Transcripts For CSPAN Syrian Refugees 20140112

To set the stage for this, if you look back at our generation, essentially your parents, if you look back at the generation we came in through the 1960s in the country changed radically in ways that you cannot imagine. Unlike the relationship you had with your parents through the most part were you talk to back and forth in your shared values and even musical taste, unlike that kind of relationship we could not have got. We loved and respected our parents but they did not understand us at all. We did not understand them. We really did set out to develop a new country, a new culture in many ways, and we did. It was not so easily done. Our parents went through the great war, world war ii. They came back having seen horrors and they had fought for their country and wanted nothing more but to settle down and live a decent life where hard work was recorded where they could simply raise kids and have a family. They were very different than we were. There was a war going on in that generation. Literally. At one point, as many of you who may remember who have read american history, unarmed students on kansas state were demonstrating against the war and there were demonstrations over years on College Campuses partially because of the universal draft. And the National Guard killed four unarmed students. That was really, i think, the final straw in the separation of generations. No generation is the same across the board. There were plenty of conservative kids and they certainly did not have a lot of sympathy on what was going on in College Campuses but it divided our generation from our parents. The reason i talk about all of this is because it is the seeds of what you are seeing now in congress. The socalled difference between people who had a wide view of inclusion, which was my end of the political spectrum, and people who did not. People who had grown up in a different way, many of them in places where they fell secure, usually small towns where they knew everybody and were brought up a certain way and basically believed it was the same way they were going to bring up their children forever. That is the real Cultural Divide in my generation that goes back to the 1960s. I will say one other thing. Theres a lot of talk in washington about equivalency. Extremes on the left and right and they cannot get together. Its nonsense. There are no extremes anywhere to speak of on the left. I was around when there really was a left. Right now theres a thought that there were people out of the edge im trying to be polite because this is on cspan. I grew up when there really was a left and they were the ones who are crazy. They were way out there using all of this rhetoric about bringing down the government. They were blowing up the buildings. They did not know this but there was a physics graduate student that had nothing to do with war. They blew up the building and killed him. The crazy stuff was going on and the left. I remember when there really was a left in this country. This idea, and the extremes on the left and right wanted to get there, that is nonsense. Strong differences of opinion and there are people who are locked in and thats what i want to spend a little time explaining to you but this has a happy ending. Fast forward and were are still having these battles in our generation that we had in the start of the 60s and 70s and along comes your generation. I already talked about the difference in parenting styles that we parented you in a very different way than we were parented. Were pretty frank about things we would not think about talking to our parents about. We share a lot of values, those of us in the generation, for want of a better word, characterized as progressives. In those days we were characterized as liberals. It was the mainstream generation. When we left your generation, this was a set of ideas. This is a fascinating divide. Weve done a lot of polling on this when i was running the Democratic National committee. You are more financially conservative than the democratic, especially the more liberal. You are more libertarian. You are less apathetic with the labor movement. Sympathetic with the labor movement. Democratically oriented liberal people in my generation. You are also inclusive. There is a difference between what you are, inclusive, and what we are, tolerant. We talked about tolerating different kinds of people. Look, i was a big preponderance of the civil rights movement. Many of you who read my autobiography know i had two africanamerican roommates which was incredibly unusual at that time and we learned a lot from each other. We are still really close to this day. If you had told us in the year that Martin Luther king was assassinated, rfk was assassinated, that the Democratic National convention blew up with demonstrations of what we later called the police riot and we would have a black president 40 years later, we would have thought we were crazy. Thats exactly what happened. It was powered by your generation. I did not know any African Americans before i went to college. I hardly knew many jews. We grew up in the silos. Even though we believed in the generation of equality. You have grown up with people of every immigration status every , religion, every race, every sexual orientation, you guys have grown where we dont have to worry about diversity. Racism is never dead. We have to worry about those things but you take for granted your friendships with different types of people. The fact that you take advantage of those friendships and understand and have learned much more about each other than we could have imagined has rebuilt the way that you think about this country. This is the most diverse country on the face of the earth. With a rehearsed time, we have a multicultural generation and i actually do have some friends that are conservative and it may not be multicultural but it is a multiethnic culture and it is a mixture ordinary thing. It is the first multiethnic culture, not the first in the history of United States, but the first multiethnic generation in the world because of the internet, because of the ability that you have to connect with people all over the world and be friends with all of these people not just because of the reduced in airfare and you have traveled way more than we have but what you have done is built a worldwide multiethnic generation. Its the first one in the history of mankind. Its an extraordinary thing. Our values are not exactly the same. Our values for inclusion are the same. I am actually on the right end of the spectrum. About money. I dont believe in the responsible tax cuts but i do believe you need to balance a budget. Once you get to be the governor, there is no right wing economics and left except for academics who dont have a lot of Actual Experience doing it. Theres just economics. You tend to be pretty moderate fiscally. Our generation fought. The difference in values is not about the core values of who you are and what you believe, you partially inherited from us in a grew up in a multiethnic situation for the most part and this unbelievable tool which has given more people individual power than any human invention since the printing press. You have more power because of the internet and i will talk about that in a minute area i will end up with how we will work on the budget and i want to set the stage for why we are the way we are and whats going on in washington. You have the civility to bypass this ability to bypass politics and because of the culture war of my generation and because you are a multiethnic generation, you approach the world differently. We will fight to the death of these things, gay rights, abortion, until we are in senior housing. But you dont fight over things like that. We focus on the 20 of ainslie things we strongly disagree you focus on the 80 of things you agree with and find Common Ground. I will give you an example which is extraordinary. When i was running the dnc, i happen to be a christian and i know something about the bible. I