Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Steve Forbes 20160611

That resulted in 122,000 american casualties, how political and Business Leaders are using Digital Networks and the executive director of the author on how they represent authors. Thats just a few of the authors on book tv this weekend for a tweet television schedule, booktv. Org, book tv, 24 hours of nonfiction authors, television for serious readers. Steve forbes appeared last week indepth program, the editor in chief has rung twice for president as the United States and his most recent book, reviving america. Host steve forbes, are the issues you talk about and write about, are they being discussed, you think in this election . Guest actually not the way they should be. In many ways this is the most contentfree campaign weve had in decades. Take the republican side, most of the caund candidates have nice position papers but how many led like i did with flat tax. Whatever you think of donald trump, he led with a diagnosis, prescription and diagnosis, he put it out there and what is amazing his 16 opponents didnt realize what he was showing them. If you lead with an issue, lead like you have conviction, you can get peoples attention. Its amazing and thats why sometimes i shouldnt say this specially on the air, i fantasize that maybe get joe stalin for five minutes and shoot Political Consultants because they really dont understand how you get a message across in the way that the American People can grasp anday say, yes, this is the way we should go. Host but youve been talking about the flat tax for a long time, in fact, your second book was flat tax resolution and second book reviving america,oo replacing the tax code. What exactly is a flat tax . Guest what it would do get rid of the current code, a couple of years ago the Tax Writing Committee in congress before retired put together after several years of real effort a bill to try to rationalize the current code, the bill came 997 pages which tells you all you need to know. Bury the tax code but the epa may not allow it, its toxic, throw away the code, put in a single rate, we recommend in the books 7 , generous exemption for adults and children so nobody gets a tax increase in this thing. So, for example, a family of four, your first 52,800 of salary is free from federal income tax, no tax on your savings, no death taxes, aye always believe that you should leave the world unmolested by the irs. Not the rate down to 17 , have immediate expensing of capital expenditures, so say on the personal side above that 52,000u you only pay 17 cents on the dollar, we could literally do your tax return on a single shiet of airplane or a few key strokes on the computer. By the way, 40 countries jurisdictions around the world, i say jurisdictions because places like hong kong, theyre not a country but selfadministrationing have variations of the flat tax. This works in the real world. Host how has it worked for the other countries . Guest it has worked very well. What it does it not only creates more growth because you can spend your time working on the thing, doing real things insteag of coping with the tax code but also much easier to administer and collect, so the tax evasiont becomes that much more difficule. Host one of the complaints that we have about our system that not everybody pays taxes . Do you believe that everybody should pay taxes . Guest well, i take a little difference with some of my colleagues on that one. Everyone who works pay taxes, you pay taxes on sz for sz and medicare, the socalled fica taxes, the government pretends thats not a tax but a contribution for the future retirement for pensions of healthcare but in the real world its a tax and its from your first dollar of income, so you take a typical american, he or she is working, yes, they are paying income taxes to the feds and on the state levels many have income tax with low levels of thresholds so they are paying on that level as well. So no no one is get get away from paying taxes unless theyra not part of the economy. Host are you a one percenter . We can discus in the subject of money is when you have unStable Currency, you do get more sharper social divisions because of the economic stagnation, you have the 1 versus the 99 . All of these divisions. People start to turn on each other. So, yes, in america at least until recently before we had the stagnation is what was remarkable is how fluid our situations were in economic life, our 400 richest list, youre off of it the next. My father liked to say n this economy if you think youve arrived. Be ready to be shown the door. Nothing stays. Am host repealing obamacare replacing the tax code and reforming the fed will restore hope and prosperity. In it you write that our Healthcare System is like a patient who has been misdiagnosed and treated time and again with the wrongngand medicine, he just keeps getting sicker, six decades of growingde government involvement has distorted the Healthcare System . It has, indeed. We point out in the book, nobody is on the system we have today. S by the way, i dont think what political persuasion you are, no one is happy with the system we have today. Ha all right now medical costs are starting to really go up again, you go to a hospital, most people, you know, bad enough to go to the hospital, but the experience leaves them really shaken. You wondered does the specialists talk to each other, do the socalled hospitals talk to each other . Ation yet somehow she ends up being administered the medication, its an unnerving experience and so the system grew out of world war ii that wage and price controls with millions of people gone in the armed services, you have labor shortages here at home, you werent allowed to pay people more cash so companiesed started to pay in kind, benefits, Healthcare Benefits and the government during the war allowed it and then after is the war in 1950s this could be Tax Deduction for businesses and not count as income to employees. So nobody design it had system. It drew higglypigly. The Real Companies are Health Insurance companies. They get the revenue by how well they negotiate with Insurance Companies, and the government not how they satisfy patients. He we cite in the book, it sounds prif louse but very telling where a the patient really lies in this food chain that thel crumbiest motel in the world wouldnt dare put you in a room with another guest with a curtain in between, a sickck guest, no one does that. The crumbiest motel wouldnt give you a robe by sl Salvation Army that goes in thel dumpster. Turn what looks like a hopeless liability in terms of financial liability, costs keep going up and up into the most Dynamic Growth industry ever. Host does the Forbes Company offer Health Insurance to its employees . Guest slut sli. Host that a good system . Guest it grew. It was equivalent of Health Savings account, we give our people or media 2,500 cash during the course of the year, you are in charge of it if you are blessed with good health yo choose not the spend the money, you get the keep, if you find that a generic prescription is better than the prescription,pt that savings is yours. Not mine, not the Insurance Company and not the government. Its in their benefit to do so. Our cost over time when you compare apples to apples we havent had quite the problems that other companies had but we are a small outfit compared to the rest of the economy. Thats what you need more and more where patients are in control of the resources, so if you move to another company, that policy should go with you, what they call portability so youre not chain to a company, i want to leave but i cant because im going to lose the benefits and what i i do i do. We want to have liberation. Again, patient control. Free market. Itll do so in health care and get more safety nets from thee crazy system we have today. We do it in food. You know, government run agriculture, we would have no more obesity because we would all be starving. Companys process the food. Sell food everywhere, supermarkets, grocery stores, hotels or whatever and you have problems, you have food banks and food stamps to deal with it. Why cant we do the same thing with health care . Real enterprise, real patient control and more effective safety nets whether highrisk pools or you will be covered in the catastrophe hits you. Host back to reviving america and taxes, the last thing we need another halfbaked solution and not simply enough to tax cat rates, think about what happened in 1986 after the code was somewhat simplified, numerous tax shelters were eliminated and the number of brackets were reduced to 2. But no sooner was the ink dried on that legislation than washington politicians picked up their old habits, there had been more than 15,000 changes to the code as congress at the behest of the swarm of lobbyist snuck in clauses and amendments to favor individuals, companies, industries, nonprofits, causes. Guest yeah, hopefully next year we will get serious tax reform. Thats why you have to have a single rate. In 86 we had two rates. Putting two tax rates together is like putting two rabbits together. They breed, they multiply. When they have a single rate, you want to change it, everyoneo sees it, everyone knows theyll be affected by it so its a real insurance against what happened 30 years ago when we last try today simplified the code. By the way, this also shows trying to deal reform with thea code as we have it today impossible. , that 86 act, came to 800 pages or something. Again, just throws the thing out and start all over, by the way, those who worry am i going to lose my reduction and mortgagell and all that sort of thing, do a variation what hong kong does, give people a choice. You can go with the new system or if you lack selfesteem and stay with the old, go ahead. But this way you lower the temperature, you say to people dont trust me, see for yourself which one is better. I think 99 . By the way, when we talk about taxes we get all hung up on gdpp and revenues and crossing lines and all that sort of thing. Think of an opportunity cost. The irs estimates we spend s 6 billion a year filling out tax forms. Experts we spend 200 billionn plus complying. Think of 20 years. Tens of billions of hours, trillions of dollars, immense brain power, very bright people are involved in this thing, imagine all the resources gone to products, new cures for diseases, how much better off we would be, what economist call the opportunity cost, that is the real immoral travest, what is taken away from us, the corruption of it, but what weve lost because we spent our resources on something totallyas unnecessary. Host my guest is your taxes are most complicated for most people. Have you figured out how much time and money has been spent doing your taxes . Guest yeah, its horrific. 40 years ago i could actually do my return. 