Really need an introduction. With the right time, right book. Just fantastic work and not to hate him on his first ever book. He is going back to Columbus Ohio where he will be doomed watching secondtier football for the rest of his life. Im from the Southeastern Conference i can say that. Also, redefined the term right, right time. A claim intwitter the election season from texas to living in texas and i lived the middled in capital of the world columbia of , tennessee, home of the annual mule day festival, which is as i like to call it, redneck woodstock. And so were here to talk about conservatism and the class divide. One of the hottest topics of the last year. When all of a sudden a big chunk of america looked up at the success of dnldonald trump, looked at november 8th and the Morning Hours of november 9th and said who are these people that voted for donald trump in so many numbers . And then also looked at some really disturbing numbers about Public Health in the United States, about the rise of opioid addiction, the recognize of alcohol deaths, the rise of suicides and said what on earth is going on . Thats what were going to start with and i guess well start with j. D. And sort of for those who have dont want to summarize a book entirely, but those who have not read it, those who have not followed it closely, where are we right now . Well, thank you, david. Thank you, kevin, for sharing the stage with me. And i guess hello, we bring tidings from real america. So, where we are right now. I always frame this as and i hope the book framed this question as primarily one of the interaction of economics and culture because i think that its impossible to completely disentangle one from another and they obviously influence one another in important ways. But, fundamentally whats happened is two things. One, weve had an economy that you see on a ton of News Headlines that is unable to and on the other hand, you have a cultural disintegration that has happened at the same time. Andsuicide rates alcoholism. Using disintegration of families. Rising working class. Every other demographic is working in the right direction. So generally, what is going on is when you have a group of people who feel, in some cases, the country has left them behind and that things are not working. You go outside and you see all of the local businesses are closed. You see that another thehborhood has died of open at crisis. It was possible to misinterpret this but now, everybody is faced with this. You realize that we have a large the onlypeople, not group of struggling, but they are struggling and they are reflecting the frustrations and the way that they vote and approach politics. So that is my sense of what is going on broadly. My book is the personal story of what that decline and struggle looks like. One of the things i like about your writing is that you have reported from what you coin he big white ghetto home, as i call it. Exactly. And i think that is different than the stories we have heard about in the last couple of days. There was a golden age with thriving factories and jobs and then factories were shattered that is the story of the big white ghetto. Can you talk about that . In kentucky, they hate to see reporters coming but they are used to it. Because every time this comes the poorests out as place in the United States. So they are used to journalists coming to talk about how much it sucks there. And the police chief is funny. The police chief married a local lady and he has the first guy you go to. And he makes fun of all of the whole enterprise. , what isis funny to be true broadly of greater appellation and even when i talk about where i am from, nothing happened. There wasnt a Great Industries it went away, it wasnt a factory that closed down. It wasnt anything like that. Further east, there is cold mining and that is a different itry but it was always poor just stagnated while the rest of the country changed. Becomes more dramatic in contrast that the rest of the countrys welfare. My view about the political end of this is maybe a little bit different for others because i write a lot about the economics even though i dont think this is an economic question. What happened is that we are paying the wages of the in theion and most men world and most average people in the world are average. That is how things work. You might be above average or below average. Most places historically have not taken a great deal of meaning in the lives or status or a sense of self from their jobs. People in this room and people who go to law school, they talk peopleareers and these dont have careers, they have things they have to do. And where your sense of self you hadm was the things to do. We have taken the option off the table for a lot of the country because they dont exist. Has leveled off a little bit but that is largely driven by the fact that people are not getting married. To start with. So, hooray. So what we have is a large group of people, and i think men,fically in terms of who traditionally would have derived a sense of self and a from theire world position as men in families. , what isbeing gone left . If something doesnt give you the sense of value or worth people talk about the 1950s and 1960s as a golden age. And in a sense, there was something to that. There was something to that. We were in an interesting industrial age. People forget how poor 1957 really was. Car with health care and nobody really wants that. It isnt about material standards of living, it is about peoples relative sense of status in society. That is one of the reasons why