farmers from te bit, and i found a group of boys from china who all aspired to be hair designers which i don't know, i don't know what a hair designer is exactly, but if you asked them what they wanted to be, they said hair designer. and it was like five boys, and every day they came in with edward scissorhands-style haircuts. there was a group in the cafeteria called the arabic family, boys mostly are from yaleen. so there were all these -- yemen. so there were all these different groups, and rap groups from the dominican republic and haiti. but no hierarchy, the kids were equal. >> host: were there are issues among the different religious groups? >> guest: um -- >> host: you mentioned the arabic family. >> guest: the arabic family, yeah. there were, you know, sometimes you would hear discussions about palestine and israel. i don't really get into any of that in the book. you would hear, um, you know, certainly the kids from china and can the kids from tibet who are buddhist. there weren't a lot of religious tensions at the school, no. but there were a lot of kids who were muslim and who were struggling to deal with how to, um, manage their and how to balance their muslim cultures and traditions with, you know, life in america where, you know, like, for instance, going to prom some of the girls couldn't get their fathers to let them go to prom. so there were more issues like that, not tensions between religions so much as, you know, tensions between the old worlds and new. >> host: time for one more call for brooke hauser. her book is "the new kids." larry in atlanta, you're the last word. >> caller: just wanted to know from brooke, good book i read, whether all of the people were bilingual, and do they have the same requirements, you know -- [inaudible] >> guest: are the teachers bilingual? >> host: we got that part, larry, we got the bilingual part. what was the second half of your question? the a little hard to hear. >> caller: are the teachers, basically the same requirements that teach in a traditional city school in the new york city area? >> host: thanks, larry. >> guest: yes. the teachers have standard backgrounds, similar as you would find at schools in new york city and around the country. no, it's not a requirement to be bilingual, but many of the teachers are bilingual and trilingual and i'm not going to go there. [laughter] they speak, you know, some of them several different languages. and, of course, that helps tremendously. especially if you have a student who is one of the only students in school to speak his or her own language. >> host: this is the book. it's called "the new kids: big dreams and brave journeys at a high school for immigrants, teens." the author is brooke hauser, and it's brookehauser.com in case you would like to go to her web site and see some reviews of the book. published by free press. thank you, brooke hauser, we appreciate it. >> guest: thank you so much. >> host: well, coming up in just a minute, we're going to show you an event, we have one more call-in coming up, and that's with jim lair. it's about his hosting a presidential debate, so you'll have a chance to chat with him. not only are we broadcasting live from miami on booktv on c-span2, but we are also broadcasting on booktv.org. separate events. these are author events up in chapman hall. right now nell irvin painter and randall kennedy are talking about their respect i have bodies of work. their most recent books, painter, the history of white people, and randall kennedy, the persistence of the color line. they're up in chapman hall. you can watch all of that online. and, in fact, we've got a tweet here in voting poet saying i simply can't find this broadcast on the web site. what is it listed under? well, voting poet, if you go to booktv.org, right in the center of the home page it says featured video, and right under that featured video it will say miami. and there'll be a big watch button. click on that watch button, and your video will come right up, and you'll be able to watch it online there. um, so that's online. we're also broadcasting live here on c-span2 on booktv. we have a couple more hours of coverage from the 2011 miami book fair. well, coming up next bill clinton spoke in new york recently about two weeks ago at the new york historical society. he was in conversation with his daughter, chelsea clinton, about his most recent book, "back to work." want to show that to you now. [background sounds] >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen. my name is sonny, and on behalf of all my colleagues at the doubleday publishing group, i'd like to welcome you to the new york historical society for what proms to be -- promises to be a memorable evening of conversation. tonight's conversation will reach across the generations. we use that term when the old are interviewed by the young. and we'll focus on something of interest to everyone in this room, our collective future. the american dream is a powerful concept. of late the talk has been of us being derailed. people are worried about their jobs, they're worried about the economy, they're worried that we've lost our competitive edge. and they're concerned that america -- they're concerned that the american safety nets are fraying and not be there for them when they retire. my good friend, president clinton, has written a new book that addresses these concerns. in "back to work," the president writes, and i quote: i came of age believing that no matter what happened i would always be able to support myself. it became a crucial part of my identity. it drove me to spend a good portion of my adult life trying to give others the same chance. president clinton goes on to say it's heartbreaking to see so many people trapped in a web of idleness, debt and doubt. we have to change that. we've got to get america back in the future business. president clinton, wisest of statesmen and