Criticized in the book, big business. [inaudible conversations] if i could have your attention please. We will get started. The president is on the west coast for a fundraising trip so i am filling in for him. I have a brief chat which is to introduce our distinguished introducer. Megan is a Washington Post columnist who writes about economics, finance and government policy. She has previously written as a correspondent for the economist, the atlantic, newsweek, daily beast. Articles have appeared in reason, the guardian, New York Post and the new york sun. She is everywhere. She started one of the First Business economic blogs asymmetric information and authors a 2014 book the upside of down while feeling well is the key to success. In her spare time she appears as a commentator on fox news, msnbc and npr. She is degree in literature from the Pennsylvania University and an mba from the university of chicago. Please join me in welcoming her. [applause] i admit when i was asked to stand in for him that i had a little trepidation because theres so much written about millennial and how dire their lives are and how theyre all scratching out a living by taking two garbage or whatever so can anything new be said about this wellworn topic but luckily, it turns out, yes, something new can be said. I like the way he summarized the book. Mr. Sternberg is a new old friend. I just met him but i said how would you summarize the book and he said im not advocating a generational war yet. [laughter] as we had into the end of game of thrones season i think we can quake in terror at what a generational war between the boomers and millennials might be or look like. Luckily, none of them have dragons at least until genetic engineering. The great thing about this book is something that he also told me is that when he thought about selling it in the british market he was told his book was not believable enough. The United States does have a market that britain does not. Its for datadriven and serious attends to look at Public Policy without screeching that your enemies are destroying the world and that is what is really great about this book is first of all, the data and the rich data but second of all, the way in which he treats his opponents arguments so fairly and even often confronts them which is unusual. Its such a heartening thing to see in the political polarization. Let me run you through the best part in the best possible version of the argument im about to argue against. Steel manning rather than a distraught manning. Its incredibly rich with not just data but arguments about subtle questions not do millennials have too much student debt but how do millennials have too much student debt . Is there bifurcation between people with small dollar loans, large dollar loans, median and mean as we like to say and he explores these issues with humor but also with some very eloquent writing. He is, as we discussed, starting a conversation that does need to be had. Not just about millennials but the rest of america. The financial future of our government and the economic structure of our economy clearly are not working for a lot of people. Especially the millennial generation have it the worst and as you said at some point, part of the reason the millennials have it so bad is that the baby boomers did not understand what had happened to them and they picked up the wrong policy solutions to it and in doing so worsened rather than fixing the problem. And so with that i will close by saying by authors books. They are not just great to read but if you have a shaky tables the need to be propped up very good for that and give them as gifts, check erosion in the gullies for your house. [laughter] no, but this is very seriously a book that is worth buying and worth reading and worth keeping to look over in years to come. Please lets have a round of applause to the author. [applause] you know, i was talking to some of you before we sat down to lunch i noticed there are a few millennials in the audience here. I thought you brought your pitchforks and purses because although we are not starting the war yet we can march on washington today. Thank you, megan for that kind introduction. I hope to live up to the wonderful things you said about me. Before i go further i also want to thank our host of the Manhattan Institute for hosting this event today. We are at a moment where there is a lot more heat than light on these policy issues and this is something i particularly encountered when i dug into the millennial versus boomer issue and its nice to have institutions like the Manhattan Institute bringing issues to light rather than the heat. With that spirit i will try to make my own very modest confusion to that effort this afternoon. We talk about the theft of the decade and as with so many things involving millennial these days the story i want to tell starts with an avocado. [laughter] im not sure exactly how that fruit has become an emblem for the millennial generation but here we are. The whole avocado thing seemed to reject a fax around the summer of 2017 i think it was when there was an Australian Property magnet who happens to be an older millennial himself and took to the airwaves that millennial cant afford a down payment on the house is because we spent too much money on avocado toast. Now, you will not be surprised to hear this comment went viral on twitter, of course. The backlash was furious and one millennial quit sarcastically that he wouldve put a down payment on the house if you just not flown blown 44000 on brun brunch. The New York Times helped fully calculated how many years a millennial would need to scrimp and save for a down payment by skipping a brunch in order to afford 20 payment of the median American Home in the home answer was 113 years. Of course, i cant help but note since i live in london the west wing newspaper there took this is another opportunity to have structural inequality. The whole avocado versus house uproar resonated very differently with a lot of older adults and even with some older millennial like [inaudible]. I think the bigger point he was trying to make was generations seems to lack the work ethic of our elders. We prioritize creature comforts like b