went to a school where you had to go to church twice a day and twice on sundays. The chief of staff of the Democratic Party was a pentecostal minister. I know no one on the right will believe this but it is actually true. Her father was a big Civil Rights Act to this and he still alive. We had some discussions about religion because most evangelicals dont vote democratic and we wondered why. There is something called a red letter christians. They believe if you could but the words that jesus said in the bible in a red letter in you look at it, its pretty much caring about poor people, about outcasts, the parable, the samaritans. I asked why he was that we cannot talk to evangelicals. If you look at the words of jesus, evangelicals should be democrats. We did a poll and we pulled polled evangelical christians through the country. This is probably 10 years ago or maybe not quite, eight years ago. We polled evangelicals and we found a few were over 55, your big issues are antiabortion, antigay rights. Those were really big deals. If you are under 35 and you are a christian, and you are evangelicals, the things he you cared most about were poverty, climate change, and at the time number three was dark arfur. Looking at the polling data, if you poll what i call secular activists, young people, the number one would be poverty in two would be climate change. The fact of the matter is your generation has less ideological bandwidth. You dont have a right or a left. What you have is a lot of people willing to focus on types of fact like that, like evangelical christians. Theyre going like this and we are there to work with you on stuff that you care about if you are a secular activists, the term made up for a better way of describing what a lot of people in your generation are like. You can find Common Ground and you know it. We struggle because of the polarization going all the way back to the civil rights. Why did i give you this course in the history of your generation . The reason there is not compromise in washington has nothing to do with the difficult issues. It is really easy to compromise about numbers. It would be so easy if people wanted to. You think there should be more tax cuts and a rewrite of the Corporate Tax code. We think we need more help for Homeless People. Lets work this out. We will not get as much help for Homeless People as we would like. You are going to get some tax cuts we would rather not give you. Its not very hard. Numbers are numbers and theres always a middle ground. The problem is the ideology. The problem is that you have upended the United States. When you were 24 years old, you elected barack obama as president. Dont you think that is a bit of a start or a lot of people around this country . In 2050, the majority of people in this country, there will be no majority of people in this country. We will be like california. There will be no majority. White people, black people, there will be no majority. That is your generation. You are taking over. If you dont think youve taken over, youve already elected your first president. The largest turnout of young people in the history of this country and the only time in my lifetime where more young people turned out than older people over 65, the only time in the 2000 election. Yes, barack obama got 98 of that into a huge percentage of the latino vote but the big thing that nobody expected was this enormous turnout of people in your generation. That turned the page. When you turn the page, they all say human beings want change. It scared the daylights out of a lot of people. Then along comes this terrible recession the president inherits it. Truth is if you are 65 years old then you lose a job, you will have a hard time getting another one. When people are scared, one way they react his anger. Thats a lot of what you are seeing, catering to the worst instincts, as they often do on both sides, and catering to the anger that you see on the right, a group that feels they are no longer in the position of privilege they once had data they are economically in significant trouble because they have lost their jobs and they are terrified of losing their jobs. They reacted by clinging to what they know and resisting change. That is ageold history. People have done that for as long as theres been a human race. Along comes your generation and things are going to be different. One that is so interesting is that it does not matter nearly as much. Washington has always been behind the times. There have been great president s who have made huge changes. The vast majority of change does not happen that way. It starts in someplace, silicon valley, somewhere else, selma, alabama. There are lots of places that change starts and most of it is grassroots and goes up. Social security, that did not start, Franklin Roosevelt did not come to the white house and say, lets do Social Security. It started much earlier than 1929 when the stock market collapsed but in the mid1920s in the Agricultural Sector but they were not able to get financing and there were all kinds of panicking and they were getting chills. A lot of what would now be conservative states like kansas, that is where Social Security started. People had nothing in when they cannot work anymore, they died. They had no way of supporting themselves if no one else could either. So Franklin Roosevelts on that, saw some states that had it and he said, lets do this nationally. Its not that they did not do anything but most changes start at the grassroots, start someplace else and come to washington. The problem today is because of the internet emma changes so much faster in this cumbersome political process we call democracy my favorite quote is by Winston Churchill. The worst system of all, except for any other. Remember that. It is alarming that Vladimir Putin would get elected and they will give up their rights and in favor of stability. You dont often get the dictator that you like and thats important why we should put up with the system and it drives us so crazy because as Winston Churchill said, it will turn out in the long run to be better than any other. I will give you an example and then i will shut up and take some questions. A few years ago, you may remember this or you may not because you are not that old. A few years ago, bank of america decided to have a five dollar charge on their debit card once a month. Because your generation does not use cash. I was appalled to go to starbucks and have him pull out a debit card for 3. 99. I could not believe that people paid on debit. Well, you guys dont do it. Fine. Whatever. It was a young graduate at Roger Williams university in rhode island, a workingclass university and shes the first generation of her family to go. She was outraged. She was trying to find a job. She did not have any money. She had a lot of Student Loans and all of a sudden here comes bank of america raising her debit card and charging 60 a year just to have the privilege of using her debit card. It was a platform put together inspired by some people who knew something about this. This is where your age group decided to come take over my campaign and do whatever they want revolutionizing the country and it started something called change. Org that helps you build campaigns to get whatever you think you need to get done and they have led a ton of really successful campaigns. She talks to all the people with debit cards, 300,000 people signing up saying they will take your money out of bank of america. She gets calls from managers, the president of the bank. Young lady, you just dont understand. I understand i pay 60 a year for the privilege of having your card. 28 days later, bank of america decides they will get rid of this debit card fee. Our generation would run around the white house with pickets. We have a choice between long haired kids and lobbyists giving us money, who do you think we will vote for . And nothing would have happened. A few days after and this is the bonehead corporate move of whatever that year was. 48 hours, maybe a few weeks after the