1970s. I always have an accountant look over it but i could semiunderstand the thing. Onethird of that and subtract line 7a, you have to go to 8c, by the way, let me point out in the book, i have Good Software to help me do it. Well, we point out depending on your circumstances, Different Software packages will give you different estimates of what your Tax Liability is. Even they, the gods we worship, the Software Must have it arent getting it right. Nobody can. Host in host in 1999 in your first book, a new birth of freedom, the dirty little secret inin washington, what the politicians really fare from tax relief is not a loss of revenue but they s really fear is a loss of power. Guest complexity is power. Here in washington where we are today, if youre a member of the house and ways and means committee, youre a member of that committee, youre set for political life. I think i will have a reception tonight. Every lobbyist comes with a check, yes, i need access, contribute to your camp own or whatever you want and this way they have power. You have to go to them. Either to protect yourself or try to shaft an opponent or something the code is being its hurting your industry of business. So you always have to come to them. Thats what they like, you always have to come to them which means checks, be blunt about it. Host from reviving america, our nation seems myered from a malaise from the 1970s is this uncertain polarized and economic stagnant america the new normal . Guest no. Some people, i think former secretary of treasury talks about the new era as if its from aliens from space. Something the new forces of history. Of its absolutely nonsense. What we have gone through today is as result of policy errors. The nice thing of errors that can be corrected. Thats why we did the book. We focused on big three reforms, get those right and by golly this economy will come rooring roaring back. Th same thing in the 70s. We can do it again. Host now your friend ron paul has written in the fed but youre at reforming the fed, here is what you write, we may be in awe, but they can no longer guess the need for money than the central days of the soviet union. Guest absolutely. That the fed can determine what Interest Rates are, how banks should be run, what the money supply should be is preposterous. The soviet union fell and weoo point in the book what the feded has done, weakening the dollar which started under republican administration, this is bipartisan nonsense here. In the early part of the last decade, started weakening the dollar, thats why commodities prices went up and housing prices went up and led to the disaster in 2008, since 2008 the fed has misbehaved. I take for example zero Interest Rates, should they raise Interest Rates . R controlling Interest Rates is like price control. The fed should be out of it. They can set the rate theyll lend moneys to banks at, discount windows. Theyve always done that. But in terms of trying to set the price of borrowing andhe lending for the rest of the economy, its like the soviet union, distort of the market. For example, bonds. I dont know whether they they did this, they created a credit market where the favoritism goes to bonds. Corporate bonds, government bonds. Who can issue bonds . Usually Big Companies, obviously governments, what has happened, if you look at the credit where credit has gone since 2008, since the fed started this nonsense, the Small Businesses, new businesses, household, tinyn killing the creation of new businesses, killing theli expansion of Small Businesses, which is a key reason whydi addition of overregulation, for the first time in history Small Businesses arent created. Since 2009 the number of creation of Small Businesses were a fraction of what they were after previous recessions. We know, Small Businesses, newes businesses, where the innovation comes from and where job creation comes from. Not from the biggie, but from the new ones. Its not happening. You have periods where businesses are Going Companies are going out ofne business at a faster rate than new companies are being created. That is brand new. It goes against what one of the great strengths of the this country, the ability to come up with new and greater companies. Back in the 70s, whoever heard of microsoft, whoever heard of fedex and apple, they all started as little companies in the 70s, biggest of the 90s today. Thats the flow, kind of rot that i think people sense but cant put their if i thinkers on. Host arent low Interest Rates politically popular . Guest low rates today, yes, they favor that, but how much real Home Building has been done . Again, they say its better than 2009. I would hope so. In terms of the needs of this economy, still not where it should be. You try one of the reasons you y dont have mobility the way you used to. You want to move from here to texas or oregon or whatever, can i get a mortgage there . Can the person who wants to buy my house here can get a mortgage . Very, very uncertain, so the rates are low. Its like having a rentcontrolled apartment if you dont mind the lack of upkeep,ey the landlord wont give you much upkeep. Us in terms of creating new apartments, housing, it doesnt work. They give one statistic. I hate to do this, but in the last five years, credit to government has grown 37 , credit to corporations 32 , credit to Small Businesses and households only 6 . Devastating figures, specially when compared to the past and thats one reason why our labor market is to bad. Even putting aside how many people have dropped out, people are not getting the jobs they should, a lot of part time jobs, people dont want them. We saw lousy job report last month and was bad enough the Establishment Survey where they go to existing companies and they have to call the household surveys which is better at picking up new businesses that havent come in the governments radar yet. So across the board, we are still stuck in second gear like a baseball player, maybe we raised our average from 18 to 2020 but it aint going to help the world series. Host 90 Million People are not in the u. S. Job market. Guest yes that came out with that labor market report, you see it in what they call Labor Force Participation rate, lowest it has been since in 1970s, it was the 70s where you saw a real surge of woman coming into the work, really ramped up, so we are going back to the dinosaur age and not because people of sudden dropped out because i dont really want to work anymore because they dont have the opportunity. Host from your book, how capitalism will save us, alan policy undermine free markets, ayn rand would not have succunbed to the temptation to believe that a government a handful of people in washington or in the European Central bank or the bank of japan, bank of england can determine what the price of money should be, thousand economy should grow, they treat the economy as if it were a machine. The economy is in this country 320 million individuals. And its adding up 300 of million of us do, we are not a machine. And when the fed does something, it affects the economy in different ways and so weve seen Central Planning does not work in the soviet and chinese are still grappling with trying to be with the old and in with thee new to get their economy modernized and yet the fed i thinks that it can guide the economy that by manipulating Interest Rates they can determine what the right price is and what the economy should do and its just scandallist, just one little thing. Janet yellen who heads the fed today, we need 2 inflation. Thats way of saying, prices should go up 2 a year. And a family making 50,000, a medium income in country roughly, that translates to 80,000 a year. Is th how in the world raising a thousand dollars a year stimulate the economy . Y . I havent figured it out. I dont think they have, manifestly they havent perhaps we would have a vibrant Economy Today. Host is some of the Monetary Policy today is high inflation of the 70s . Guest well, what the 70s w should have taught us when you dont have a sound currency, a currency of stable value, youre going to be like watch and cant tell the time. A watch thats too slow or too fast. Neither one is going to help you very much and so what we should have learned from the 10s is stability is better than te instability, watch that can tell time is better than one that cant, but that lesson is just lost on these people. Host are you a deficit hawk guest you have to be very careful of that because there are some who say we dont love deficits, they love spending, they want to raise taxes, to Milton Freedman said he would show he would rather have a government of 1 trillion that was in serious deficit than a government that spent 2 trillion with a budget balanced. Whether you borrow the money or whether you tax the money or you try to print the money, one way or the other, youre taking reat resources. It doesnt. One of the points we make in this book is money is not wealth, its a claim. You know go a restaurant, you check your coat, you get a piece of plastic or piece of paper, pd worthless in and of itself. Has no intrinsic value. Its based on trust. When you start mocking around with the ability of what thatpe piece of paper can buy, take the clock. Imagine 10 minutes a day, weh know life would be chaotic, right . Lets say you are baking thehe cake, bake the batter 30 minutes, is that nominal minutes, inflation adjusted minutes . Is it a washington minute . A mexican minute . Money is a claim and so when you start to muck around with it, you get problems. Host so the Gold Standard. Guest there are so many myths and we deal with them in the book about the gold g standard, the Gold Standard is not using gold coins, that would be highly insufficient to go buy a pair of walmart with 120000 gold coin. Not very efficient. Think of gold as a ruler. Gold keeps value more than anything else. If you see the dollar fluctuate each day, thats the value of the gold fluctuating. We had a Gold Standard for 180 years, we went through a depression. Civil war, two world wars, countless crisis in between, and yet we achieved the highest Economic Growth rates in the history of the world. F if we had maintained the same growth rate that is we did for that 180 years in the last 40 years, our Economy Today would be 8 trillion bigger. Because the way you get an economy, the way we get a higher standard of living is by investing, doing new things,s, expanding businesses, starting new businesses, new products, new services, that takes investment, thats risky enoughu most investments dont work out, but if you dont know whether youre going to gets 100cents dollar. We went back to mucking around again and look at business investment, stagnant. T. When anyone asked me, should i buy, invest in gold, i know we have a problem. Buying metal, buying an object, piece of art, thats not anve investment, then i know we have a problem. You should be investing in the things that are today unseen. Bigger inventory when you dolr things that already exist, it means people without them realizing or protecting what they have and you also go to commodities, oil is one of the oldest commodities around, 150th years n. The 70s when we devalued the dollar, went from 3 4 a barrel. Everyone thought, we might be running out of this stuff and when we conquered the inflation in the 80s, it went down to 10, crashed stabilized to 2025, then in the early part of the last decade went back at it, suddenly went up to 100, we must be suddenly running out of this stuff and we went back on it, and so when things that are already around like gold, like copper, like land, unless its in a hot area, well, oil those things go up, housing prices go up sharply, house thaa was worth a hundred thousand yesterday, its