c brunches or the discipline of scrimping and saving to get ahead and we have all these bold visions for what we want our future to look like often inspired by social media like instagram but dont have a clear word map for how to get there and we get frustrated when our parents do not just give it to us. I suspect there is one baby boomer in the audience right now whos been suppressing the urge to nod his or her head at that and dont worry, i want you to raise your hand if it is you. The big question i wanted to ask as i dug into the book the became that of a decade is who is right about all of this humor and sorry to tell you, dear boomers, it is not you. I think millennials do have a point in his arguments that we are having about generational fairness right now. Something has gone badly wrong for us ultimately with our millennial generation or the past decade and i think the fact of that has gone seriously wrong will have a lot of invocations for our economy in the years to come and on our politics. To explain why i will touch on three points this afternoon. First, i should explain what the millennial is what has happened to us for the past decade because theres a lot of confusion around both of those points. After that i would try to convince the boomers in the audience that really is all of your fault. Then finally, i will close out with a few scattered thoughts about the question i think we all really want to know the answer to which is what will this mean in the 2020 election and beyond. So, the first thing we need to do is to define what a millennial is what a millennial would have said. The key point is we are older than you think we are. There is no looser, from 198196, im a child of 82 myself. There are a lot of us. In a survey, 71 million. There is some disagreement about the precise number. The millennial generation is not already bigger than the boom generation it will be. And i think the other interesting fact about millennials is we are different from the boomers. Boomers tend to be more diverse than the boomers because our numbers tend to be augmented by immigration, partly because america has a large influx of population the last few decades. My main interest as far as the demographics is the economy and the reality is it has been a tough decade for us. The oldest of us, those born in 8182 graduated high school in the year 2000. If we went to college we were hitting the labor market around 2004. That was going to be around the time the housing boom is entering its manic phase. We at least managed to crawl onto the career ladder, a little past entrylevel job before the financial panic hit and the Great Recession. The youngest of us, those born in 1960, just about graduated from college, they are graduating into the trump economy for good and ill but most of us interthe labor force in the aftermath of the Great Recession and first years american of adulthood shaped by their experience and i will note as an aside that if you spent a lot of time worrying about snowflakey college kids, dont blame us anymore because those are members of generation the. It is important to understand what the Great Recession experienced. We are familiar with the terrible headline numbers for the Unemployment Rate and youth Unemployment Rate was consistently higher than that. I think it was after Labor Force Participation also plunged. The interesting thing that happens is Young Workers are attempting not to go into the labor market at all. Instead you see more people going into further education. Someone getting a bachelors degree or people going into graduate education because after they got the undergrad degree was not set up for them. Some of these trends, it is true College Enrollment could be increasing, graduating group went, the cliff edge you see around 2009 is striking. And and as for the millennials who did find work, the reality is young adults have been uniquely vulnerable to the economy and the effects of that tend to linger throughout someones career. A lot of Interesting Research about the effective recession on people who graduate into it. Most of those, the higher the Unemployment Rate at the time you graduate, try to get your first job the lower your earnings will be for a substantial period afterwords. It turns out if a to recover from that and this is an important point to keep in mind looking at the unemployment data that is very healthy. A lot of millennials of started to move to the labor market and successfully so but still going to struggle to recover from the economic aftereffects but we lost earlier. One reason this happens is Young Workers are skilled in the economy. A lot of people out of work, they meant we were competing with a lot more skilled Older Workers as people find their way down the ladder in search of work and yet that is a real problem for us because you need to get onto that latter somewhere to acquire the job skills that will make you successful over the long term. Another interesting thing i found, Young Workers rely on an ability to job pop. People tend to stay in the entrylevel job for a year or 2 and half quickly to the next thing. People who gains more skilled, more knowledge, more experience and pump themselves up the salary latter. If the job Market Opportunities for that kind of job hopping, the Young Workers again struggled to make up those effects over time. These are all things, and put those negative effects on steroids. And and for entrylevel jobs. A job applicant might say didnt require previous experience. And slightly Older Workers competing for entrylevel jobs. Job hopping for millennials became job hanging on for dear life. Millennials who had found work tended to stay in those jobs a lot longer partly because there werent other jobs for the top two and we didnt want to give up on whatever perceived security we had to get new opportunities. I found one estimate if you compare what actually happens with youth job numbers during the Great Recession to the historical averages for people our age, millennials from 20092013 have missed out on 55 million opportunities to hop between jobs as they work their way up the ladder. It is important to keep these numbers in mind as corrective to a lot of anecdotal discussions