trump was an effective candidate because he is a cartoon. Cartoon and he is a billionaire, a real estate acoon from new york, with swaggering persona and he speaks to those specifically male, societys about place in the idea of looking at that end saying yes, that is what i finde to, personally, i that horrifying but you can understand why a candidate like that would be appealing. And by not compromising and who he is, even though he probably ought to apologize for who he is lot of time, you can see the appeal of that against the background of what i was just talking about. That sock love something that came up yesterday in a direct way, the subject of moving. There was an economic panel. And there was a pointed exchange saying that if you look at struggling communities and you ask able to move, not only is that unrealistic and it might be harmful. Familiesle to leave and places theyve been for a long time and a couple of things came to mind. And i know that both of you have your on perspectives on that. Thought, weely, i are going to have kevin here. So i thought it would be your piece about moving, and moving from a depressed economic areas to places where their jobs, it might be one of the most slandered and misunderstood pieces of writing that i have witnessed in a long time. At least according to twitter and breitbart. We saw what happened yesterday. Lets give your reaction . Do things about that. I will make it brief. The pilgrims landed in massachusetts in november. If you have ever been to massachusetts in november, it is cold. Like landing in malibu. It is a different sort of place. So moving is in our dna. There is reason of their more people of irish ancestry in the United States under or in ireland and that is because the smart people got out of ireland. The same with your reject they came in for opportunity. Eventually you have to get up and move. As a reader, the issue is that recently is that we certainly should be understanding in our happening. What is you can either stay there and be miserable, you can be maintained on a public dependency for the rest of your life or indefinitely, you could move to a there is a job and there isnt a fourth option. So you could take sense of what is being lost. There are certain ways of life and communities that are going to make it. And what it got people mad is that i said a lot of them dont deserve to. There are groups of dysfunctional communities that raise their children badly and there is disruption and violence and addiction. I have seen it from firsthand experience at that is how i grew up. I know that world better than i would like to. And i know people who went to california or houston for better jobs and opportunities and lives. That am all right with tradeoff. At the end of the day, there isnt really another option. And i think any selfrespecting person i dont take any , whats toting man maintain independence indefinitely. I mean i do there is a wealthy lady out there somewhere. [laughter] love to work harder to make that happen. But i dont think anybody really wants that. It is true with what we are talking about appellation. I didnt meet a lot of people up there who wanted to maintain independency forever either. I dont think it is a normal part of your life. You want to have the element of control. You may need assistance at times which i am a strong believer in. But i think we are to structure the help in a way that helps people to become ultimately selfsufficient. Lies, one of the things i have advocated for is taking the expenses of moving and helping move there. You could take a job in start a new and life. There is something that will be lost but there is something that will be gained. To Silicon Valley from ohio. That is something you shared with us before on this topic. Conflicted views about moving because obviously the story of my grandparents life is that they went from Eastern Kentucky coal country to southern ohio which was the land of opportunity takes to the Industrial Revolution when there were factory jobs and that the storyhow in was a story of a downward mobility. We started at a different spot because my father because my grandfather worked in a factory job. So i recognize the importance of first, we have two Little Movement in the country. And most will recognize this. We have the geographic mobility that we have had since the postwar. And we have national disparities. Denver, colorado which has a 3 unemployment and then most counties in West Virginia have 30 unemployment and that fully captures the scale of the unemployment. So there is a really good argument being made that it would be better for a lot of people to pick up and move. But i also think we have to recognize the importance of place in a lot of peoples lives and identities. And there is a regional element. We talk about pilgrims who move from england to massachusetts but there are a lot of people moving from the u. K. To massachusetts. A victim was called the u. K. Back. Westare moving from virginia to ohio or kentucky to atlanta. So there is still a broader regional sense of place. They are still connected to grandparents. Cities such concentrated and areas of Economic Development and improvement that even that interregional im sorry, intraregional choice is becoming impossible. It is really hard to move from eastern tennessee to western arginia because there are not lot of jobs and in between. So i think we had to be mindful of the fact that those of us who i wrote about this those of us who have been lucky enough have opportunities, we shouldnt abandon the communities where we came from. Maybe