worth 120,000 tomorrow, same produce, no improvements. You have a problem. Host steve forbes do you believe that we are living in a economy that we have the have h and have notes and the middless class is shrinking . Guest well, we have, tens of millions of people, their real incomes havent gone up. Thats not the new normal,e thats the new abnormal, again, when those things happen, people cant grasp why is it that prices seem to go up a little bit, health care goes up, college goes up and my income is not really going up, i just cant seem to get out of thisg thing like those nightmares where you cant get out of the thing. You get the real dissatisfaction, you dont just see it in this country, you seat it around the world. People dont understand why are we in this rut, why arent things better . Oa why people in authority cantt create an environment or get the train back on track again . Host from your book, how capitalism will save us this is warren buffet. T. About the other 99 . Guest thats a tradition the country. We tend to think that america is the most philanthropic nation in the world, and people wonder why are we the most commercial nation and the most philanthropy ic . Commerce is meaning you succeed in true free markets by meeting the needs and wants of other people. Even if you lust for money, you dont get it unless the government is behind you. Unless you provide something that somebody else wants. I think it was steve jobs, when asked if he does marketing survey. So i said no, because peep dont know what it want until i show them. Putting something out there, and putting something out there and, so free markets will turn scarcely into abundance. Free markets to work if you allow them, but if you put in huge regulations and just one example, the federal criminal code. They cannot count the number of crimes in that code now. Estimates 5000. You put in the regulations, 300,000. I think it was a professor who writes for us and a famous defense attorney estimates he wrote a book called threeto felonies a day. Any professional without that person knowing it commitsey several felonies a date innocently because they have noo idea these complex vaguely written rules of law that emanate from here and you seat on the state level as well, that is not right and it contributes to frustration. You have all these regulations and there was an estimate co several years ago that a company with 19 or fewer employees find with regulations cost almost 11000 per employee. Companies with 500 were over 7000, so this is what the Big Companies are doing very nicely, mostly. Small and mediumsize companies are struggling. Killed by the tax code, growth of regulation, unstable dollar in these uncertain credit markets spin it from your book the new birth of freedom m vision for america microsoft paid no attention to my washington and the result a mammoth antitrust action that dropped on for years costing the country billions of dollars in fines and legal fees. Today the cup and he has a major presence in washington dc ander employs numerous powerful lobbyists to protect its interests. Facebook, which became a multibilliondollar giant a few years after was founded was not about to make the same mistake. In 2011, the company concerned by potential government Privacy Restrictions opened up a a spanking new 8000 Square Foot Office in washington with a staff that includes a former privacy expert from the aclu. Google, another startup turned giant, is a spending each year millions of dollars. Yes, and this tells you something about the scope of government today. If you reach a certain size, you have to pay tributes to the powers that be when they will come and get you jerk then, it turns from protection, thats a protection racket, from protection to cronyism, which is one of the things people are upset about today. Recent example of it, agency buried inside the Federal Reserve came out with the agencys unconstitutional, and i think eventually will be thrown out, but it cannot with the rules, over 1000 rules that will put socalled payday lenders out of business. One of the advocacys of that was google, which is said a few weeks ago it would not allow payday lenders to advertise. Guess who has an investment in the company that will move intou that market with these people are put out of business . Google. Cronyism. Host does forbes have a lobbyist here in washington dc . Guest no, but with a Public Association and the like, but we are now more internet online and postal rates dont have the same impact they did in days past. Bus, again, when they talk about how do we curve a ball this lobbying in washington, you can put all the t restrictions that you had to be out of congress for 500 years before you can join a lobbying firm and allt a these things, have lunches and things like that. If you problem witha mosquitoes, you have to get the badwater. You have to drain the swamp. Reduce the scope of government. O otherwise, guarantee when where the otherther, pe people will find ways to petition the governmentholds lnd especially when it holds lifeanddeath decisions over their own existence. Steve f human nature. Host steve forbes, we havent talked about this for 250 years in this country and you have been talking about this or yourh entire career, why hasnt been changed . Of guest because we this was a very until the Great Depression as we do today we have the largest economy in the world. Omy the most sophisticated economy in the world, most complex country in the world. We had also the smallest Central Government in the world, state governments were three times the size of the federal government. Then came the Great Depression and one of the things that came out of world war i, massive controls, but that worked during war. Why cant we do it in peacetime . Bigger government of presence and get rid of this wasteful competition and let science rain, experts rain and glory will be here. Clearly, that has not worked out very well, but one of the things and we hit that in freedom manifesto is that its not enough to say free markets worst, government in many areas does not work very well. Is not enough to say that because government always says, well, we may mess up, we may screw up, we may hurt the people who we were supposed to help, that our hearts are in the right pace places and we occupied that higher moral ground. Businesses, you can trust them. The truth of the matter is, again, the morality of free markets is true free markets, not to cronyism is meeting the needs and wants of other people and has people whether they even know what trying to figure out how to make you happy and buy what youre offering. It reduces barriers between people, contrary to myth. May not love your neighbor, but you sure when to sell to your neighbor and thats one of this complex Global Supply chain, people are working making products. Ticket typical product today and it involves thousands of people, parts and pieces of it all around the world. Take the iphone, ipad parts and 10 of those parts are made here. The rest are from around the world. Bets, its not just they deliver the goods. Theres a moral basis, meeting the needs and wants of other people and allowing for creativity. Look at this people whoo rise out from the most strangest background and theyve learned in the free market. Take steve jobs. Took a personality, presented it to a Human Resources person today without the name on it and they would say thats not the person we want here. Often in his younger days he was aggrandized or, taking other peoples idea and nottthats giving people credit, w putting people down knots when he was fired from his own company before the age of 30, but the amazing story about him is that he learned to become an effective leader and how to bring others together to get something done itny was painful. At a lot of setbacks, but he learned in a free market. Expe many people are not born leaders. They learn from experience. Hes a fine example of a. So, thats what free markets are about, always turning scarcity into abundance. That first a cell phone we had 30 years ago, motorola, because a shoe box and played like a brick, 40 minute battery life, 3395 per today they give them away. Get a good smart phone with a plan from verizon or anyone else for 100, down to 50 and we have become so spoiled. I grew up with a name called the card catalog. Do you remember those inn libraries . A now you have instantly in front of you. We are so spoiled that we place a call to a shepherd in Outer Mongolia and it takes longer than 10 seconds and then we say this is a piece of crap p required since it working faster and thats what the free market does, always turns a scarcity into abundance. Host are you a technology userd guest yes, and the nice thing is that thats all about the ipad. You touch and something happens. Thats the thing. You dont have to be an engineer to drive an automobile. You dont have to be a technologist to be able to use this stuff and often times, the people who do best and not the ones who invented, but the ones who learned how to use the invention. Take for example the mainframe computer, one of the big things the cannot of world war ii and it was originally designed to make it easier to calculate where artillery shells would go. , and mathematics. Obviously, computers had many more applications that artillery shells, but do you know who made the most money, it was not the originator. It was ibms competitors ibm 25 years ago kelly went bust. Who made the most money . Sam walton, 50 years ago, small west northwestern arkansas retailer. At the time, kmart was 50 times the size of walmart and walton realized he could knew use these new machines and develop special software to manage its inventories better than the anyone else and supply chains better than anyone else. That was his secret sauce. He used it invention better than anyone else. Host i think its in reviving america that you coauthors talh about how google buys smaller computers, millions of them to do what they do and then they throw one away if they need to speak to guess, like a pen, disposable. The times again, we think google this big giant to today, but in the 90s it was nothing, two young kids kids go in against microsoft and yahoo was a big deal at the time. How are you going to go against these giants and Search Engines . These two guys recognized that Search Engines should be likery the brain, when cell, not very impressive, put them together it is impressive. So, they strapped these devices together and you say one doesnt worked on bother to fix it its not worth it, but t another one is. They are math it users of electricity and thats why they go for hydropower another access to a lot of cheap electricity. Mammoth usericity b electricity, but it worked. They beat the big guys at their own game. Good afternoon and welcome to the tv on cspan2. Au this is our monthly indepth program where we invite one author on to talk about his or her body of work. Of this month is author, publisher, president of a candidate steve forbes. Hes the author of several books beginning in 1999 with his first book, a new trying to vision for america, flat tax revolution can mount 2005, powero ambition glory, which we have not touched on it yet but we will keepp in 2009. How capitalism will save us also came out in 2009. Freedom manifesto 2012. In 2014, how the destruction of the money t how the destruction of the dollar threatens the Global Economy and this past year reviving america how repealing obamacare and replacing the tax code in reforming the fed will restore hope and prosperity. This is an Interactive Program and we want to hear from you and there are several ways for you to purchase paid in a program and talk with mr. Forbes. 