people have about millennials in the labor market even today. The reality is some millennials totally make it. If youre a millennial who works in silicon valley, congratulations, i wish you many happy saturday mornings shopping at the foods. I have to congratulate you if you i millennial tradesmen who happens to specialize in installing solar panels. It turns out that is one of the blue collar professions were millennial workers outnumber boomers. Who would have thought . All of the evidence is many more millennials have different experiences and it is important to keep that in mind because im going to come back to this issue of different experiences in a moment. I talked about the job market and that is an important part of the story. One of the reasons is influence on so many things, take student loans. Millennials go to college in larger numbers than previous generations and certainly been a longterm trend and you can make a good case, more of us into pursuing education than otherwise would have. An indication of a bad job market induced more people to take on more student debt. The most marginal students were most vulnerable to negative effects of the debt burden, if they graduated at all. That is my spin on a few facts megan referred to in her introduction about the student loan crisis which is recently filtering into the discussion of that problem. The crisis is not among students who owe 6figure debts. Those big debtors are only around 5 of all student borrowers and their default rate is lower. The reason for that is people who have that level of student debt have gone to graduate school and probably emerged with the kind of education and social capital, connections of internship experience that will allow them to launch themselves into the jobs where they will be able to repay. The bigger student crisis is among people who owe less than 25,000. Especially among those students who might have borrowed to fund a couple years of college because they thought college would be there pathway to Economic Security in a bad economy but then discovered they had to drop out for some reason. Those are probably a lot of students for whom it would have been better for them to work financially if work had not been available. You cant buy a house if you dont have a healthy income and especially cant buy a house in the highpriced urban areas where millennials increasingly have to fight for job opportunities. I am not going to recite the detailed statistics showing a drop off in Millennial Homeownership compared to boomers when they were at that stage of their lives. I want to dwell on economic implications of the Home Ownership downturn millennials of experienced. I know economists had a long debate about whether housing is the best thing, when you put that money into investment account. To my eye that discussion missed the point that a lot of middleclass households with traditional amortizing mortgage is the best form of savings available. It was a big pathway for boomers, parents and the boomers themselves into the middle class and it is a pathway that is not open to millennials because we have struggled so mightily to claw our way onto the property ladder in a lot of these highpriced areas. I call a lot of these trends and others in my book the theft of a decade how the baby boomers stole the millennials Economic Future and i think boomers in the audience could reasonably reply excuse me . Because just stating things went wrong for millennials doesnt prove the boomers has stolen anything from us. In fact i find a lot of politicians and economists over the past few years have fallen into the habit of talking about Financial Impact of the Great Recession, slow growth aftermath, in extra rebel forces, and some kind of structural change in the economy, something that was no ones fault. My argument is the boomer politicians who made the decisions that led to the panic and managed the aftermath. And a lot of policy choices in the past decade. And redistributed that recession away from boomers, once the downturn happened. I might have done that, im not going to recite all of those factors here. I want to focus on a couple representative examples. Hopefully the boomers will find particularly provoking. The overarching story im trying to tell in the theft of a decade how the baby boomers stole the millennials Economic Future is about investment and productivity which have been going haywire in various ways the entire time the boomers have been in charge. I mentioned a few minutes ago the job market works really well for some millennials and really badly for others and this is a consequence of this. We created an economy that has become very rooted in some industries and investing a lot of others. The main boomer error i would argue, this will be a little controversial is to focus so much on clearing out the financial plumbing of the economy to work and getting that set that they lost sight of the minor question of where all of that money would go. I want to be clear this is not a leftwing complaint about wall street, the financial industry or any of the stuff millennials hear from bernie. I spent most of my life working abroad, and most overseas which they had a Financial System that works as well as hours does. And the Financial System, and productive investments, the boomer mode was to close more channels off. When you have a business idea that involves investing heavily on the tech platform. Some of the Biggest Companies at the moment i digital advertising. If you want to do anything that involves manufacturing or employing real human beings. The boomers steadily burned a lot of those industries particularly the more laborintensive ones, with more regulations and higher costs, ranging from environmental regulations to even obamacare. The boomers react with surprise, shock and horror when they discover our economy is skewing in favor of a few highly skilled graduates and not creating enough opportunities and not creating opportunities for younger people. The boomers double down on what already havent worked. To a surprising extent many policies over the past decade, and calibrated to price labor especially in millennial labor. You saw this directly, a threat hanging over business