bank of america finally caves in, verizon decides that theyre going to 2rge people to dollars extra if you pay your bill online. First of all, thats a crazy business decision because its much cheaper to pay the bill online but they are taking advantage of the idea that is true for most people no matter your generation that if we just charge you two dollars a month, you wont get off your body and your butt and do anything about it. Most of you will just say ok. She goes back to change. Org and create another petition. She gets them knows how many thousand people signing up saying they will switch from verizon to at t. They lasted two days before rescinding the fee. The reason i bring these things up is because you have the kind of political power he could not dream of. We thought the power was having marches and all of this business. Organizing people to go up to new hampshire, which did make a difference, because jackson Lyndon Johnson realized it was so much trouble he did not run again. But all you have to do is go online. And not even that, it is not one like verizon and bank of america. Education is being revolutionized in the inner cities, and washington has almost nothing to do with it. It is movements like teach for america and the Charter Schools. Not all Charter Schools are good, but there are some. Make ay came they difference. Innercity kids have the opportunity. We are not talking about kids who end up in college like some of you here. We are talking about kids who could not graduate before, could not graduate high school because there was not a Decent School to teach them, and nobody cared, certainly not in school, and that is being changed. That is not changed radically, it is not being changed perfectly, and you can read about scandals, but for the most part, there are a lot more kids that have opportunities, and it has little to do with washington. It is about local stuff. It is about a young woman, who is not so young anymore, and the woman who started teach for america was a princeton undergraduate and raised tons of money, and now it is teach were all in places like argentina and things like that. And in places like that. It is about your age group that takes two years of the hardest years of your life, like being in the peace corps, where you get deposited in a country and cannot speak the language. It is really hard. I said to my son, it is not fair to drop all of these untrained kids in, and i said, what do the kids get out of it . He said there is a lot of faults with it but most of them are started by tsa graduates. This is the kind of thing that you are that is changing everything. You are not demonstrating. In fact, you are a group that does not do much demonstrating. There is some of that. Occupy wall street. That was my generation, not your generation. You get things done, and increasingly, you get them done because you do not have to wait for a political process to get it done. We might go down to the mayor and so forth. When you want to get stuff done, you just go on the internet. You find a thousand or 500,000 people to agree with you. When we wanted to get started with a business, we went for venture capital. You dont have to do them. You can do crowd funding. It is unbelievable the revolution that is being caused, and what congress, eventually what they have to do is catch up with the revolution, and the revolution is getting farther and farther ahead of them. Because they have not solved to the business of their older generation. So how does this all end up . You do not have as big a desire to actually serve up on capitol hill or some of the organizations around here, but it is going to happen, because eventually, we are going to age out. Boomers that we are, there is some finite section to this process going on in congress, and it is happening sooner than you think, and as soon as there are people of your age in congress, this is going to stop, because there is not the patience to treat people the way they treat people. There is not the patience to be on twitter and say horrible things because you disagree with somebody. You do not disagree that way, and i know that because i teach with three different universities, and we think you are sometimes too kind, glossing over some things that need to be talked about, but it is an alternative to us, so the compromises and the real bipartisanship is going to happen, and we change, the Democratic Party changes, and i forgot which republican said this, but it really was from the amnesty, acid, and Something Else that began with a. Starting with nixon, they made a lot of heyday making the Democratic Party into a party of longhaired people who did not go to work and dodged the draft. Today, the republicans have this problem. They dont like abortion, dont respect womens rights. That is not true, but that is their caricature, because there are enough of them that talk like that, just like there are a enough on the left, and that is how we got granted, and they are branded that way now. What happened to us is we lost three elections in a row. We finally moved back to the center with bill clinton. This election in 2016 is important. The republicans lose they are already struggling. With how to appeal to your generation. They could get you if they were only able to talk about libertarian economics, because you are more libertarian and fiscally conservative than the leftwing of the Democratic Party. But they cannot get you as long as they are talking about immigration and gay rights and abortion rights, as those are your friends. They are victimized, and you are not going to throw your friends under the bus. You are not going to do it. It is not going to happen. I have seen people called on the stuff in your generation and you are not going to do it. They know they have to stop talking about those issues. They made a deal with the devil in 1968 with the southern strategy, and there is a wing of the party that only want to talk about those issues, and it is getting smaller and smaller and smaller every day. If they they lose the president ial election in 2016, i think the Republican Party is going to retool itself and come roaring back. To compete for you. The way to do that is to stop the rhetoric and the fire flame throwing and to actually get something done. That is what it is going to take to get your generation. If you remember what barack obama was talking about, he was talking about bringing people together, and i told him, dont count on that, because i have been fighting these people, and they are ruthless, and they will do whatever it takes, and he has since found out otherwise. When senior people in your party are talking about the fact that you are a muslim and born in kenya and you are president of the United States, there is something wrong, and your generation is not going to buy into that. I know a lot of republicans i respect they are not talking , like that. They do not believe that stuff. They are trying to figure out how to retool this party and undo the bargaining in 1968 with the far right. Who will do anything and say anything. They know in order to win, as your generation comes into power, that they have to appeal to you in that way, so the compromises will come. The compromises that are not, for the most part, there are somewhere it is difficult to figure out where to compromise on, like abortion. That is a hard one, but the rest of the stuff is not hard, and the budgets are easy. They just have to have the will to get it done. The last people who didnt were Ronald Reagan and tip oneill, who figured out how to shore up Social Security, and they made a deal, and they both made compromises, and it worked, and it postpones the day of reckoning for a long time, so if you have the will to compromise, you have to find that, and that is what we are lacking, the will to compromise. Thats will comes from the american people. Very little change actually comes from washington. It comes from the outside. You guys are making change in your communities all of the time. The ones the work, a lot of them