we go something to the places that raised us and created us. I cursed people to be mindful of vacuum annoy dont agree necessarily need to have a massive infrastructural project that will create 30 billion jobs in appellation. The last point i will make there is that i worry about this a lot from the opposite side. Lower income america, america who cant find jobs, and whether they should be moving to areas of opportunity. I also worry about the fact that the trend in modern america is go to five or six cities. You get a fancy education you end up in new york, d. C. , seattle, San Francisco, l. A. And may be chicago. And this is a significant problem, culturally. It ends up taking a lot of people who get sucked away from the communities that care about them and they get redistributed and they culturally condescend on the people that they came from and i think this does create intense cultural conflict in our society that we have to mindful of. Conservatives should be mindful of the fact that if you live in a place like West Virginia, it isnt a question of whether you should pick up and move to a place with more opportunity, is that when you send your kids away to college, they start to dislike you, maybe just like the community they came from. And i think that is a very effective way to run. What gave me whiplash in the 2016 cycle is that my entire life groep is a conservative, looking at the deepseated problems in the inner cities, the conservative argument was, we need to prepare the family. We need to repair specific institutions. We need to support the church. And faithbased institutions. That government coming in at supporting us all is what ails innercity chicago or the worst parts of the bronx, it is just the wrong answer. And real also need individual responsibility. Nobody makes you have children out of wedlock. You be unfaithful to your wives. What we need is people to begin to step up in their lives. And that was a conservative argument for a long time. One thing were looking at is the White Working Class opportunity. Church taking drugs more and breaking up their affecting thend social conditions that was mirroring the conditions. And some of the conservative said wow, people me to take personal responsibility here. They need to get married and stay married and come back to church. Was anponse overwhelming, thunderous you are an elitist. You are condescending. Are is my simple question, democrats epocrates . It is something a right about a lot of my writing. Misst say this to attribute nasty racial feelings to people because i dont think that is what it is. But a lot of the things that we start to say about blacks and latinos we start to say about white. It affectsnd of where jd is from and where i am from and people dont like that very much. Thehould remember that black people and brown People Living in cities didnt like that very much either. I dont think people are going to welcome that sort of criticism. It is easy to make criticisms of i think ite people are more rational, we could stop right there. It is one of the reasons why they come down upon us with education 100 of the time and it will tell us. These are not necessarily shared concerns. The question is, are people right about the policy prescriptions . It was said that it is hard to move to West Virginia. But it is really hard to move to Silicon Valley. Is addng that we can do and make level, housing more affordable. Usually, its steven sotloff. You can move there and get an apartment and it isnt a horrible thing to have to move there. A lot of people dont have that. Theyre people moving to Silicon Valley and people who are not rich. They are living 17 to a small house and working a sector job. We could do a lot more for people if we got a place to move to. So we say yes, you have to move and take a job but we have to think about ok, where are they going to live . I agree totally with that. And one of the underappreciated drivers is the fact that we have such terrible housing policies at the state and local level, especially in towns and cities where there is a time of economic opportunity. It is weird to have lived in San Francisco for a couple of years and to find that the Democratic Party is the Rational Party when it comes to the housing. Theres always a war from the left wing should we bring more Affordable Housing and rent control. It is sort of bizarre to be agreeing with the democrats but in San Francisco, that is as good as you will get. The republican population in San Francisco recently dropped by 50 . And they moved to ohio. So this question about personal response ability and it is something that i care a lot about because it is one of the themes of my book, there is a difference between the thematic or discursive element of personal responsibility. And the substantive question is what is happening on the ground. So i think it is a matter of political discourse and the way our political leaders friends question, we have to continue to talk about personal responsibility. Whether it is context of the black community or the white community. Whatever. When you are a kid who grows up in a circumstance where most people around you are struggling, you start to feel that is the norm and it is useful to have people talking personal importance of agency and directing your own life. I harp on this in the book. You can admit that life is unfair for a section of america. You can admit that the deck is not even for a kid born in a stillold like mine but say you have control over your life. Because if we lose that, then we basically send a message to every kid