dedicated public servant, will be joined on teenage is tonight by one -- stage tonight by one of our brightest young citizens, also a champion of public service, chelsea clinton. chelsea clinton is a graduate of stanford, has earned a master's from columbia and is currently pursuing a doctorate at oxford. her recent professional and academic work has focused on improving access to health care for citizens around the world, on equal rights and on education for children. ladies and gentlemen, please, join me in welcoming president clinton and chelsea clinton. [applause] [applause] >> thank you. before we begin, i should acknowledge the fact that i am certainly not an unbiased interviewer. [laughter] i am unapologetically and profoundly biased towards my father. we don't always agree, but i certainly always learn from him whether in conversation or in the pleasure of reading many drafts of his book and then finally getting a hard copy myself. um, last week. so i think it would be a good place to start a bit where sonny left off. saying that you wrote this book largely because you worried that for many of us the american dream had become opaque, and for others it had been lost. and so i think it would be helpful to hear why at this point in time you you were compd to write this book. it is brief, it is distilled, but it is action-oriented. >> well, i first was inclined to do it after the 2010 elections because i went out and did, i don't know, more than 130 events. and i wasn't particularly surprised ant the outcome -- about the outcome for the reasons i state in the book. people tend to hire democrats when things are messed up. if you think about it, in the last three years. so they hire us to fix things, and they didn't feel fixed on election day. they also, the american people are always somehow deeply ambivalent about the role of government. and they have been from the beginning. keep in mind, we were born in reaction to unaccountable government power. i just had my picture taken with the stamp act. [laughter] imposed by the british government under king george, and it's the first time i think the stamp act's ever left the parliamentary archives in london. it's here for an exhibit that will be at the new york historical society through april. so we always wanted -- we didn't want too much government, but we want enough. and what's enough and not too much is the source of constant debate. and so all this stuff happened, we lost. so what bothered me was that the election was almost completely fact-free. and i think that's not good for us. and then i started thinking about the last 30 years in american politics, how the sort of anti-government paradigm had led us into one blind alley after another arguing only about whether we should always be against more taxes and always be against more regulations and government would always mess up a two-car parade instead of going to the end and working backwards. how do we build a country that is a country that promotes shared prosperity and new jobs and new opportunities and broad-based educational opportunities for people in the 21st century. and then working back from that, how do you get that? if you look around the world at the most successful countries, they have both a strong economy and a smart and effective government, and they work together. so that's what propelled me the write this. and i'd been saving all these articles that i had gotten out of the newspapers, blog sites, magazines for, since 2007, since the recession started. about the economy and about other things. and all the books i'd read. and i finally decided i should just try to distill it and say here's a political and economic history of america for the last 30 years, and here's what i think we should do now to put our country back in the future business. that's how i did it and what i was thinking about when i did it. i thought it would be a good thing if every american who cared could have a slim volume with enough facts in it that would prove the case about how we got where we are, and then i could make the argument about what i thought we should do going forward. >> one of the things that you clearly articulate in the book is what in your estimation is just the right amount of government. and what the role of government should be. um, one thing you don't articulate in the book is what should the role of the private sector be and what do you think is just the right amount of engagement and action particularly at moments like these by the private sector. and certainly for my edification, i'd like to hear you answer the former and the latter together so that there's sort of a clear and cohereto vision of -- cohereto of, you know, what should be rendered unto government and unto the private sector. >> well, i think in general the private sector should do the work of the country. that, basically, the private sector is better at competition, building businesses at work, hiring people, creating jobs. the government should set the rules, the boundaries, how do you get what kind of -- how do we have clean air, how do we have safe, clean water, how do we have safe food, how do we produce energy in a way that maximizes the positive impact and preserves the environment. and should do it in a way that leaves the largest number of how questions to the private sector that's possible and still get the good results. when i was president, we had 43 million more americans breathing clean air. and we had to pass the chemical rights law which favors transparency, but we tried to set up a system where the private sector was incentivized to meet these objectives at the lowest possible cost in the shortest amount of time. so, but it changes over time. you can -- we privatize some of our management of nuclear stockpiles. nonbomb-making material. over time there will be more and more functions that government used to do that might be profitably done by the