will not work, but the things that do work will spread, and the other thing is you are setting a tone for the future of politics in the United States, and that will make it easier or these guys to do their job as soon as they figure out that they have to start saying paying attention to what your values are and not just talking about Student Loans or things like that to draw you in. One of the greatest things is youre not subject to special interest subjects. Student loans matter to you, but what really matters is the tone and the possibility and hope for the future. The last thing i want to say before i close is the discussion about any quality. About any quality inequality. I come to the discussion about inequality not as a democrat and not as somebody who thinks, well, the poor have to get a better deal in life. I think that is true, but the reason i think it is not because of that. This is an exceptional country. It really is. I hate to think about the perception that it means americans think they are better than everyone else. I do not think that is true. This is an extraordinary country, and it goes back to the documents that founded this country, the constitution and the declaration of independence. If you look at what happened at that time in the late 1700s, as we were being founded, what america did was raise the bar in terms of the expectations of the time about how we would treat each other as human beings and about how our government was to treat people. What was done in 1776 and then the reframing of the constitution, which was written twice, because we did not get it right, and then the articles of confederation, what we did was to set a new philosophical standard which became the standard of the world about how human beings were to treat each other and about what our relationship with the government is. That is what makes it special. The translation, and the reason this country has been so strong economically for so long is that we attract the brightest and the best and in brace to those who and the best from all over the world and those who immigrated. Why is that . Because it takes a lot of learn nerve to leave what you know and to come to a country where you do not speak the language so your children can have a better life than you. That is really gutsy. Why is because of the framework in the constitution and in the declaration of independence. The wealth gap threatens that, because the core belief in america that has kept us going, which has made us an exceptional country, was if you work hard enough, you can succeed, and your success is not limited, and everyone knows that luck plays a role and so on and so forth, but the key thing we are taught is that if you work hard enough, you can be a success. In the last 20 years, the bottom 80 has not seen a pay increase. This is not about poor people. Almost the entire adjusted for inflation growth in wages is in the top 20 . I think that is great for the top 20 . I do not begrudge anyone any money in this country, but if you say it does not matter how hard you work, you cannot get ahead, to the 80 , and it will be harder and harder to pay for your kids college education, that is a spike in the american dream. We have to fix this problem, not because of the issues with the poor and all of the things that the democrats think. That democrats care about. This is the core of what america is about. This is what has given hope to all of those in the world that do not have these kinds of opportunities the last 200 some odd years. That is what is at stake. It is not a philosophy. It is an opportunity to be a beacon of hope. The mistakes that we have made, and there are many, we are still the beacon of hope for the world. If we want to do that on human rights, issues settled in 1776 in our founding documents, if we want to do that, we have to make sure there is equal opportunity economically. That does not exist today. We have to make sure it does. When we talk about income inequality, it is not going to be about transfer payments, even though we need that. It is not going to be about minimum wage, even though we need that. It has to be about real opportunity, and there also has to be the opportunity to fail. An economist, who i actually think wrote some really smart things, very conservative, and some of you know who he is, but what he said in capitalism, you have to be able to fail. Right now, we have a system after 2008 where the banks are so big that if they screw up enormously, he cannot allow them to fail, so there is no penalty for screwing up in the capitalist system. That cannot be. That is not real capitalism. That is one of the things, to have people accountable for their actions, not just doing it with the law, and it also has to have economic penalties for the top folks, especially on wall street, who have exempted themselves from the rules of capitalism, and that is a big problem in a society which relies on equal opportunity for everybody. Thanks very much. [applause] so i am happy to take questions and comments if we have them. I have not looked on the time. We have some questions we have some microphones. Good morning, governor dean. My name is ryan navarro from this college. You had mentioned the election in 2016, and i am wondering in the event you were to run for president again, what would be the top three issues on your agenda if you were elected. Well, i am supporting hillary, so i am not running in 2016, but thank you. I think number one is income inequality. Number two is the financial situation of the country. We have too much debt. We cannot continue with this debt. It is a serious problem. It has to be dealt with. I think my views on how to deal with it would be different from others, and the third is i have always believed you have to have a universal health care system, and i think we have made some progress towards that, but we have a lot of work to do. [inaudible] hello . There we go. I am from stanford university. In light of the recent budget deal, do you believe what is characterized a lot of the budget disagreement has been dissipated, or is that going to be a continuing factor in the Budget Discussion . The anger in congress is not dissipated because it is a relatively small group of people. I should not say that, it is not small. It is 80 members. I think the speaker has been pretty clear that he is not willing to be blackmailed or pushed around anymore, and i think that is really important, the victory with the budget deal was that we could actually have republicans and democrats talk to each other. It turns out the budget deal was not all that big a deal, but nonetheless, it was a big deal that they could agree on something. So the problem here is what is going to happen to the far right and how much leverage they are going to be permitted to have. Leader pelosi, she is going to have to deliver some democratic votes, if the speaker is going to be able to cut deals, and that means she is going to have to move her caucus towards the middle, because i do not think there can be enough republican votes with the tea party to assure a deal. They are on opposite ends of the spectrum. And it is not because everybody is having a kumbaya moment. They continue to cater to anger in a certain percentage of the people in congress, but it is that those forces have begun to be overcome by the leadership. Thank you. Hi, my name is Haley Schneider from this college. I appreciate your insights when you say when people are scared, they react with fear, and i am wondering, in your opinion, what can be done to address some of the fears and open up more bipartisan discussion . The only way to adjust to fear is to give people time to adjust to circumstances. They need time. As many of you know, i was the first governor of the union to sign the Civil Liberties bill. Of it as ahinks kumbaya, granola crunching state. People were opposed to samesex marriage, but this is marriage. Marriage is out of the question. Note chance you could have passed marriage in 2000. Things change very rapidly, especially in your