in that era. You can see it indirectly, the effect of raising the wage an employer has to pay to indict a sideline worker off the dole and back into the labor market. I should pause to be clear, though i am hardest on president obama, im hard on him because he was in charge for most of the stolen decade i am writing about. I dont view this as a partisan issue. It is worth noting george w. Bush administration laid a lot of groundwork for the 2007 panic, its own set of republican policies that distorted investment. In that case it was by diverging enormous amounts of money to the housing market. And under donald trump it is true that some things might have gotten better, his deregulatory drive is probably one of the most significant things to happen to millennials in recent years even though we dont seem to realize it. I think his opinions on a lot of other matters like trade and Monetary Policy sound to me like boomer, we are not out of the woods yet. I need to remind you of something i mentioned a few moments ago. Millennials are older than you think we are. The oldest of us are pushing 40 soon. I have some gray hair and the beard. Dont necessarily sue miami millennial if you see me in the street but i am. That fact makes many policy issues a lot more urgent for us. If we cant jump onto the property ladder soon with a 30 or mortgage are we ever going to pay off the house before we expect to retire . Or student loan repayments continue to eat into the money we could otherwise put into Pension Savings or into a house are we going to be able to retire at some point . These are the questions that keep us awake at night metaphorically and sometimes literally. Which brings me to the politics of all this. Here i am going to confess that on a certain level i dont get it. We are supposed to be hip and new but the main political story, we are flocking to socialist spelling discredited ideas that come from the victorian era. Even through a generation like ours where retro is in this seems a little extreme. If you look closer there is a certain logic to that. We need to discuss that openly. The main boomer political project on the right and the left in the 90s and early 2000s was the third way politicians like the clinton tried to copy the rise. Boomers spent most political lies believing only when pulled the right levers you can melt the protective power of the market. I find this is true, the most controversial, radical seeming builder policy of the past decade. Remember the main political pitch behind obamacare seem to be it was not a singlepayer system but instead was a particular attempt to harness the market. Before that we had the george w. Bush administration creating Ownership Society and the market by fannie and freddie to the deck of explosion. My theory is millennials have air in the mode that recovery doesnt work. We are living with the consequences of that failure. When a politician like bernie or Elizabeth Warren can offer is something that purports to be a clearcut explanation for that failure for the past decade and a, quote, honest solution which is less market and more government. The one thing they have going for them from a millennial perspective is they are not invested in defending a lot of the boomer policies millennials now didnt work for us. Politicians like bernie and Elizabeth Warren and now millennials like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are prospering because they can take potshot after potshot at the old consensus and a lot of millennials find themselves nodding along. You should not write us off as in court double lefties. A good example of that is the essay Edward Glaeser wrote in the city journal. If you ask millennials about the socialism question theres a lot of support for socialism because it does sound new and different from what has gone before. If you look at attitudes toward entrepreneurship and a lot of other attitudes and things the government might do. Millennials are more openminded than we give them credit for being. I would add to that analysis some polls find a skeptical of the most redistributionist elements of the boomer agenda. Social security and medicare, polls out there will tell you only 25 of millennials expect those programs are going to be with us in any meaningful way when we retire. What is happening now is not so much they are embracing the socialist left so much as we are casting around for answers, the democratic party, the political left has been a bit further along and how they play to their own strength to capture that vote. The free market, here we come outlasted donald trump. Some people are protrump conservatives and other people are never trump conservatives. What i discovered as i was writing this because i found myself becoming a trump who conservative because he feels so irrelevant to a lot of millennial concerns about the economy. Politically he creates a big problem for conservatives on the right because we dont like his political persona and is a sense that he doesnt like us but the bigger problem is just that he is such a boomer. Especially on issues like trade or formulations you hear about Monetary Policy. His agenda reflects a lot of the preoccupations boomers have been working on the past 20 or 30 years and the 2017 tax reform and large deregulation drive helpful for us, his steadfast refusal to reform Social Security and medicare are completely different matter. The main danger i see at the moment especially for conservatives is donald trump is so distracting. The political left knows where it is going, further and further to the left. The political right instead of talking about the problems of millennials is trying to figure out what we think about one particular politician. You are probably asking a more freemarket approach to millennial concerns, i wish you wouldnt because dont have all the answers, it is a relief we are at least finally having this discussion because i detected for a period particularly in conservatives a tendency to dismiss a lot of millennial concerns or to at least expect that over time it would work itself out somehow. That is a mistake. What millennials are demanding is more ideological policy competition from politicians and it is a good thing for