202 is the error code for all our numbers. 7488201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones and you can also send eight email to the tv at cspan. Org. You can make a twitter comment and you can make a comment on facebook as well. Now, we have one of the way you to contact steve forbes today and thats with a text message, using technology. Here is the number. This zone for Text Messages spirit. We will begin taking those calls and comments in just a few minutes here on book tv. Steve forbes, alyssa is a coauthor on a lot of your books. Who she . Guest involved in Public Relations and communications and she worked with a speck in the 1990s and went out on her own and started her own firm. So, we have done the several books together. I also did one with john prentice. You mentioned power ambition glory and it can help when you get to people if they dont kill each other by the end of the process,e which is always a danger in terms of an tracking and getting something more sharply honed. Host so, what is your processph to rights, do you come up with the idea, do they approach you about the idea . Guest on power ambition glorye , john premise approach me in the idea and we got to know each other and i did a review of a book he did on hannibal, crossing the alps. He had the idea and said, im doing a book on ancient leaders like alexander the great, maybe you could bring in modern Business Leaders and if there are common leadership lessons and one of the things that quickly became apparent0, 2,000 that while times and circumstances obviously change from the world we have today in the world of. 500, 2000 years ago, human nature does not. Attributes of effective leadership dont change peopl and thats with so fascinating. Its about people. Whether the ancient world of the world we have today, how people respond, how people respond to crisis, opportunities and one of the things you learn is effective leaders are always innovators, but you also learn you are never master of the universe of matter how smart you are, no matter how good you are. Other forces come to play. Host well, who was hannibal and in your book, power ambition glory you compare hannibal to google. Guest because hannibal was an innovator. His country had been beaten by the romans with a call the first punic war and Macarthur Ridge when and not revenge, but realized that if they did not knock out rome, rome would knock out them one or the other was going to dominate. So, the romans thought that if carthage would send out a great navy and carthage was going to go against rome it would take a southernhann group, southern italy and worked their way up to rome and hannibal came up with the idea ofof why not go hit 12 from the north where they were not expected, go through spain, go through italy through the alps with elephants. They were very good. A hits them where they least expect it, he wasf an innovator not only in terms of that kind of strategy, but in terms of battle strategy. Traditional set battle the romans could never accept at the very end of the romans never beat hannibal. However, why did he win . Again, he didnt control his universe. Cartridge, politician, would not give him the necessary resources to finish the job and when at the end a felony a fellow named skippy zero , interesting leader in himself, his father knucklehead been killed fighting hannibal. Instead of just raging, he said the best revenge is success. He studied hannibal. Studied his toxics, his strategy his tactics, strategy and probably knew hannibal better than hannibal knew himself. He did a reverse hannibal. He took an army and went and reversed what hannibal did. He went into spain. That he went from spain wh into threat in north africa where Macarthur Ridge was. When Macarthur Ridge and indians that they might have to face the wall roman army they sent word to hannibal in italy and said you must come home. Hannibal said you can handle that. You want overthrow you, but he said if you calll it back i will never get back to italy again and we lost the war. They still called him back and they lost the war. Host from power ambition glory, and the rights of corporate leadership a crucial mistake is attributing to success of a company solely to the skills and charisma of one individual its wrote ceo. Thank guest thankfully there is a whole body of new literatureit coming out now especially with Big Companies is that one person cannot do everything. On effective leader recognizes what he ort she can do best and is able to assemble teams, fill in where you cant do it. There may be a particular job you could do better than the person doing it, but its not the best use ofs your time. One of the challenges of Donald Trumps campaignhe and hes running that almost by himself, he needs teams if hes going to be effective this general election, otherwise they will overwhelm him. Disco in terms of a company now they are discovering more and more. Have you become innovative when you become large . To do it with small teams. Theres an effectiveha team. The two pizza roll. When you put a Team Together, eight, 10, 12 and if it gets bigger than that and it takes more than two pizzas bigger one and two pizzas at night than the team wont work. You can get a real job done and effectively. So, how do you get this done . One person . Preposterous, just like trying to run a country. You have to tap into the brainpower and how you do that we are discovering hierarchy may not be let best way to do it. How do you develop these teams . Platoo the military has been very good town to the platoon level developing teams to get the together job done, so an effective leader w recognizes they be sure she wants to pray to the presence a and the genius, but in the heart of hearts that the note and this is what steve jobs learned, you had to have affected people whoho could not execute, butdg come up with Creative Ideas in their task is to make judgments that w works and doesnt work and what brings companies down. By the way, jobs one of the things that haunted him is what happened to sony. After world war ii, new comedy, dominated the new electronic world andred then it faltered. Part of the reason faltered was it became a serious products, sat task, and unpopular and so he feared that. He did not want that tor happen to apple seven he designed their new building in california, even things like where the restrooms were he nature they were located where people from different departments p would interact and run into each other. When they do hires for major jobs it would just be the department where this person might work, he would have other various parts of the company to become involved. So, you wouldnt get this built in us versus them in the lack of cooperation, so in making a Large Organization work, swallowing yes, one person can do it, but a large one you better know how to have effective teams. You can guide them. If you think you can do it yourselfe host steve forbes is someone whose name is well known in whose name is on the company. Is attempting, addicting, intoxicatingo to maybe take credit . . Guest well, success is the ultimate credit and one of the challenges and this is true of anything what you see in business all the time is what happens when your world is changed. The rise of the west destroyed everything i had learned and my family had learned and all of our people had learned. Eam model, going back to the 1830s and the rise of the steam press, destroyed. A we had to start allr. Over. Easy to say. Extremely hard to do, which is why often outsiders make the big changes, not the encompass because they are not weighed with legacies. One of the things that legacies have to remind themselves is that companies should always ask themselves, what is your purpose, what is your mission, what is a you are trying to do. If you try to focus on what your ultimate purposes, you dont get quite as hung up with the means to achieve that purpose and they are finally changed. Art of part of the we live in an era where you say you can eat well or sleep well. The eat well part i cann do. The sleep well part is quite another manner because these are constantly changing and theres no playbook here theres no turnaround broke. Heres what you do when your model is beenen destroyed. You are inventing as you grow long, so you have to be prepared. You will make mistakes. You are in uncharted waters. The consumer is getting great new things, great new services, but for those running it by golly it can have some tense moments. On host how did you respond . Baest thankfully, we recognize and made a good decision 20 years ago when the web for skin along and publishers that, bike we will take the printed page and put it on a screen and we are in electronic publishing, which is sort of the equivalent when over 100 years ago when movies were invented some people that that you just filmed a stage play and that would be a feature film. No, to different mediums. So, in the mid 90s we took our new website, we put it in a separate building, separate staff , separate support system. Y . Critical reason was that if you put that in the same line of structure i authority it will get crest. It would not be out of malice, meeting the needs of the print size, so we didnt want the baby to get crushed in the crib, so we added a separate entity. 