private sector just as the government should do things that help us to get into new areas of economic opportunity or deal with new problems that are broadly shared that the market won't solve. but i'll just give you one example of something that was done in 1980 that is probably more relevant today than it has been in decades. in 1980 with a bipartisan majority, the congress passed a law that president carter signed which provided for federally-funded research to universities that result in commercially-valuable findings to be licensed to the private sector. on terms determined by the university. because it was recognized that the private sector would be able to make the most of the commercial development and that most colleges couldn't run their own businesses. shouldn't be starting businesses and doing it. that tech transfer system has worked pretty well for 30 years, and one of the things that i argue in my book is that all the colleges in the country that are doing this -- and i have a young cousin who does this work at texas a&m university, and i love talking to him -- >> who does get a shout out in the book. >> what? >> who does get a shout out in the book. >> yeah, yeah. what the heck, i've got to take care of my family, right? [laughter] but the best tech transfer program is probably mit's because they never take any money. they only take stock in the new company. they will give a professor a year off to work in the company, but the professor must promise after a year to bring in a professional business person to run the company. and they've got a lot of other things. but anyway, it works really well. and there's some other models, but in general i think this question chelsea asked me is something we ought to be always constantly asking ourself, should this be privatized, and should it not? if you have a doctrine position each way, you might wind up with a bad decision. i'll give you another example. the united states is virtually the only big country that does almost all of its large infrastructure with 100% public funding. other countries don't do that. so the president actually has asked the congress to adopt the infrastructure bank proposal that has bipartisan support in the senate to have the government seat an infrastructure bank with a relatively modest amount of money, let's say $10, $15 million, and i suggest in the book ways to get it. and then allow the bank to sell bonds to allow american citizens to invest in many it and also to take money from overseas interests and from pension funds, but also from sovereign wealth funds from governments all over the world because these infrastructure projects yield a very high rate of rump. return. and i think we shouldn't be the only country in the world that's afraid to take private sector money to build our infrastructure. and i don't mean just roads and bridges, i'm talking about, you know a decent electrical grid, faster broadband connections all over the country. it should bother you that south korea's broadband download speeds are four times faster than ours. and so having good government policy doesn't preclude some things being done by and with the private sector. >> well, one government policy that you discuss in a few different places in your book and that i know you're personally advocating, um, for is the extension of the 1603 green tax credit. um, which is particularly germane to the title of the book, "back to work," because as you articulate in your book, roughly a billion dollars that's invest inside a new coal-firepower plant yields about 187 jobs, and a billion dollars invested in building retrofits yields between somewhere in the order of seven to eight thousand new jobs. so maybe you could talk a little bit about the green tax credit and why it is set to sunset in 2011 and sort of hearkening back to the first part of your book, a political history, and how those of us in this room could try to help change that dynamic for 2012. >> when the president and the congress were debating after the 2010 elections whether the bush tax cuts would be extended because of the recession and whether it'd be a bad idea to raise anybody's taxes in this down economy, one of the things the republicans said is tax cuts are all the wonderful in a -- always wonderful in a down economy, but spending cuts don't hurt at all which is self-evidently crazy. i mean, there's really no difference from a macroeconomic point of view as our friends in the u.k. are finding now. when they went for an austerity response for the current circumstance. one of the things they wanted to get rid of was the 1603 tax credit, and they said it was a spending program. this is the kind of argument that ought to be held in a seminary over some obscure provision of scripture. [laughter] in my opinion. but you be the, you be the judge. the republicans say we ought to get rid of 1603, it's a spending program, it's not a tax cut. and it is, but it isn't. when the congress did things like loan guarantees for new energy companies, like the infamous solyndra loan guarantee was actually adopted during the bush administration, signed by president bush and supported at the time by almost all the republicans on the energy committee. it's hard sometimes to mix winners and losers. 