generation, which does not seem to have any problem with samesex marriage at all. Whether you are conservative or liberal, and that is just a matter of getting used to it, so they the way you overcome fear is that people get used to a different situation, and it is not so fearful anymore. The other way is to become a better economically. It is important so that people can go back and worrying about their pocketbooks but how their kids are going to be in school. It is a different level of fear. People, regardless of where they stood on the political spectrum, who are older but who had older kids at home who had legitimate fears of never being able to work again, a combination of turnover and age in the workforce when they lost their jobs, so that is basically had to overcome fear. You have to overcome fear by getting to know each other and trust each other and working with each other, and it requires an enormous amount of work, and this is a human emotion. It has nothing to do with america. Look at south sudan. South sudan irresponsible politicians cater to fear, and responsible politicians try to keep people together, and this is again not about necessarily america. In sudan, you had a new country that had thrown off the shackles of what they thought was an impressive government, and then they dissolved in fear because they had their own agendas and went after each other, and they then became fearful. The way you fight fear is you have to be committed to keeping the country together with leadership, and you have to make sure there is an opportunity to get to know each other, and you have to have an economy that does not threaten the livelihood of children, because that is what is most important to everyone. Thank you. First of all, thank you for being here. You emphasized the importance of the internet in revolutionizing the political process. One person can influence the world by simply posting something on the internet, like change. Com. My question is, do you find there are other negatives to this is generational change, other than it is happening faster than the political world . People are talking about slackers and people in videogames and criticizing your generation, and i find that to be vacuous. It is mostly people my age who have their own problems. Are their criticisms . Of course, there are. You are human being so you are not going to do everything right. Here is one thing i did not say that i should have. When you look at a generation, you cannot brand a whole generation of 40 Million People of however you want to slice the pie of this way or that way, but it is the top 15 or so that makes the difference, and i am not talking about people who went to stanford or yale or someplace. Because the top 20 comes from all over the place. The top 20 in washington did not go to the ivy league. I did. It is still pretty much a meritocracy in this country, but what i mean by 10 or 20 or what the number is, it is where they are taking the generation, and that is the difference. There are some we would not want to use as an example if you had kids, but there is going to be a lot more people doing more things, and if you look at the overall change in the direction in which it is going, i believe it is unbelievably positive. My biggest gripe is something i know cant be fixed and should not be fixed. We will go right at each other on issues. If somebody is a muslim and somebody else is a christian, they will go right at each other. Hopefully they will listen to each other. You will not do them. Do that. On campuses, i do not think there is enough discussion about gender relationships and gender equity and sexual harassment. I think people avoid having that discussion. I do not think there is enough discussion about race in your generation, but we had all of these discussions in my generation, and the reason i think you do not have those discussions, i think you need to have those discussions, but i think it is secondary to what you really need to do, which is to heal the wounds of my generation. Now, what we did, the civil rights movement, how about that . Every generation has their things they can be really proud of, but we also have things we can do better. I have kids just a little older than you, and i am rooting for them because we are turning it over to you now. We are hoping you will do the things we did not do right, and you will fix them, and then your children will come along, and they are going to fix the things you did not do right. Im not very critical of your generation. I can find some things i wish you did, or do i wish there was not as much of that, and all this kind of stuff, but i think in the broad picture of where you are going, america and the world are at a good time. I will leave you with a quote did one of the kids who tahrir square, and then morsi comes in, and he hijacks the revolution, and then they get as much a hardliner as mubarak except younger and more vigorous, and i said to him, dont you get discouraged about all of this and all that you have put into this, and he said, i do, but they cannot stop us in the long run. First of all, the Second Generation of the Muslim Brotherhood we can speak with. They dress like us, and we can do business with them, which is typical. And then he said this is a worldwide movement. This is not about egypt or the middle east. Our generation is not going to put up with authoritarianism anymore. Our generation does believe in democratic, inclusive values. We are going to work on this together. If that is the credo of this generation, i think that is pretty terrific. We have a lot of work to do, of course. Thank you so much. Im glad were doing ok. Hi, my name is kimberly and i was wondering how you think we could strengthen the economic recovery. Where do we start . I do think well, first of all, i think we are in an economic recovery, so it is not necessarily an issue of Economic Growth and recovery. The problem is the inequality of distribution of the fruits of recovery, so you have to figure out how to do that. There will be some transfer payments. Obamacare is one of those, have universal health care, so there is a safety net, but the problem is, transfer payments alone do not work. This is where republicans are right. You do have to refurbish the economy and make work pay. I believe in increasing the minimum wage. But you also have to increase the ability for people to do entrepreneurship and not worry about business regulation and that, because it is a drag. There is a package if the two sides would sit down and Work Together that you can come up with, which is a little of both sides. It would actually make the most sense. Now, with some of the Bigger Picture stuff, we have to do better on exports. I think we can. Free trade is generally good, unless it in fringes on sovereignty, where, like equal rights, and an strong environmental protection. Trade agreements are not a bad thing. You just have to be very, very careful with how you put them into effect. It contributes to political stability and economic stability. In the countries that partake. At this particular point, i think the deficit is a problem, but i do not think it should be brought down too drastically. The great hero in the room resolution of this was ben bernanke, who took a lot of flack but understood that unlike what the europeans did, which was austerity and meyer in miring themselves in a serious but as we begin to recover, you do have to worry about the rings people objected to in the first place. Their timing was just wrong, not their ideas, and then you have to ease into that slowly because you do not want a tremendous amount of inflation. The bottom line, this is a very long and complicated answer, but the bottom line is there is no perfect solution to this. The solution is not to just have unfettered capitalism, he can then you get 2008 again. The solution is to let capitalism work as long as it is as fair as possible. That is where the political debate is, how do you make capitalism fair . And there has to be some resolution. There is no doubt in my