conservatives to start engaging in that kind of debate. Millennials already had a lot stolen from us economically over the past decade. Please dont steal from us now the opportunity to have serious balanced political discussion about a lot of these problems. I am going to leave it there and im sure we will have questions that will be by turns probably angry and angry your. Should i just call on people . [applause] i will field some questions. Lets start over there. Thanks for your insights. Not sure how much millennials stall as much as screwed it up. They definitely screwed it up and all those hightech jobs, i want to ask a question out of left field. You list of my understanding why millennials are leaning toward socialism. How come trump, can you explain that . You seem to be able to explain a lot today. Im not going to explain that question and dont ask for any predictions about the 2020 election. What is interesting about trump if you look at it through a generational lens i need to preface this by saying trump is a complicated phenomena and. There were a lot of factors that contributed to that but it is true he did not win with a large section of the millennial vote. Hillary potentially lost that election because she didnt win a lot of millennials either. One of the things i found interesting and surprising is Hillary Clinton did not win millennials in the same numbers barack obama head, the enthusiasm wasnt there. Some people suggested if she had done better that might have dipped the balance in the election to push her over the line. The implication of that is millennials are demanding more competition. Younger voters seem less loyal to the two major parties because i think they are looking for people who engage in this kind of political discussion about the economic experience we have been through in the past decade. Questions over here. A lot of what you said really resonated but it struck me listening to it that it wasnt the boomers that were of a problem at all, but more progressive elements. Everything you talked about that you attributed to the boomers arent really the boomers. Looking at the trump bush Financial Issues with homeownership, that was all the progressives. That was against what bush was pushing for, not for it. Is it really the progressives, liberal progressive element or is it the boomers . That is an absolutely fair point that it does become a little touchy when you talk about an entire generation, not necessarily delve so deeply at least talking about the debates going on within the generation but it is fair to say you find in the republican side and the democratic side a certain approach to a lot of these policy issues traveling within a very narrow lane. That is the way i came to think of it. It is true that many of these policies were championed by the Progressive Left but some of them managed to find purchase in enough parts of the political right to have consensus about it too. Why dont we do one more and then we will go back over there. One big disservice younger people were done by their parents was this ridiculous narrative you have to go to college to be a success or college is the pathway to the middle class. Kids who come to big cities and work in law firms or consulting firms are not the norm. Most kids just want to stay in the towns where they were raised and have families. Do you see this narrative changing . It is clear to everyone that someone who has more flexibility than a Typical Office worker and towards w and obama considered to press this idea of universal college and also the second part of that question, debt that cant be repaid will be restructured one way or another, not saying for or against but have you contemplated any kind of student Debt Forgiveness program that wouldnt look like moral high school . On your first point, the notion that college is the ticket, the 4year University Degree is the pathway to economic success is preposterous. You have to think about the way boomers often talked about education particularly to their millennial children, always encouraged to think of it as an investment in human capital. That is the whole rationale for borrowing to fund education, this notion that the return of the end of it, the salary premium will repay it and yet we were told education was the one investment in Human History that always pays off and i think you are discovering a lot of millennials found that is not the case, the job market doesnt require part of it is the job market doesnt require that many people who have graduated from college but there is also a twin problem, when you think about skills and training you are asking 17 and 18yearolds to place a bet when they took a College Major on what kind of skills or education they were going to need for a career path they havent even decided on at that point and you are asking them to make that bet with 80,000 and that is not a sustainable model and there has been discussion about whether we can do vocational training, the 4year College Track to avoid that problem, it is too late for millennials, and implication the we are older than you think we are is we have all graduated from college now. The millennial student debt is going to be what it is going to be, we can save our younger brothers and sisters in generation the and that leads to the second question and the thing that drives me nuts about this discussion is it tends to be boomer politicians being generous with millennials money so if you go back and look at the obama era programs for Debt Forgiveness after you have been in the labor market, if your income was too low, to calculate exactly what year you would start hitting the point people would be eligible for this forgiveness. What would be the age range of generous these programs were calibrated off of benefit and would happen once most boomers were out of the workforce and millennials contributing more in terms of tax payment. There is an instinctive repeal of the forgiveness plan. Until you start asking who is going to pay the bill and who are the taxpayers who will subsidize that. It is not going to be people of Elizabeth Warrens generation. The lady there. Thanks for an interesting discussion. College debt is small potatoes compared to