1603 recognizes that a lot of people building solar and wind installations are start-up companies, so if you give them a 30% tax credit that you would ordinarily give someone for building this new factory, it'll be worthless because they have no income to claim the credit against. so what 1603 does is, basically, give them the cash equivalent of the tax credit if they're start-ups. a very significant number of the new solar and wind projects have used 1603. so my argument is it ought to be extended because we've got thousands more facilities in solar and wind powerture becoming more -- which are becoming more economical. the price drops about 30% every time you double capacity, and solar in particular has had significant technological advances in the last three years. it's, ironically, one of the reasons solyndra went down because the technology, other technologies got cheaper faster than anybody figured. and took them out of a competitive mix. so i like this 1603, and i think it should be continued because i think we should be supporting start-ups as well as existing companies. and a very significant percentage of america's new jobs over the last 20 years have come not just from small businesses, but from small businesses that were five years old or younger. so this is the kind of thing that i think, you know, my argument is we should say where do we want to go with this country? we wallet to build shared prosperity and modern jobs, and then back up and say how do we get there? what's the government supposed to do, what's the private sector supposed to do? i think if you do that instead of saying government/no government, you come out and say this 1603's a heck of a good deal, and we ought to keep doing it. >> since you mentioned the end of 2010, i wanted to give you an opportunity to sort of repeat something that you said to me earlier which is that the one part of your book where you feel like you gave the president a bum rap was around the debt ceiling debate. >> yeah. >> so, that's been in the coverage a lot, i thought you could address it correctly. >> i was really upset, and i didn't know whether it was the white house or the congress that resisted raising the debt ceiling in 2010 after we lost the election. >> when we still had the majority. >> when we still had the majority because i knew the congress was meeting in november and december of 2010. and i knew if we waited until january, the republicans would drive a very hard bargain. and so i said in a very kind of muted way that for reasons that were still unclear to me this didn't happen. and gene sperling actually sent me an e-mail and said -- who worked for me and is a scrupulously honest person -- said, oh, we tried. you know, we didn't make a big deal out of it because there was such -- the main subject was were the bush era tax cuts going to be extended. but this shows you, i'm trying to force myself to say once a day either i don't know or i was wrong. [laughter] because i think it would be therapeutic if everybody in washington did that. [laughter] and so i want to be as good as them. so he's something i was wrong about -- here's something i was wrong about. since raising the debt ceiling simply ratified the decision congress has already made to spend money and since the budget is the only thing that the senate votes on that is not subject to a filibuster, i thought that the debt ceiling vote was not subject to a filibuster. and i was wrong. so gene sperling sent me a message and said senator mcconnell said he was going to filibuster it unless we agreed right then to all their budgets that they'd run on. so turns out he couldn't raise the debt ceiling, and i was wrong. see, it didn't hurt too bad. [laughter] and that's one way we get less ideological politics, if people find errors they make and fess up. >> moving a bit out of washington, um, one of the things that you do frequently in the book is to cite examples of kind of where you think this sort of appropriate partnership and shared responsibility between government and the private sector is working at the state level. maybe you could talk a bit about your theory of that and also share some of the examples particularly from your time as governor of arkansas, sort of what worked then and then also what has continued to work and not worked subsequently in arkansas. >> well, first, i think we americans are used to people at the state and local level hustling business, trying to save businesses, trying to expand businesses, trying to locate businesses there. and it is largely a bipartisan activity undertaken, perhaps, with varying levels of exuberance by elected officials. but one reason i was able to stay governor for a dozen years and never got bore with the the job and loved it is the whole economic development aspect of it. and the interesting thing is that in most every state in the country, although it's gotten more partisan now since 2010, but i think that'll settle down, it's largely a bipartisan activity. and so i tried to cite some areas in the book. for example, to give you just one practical example, there's a long section in the book about what i would like to see done to clear the mortgage debt more quickly. and i guess i should back up and say these kinds of financial crashes take historically five to ten years to get over. and if you have a mortgage component to it, it tends to push it out toward ten years. we should be trying to beat that clock. we can't do it, in my opinion, even if we adopt -- i'm for the president's jobs plan. i think there are a lot of good ideas in there. but, and they'll give us one and a half, two million jobs according to the economic analyses. but if you want to return to a full employment economy, if you want to start having 240,000 jobs a month, i think we averaged 227,000 a month for eight years. if you want that, you've got to flush this debt and get bank lending going again. and so kenneth ro rogoff at harvard recommends that since some people say, well, but if we lower the mortgage rates, if we bring the mortgage down to the value of the house, then the people who hold the mortgages will lose money. who's going to compensate 'em? and what's it going to be? rogoff has suggested that the banks are the people who ultimately hold the mortgages. instead of writing them down, just cut them in half by taking an ownership position in the house so that when the house is ultimately sold, the people who issued the mortgage will, or own the mortgage will share in the profit, and you get the same practical result. you no longer have a bad