10 years later it came time to unite to them and we had a horrific problem uniting to different cultures. Nalist the journalists on the website or i should say the journalists on the print side thought that the web writers weres peasants, just turned out trash, common and the web people thought the print people were printed print journalists were lazy snobs who did do very much in it trying to match those together was very difficult. Many people couldnt make the transition. Today, common knowledge, you master both. 1300 but, it was hard to do. Content creation, we still turn out 12, 13000 printed articles of gear on the web now, we do over 120,000 submissions. We have over 1800model. Contracted contributors. Very different model, but again serving the needs. But, very different. Now, we are facing a challenge. I think we are doing it better than most people. Im not, thankfully we have people with us that know what we are doing, but facing the challenge of handheld mobile devices. Very difficult for advertising, sinceev constant. My father said again, you think you arrived, be shown the door. Especially in this fast paced world. Nothing stays the same. Host what is forbes mediaue today . Guest forbes media goes back in terms of getting the purpose, our profound belief of in entrepreneur capitalism. Ent my grandfather who was an immigrant to thiscame to come country came with very little money from scotland and eight great education he said the purpose of business is to produce happiness, not to pileup money. So, thats been our that ever sense. Dr so, in that sense one of our editors bikes to say we are like a dramatiio critic, we love it when a production is done right and hate it when they botch a. So, thats what thats our central purpose, giving people analysis, tools to be successful and thats why we focus so much on people. Its not the impersonal forces. It all gets down to people. My grandfather like to say, get to know the prospects of a Company Better by focusing on ceos then you will the Balance Sheet. Good leaders, good people, can turn a bad Balance Sheet into a cold one and bad leadership ive seen time and again can destroy even the most wonderful Balance Sheet. Host what are some of the publications today, mr. Forbes, that your company puts out . Guest the main one is still what we call the mothership, forbes magazine. With a number of investment newsletter, a forbes asia, Forbes Europe in various publications, but the key thing is now more and more electronics 3 with over 36 licensed editions of forbes around the world. Local partner, not conceited enough to think we know every market in the world, so we licensed it normallying it varies. About half the content will come from as, half the content will be created from their local market. So, that print side is doing well, but we are doing more and more on the electronic side. More and more about traffic is coming from around the world, no surprise. Host what is your role today . Guest my role today is to help out on the marketing side, promotion side. A lot of the daytoday stuff is now done by others, but i still have a day job. I think given whats amazing around the world is the power of the forbes brand and the reason is not size or anything like that. I think entrepreneur around the world said that with us we are on the same page. We understand your decisions. We understand what youre trying to do and so we dont see you as mistry or something that has to be squashed or tolerated because you deliver the goods. We see them as a noble pursuit. Human nature being what it is, but i think they sense what. Host how would you think your leadership style is different from your fathers, Malcolm Forbes . Guest in terms of some of the things he is famous for i dont ride motorcycles. He was very flamboyant in that sense and i said for decades i am always too young to write a motorcycle. He was very very outgoing and one of the things he taught me and my siblings was he said, dont try to imitate others. You can take inspiration from others, but if you try to imitate conduit b says someone else did it and you will send yourself to an early grave. Each of you will develop your own way of doing things. And it will be constantly evolving. He had his own. He change from what he was 30, 40 probably was in his 60s. People who work in a world that changes, you dont chuck everything aside. You try to keep the cord core, but you try to adapt to changing circumstances. Host of the leaders that you profile in power power ambition glory, serious, alexander the great, hannibal, Julius Caesar and augustus, where would you put yourself, where would you put your father . Guest my father would probably be a combination of in terms of knowing the importance of having that brand image would be in alexander or on augustines who recognized how you appear is critical in terms of what kind of ability and power you have, but i think the one thatk impressed me the most was not household word today, but an extra ordinary story. He was an aristocrat and as a lark, a young man decided to grow the date coupe start mercenaries, mostly spartans, some were greek, but 10000 mostly spartans mercenaries can go fighting one of these succession wars inrs persia. Two brothers were jousting with each other and the spartans were hired by one of the brothers and so xenophon went along a sort of a lark and at the time, as you know, that athenians and the spartans hated each other. They despise onee another. Bed, they tolerated the bond. Well, they backed the wrong horse, so heredl they are in the middle of persia, 10000. Opposing army of the brother who won, hundreds of thousands. s parents fought well in those days. So, here they are and they looked hopeless. They sent a delegation to negotiate the when he brother to try to buy their way out to greece. He killed them all and so the spartans foughtho to the end. No lines of communication, in the middle of nowhere, hostile territory and so xenophon spontaneously so x didnt go to military academy, got up and gave a rousing speech sayingea we can find a way out of this. Stirred them and they said, okay. In effect, lead the way. And he was smart enough, he realized at the beginning he must not take the lead in letter to be the front people. Also, in those days inal terms of the army you had to persuade soldiers you had to talk to them, assemblies. You couldnt just say you had to persuade them if you didnt persuade them they decided to replace you he didnt get a gold parachute, they stoned you, so this was highstakes. He became the effective leader. They got out. Their moment when itul looks like would be lost like you may be stone, but what it demonstrates is a couple things. What is circumstance may come that you could never anticipate and you have to rise to it, even if you feel you are not. Ready yet to step in and stay i will do the best i can. The other thing is, you are still not fully in control. Er there is a point where it looked like the immediate danger was over after a few months and a few of the spartans broke off and he said thats going to be a disaster. You are going to get the mail we will be weaker for, but they just had to hope they learn before they got destroyed some of their senses to reunite. Sometimes things are out of your control and also sadly what it demonstrates his no good deed goes unpunished. After he led them through this heroic rescue, he gets word from athens, your exiled we dont want you back. So, he ended up in sparta. King took pity on him,m, which was good for us. He became a farmer and wrote to the historiesche that the sources much of what we learned, but a going in and persuading. You see this in politics all the time. For example back and 80s senator from new jersey, bill bradley, impressive man, great career, and democrats were saying you ought to run. First and 88 and then in 1992 he said im not ready yet. When he felt he was ready in 2000, he lost. It was too late. Chris christie, new jersey governor, a lot of people went to him for years going i said you got to run. He said im not ready. He should of. Even though he felt he wasnt, like the xenophon you just have to go in. A life doesnt always go the way you wanted or on the timetable you think is best for you pick youo up to plunge in. Host is he any relation to the term that we use today xenophobic . Guest dont know because a xenophon was not xenophobic. Host quite the opposite c2 athenians learning how to lead spartans. D host where would you put yourself on this list of leaders that you talk about these ancient leaders . Guest like most it would be a mix. Xenophon, the importance of leadership and being able to respond to change into circumstances. One who gets a short script from history because the greeks wrote it was cyrus who created the modern persian empire. He was very tolerant ands normally in those days conquers came in and killed everyone and soso the rest into slavery and he in effect would take over a place and say pay us the attributes and we leave you alone. Jewish historians like he was much more tolerant than some of the others that ruled them. So, again, realizing you cant have it your way or the highway. I think augustines innocence of recognizing of how you step into an unusual situation reform he was a great reformer,e even after he won the civil wars. He was not a natural born military leader. He had to step in and hope along the way, but he was smart enough to recognize also that you dont have to be flamboyant. Julius, his uncle, flamboyant. Le even though he knew hehe had all of the power, he always took care tow consult, work with people so he wouldnt to get natural accumulationb of enemies where someone says do this to that, like jobs. He learned he survived. He does it die to his uncle did. His wife killed him at the end. Host last question before we go to calls and Text Messages etc. , some of the leaders that you speak highly of, i think, in power ambition glory in route include ray kroc, sam walton and henry ford. What do they have in common cracks why do they get positive treatment . Guest they are all innovators. Henry ford we all this always say from the movie assemblyline. People forget he would bankrupt twice and almost went bankrupt a third type. The model a, before you got rightt and it was sheer determination that he made it happen in the lesson one was that he fell into a rut. Alfred sloan, putiod yourself in his shoes in the early 20s he nearly went bankrupt, ramshackle comedy at the time. Henry ford with an estimated 56 of us market, no one could make a car cheaper than henry ford, the model t. Cheaper and cheaper. What you do . Your company, ramshackle, disorganizedy , cant compete on price price , so sloan change t the rules of game. He introduced the annual model change. He recognized the car just was a contraption to go from paint point a to point b. Was a fashion statement and all of the things we now take for granted. This guy looks like an accountant and he recognized the importance of fashion. He segment of the market from chevy to cadillac. He set up a car for every purse. Allowing you to choose color. Henry ford said you can have any color you want as long as its black. Sloan let you choose the color and then buying on time for today, no ad is complete without six years financing. In those days you put the cash up front. Before to thought sloan was going to destroy General Motors by wou allowing people not like a house, a car you could move, but a house you could do a mortgage on that. He thought a mortgage on an automobile was ridiculous. Sloan allowed you to put a a down payment and make monthly down payments, so in a handful of years the company that was on the ropes became the dominant part of the company and even today still fell at times more cars than toyota. Ors General Motors had its own history and law side of albert sloan, but sloan in that sense was in this ration. Someone dominated one area, by the waypolit republicans should learn about this with donald trump and try to play this game. He will be cheap. Shouldve taken inspiration from sloan, devise your own rules of the game. Its only way you will have a chance to win. He ray kroc, hes an inspiration. Back in the 1950s, never quite hit it in life. So, here he was selling milkshake machines in california. Always striving to make the big hit especially in food and never quite get it took long story short, he came across a him understand. Mcdonald brothers. That a couple of outfits and he so it they did not see. W they had standardizedbusines the food is business. As you know the Restaurant Business is the toughest businessntory possible with the highest title casualty rate. Each day you start up a new. Tough, tough business. Thats why he never had a national chain, survey semi one in the railroad days. Too complicated a business, but he realized standardized the business and he thought if i get the Mcdonald