growing up in terrible circumstances that you should give up because there is nothing you can do to affect change in your circumstances. So from the level of conversation and how we talk about this stuff, it is important to keep the emphasis on personal responsibility. What worries me a little bit, and i will criticize the way we talk about this it isnt all about the individuals. We have to keep in mind that there are individuals and theres the state and then theres the stuff that exist in the middle. And that is why i think it is a personal responsibility it is importantly rhetorically, it fails to capture what is going on on the ground in some of these communities. You can look of my life and look at me as a 14yearold kid about say sayat high school and that the kit is making poor choices. And youre right. I was making poor choices. The expectations that my community is setting form a of to look at the fact that i was a nature magic and unstable me notich was making even want to go home when the school bell rang. The conservatives would do well to look at the fact that it isnt a failure of individuals making the wrong choices. It isnt an opportunity for those individuals to grow up in those circumstances. It is trimmed black communities and White Communities as well. And this raises an important point. I will circle back to the housing point. One of the most powerful drivers of mobility and we see this in the data is consecrated is poverty. Up seeing only struggles and desperation, you internalize that that is all that is possible. One of the things that is driving consecrated part of the consecrated poverty in the way that we manage the sector a program is that we almost encourage the poor to trap enclaves of only poor people and we are surprised that kids you up in the circumstances have their expectations biased. So the take away from me is that we have be mindful of culture, even as we talk about the importance of the and visual responsibility. One thing that whats interesting about your book, we talk about personal responsibility. One thing you read was i didnt really know how to take responsible before your life. And this is also part of the house immigration. One of the things that is helpful is that people who are poor it is to be around people who are not like them. Friends parents were professors and doctors and that sort of thing. I didnt know how to fill out a College Application form or talk and myinancial aid parents couldnt help you with that but other people could. We talk about personal responsibility. Get a job, 10yearold. [laughter] are using the phrase personal responsibility. There is a missing element to that. Asoften think about that personal responsibility in government or the person in the position where we perceive them to be needing help. You dont often talk about what. S my personal responsibility i live in a town that is not as prosperous as nashville. What is my responsibility in that context . And i think that is something that we, as conservatives, one of the things we want to do is modeled the values we proclaim. And i think that involves getting involved in communities. We areoften think helping a lot by getting involved in politics but as a general rule, you can have a lot of influence over a few people and very little influence over many people. Timee often wind up taking to think about how we can influence many rather than to ag a lot of influence few. I just had to jump on my soapbox for a minute. Back on the soapbox. I will jump back briefly. Be afraid to talk about faith in this context. We cannot be afraid because of to talk aboutld the hole that has been left as people have left church. It is part of an intentional notess to fill that hole with Public Policy, but with faith again. And that is a critical element of that. Public policy is poorly equipped to deal with that. Lets talk about some of the we have talked about housing. Some of the ways that Public Policy is hurting the poor . One of the ways that comes off the top of my mind is disability. The disability system. I know you have written about that as well. Maybe walk some people exactly through how kenny system the mostto help suffering population of america, those with permanent disabilities, turned to a system that sustains dependency and misery. If you look at the numbers, it is shocking. You will find that one in five is disabled. En how did everyone get sick at the same time . Disabilities are related to fair conditions. Some places, you could be disabled for prediction but that isnt generally the case that happens. Or you know, chronic disease unexplained pain or anxiety disorders, is like that. Anxiety disorders i call that being human. Anxiety is part of the ballgame. That is how it is. Anytime there is money on the table, someone will pick it up. Did you did you know took medicare . Of course she did. Money on the table, someone will pick it up. Some money goes to people who desperately need it. Some of it doesnt. Doesnte someone who want to relocate and baby doesnt have a lot of skills or a High School Degree or economic prospects, maybe you could get this or that and a lot of the things that are available to men is disability. It is easy to get food stamps if you have children. Form of it is a way to extend benefits to people are not looking for jobs anymore and probably arent going to find them. It does need to be policed more carefully. Any to be propagated where there is fraud more than it is. And we will always have benefits for disabled people. We, as a society, are wealthy. And there are certain classes of people who will