debt on the books, and the homeowner's got a mortgage that he or she can pay. and i said in the book, i know this'll work because in, when i was governor in the late '70s and early '80s and our farmers got in trouble, we had then hundreds of small state-chartered banks who did not want to foreclose on the farmers. they knew that they were just having a couple of bad years, and they couldn't pay their farm loans off, and they didn't want to take possession of these farms. so we allowed the banks, we changed the law, allowed the banks to take an ownership position in the farms and then gave the farmer an absolute buyback right to the take his farm back at full title once they could pay off the farm loan. .. >> and i went to the signing with president reagan on the white house lawn with a republican and democratic counterpart we worked with the committees, the democratic chairmen and the republican minority leader and never once the gulf politics. we always talked about how this would work or how would affect working people and what do we do. then with the first president bush in office come i represented the democrats and rewrote the national education goals. i was in the "state of the union" with my republican counterpart we stayed up all night at the university of virginia we only talked about what we wanted. the need that again. every time an election rolls around we stove disagree to have one heck of an election but when it was not going on we thought we would go to work for you not for them. right? i could give you other examples of things of economic strategies to be developed a andrew cuomo did a great thing organized york into 10 regions and the legislature set aside money and they are competing with this to get the cash $200 million they have not decided how to divide it but they have to come up with the regional development plan new york is a very diverse state. my went the other day up to all the need to meet with the thousands of people that represent these regions and i am telling you know, even those that don't get the money are way ahead because they're actually talking about what they want to do and how they will do it instead of having idle political debate that is what i think chesley is referring to. we ought to give the tiniest the market? even though we have greater capacity and domestic demand am much better venture-capital than they do? and the price drops precipitously? and if you know, what should we do about it? the government and the private sector the same thing with the wind in governor cuomo just signed a great bill kidney york called on bill accounting. the bottom line, if you retrofit your home or your office building, you can get it financed in that way then pay off all the from your utility savings because they add it to your utility bill. it is the just say yes system creating 10 or 12,000 jobs in new york to put billions of dollars into this economy within a matter of months as soon as it is fully implemented. those of the kinds of things we ought to do more of. >> host: having conversations like these and writing books and advocating is this a niche that civil society should fill to discuss the role of the public sector and in many ways you has a unique ability but i think a lot of us can make the sorts of contributions. >> yes. bubble like to explain. the non-governmental organization has largely done two things in the modern era. one is going on with back to before we became a country. the first ngo in the united states is the volunteer fire department benjamin franklin organized and philadelphia before the constitution was ratified. and he was doing old fashioned ngo work 18th-century style. there will always be a gap between the private sector will produce and the government can provide we did not have enough government to afford a fire department and not enough buyers to make it profitable. on the other hand, if it was your building you thought there we're eat enough buyers. so we organize the volunteer fire department. one of the morning television shows i did today, the "today show" after i left, they have what is fast becoming the biggest family in america, did you see it? this family with 18 children , 19 about to be 20. he is a conservative republican in the arkansas legislature my last year of president. i met him 11 years ago but we were talking to his kids because they are proud of the fact that he is a volunteer fire man were i established a fire department has governor because we set up 700 departments the point* is that is the ngo. that is the gap because what the private sector can produce and what it can provide. the new and additional improve role is to basically hopefully work with public and private institutions to figure how to do things cheaper faster better because you to have to turn a profit every quarter and unlike the government be embarrassed that you fail. you can say i tried to do this and it did not work. we will try again. that is what you do in school. you try to figure out how to take statistically disadvantaged kids to prove they are just as smart as everybody else and having the chess tournament will increase their learning level. i think with what we did with ctia america we tried to bring people together about what we could do to create jobs. there are other examples where private foundations create employment directly in partnership with public and private groups and in san diego now is the center of activity the largest number of nobel prize-winning scientist from any country university of california san diego, all of these other things but they have other foundations investing and they all work together on a common plan. that works in the modern world. cooperation works in real life conflicts works in politics and news conferences. it does. i am as guilty as the next person i have three cheap thrills for every one serious. >> adam of that is breeding conflict