Brothers to expand even more i can sell them more milkshake machines. Hes a milkshake machine salesman and he realize this is bigger thaninha milkshake machines. Ultimately, he bought them out and the rest is history. Established the First National chain and it went over season standardized business that people did not think it be done. He was one of those that said stick to your knitting. They would say why do we go in this area or that area he said can you guarantee me that every restroom of every Mcdonalds Restaurant is pick and span clean . They said no, then we are not going to go out of our realm. So, that kind of ability to do big things and innovate in an area again, seeing what others did not see. Ray kroc saw with the Mcdonald Brothers did not. They did not know whathe they had invented just as when steve jobs went to menlo park. They did not realize what they had. N heated. He that this is unbelievable. Went and developed it. So, again, not just inventing. Need some and who recognizes what the possibilities are. Host steve forbes is our guest. , you have been patient. Lori in new york, you are on book tv. Pl caller hello. Guest how are you. Caller can you hear me okay . Host we are listening, sir. Caller im interested in your view, how you view the Union Movement in this country. Its very influential still. Can or do they help or interfere with your kind of reform proposals . Host lauren, what is your viewo of the union . Caller i think they are necessary, but they seem toey interfere with a lot of things. Host thank you, sir. Steve forbes. Guest i think first you have to make the distention between traditional, what we used to call industrial unions and government worker unions, two very different things. The government workersn in unions have a lot of power and because in effect they negotiate with themselves, the politicians know many of them that they are dependent on theirdepe support. We have gotten in ap situation where pension systems have not been properly funded. On the industrial side,on prosperity of the us especially since the depression unionun membership has declined sharply. Sometimes, many times, they have gotten away from their Companies Whose workers they represent from making the necessary change. The classic places detroit. Back in the 1970s or early 80s when theic japanese decided another Foreign Companies decided to put facilities in the us, they first went in the michigan midwest areachigan because thats where the f a structure was for the auto industry. They went into the uaw, United Auto Workers and a said we want to set up shop here and set up factories. However, your work rules especially to the japanese, honda led away , they said we cant work with these. They wont work with us so we need a change in the work rules and the uaw said no way. You will have the same work rules as the othersrs honda first did a facility for motorcycles in ohio. Nonunion. In the other manufacturers came in and put in facilities in right to work states were you did not have unions and they flourished and detroit, we saw what happened to them several years ago. So, the unions did not respond in this case to a very changeng circumstances. They are stuck in the past and it hurt. Either way, sometimes union leaders, not just politicians are out of touch with their constituents, union in the northeast called the communication workers of america, big and government unions, but also still represent just had a strike withu verizon and the cwa Workers Union leaders in favor of Bernie Sanders, but astonishingly good portion of their rankandfile, not government workers, but Industrial Workers are in favor of donald trump. They are quite startled by it. Host there is a book that you wrote with your picture on the front that came out in 2005. Its called flat tax t revolution and i think you know im going to show her your. Its the blurb on the top of the book. Must read by anyone interested in the future of this country, donald j trump. Is he a friend of years . Guest i have known him for 30 i years. Back in the 80s when he first was on the realal estate scene in new york and i was hoping he would go with the flat tax in the campaign. He came up with a tax plan, needs tweaking. Not bad, but was not the flat tax. Persuasive enough, persuasive enough. Host have you endorsed him . A guest i made clear that if he is the republican nominee, yes,i i will back him. Host who were you supporting in the primary . Guest none. It was like the dating game. I would find a piece of that candidate that i like im a but none of them ever put it together. We were discussingng earlier, i was shocked that many of these people did not lead with Something Like the flat tax or Something Big and healthcare. Not to pick on them because everyone did. Pi jeb bush was a sensational governor of florida came up with we need more Economic Growth pick thats right. He said 4 need 4 gdp growth. I understood what he was saying. You say 4 gdp growth and it sounds like her formula, rogaine. Never gave people a take away. Never gave people what they call in marketing deliverable, how this will better the country, how this will better you the way reagan did in 1980. Wasnt just reagan, heve was very smooth speaker and all that kind of thing, but he had substance and knew how to put it in a way that people would say, guess, i got it. He understood how to communicate. He by the way, even though we all worship worship him, abraham lincoln, you can learn how he tried to persuade people who on certain issues were not very much in favor initially fromo where he was coming from how you bring people along. R he learned that because he was on attorney and knows how to convince a jury had i get the point across to the jury. How do i bring people along, so he would always start with something small and try to bring them along. Understanding sometimes they will not come along , but bringing people along. Reagan understood it. Most of these candidates did not. I think people still yearn for that. Host and heres a text message that came in for you from detroit. How can a republican president create changes that would be more favorable to the economy than a democratic president . Guest because taking berniee sanders and to a lesser extent hillary clinton, she has Bernie Sanders like, they both want to raise taxes substantially. That is going to be a disaster. Be they want to have more government balm in healthcare. That is a disaster and huge missed opportunityin for really unleashing great new innovations inea healthcare. Also, better coverage for everyone. They dont understand the feds and so on the republican side, ted cruz i know he has dropped out. Doing very good on the need to reform the feds, but donald trump has made some comments on it, so maybe he will elaborate more. I think trump understands, we will see how he articulates ited for the need for fundamental tax reform, need for reform in regulation. When you talk about reform and relation people think youre in anarchist and want to throw them away, no. What you are doing is trying to come up with common sense rules of the road, not telling you what to drive, where to drive and things like that. Ost host we have a dedicated number set aside for Text Messages. T not from calls. If you do send a text, please, include at least your name and a city so we can identify that way. Freda is calling in fromom little rock arkansas. Freda, you are on with author, journalist steveev forbes c3 thank you for taking my call. Lets me just say that i am disappointed in you, mr. Forbes for not backing fully ted cruzs. He was the only constitutional candidatel that you had and he backed capitalism credit he thought of your flat tax and adjusted his tax plan according to you and he adopted some ofof your ideas. Why did you stay neutral our country is at stake here and get all the people that are conservatives and yourself stay neutral. Host freda, we got your question. R. Guest freda, in terms of ted cruz, he did have some interesting good ideas on the flat tax, but it was very late in the day before he put it out there and lead with it and in terms of the same thing with the Federal Reserve and he started to get a. I talk to him about it, but he did not lead with it and you have got to come out front on these things and he didnt do the way we are discussing in terms of making these clear in a way that people could immediately grasp. You say constitutionalist. I understand what you are saying about the constitution or cracking, by the way, ted cruz should be ath chief justice of the Supreme Court or at least associate justice sunday. He would be superb and he understands that document in weight few others do in the history behind it, but he did not go out there and lead the way that reagan did and so i was almost there for him, but he didnt close it untilse almost the end when it was too late and thats why when all of the other candidates of fell by the wayside, most of them except for governor t case it, cruz had not established that reagan identity in terms of these issues like the flat tax or health care, and having patients and is so trump was able to beat him because cruz and not establish it the way trump did withth issues like immigration and 45 sales taxes on imports. Be host will you be attending the convention, mr. Porton cleveland . Guest i have not attended a convention in 20 years. Host why not . T . Guest i did it for 30 years, attended everyone, so wasnt much new to see, i thought. G i thought i got more sometimes like watching a Football Game in the midst of winter use them i on the screen with cspan and others in fox and others covering nothing, so i thought instead of swirlingo around rumors i would have people like you spell out what was happening, especially in this age of social media. Host what do you remember about conventions in the earlier days . Guest i enjoy them in the first time i attended was 1964, goldwater convention. Fand back then, they had not mastered television, so the speeches were awfully boring, but they were authentic. They allowed for demonstrations and people behaved in ways that they rarely would do today on tv where these things maybe the democrats will be different this year where everything is choreographed down to where you said what you wear and when you smile and when you dont. In 64, it was a very raucous brawl, goldwater rights were taking over, socalled eastern establishment had been defeated and there was no love lost and i will never forget being there watching nelson rockefeller, governor of new york, unsuccessful candidate make a speech. Went up with his wife, second life wife. We forget the divorce was a huge issue, far more than today. Here he came with his second wife and most of the delegates were goldwater delegates booed and it wasnt just blue, you would look at faces and this was representative of the devil. The devil would have gotten a better reception and at thef raucous, screaming. Lower. Wow what. That is amazing. That was the kind of youat a raw emotion you would see at a convention and things would happen. N. 68, enough said. Chicago, riots in the street. Convention was going on. Mayor daley, wouldnt do it today, obviously passed away, but where heat in effect said some choice words. W rubicon connecticut was speaking. You dont see much of