mind that capitalism is the best assistant to have, the problem is when it gets out of control. So you have to figure out how to make that work. But its really complicatedr, stuff. Thank you. I am from the netherlands. I have a question about the debt problem. The past two years i have always heard about america having the biggest debt problem in the world. Homeless does not sound very good for the debt. I always hear that democrats like to spend money, spend money and create problems. Yesterday i heard a gentleman all Grover Norquist uh in my creating problems . Yes. [laughter] he called my country quite socialistic. So, my question to you should knowrquist you know how ignorant americans are about europe. Had a veryands of conservative government for quite some time. He probably should know that. No, he doesnt know much. [laughter] the democrats want to spend too much and republicans want to cut taxes for people who do not need it. You have to look at the budget. You can increase your debt in two ways. Spend money you dont pay for, because you do not raise taxes enough which the democrats have done in the past. The republicans will cut taxes but wont cut programs. It is no different from a Balance Sheet point of view than spending money you dont have. But spending it on different people, at the top of the income bracket. You have to have reasonable policy. Youve got to have a balanced budget. It really does need to be that. It is not true that america has the biggest debt problem in the world. That is false. We are around 65 of our gnp. European countries are in general significantly higher. The ones in real trouble are over 120 . So, we do have a problem. We dont want it to get worse. It will get worse. Some things will go on no matter what. It will take us time to turn the ship around. We have to do it in a longterm way, in a thoughtful way. We will have to rehab things. Medicare has to be changed. Not because it is a bad program. It is probably the best of all the programs we have. But the medical system is out of control. All the Economic Centers want to spend more money instead of less money. We have to deal with that. It is a huge issue. It is going to be a big problem. We do have substantial problems. One of the things barack obama has done well, although it created a stir for other countries because they are not used to it, we try not to lecture other countries as much as we used to. I think grover is a little behind the curve, lecturing you about europe. America has its own problems. Right now we should work with people as partners, which i think obama gets. The relationship between europe and the United States has changed dramatically. I spent a lot of time in europe. They used to claim, obama has forgotten us. He never pays any attention to us. I was tell them, that is a good thing. You are not a junior partner anymore. We dont have to worry about you all the time. You can take care of your own problems, your own matters now. We should be equal partners, not the senior partner telling you what to do all the time. I think the president has changed that relationship. That is a very good thing for the United States and europe, and we are working on that aspect of dealing with other countries. Thank you. Thank you. Some but this is the last one. This is the last one. Hello. I am lake and sanders. Laken sanders. Kind of going off what you said with our generation being the movers and shakers towards change, also having help in america with resolving issues like inequality and gay rights and poverty, do you believe that the more conservative party will in the future, maybe even in the next election, sort of the shifting and refocusing ideas to be more appealing to the younger, liberal generation . Great question. I think they have a problem. They made a deal with a Certain Group of people that is about 35 of their vote. Why dont you just throw them over the side . It is much better for the country to have two strong parties instead of one that is reasonably dominant, which is where we are headed, i think. They say, i would like to do that but you tell me where i will get that 35 of the vote. So it is not so easy to turn on a dime. You can see, look, the smart people in the Republican Party know they have to change. Then you get people like todd akin or Richard Murdoch running for senate, who should have won, and they said outrageous things and the whole country went, is that what the republicans stand for . Of course, the democrats were only too quick to say this is the Republican Party. Intel the republicans are willing to cast them aside, as bill clinton cast aside the left fringe of the Democratic Party, they will have a struggle. They cant just change on a dime because they built a coalition. Throwing off one of the partners in the coalition, essentially. The difference between europe and our systems is we build our coalitions before the elections. They build a matter because they have five or six parties. Maybe we should have five or six parties. It would not be such a bad thing right now. But we dont. For the republicans or the democrats in the 1970s we had , to retool. For that to happen, it is not so easy. The quickest impetus is the leadership finally says, we are tired of losing. Which is why i am really hoping for a Democratic Victory in 2016. We are tired of losing, we will make tough decisions, ritual or retool our message, and do some people not like it that is just too bad. We will make these changes. I think that is going on in the Republican Party right now. The pundits in washington say there is a civil war in the Republican Party. You should never believe anything written in washington. As bill clinton once said, it upsets the staff and nobody pays any attention anyway, which is true. There is this tension in their party, and the leadership, the smart leadership, and there is plenty of smart people who want to do the right thing in the Republican Party, they understand they cannot be sunk by the far right you are so unreasonable and appear to your generation to be so far away from anything you are remotely interested in. That is not a longterm winning strategy. They know it. They are trying to fix it. It has been a long time that they have depended on that wing of the party. It is scaring the daylights out of them. I was on npr with a terrific guy who was a republican, conservative republican from minnesota in the 1990s. A woman from the tea Party Running against a guy in texas in the primary. This guy has a 100 conservative record. 100 , every time the most conservative Rating Organization has said, are you with us . He said yes. She is running against him from the right. Because he is insufficiently conservative. That is the problem republicans have. In a republican primary, she could win. So they have to sort this stuff out. We went through this in the 1970s and 1980s. We sorted it out and we are back in business pretty well. It is a struggle to turn around a big party in a country like the United States where there are huge demographic changes and people being left behind are looking for a way to express their fear and their anger. That is what the Republican Party has to deal with right now. Thank you. Thank you. [applause] mobility and poverty. From the American Enterprise institute, this is 45 minutes. [applause] thank you for hosting this. Thank you for hosting this. Thank you for all of you for being here today. I am honored and privileged to have the opportunity to do this on this important day. My mother was one of seven girls whose parents often went to bed hungry at night so the children would not have to. My father had it even tougher. He lost his mother when he was about nine years old. He had to leave school and go to work at a local restaurant when he was the same age as my oldest son is now. My parents, like most people that have ever lived, were raised in a country where they were trapped by the circumstances of their birth. But just ninety miles away there was a country where, through hard work and perseverance, anyone could get