always be helped. Children, mentally ill and people would cannot do something for themselves. People with disabilities, you know, you cant tell a guy who doesnt have arms or legs to go get a job. I wont make that joke this time. But a very, very large share, and maybe the majority of people, receiving disability benefits, are not disabled in any of the sense. They are not people who could not do work. And you would be surprised how undisabled people become if something comes up, a job they want. I have a friend who is a private investigator and the90 of his work is investigating disability claims. And 90 of the you know, they get to that point, typically people who have done you know, they get to that point, typically people who have done that. It is one of those unfortunate traps that paul ryan talks about from time to time. But it is also something to keep in mind about the broader discussion like Social Security reform. If you raise the age of retirement you will put people on disability. People who are 68 or 69 years old, they cannot do the work they did at 30 or 35. It doesnt necessarily solve your problem. I wouldnt mind a system where we paid out with a welfare system that is more generous. If it was more honest and transparent. Not to go on on a long tangent but i read something that texas wants to pass a law requiring Insurance Companies to cover hearing aids for children. You are talking about a couple hundred kids a year born with hearing disabilities. Just send them a check. Laundering money through Insurance Companies doesnt make it any more efficient or take away the bad incentives or anything like that. I would prefer a system more honest and direct and more honest about the means. We want you to get a job and we will incentivize that in various obvious kinds of ways. Here is the care and here is the stick. You get one or the other. Not confined to disability but what are other ways you have seen in your life and studies where Public Policy is hurting maybe more than helping . Or so inefficient to be useless . Sure. Not just in the disability context, but in a lot of our welfare welfare programs. We have a benefits cliff where you work an additional 10 hours a week and your benefits are cut so much that it almost doesnt make Financial Sense anymore. Related to disability, one of the things that came across my mind when kevin was talking is that this comes up in the context of youth, children, and school a lot, in a very sad way because a lot of times parents get a disability check if their kid is classified as learning disabled. Of course that creates an incentive. And maybe the kid is. But it creates an incentive to keep your kid below grade level reading because if the kid matches up or catches up then you have a problem where you lose that disability check. There are a lot of different cliffs like that in the social welfare system that should be fixed and i think could be fixed. One thing that comes to mind that doesnt get talked a lot, so i will talk about it here, is that if we think about the real drivers of social problems in our society, not everyone, but a significant proportion of the social problems in our society come from people who were abused and neglected as children. The number is 600,000 to 700,000 kids a year who go into the Child Welfare system. There are a lot of kids who are abused or neglected that never make it to the system in the first place. You look at high school rates, incarceration rates, those are problems children quite literally in our society. One of the best and i think the hidden social safety net for a lot of these kids is what family law folks call kinship care. If you look at the outcomes for a kid, lets say, whos placed with a grandparent and aunt or uncle away from an abused or neglected kid, those kids outcomes are much better. Even approaching a kid never removed from the home in the first place. But you look at outcomes for a kid placed in traditional foster care system and those outcomes are much, much worse. The kid is already messed up. Already abused and neglected. Gets ripped out of their family extended network and placed with a complete stranger for a couple years, where at the end of the couple years they end up with the same family in the first place. So you think about that scale, of 600,000, 700,000 kids a year, and Public Policy creates real financial and sometimes legal disincentives to allowing abuse hed neglected kid to go with their extended family. One example is if you are a foster family and you take in an abused child, you get paid for it. As you should. A family member, even though it is more positive for a grand parent, you dont get that payment. Sometimes and states have moved away from this, if foster care you are not a licensed agent you cant even legally take custody of the kid in the first place. That means, of course, you have more and more kid going into this situation. I think thats one of the hidden ways that we really prohibit and disincentivize one of the really successful safety nets in our society. Again, we have brought up berk quite a bit, but i think that second layer of the family as the most underappreciated element in that policy. And your broader point is right around, right around the time i was born, early 1970s, we ran this crazy experiment. What happens if we have children not raised with families . Here we are and were nuts. You cant go back on it. The sexual revolution aspect of this is something for which there should be a nationwide reckoning. We have a message sent for decades that the traditional family, not only does it