that. The last convention we had even a semi contestst was 1976 in kansas city between reagan and gerald ford, but even there we sort of everyone sort of new a sl ford had a slight edge. It would not be a landslide, but he had a slight edge. Report that the nomination to accept the nomination he called reagan down to say a few words from the stands, reagan was in the audience. He had lost. Reagan finally persuadedna reagan to come down ando say a few words and reagan said some words, probably from the speech he was going to get if he had gotten the nomination. You could see people saying, man, did we make the right choice herec because he was so good. Then, in 1980, the excitement was when it look like reagan might try to have gerald ford, next president become his running mate for Vice President , sort of a copresident see, so for several hours that was swirling around before reagan picked george hw bush. Eo those moments are rare and more and more its become festive. C thats why the democrats have their superdelegates, since the convention is a coronation. Why not make sure, theyre thinking was, you have all of these elected officials who might not have made it through the primaryve process, but we want them there to unite the party. Thats why the super gala delegatesth normally the decision has already been made and here we have a year where you could still come up with a scenario, i wrote about at the other day where joe biden could end up with the nomination. T this year has broken alli the norms, so maybe i should go. I will watch you guys do it. Siblings. We were visiting president eisenhower. This is 1957. Host which one are you . Guest i am the one right next to the baby, with a Mother Holding my sister, moira issue is about a yef. Visitin giving this blessing to my fathers candidacy. Governor of new jersey and gave us presents. That was a big deal. Host you still have it . Guest yes. But for a kid it was exciting going to the white house, eisenhower wasnt just thehe president , was the man that helped win world war ii and so it was quite exciting but a good political lesson even though hes endorsed and ike and Vice President nixon helped my father. Endorsements are nice but they dont always sway voters. Host we are going to show another picture. Who is in this picture, mr. Forbes . Do you recognize who that is . Guest yes, my father and my mother, brothers, they make it a little larger. Host thats you next to your father . . Guest thats me next to my father and theres more of me now and less hair. Host who are your three brothers . Guest christopher, bob and tim and each amazing social engineering, here we are brought in the same household and same parents and each of us very different. One example, my brother tim is big still even though in the 60s on mountain climbing. I think its nuts. He actually enjoys it. We were in wyoming and decidedn to do a climb and he went with his daughter. They went up at 1 00 a. M. In the morning. Thats what you do and spend the day climbing up and down and at the end of the day, Late Afternoon and he comes back, she is limping, she is in bad shape, could barely move, can take days to recover and she said, and he does this for fun . Whats the matter with this guy. [laughter] host jeff in fresno, thanks for holding, youre on with steve forbes. Caller in my adult life in nixon i dont remember any republican legislator to try to Bring Health Care to all americans. Now dont get me wrong i dont believe in socialize medicine by why not modify obamacare as oppose to appeal it completely . Guest the reason starting like the tax code with obamacare is that the thing is just not working. Ca for example, the individual mandate, expert who works for the government said we have effectively exempted twothirds of the individuals to theds mondayate because the thing wasnt going to work, politically unpopular to require it, expenses are still going up, exchanges not going well on bronze plans, deductibles are horribles so people may have insurance but theyre discovering that theyre out of pocket costs are higher than they were before. So rather than try to amend obamacare, i think we should move more in the direction of reforms such as nationwide shopping for Health Insurance. Right now every state has their own rules, you have the statehe cartel it is. I live in new jersey. Even before obamacare, new jersey regulations were crazy. Fraction of the cost of new jersey, but was illegal for met to do that. So lets have nationwide shopping and how about transparency. They could do this tomorrow by repealing obamacare, i want toma enhance the the availability of health care, but in terms of getting consumer control, why not mandate that hospitals and clinics, post prices lower treatments and services, and so if one hospital charges 200 for mri and another for 350, you as a consumer can say, okay, lets look at that, or how about requiring hospitals to post eaca month how many patients die from infections received after they went to the hospital. Ed its a national scandal. Chipotle, food, any restaurant gets food poisoning, its a national story. Thankfully nobody died in that case. That should be public information. And you should be able to chose your own Health Insurance policy instead of what the government says you should have. I dont neat pregnancy services. And so those are the kinds of reforms we outline in the book that would be very positive andu have more effect i have like we have with food, more effective safety nets, more health care, more Affordable Health care and you see snippets of it. Surgery of the eye so you dont have to wear these, a fraction of what it did 15 years ago, why, you dont have the y disconnect between providers and consumers. Providers have every incentive to make it more affordable to you, attract i have to you, we know our publisher reviving america, about 12 years ago he got it down for 5,000, i could get it done today for 2500 and i perhaps a better result. They want all of that in health care, more for less, cosmetic surgery has grown sevenfold in 20 years, its between you and the provider so you scope it out like anything else so you dont have the wild inflation, so we are trying to get the boast of both worlds instead of system of more rationing. I will give you one example. One of the virtues of free markets is it gets information out quickly. When somebody works, everyone quickly imitates. Ou when apple came along with i pads, iphones, our product is better, you dont find that in health care, it takes years for things to go through. One example is Breast Cancer, youre told a certain age, get the mammogram, do you realizege that if you have dense tissue, i mammograms have a hard timeti detecting that cancer . They only get it 30, 40, 50 of the time. They have a new way of doing it, metabolism, lets see what we have here. I will find it yeah, molecular breast imaging, mbi. It comes from the mayo clinic, is the one pushing it. High le reputable. Tell them to get the mbi. Its life years ahead in terms of detecting Breast Cancer if you have dense tissue. We have critical information doesnt get expanded as rapidly as it would in a normal free market. Pa these are truly life and death decisions and thats why i dont want more of the same or trying to improve what we have now. I want more where the providersw know they have to satisfy you the patient and when youre in charge, i guaranty you, itll be a very different experience, not perfect because we are human but far better than the experiences you have today when you go to a hospital. R joseph in santa barbara, please go ahead with your question or comment for steve forbes. Guest good morning, it tookt me three years to get on and mr. Forbes im happy to have you there. I would like to first im a registered independent, in my 70s and ive been watching cspan since the very beginning but my concern is and i would like to get your opinion on aonn solution is that we have a situation where our Congress Makes the laws, but when it comes to the rulemaking and regulations that is done by unelected bureaucrats. Guest right. Caller the problem i see there is, of course, they are mainly primarily liberal, theyre protected from beingly firing and it doesnt matter who, what administration is, whether its republican or democrat, they continue to exist so its almost like a fourth part of our government which is not in the constitution. So that concerns me and i dont know what we can do about it and i dont see a lot of talk about it. Host lets listen to steve forbes and see what he has to say, joseph in santa barbara, im glad you came through. Guest most effective laws are not made by congress,st theyre made by the agencies and the government departments. In 2014, for example, i think Congress Passed 115, 114 laws. Agencies fases equivalent of 3,400 laws regulations of the force of federal law and 3,000w others in the works. Ther trying to fight them, very difficult and people dont know, we were discussing earlier in the show people are committing felonies. If you go on a federal land, walking your dog, if your leash is longer than 6 feet, youre committing a crime. Now, put aside whether they should be regulating the length of leashes but making it a federal crime is preposterous. 5,000 laws they cant even count them all and from the regulatory agencies which you talked about 300,000 and so one step in the right direction senator half h hatch of utah is pushing in the house, it hasnt gone to the senate, latin for guilty mind. In other words, if you dont know that youre committing a felony when you have a long leash when you go on a federal parkland, they cant throw you in jail and so you have to know that youre committing a crime before they can do it, that in essence is a reform that senator hatch want to put in the new crime bill. T that would go a long ways to what arbitrary situation where rules are written in vague language, so its up to the bureaucracy to interpret what they really mean. It goes against the rule of law. Rule of law is based on you know what the rules of the game are and if you violate them, you know youre going to pay a price for them. Today the book by harvey, flee felonies a a day, that is all to true. If uncle sam wants to get you, he should. We should change to uncle tyrant in that sense. The reform would be a superb step in the right direction and then two, a number of institutions, i was at a dinner the other night that are fighting legally these excesses and pushing legislation, for example, on the regulation, the cost more than 100 million a year, Congress Must vote it up or down. It just cant say, thats out of our hondz. They have to take electorate responsibility for it. So i think people need to learnl more about how dangerous this situation is and reforms liketuo the reform or some of the other bills that give the citizen more power and more accountability to our elected officials so they cant hide behind regulatory state. Host steve forbes write, regulatory violations are increasingly being treated as criminal offenses by federal bureaucracies that are recruiting to use of force. Joe, good afternoon. Caller good afternoon, mr. Forbes. Ed you sounded like you didnt seea that as a good thing and myy experience is that when my company downsized, i lost my job and i was paying 13,000 a year