ahead. And so they came here with virtually nothing. The first years in america were difficult. They worked long hours for little pay. But they kept on, and in time, their lives improved. They never became rich. They never became famous, and yet my parents live the american dream. Because like most people, for them happiness wasnt about becoming wealthy. It was about finding work that paid a livable wage. It was about a happy family life, being able to retire with security, being able to give their kids the chance to do anything they wanted. My parents story, of two everyday people who were given the chance to work their way into a better life, is a common story here in america. It is a defining national characteristic rooted in the principle that is at the core of our nations birth that every single human being has a god given right to live freely and pursue happiness. This conviction has proven to be far more than just a line on a founding document. It has become the shared and defining value of us as a nation and a people. It has set america apart and has attracted people here from every corner of the earth. The visionaries, the ambitious, the people who refused to accept the stagnant ways of the old world, they came here. They brought their ideas and they brought their dreams, and finally, free from the restraints of the old world, they helped build the most prosperous nation in Human History. We are still a country where through hard work and perseverance you can earn a better life. The vast majority of americans today live lives much better than their parents. Yet we are rightfully troubled because many of our people are still caught in what seems to be a pervasive, unending financial struggle. It bothers us because as a people we are united by the belief that every american deserves the equal opportunity to achieve success. Fifty years ago today, president Lyndon Johnson sought to address the plight of poverty by waging a war against it. On that day, he stood before a joint session of congress and vowed, it will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. His very next sentence served as a small window into his Big Government vision for this war, and its future failures. He said that the richest nation on earth can afford to win it. And with those words, he foreshadowed the belief still held by liberals to this very day, that Government Spending is the central answer to healing the wounds of poverty. Today, the debate on poverty is primarily focused on the growing income gap between the rich and poor. From 1979 to 2007, income for the highestearning americans grew by more than it did for anyone else. From 1980 to 2005, over 80 of the total increase in income went to the top 1 of americans. These are startling figures and deserve our attention. But if we focus on that alone it does not give us a complete picture, a full view of the problem that is before us. Yes, the cashier at a fastfood chain makes less money than the ceo of the company. But the problem we face is not simply the differences and the gap between pay between them, but rather that too many of those cashiers are stuck in the same job for years on end, unable to find one that pays better. And it is that lack of mobility, not just income inequality, that we should be focused on. For most americans, their primary asset ration is to primary aspiration is to achieve a better life. For some, that means becoming wealthy, and there is nothing wrong with that. But for most, they just want to live a happy and fulfilling life. Like my parents. To earn a livable wage in a good job. To have time to spend with family and do things they enjoy. To be able to retire with security and leave their kids better off than themselves. The good news is that even in the midst of our recent economic struggles, most americans have been able to do that. Posted 50 for example, close to 50 of people in the bottom fifth of the income scale in 1996 had climbed into a higher income bracket less than 10 years later. Many of these americans have children that have gone on to earn even more. 84 of americans have higher family incomes than their parents had when they were the same age. Among all income levels, the current generation is making more and doing better than the ones that came before. The problem is that for some americans, this kind of mobility isnt happening. For example, 70 of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States. America is still the land of opportunity for most, but it is not a land of opportunity for all. If we are to remain an exceptional nation, we must close this gap in opportunity. So why are so many poor americans trapped at the bottom . Why are so many working harder than ever only to find their dreams living further away . Only to find their dreams slipping further away . Why do so many suffer from a growing and nagging sense of insecurity, knowing that they are one bad break away from losing everything they worked so hard for . There are a number of reasons. Our modern day economy has wiped out many of the lowskill jobs that once provided millions with a middle class living. Those that have not been outsourced or replaced by Technology Pay wages that just dont keep pace with the increase in the cost of living. Even some of the middleskilled jobs, white and bluecollar jobs, have also been lost to automation or shipped overseas. In till at least a few decades ago, our economy proved sufficiently dynamic and innovative to replace old jobs with new ones. But that hasnt happened in recent years. Social factors also play a major role in denying equal opportunity. The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of Child Poverty by 82 . But it isnt a government program. Its called marriage. Fifty years ago, today, when the war on poverty was launched, 93 of children born in the United States were born to married parents. By 2010 that number had plummeted to 60 . It should not surprise us that 71 of poor families with children are not headed by a married couple. The decline of marriage and the increase in the percentage of children born out of wedlock is being driven by a complex set of cultural and societal factors, but there is an interesting impediment to marriage worth keeping in mind. A 2011 report by the Pew Research Center found that 64 of adults with College Degrees are married, while only 47 of those with a highschool education or less are. A lack of education is contributing to inequality in other ways as well. The jobs that have replaced the low and middle skill jobs of the past pay more. But they require a high level of professional, technical, or management skills. And we simply have too many people who have never acquired the education needed to attain those skills. Whats worse, children from lower income families are the least likely to get an advanced education. The result is a vicious cycle of intergenerational poverty. These economic, social, cultural and educational causes of opportunity inequality are complex. And they are overlapping. And they are interrelated. And they will not be solved by continuing with the same stale washington ideas. Five decades and trillions of dollars after president johnson first announced the war on poverty, the results of the Big Government approach are in. Here is what they are. We have four million americans who have been out of work for six months or more. We have a staggering 49 million americans living below the poverty line. We have over twice that number, over 100 Million People, who get some sort of food aid from the federal government. Meanwhile, our Labor Participation force is at a 35 year low, and children raised in the bottom 20 of National Income have a 42 chance of being stuck there for life. Our current president and his liberal allies, they propose to address this. Their proposal is lets spend more on failed programs and increase the minimum wage to 10. 