going to be enemies based on investment right yes sir and if people don't have investment if these people who do want to spread around aren't create contributing investment and where is the investment going to come from the investments got to come from the  deficit and the debt or do you think that they will just take the easy course is they're going to be enough political will to face i think probably the best direction there is is  of focusing entirely on their career and we've done that people say all you want to have competent people but we've done that for the presidency and certainly in need more competency in the in the presidency than in any particular one of the five hundred and thirty five members of congress that is true and we don't pro gun idiology decreases the population  have i have about one hundred of those bottom lines and one of them the got some attention it said the call marks government didn't work in moscow and marx brothers government doesn't work in new york so that was in the times when the sunday morning and the next day when the papers boo boo the two or three lines up and commented on it and i was on good part of our problems are the mr rections of government and that exists to a greater extent in new york city and elsewhere i think you know you know and you know you really have taken   when they st went up there were they sent me four hundred clips there was a press conference for that there were about forty television strips that we'd had no no no public relations association with  and some some nights it's on three different television programs that clock and i think you may have mentioned the television crews of come from japan and germany and that's right but it's on almost every night and it shows that people are interested and overspending by government and i think the solution has to be a cutback in spending i don't think a little taxation that's put politically a cceptable and economically acceptable probably either do or will do it will do is it takes cut back in spending and that's where you get back to the all right one that's where it isn't i couldn't really sit in some of the pieces about that clock there should be clocks there should be one in washington and somebody proposed they ought to put a little wrist watch that running that off and present it to each congress man washington and beyond that some people are trying to put one up privately and there's a truck driver who keeps calling me that if we put one on his truck and drive it around the country work that you had sent that out back in one thousand nine hundred and seventy nine i think you've called attention to that over a long time it's out of hand it's got to be controlled and you've been helping and leading us toward trying to get an understanding of that so that collectively we might be a got a big corrected sooner or later and the greater good long if we wait the greater will be the damage assessment thank you very much thank you very much for the debt clock and for coming in and i'd remind you in the cable it's been your pleasure the perceptions it seems seem dirties organizer of this the durst organization over the long period of his concern with development of new york city and has helped us all the understanding of the problems of this tremendous deficit and debt that we do have appreciate