pension debt, medicare and Social Security. Those are the big bugaboos, things that were turned over to pay for us. I wonder if you might expand on that. That leads to a discussion about the politics of all this and i want to answer that question by looking at the federal fiscal situation and federal debt and the unfunded entitlement burdens because the big political story right now is we have millennials worming their way into congress. We have Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and mayor pete running for president , conservatives like Mike Gallagher is a millennial congressman from wisconsin, a republican is an interesting question is what are they actually in charge of . One of the greatest Powers Congress has is the power of the purse. These millennials are coming into positions where they can exercise that power and Something Like 75 of federal spending each years operating on autopilot to fund various old age and title and programs. That already, as we start having to grapple with accumulated debt problem of the past decade and grappling with the unfunded entitlement liability we face, not only does it create a fiscal problem for us, and have to make difficult decisions about whether we are prepared to increase our own taxes to fund benefits for the boomers and they were not prepared to fund themselves or are we going to cut the benefits . Im here to tell you we are seeing some evidence that can happen. It also is going to raise the question of we are making the decision against the backdrop of the fact that if we dont solve those problems we are not going to have fiscal running room we would need to address any of our priorities. Once the millennials are in congress, that is an important way of thinking about issues of the federal debt and fiscal deficit of the entitlement burden, not just a technocratic issue, getting numbers to add up but also a political dimension of what choices are the next generation going to exercise. As was point did we get so we thought college was the pathway to a job . I have four children in their 50s. Dont know where they fit in this millennium thing. When they were going to college i didnt say go to college because you need to get a job. I did it because you go to college to learn something and to become a bigger individual. Interesting part of the story. In a lot of parts of the book i am hard on the boomers, a lot of this was the result of boomers graduating into a difficult economy themselves in the late 60s in 70s into the 80s, and and looking into the history of this. And it was clear, the model of the 50s and 60s, the boomer response to that is to treat upscaling yourself as the best way to survive that environment. That was a time economys were thinking seriously about education or college as an investment instead of the consumption or choice to another framework for this cultural notion that you invest in yourself by going to school and mostly seemed to work for the boomers partly because it was true that improving your skills or education was helpful for the economy and it was evolving in that period and also because college was a lot cheaper than so it was a lowercost gamble the boomers were making. It made a certain amount of sense, continue to work for the millennials except that required us to overlook a lot of evidence that was developing especially over the past decade but that model wasnt working. It had maxed out on the extent that sending more people to college was going to solve that kind of problem. One final question in the back. Interesting discussion, interesting to me that we talk around issues. Thomas jefferson said when he was struggling to build the university of virginia he was asked why didnt he get help from government and he plainly stated you would have to have a change in the constitution for the federal government to be involved in education. When we look at the problems, you have 1. 3, 1. 4 trillion of Student Loan Debt and the reason college prices have gone up is all this money was thrown into it and all the for profit crony capitalists that went after it and raped it and we have results of that so it would be better to look back and say how do we limit the mistakes the government makes when it tries to do something good and live within the confines of the original intent of our founders. That is an interesting point to think about as we ask this question of how are conservatives going to respond to political demands. If you are going to argue the boomers ran into trouble because they were trying to hard to melt the government and private sector, the answer on the left is more government, less market, the viable political answer is more government and less more market and less government. I dont want to be unduly optimistic but you can see some evidence that millennials might be receptive to that argument if there are enough people to frame it that way. That is in the city journal piece, a lot of millennials have almost libertarian attitudes already on a lot of social issues and their perception of the proper role of the state on a lot of those matters, why not try starting to make that argument about Economic Policy too. Im not going to argue we are heading towards the libertarian nirvana or that sort of thing. We shouldnt write off the millennials because of the political phenomenon we are seeing right now. That might be a debate millennials are prepared to listen to. Thank you. [applause] thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations] in 1979 a Small Network with an unusual name rolled out a big idea. Let viewers make up their own minds. Season opened the doors to washington policymaking for all to see bringing you unfiltered content from congress and beyond. A lot has changed in 40 years but today the big idea is more relevant than ever. On television and online cspan is your unfiltered view of government so you can make up your own mind, brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. Now discussion on congressional oversight of Nuclear Security and arms control. Speakers included representatives from the arms control association. The Hudson Institute in washington dc hosted this to our event. Thank you. Lets begin. I want to welcome everybody to