10. This is their solution to what the president has called the president has called defining issue of our time . Raising the minimum wage may poll well, but having a job that pays 10 an hour is not the american dream. And our current Government Programs at best offer only a partial solution. They help people deal with poverty, but they do not help people emerge from poverty. The only solution that will achieve meaningful and lasting results is to provide those u. S. With lowpaying jobs with the real opportunity to move up the betterpaying jobs. To do this, we have to focus on policies that help our economy create those jobs, policies that help people overcome the obstacles between them and those jobs. The war on poverty accomplish neither of these two things. But we can achieve these two goals. First because we have the single greatest engine of upward mobility in Human History at our disposal, the American Free enterprise system. Real Free Enterprise isnt wealth accumulating in the hands of a few and leaving everyone else behind to live off the crumbs and leftovers. Real Free Enterprise is not corporatism, where those with the power to influence government win at the expense of everyone else. Real Free Enterprise is about a broad and growing economy that creates opportunities for everyone to get ahead. Real Free Enterprise creates the opportunity to become wealthy. It creates the good and stable middleclass jobs, like the one my parents had. But instead of fostering a vibrant Free Enterprise economy, our federal government is a major impediment to the enterprise and ingenuity of our people. An expensive tax code, burdensome regulations, and an unsustainable National Debt are suffocating our economys ability to create enough steady and goodpaying jobs. That is why poverty and inequality have only gotten worse under the current administration. Instead, we need policies that make our country the easiest and best place in the world to create goodpaying jobs. This means removing the uncertainty created by a dangerous and growing National Debt. This means an simple and affordable tax code reforms that incentivize investment. It means eliminating regulations that prevent employers from expanding and prevent our Energy Sector from growing. But we cant stop there. Allowing Free Enterprise to flourish alone is not enough. We also have to address the complex and interrelated societal, cultural, and educational impediments that are also holding so many people back. A child born into a poor and broken family, living in a dangerous and violent neighborhood and forced to attend a dysfunctional school, that child is in all likelihood going to not have the same opportunities to succeed as a child throwing up in a stable home in a safe neighborhood and attending a good school. An unwed mother with a poor education, abandoned by the father of her children, faces significant challenges to a better life. The poverty found in rural areas has some characteristics that are very different from the poverty you find in urban areas, in inner cities. These are complex problems. Our current collection of overlapping Government Programs ignores and sometimes even exacerbates them. Instead of continuing to pour money into our existing programs, we need to reform them through innovative and highly targeted solutions. Here is the problem. That is not something the federal government is capable of delivering. Washington is too bureaucratic and to resistant to change. Its onesizefitsall approach to policy is not conducive to solving a problem as diverse and complex as this one. Therefore, what im proposing today is the most fundamental change to how the federal government fight already and encourages upward mobility since president johnson first conceived of the war on poverty 50 years ago today. Fights poverty. Im proposing that we turn over washingtons Antipoverty Program and the trillions spent on them to the states. Are Antipoverty Program should be replaced with a revenue neutral flex fund. We would streamline most of our existing federal antipoverty funding into a single agency. Each year, these flex funds would be transferred to the states so that they can design and find creative initiatives that address the factors behind inequality of opportunity. This work in the 1990s with welfare reform. In that case, Congress Gave the states the ability to design their own programs, and interned the states enacted policies that promoted work rather than dependence. In the years that followed, this led to a decline in poverty and welfare expenses. However, despite the success of welfare reform, washington continues to rule over the world of antipoverty policymaking, with beltway bureaucrats picking and choosing rigid nationwide programs and forcing americas elected state legislators to watch from the sidelines. As someone who served nine years in the state house, two of them as speaker, i know how frustrating that is. It is wrong for washington to tell tallahassee what programs are right for the people of florida. But it is particularly wrong for it to say that what is right for tallahassee is the same thing that is right for topeka and sacramento and detroit and manhattan and every other town, city, and state in the country. A nation as large and diverse as the United States, with a problem as large and diverse as this one, should have a menu of statelevel policy options as large and diverse. Already, we see evidence that when states can manage the resources necessary to experiment with such programs, the results are dynamic and transformative. For example, while washington debates how and whether to fund the existing Unemployment Insurance programs, states are finding innovative approaches to get people into goodpaying jobs. In utah, in order to continue receiving an employment benefits, the longterm unemployed were required to take Online Training courses that focus on skills needed for modern professionals, with topics spanning from resumebuilding to Career Direction to interview skills. The state track the progress of participants. Here is what they found. Before the courses of professional preparedness they were at an equivalent of d . On completion, preparedness had climbed to a b . What began as a requirement turned into a soughtafter tool. 36 of participants found the course so helpful that they voluntarily completed more training than what was required. It also helps him find a job faster, by the way. Among the test group, unemployment duration was reduced by 7 . The program has been taken statewide in utah, and a 7 reduction in the duration of benefits is expected to save 60 million annually, not to mention the boost to the state economy and culture from a more engaged labor force. A Similar Program was attempted in mississippi. In that case, participants increased preparedness by a staggering 31 . Another in kentucky found that workers spent 2. 2 weeks less on Unemployment Insurance benefits when required to take training courses. These are the kinds of innovations we are looking to unleash. Not just with Unemployment Insurance, but throughout the entire web of government assistance programs. Right now, these kinds of innovations are difficult, if not impossible to pursue, because washington controls the money. But i know from my time in the Florida Legislature that if states were given the flexibility, they would design and pursue innovative and effective ways to help those trapped in poverty. As weve seen, they could put in place programs that give those currently stuck in lowwage jobs access to a job training system. They could put in place relocation vouchers that will help the longterm unemployed move to areas with more jobs. They could remove the marriage penalties in safety net programs like medicaid. They could enact a nearly infinite number of other nimble and targeted reforms to address the needs of their people. Allowing the states greater control doesnt mean washington gets to wash its hands of the problem. There will still be a roleplay for the federal government. For example, we should pursue reforms that encourage and reward work. That is why i am developing legislation to replace the earned income tax credit with a federal wage enhancement for qualifying lowwage jobs