matter, but it was viewed as an instrument of oppression. Motherfather household was that the idea of an intact motherfather household was defining. And the divorce is the birth of human freedom. Instead we find out what happened when you abandoned tried and tested structures the outcomes are not always great. One of the things that i think is so so sad about the modern trend has been that the increase in death rate. It is driven by the despair, markers of despair, alcohol poisoning. The news, i believe, just yesterday or wednesday evening that the death rate from opioid overdoses has now surpassed the death right at the height of the aids epidemic. A disease with no known cure ripping through people. Then suicide, triple the suicide rate in some ways is triple what it was in 20, 30 years ago. And i would add real quick, and maybe people here know exactly what youre talking about which is that the life expectancies for white Men Without College Degrees is declining for the First Time Since weve been keeping records. And the drivers are addiction diabetes and suicide. I messed up my statistic on suicide rates. The highest theyve been in 30 years. Which more than cancels out the bringing down the homicide rate. More americans are dying by their own hand an were ever dying at the hands of the crack epidemic. I think there is an obvious point here, we need better jobs and better training and so forth. There is obviously an element of which policy can help. But one of the arguments i make is that you cant purely look at this through an Economic Policy lens, and those statistics are one of the reasons, because the opioid addiction rate and suicide rate among White Working Class americans is higher than among black poor americans even though materially black americans are still worse off than the average white poor american. So there is clearly a cultural element to this that we have to understand and at least talk about. Yeah. You can drop a textile mill into the middle of a town and it doesnt mean a strange husband and wife reconcile. You know, you can move that tesla battery plant here but you have to bring all of the workers in from the outside. We dont have anyone here to do those jobs. So theres a bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Right. Thats an old story in Eastern Kentucky. When you grow up in kentucky as i did, right on the western edge, i would still be called a flatlander, although we had rolling hills, just for the record. Not the appalachian mountains. The shear number of well sheer number of well intentioned efforts brought in to try to turn around Eastern Kentucky. Yet Eastern Kentucky remained Eastern Kentucky. And so thats, you know, one of the things so beneficial and we will wrap up, both of your writings, its not the Public Policy doesnt matter. Public policy matters. It always matters, but there are wounds that Public Policy cant heal. That is one of the tremendously messages you have both brought, and i know many in the room appreciate it. Thank you very much. [applause] we will take a quick break to reset the stage and we be right back with dr. Charles krauthammer. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] the former u. S. Attorney for the Southern District of new york talked about his accomplishments, his criminal justice plans. He was part of a group of prosecutors asked to resign in march. He was fired after he refuse. His remarks took place last week. We will show you that tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Heres a preview. I am no longer the u. S. Attorney. I want to say a quick word about that. If you want more details, there is an article that came out this afternoon. Riefly i was asked to resign i refused. I insisted on being fired, and so i was. I will tell you i do not understand why that was such a big deal, especially to this white house. I had thought that is what donald trump was good at. [laughter] that that is how he got to be the president. After how many people remember the germanic moment on the apprentice every week when donald trump sat at the Conference Room table, manned up, looks a contestant directly in the odd come and said, would you kindly submit your letter of resignation. Some of the remarks from prett bharara. A look at tv with nasa and space expiration. Exploration. How the ladies of the Harvard Observatory took the measure of the stars. Girls. E of the rocket later, a group of whocanamerican women starting in world war ii were integral in designing the aeronautics calculations that propelled the United States to a lead investment hes race. Then how to make a spaceship. Book, beyond, the look at the next generation of space exploration. Beginning at eight hot p. M. Eastern on cspan2. Tonight, American History tv in primetime. We will go inside the National Museum of africanAmerican History and culture, have conversations with your raiders, and the author of the museum. American history tv in primetime begins at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan3. It, steve you missed russell on the 100th anniversary of the u. S. Entry into world war i. Of april 100th years ago today where i am standing, with concrete evidence of german hostility to International Peace and liberal democracy, the congress of the United States declared war on germany. Kelly on the building of the border wall. I have no doubt when i go back to him, the wall says here makes sense here, Technology Makes sense over here, i have no doubt he will go tell me to do it. Kamala harris. In regard to assessment, has ur
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