exactly. [laughter] that you get the idea we need the ngos. the robin hood foundation funds both kinds the harlem children zone does that kind of work so there is difference is there is an important tool for the ngo because they take a lot of heat off of businesses to have to turn a profit and take the heat off of government who want to try certain things but maybe scared of getting too much heat if it fails. >> meeting the laboratories of the democracy. >> but the cities are to. that is really difference between now from when the framers wrote the constitution the cities are just as much as a laboratory. look at what might bloomberg did to put up $100,000,000.2 build local million perversity lab center to generate high tech jobs. i don't know who will get the contract tracked i think the consortium should get it. >> as a stanford alumni. >> that is in competition for the money. but the point* is it is one heck of a bandit idea. the way the world should work. i think it is wonderful los angeles has a vast new consortium that includes greater energy efficiency am putting up more solar power and how they finance it will be the biggest commercial retrofit project the country has yet undertaken. they have figured out to do a. full disclosure based on the climate change initiative worked with them but we just provided technical help and support. they figure out how to finance it. the cities can do a lot of these things but the congress should not make decisions and makes them more difficult. they should be in powering and rewarding and incentivizing. >> host: it is election day to day not in new york city but in many cities across the country and mayors are being elected a reelected. but yet i don't think questions like this happen very central to the coverage in advance of even those local elections for broke although it is credible you have been a governor that people expect the governors and mayors that seems to not be central to the discourse around even local elections. how do we make that more fundamental? i know you are racing around the country trying to do that but you're not paid salable resellers although almost inexhaustible one. [laughter] how we think about that dynamic? >> i already said i was wrong but now i don't know. when i was a governor, i really work hard and the national governors association and the educational association and there were a lot of things that i did when i was governor that arkansas was the first eight like councilors four kids in elementary schools. i was proud of that but i was more proud when we were the second state to do something. because it showed we were not too proud to learn from the edge of learning and one of the real problems education and health care, is a lot of the challenges america faces for example, to provide health care at lower costs and higher quality so we can afford to be competitive in other areas those challenges have already been met by somebody but the challenge is not travel almost every challenge has been met by somebody with the idea doesn't travel. part of that is competition in the public sector with a monopoly on revenues and customers and in the private sector where the status quo has more power and resources in lobbyist and the future but one of the big challenges i tried to talk about with the admittedly not having the answer is idea make the ideas travel? what city in america has the highest energy efficiency standards for new buildings? answer, the oil capital of houston texas. why? because the then mayor bill white was a deputy secretary of energy when i was president, had been my friend for a long time and i knew he knew what about oil and gas but also wanted to build a modern energy economy he is elected mayor the first thing he did was retrofit every home of the 20% who were homeowners below and come then he had the highest new building standards in terms of energy efficiency in any city in north america except vancouver canada and reelected over 80% yet the idea has not travelled so well although they do travel better than you would think but we need to think about that in the united states because this can bubble up but if you look at this book that i wrote about the next american economy talking about the prosperity centers be need to figure out to have more of that and how people learn from each other on the basis of that. >> want to ask you about something not in your book but what came out yesterday the census bureau announced a new draft methodology how we calculate and assess poverty in the united states. the early eat hypophysis that we have 49 million americans living in poverty the highest number ever. and more elderly americans living in poverty than previously assessed because of higher out of pocket health care expenses because although the vast majority are covered under medicare, it only covers 80% of in hospital expenses. follows somewhat challenging given the numbers, children living in poverty it is lower than had been previously determined largely because of the supplemental nutrition programs, chiefly free school lunches and breakfasts but as you think about that emerging data, how does that impact both you diagnose as a challenge in the book chiefly around social security and sustainability and also your recommended prescriptions? >> first, the childhood poverty numbers are still appalling but they are smaller. the children health insurance program started when i was president and expanded beginning 2007. we had 5 million kids think now 10 million can get health insurance under it and they will be maintained and that number will be expanded with the health care reform bill implemented. that was nutritional supplements like the school lunch program does or the percentage of people who are in poverty and in fact,, what happened to the seniors even though social security checks go up more than the real cost of living goes up exclusive of health care it has gone up so much that it is affecting older people who are on medicare but as chelsea pointed out, a 20% of the hospital stay is not covered. if you are very poor and old you get medicaid as well. what has happened especially since the states are busted and lobbying against raising the eligibility locals for medicaid, this money 1/2 to pay is going up in a number of older people who qualify for both medicare and medicaid is not going up to make the difference. >> the states are not commensurate with the changing their medicaid parameter. >> and because of the budgets. and for example, 2007, gdp going down 7.5%. most people worried about going broke and 5 million americans lost their health insurance so ironically the private sector drove 3.5 million to the public sector bashing the public-sector the states did not have the money to pay in the federal government deficit was increased. what do i draw from that? the conclusion that one of the best things about the simpson bowles commission is that it recommends natalee savings in the social security program but which is what france and switzerland approximately spend that would save us $187 billion per year. how do we do that? >> it would save the federal budget. it would save you 850 million. that is what the charitable trust was an analysis of the health outcome and wealthy countries and they generally conclude that america ranks about 30th that is not fair. but oil is choose germany and france are normally ranked at the top and it is true they get better health outcomes for spending less money. and it is also true if you gave us more credit for having the longest breast cancer survivor rates in the world and a heart surgery if not some deals to be giving this talk tonight, you still have to face the fact you get what you pay for the way by finance health care in teachers service is. chelsea's to work. >> i did not get the stanford credit mackenzie issued a three volume study trying to analyze the differences between what we spend for a health care and other rich countries would spend and they essentially concluded the biggest deal was instead of paying the overall enrollment which dartmouth and others have said that leaves to about 40% of the american people getting health care that is likely to be more expensive second the way we finance with private insurance companies which add massive amounts to the administrative cost not just the insurer but the company but also the am sure it. if you have insurance on the job than it is more paperwork for the medical providers, the employers in the insurance companies themselves. about a $200 billion item we would not pay if we had administrative cost of any other country and repay more for medicine than anybody else but if we we bought in bulk we could do that. 75 or 80% of the difference. the biggest chunk left is about $150 billion because we have higher rates of diabetes and any other country in the world with the intended consequences which is why childhood obesity is a number one health problem and 1,000 other little things that make up the 5%. >> host: we're almost out of time. if you want people to leave with one glaring call to action or one fact to help lead to more fact based debates as we move from this election day to the next one in november, what would it be? >> if i can only say one thing everybody should be involved where they live to tried to support state and local initiatives that do bring government and the private sector and ngos together to do what we did that cd-i america together. start with where you are. this is still the biggest economy on earth. as much as i worry about their retirement and the baby boomers come i am the oldest one, you should feel good about this. 10 years ago i was about to leave the presidency little rock arkansas had a terrible tornado ripping up the worst part of the city a little african at the munich and community was level after i had done work there 20 years. i ate barbecue back when i could do that. [laughter] besides me only two others had finished college or made more than $50,000 per year but the number one goal was not retirement but it not imperil there children's ability to raise their grandchildren if you give up on america, remember that. it is still a good country. people make rational decisions based on what they know. in spite of all of that, our average work force ages still younger than europe and japan. the other longstanding wealthy places. canada may be a little younger but not much. and is easier to start a small business here we still have all of these laboratories for support that other countries don't have and a lot of indigenous streaks and a better sophisticated venture-capital networks and we know what we need to do. there is plenty of money out there if we can figure how to unleash the money of corporate treasury. i am not pessimistic but we do this kabuki dance in washington over the same thing we have been debating since we were told in 1981 that government is the problem. it may be the not the only problem and it has to be part of the solution. my view to do one thing, start and come up doing something to support your state and use that as evidence to break a logjam in washington. because there is not one of the most important points is i go through all the other countries that are ahead of us with faster download speeds in more modern infrastructure less income inequality and faster job growth and lower unemployment, not a single example of planet earth of a successful country that got there on the anti-government strategy which is the most important thing you can do never and never attack somebody again. not one. but of all the countries we rank 31st in the percentage of national income going to taxes. mexico and she lay are lower than we are. we are ranked 25th going to spending because all the money we have to come up with with the consequences of the financial collapse.