on cobra and i found out that it was costing 17,000 and the company pays risk pool for better price and as consumer that sounds like a better options, what problems did you saw with employerbased plans and shouldnt we be looking towards the original Bluecross Blueshield of model . Guest interesting questions. One reason why employer by the way, if an employer wants to provide Health Insurance im all for it. The way we do it is very attract i have to getting and keeping good people and but one of the challenges is that you mention you have cobra which was very expensive, but because of the tax situation, if youre an employer or selfemployed, you get to deduct your premiums which effectively reduces the cost quite a bit, if yourees just an individual who either wants to change jobs or lost a job and has to go on cobra, you go on the individual market, you have to pay aftertax dollars,v so already when you go out there, 30, 40, 50 behind and thats got the change. You get development of an individual market and one of the reforms we have to make is toin make it feasible and easier to leave an employer, you own the insurance policy and if it cost 13,000, you pay 13,000. Its not 17 or 22 or 32 and have to go on exchanges where you have 50,000dollar deductible o and you have to go specialist 50 miles away. Thats the kind of system we have to change and those changes are very feasible and i think again when hospitals an clinics know that you the individual actually control it is dollars, not the employer, employers too often and we are sort of guilty of it, we try to do our best, its sort of awe off onesizefitsall. We offer a policy and we think its a good one specially the 2,500 we give you to meet thec deductible cash, you may you may conclude that doesnt fit your particular needs, each individual has particular needs and you should be able to choose what meets your needs, not what an employer thinks, so we want a true market. You can get it through the employer, you can get it through the union, you can get it through an association or whatever, an individual market,a just like you do with home owners insurance or car insurance. I want that kind of competition and geico thing, whatever you call him, we have Something Better for you, we can do it cheaper for you. E thats the kind of competition i want and i want you to control those dollars. To by the way, one thing on this, because of the system we have. Again, nobody designed it, people dont realize how much they actually for for Health Insurance. Not just deductibles in copays, its also the taxes you pay to the federal government to finance medicare, the tax you pay to federal government to finance your portion of medicaid, the taxes you pay to state governments to finance their portions of medicaid, the salary that you might have lost because the company has to buy the Health Insurance that could have gone to you in terms of salary. It adds up to over your lifetime. E over your lifetime without you even know it, you effectivelyen spend 1. 9 million on health care and most people have no idea what the true price of what theyre paying is. Host now for every author we have on indepth on book tv we ask him or her the books they are currently reading, some of the books that are important to them, influences, here are some of steve forbes answers and if youre on the line, stay on the line because we will be coming back to take your calls. Host and steve forbes you list as one of your influences Alexander Hamilton, here is a quote from your book money in remember reins remembrance of Alexander Hamilton, money properly understood is the root of all good. Guest yes, when he became treasury secretary the u. S. Secrt jumped nation and our debts were shambles. B he study it had bank of england and studied how britain smaller than france because did finances right was able to beat the french empire and so he wanted to take some of those basicc principles here. One of them was he realized the need for stable value of money so he fix it had dollar to gold and instituted a revenue system for the government and took over state debts because he wantede debt holders around the country to have a stake in the success of enterprise and took the shambles of the debt situation from the revolutionary war andnd rationalized it and he established the mint. He got the system of finance going that was critical and is underappreciated by historians, maybe the play hamilton will get people to look at hamilton in a more serious way, a critical reason we went from a small east coast nation, largely farming to the mighty industrial nation of the world and within a hundred years, extraordinary. Even more impressive than what britain did, we take it for granted. Host you seen hamilton on broadway . Guest i havent, probably three years before i get a ticket. Theyre hard to get. [laughter] host 202 is our area code. We are going to put the phone lines up, we are going to put the social media addresses up and we are going to put up the text address, this is for only Text Messages only, 510 3405559. That again is for Text Messages only. If you would like to send one s identify your name and city. I do wanting to to a text message that we have been holding here and this is from scott in pennsylvania, mr. Forbes, you would consider a position . To guest im glad that he thinks scott thinks that i would be qualified and get the call. The key thing is to make sure the ideas are right and whoever is president not only understand it but will make clear to his or her staff, dont get in the way of the reforms that are needed. One of the secretary ships today and really frustrating governorr is when you come in the president is not your boss, you have all the white house staffers that think they know more than you do and dont mind trying to show how smart they are by micro managing you. You have to set up the rules, whoever is president , whoever it is, i will be sending my ideas even though im a scottsman. I will send him a free copy of my book. Host why would you say it would not happen of for a variety of reasons . Guest factors that go into picking a cabinet member. Taken care of certain parts of country, certain parts of the party, certain groups that you want to show that youre attentive to and so or maybe a headline about some crisis in asia so you may want somebody who recognized expert in these. A whole variety of these. Its not one postbut a whole number of posts when you go into these things and when you read how its done, its kind of a partly science at the beginning they say, come up with ten names and blah, blah, blah, and then the end they say, this person might be good but we have to use political cabal to get him him or her through congress, through the senate and even though they might be good, maybe we should save for something else. No, im keeping my day job for now. Host raymond in tyler, texas your question to steve. Caller my question is on the Gold Standard. The gold is a solid currency in regard to keeping our sovereignty as a nation and having a solid currency that is impenetrable by other nations and it is a standard, going along with law of economics, bad currency drives out good currency. When we got off the Gold Standard, we established bad currency, thats just my opinion. Now, when other countries go up in currency, you know, valuing or whatever, it hammers us. So we hit the same wall of punishment that theyre getting, but it affects everybody here in our country, every citizen. The law doesnt respect personality. Its solid. Either we conform by an act of our will to have something stable, like whats going on noo in the government, honesty. Okay. Honesty is can be considered a currency of exchange as well. Host hey, raymond, could you wrap this up so we can get ald response . Caller yes, it doesnt choose sides. We need to get back to the basics that we yield to, go ahead, im through. Guest thank you, and the key is having currency with stable valued like Alexander Hamilton recognized more than 215 years ago and fixed it to gold just as british pound was fixed to gold and thats a critical reason why we have this great road that we have and we discussed earlier, we had a Gold Standard for 180 years and it worked. We had the greatest growth of any nation in history, a lot of factors, other factors that worked but we got the money right and since weve been off the Gold Standard our average growth rate has been far lower than we were on it, average, over time and our Economy Today if we had the same growth we had when we were on gold, we wouldw be 8 trillion bigger, economyur today. Over 40 years comp pounding hurts because investing is risky, if you dont know what youre going to get paid back in, you get less productive investing and when you had a fixed value for the dollar, guess what happened . You have less currency trading. You dont have to worry about what the dollar is worth in oklahoma versus texas. Its the same currency. Y. Today having all these flowing currencies, currency trading on a daily basis is 5. 3 trillion. More than stocks and bonds putm together. Tens of thousands of the best minds in the world focus on trying to make money trading currencies. Huge waste of resources, huge waste of brain power, thats why we have to get back to a Gold Standard and also you hit the word trust. Trust is what makes a currency work. And when you lose trust, then w it leads to all sorts of social problems and just as you have 12inches in a foot or 60 minutes in an hour, you should have a Stable Currency that would make life a lot better than what we have been going through. H. Host here is a text message of northern virginia, what is your thought on bit coin . Guest the challenge, hightech cry for help. These and other currencies rose up because of a lack of faith in the dollar and sense of wanting privacy. The challenging with bit coin as i see it is its still unstable in value. Lets say you got paid in bit t coins, one week you could buy cobey beef or steaks. What is coming out of the bit coin is new Payment System. We dont realize how expensive and complicated our whole Banking Finance Payment System is today. We think when we go to the card we swipe our card, boy, isnt that magic, yeah, it is, you ask a merchant, why do i have to pay 36 for that card swipe. What bit coin is showing you can do this for a fraction of the Payment System of what we have today. Not good news for some of the credit cards, not good news for American Express and in terms of electronic banking, one of the countries that lead in electronic banking because they have to, they have no choice, is kenya. Hand helds because they cant have a traditional system. Handheld devices in terms of telephones. You are going to have telephoned poles, you could get all aroundc that with the handheld telephones and devices. You may not have to have all the infrastructure we have today. Youre already seeing online lenders beginning to emerge who can do it at a fraction of the cost and far more efficiently than the traditional system, so if youre in banking, its not just government regulation thats killing you, the web may do to you what it did to the printing industry. [laughter] host in your book freedommat manifesto we taught in grade school that Thomas Edison invented bulb because he we wanted to create better lighting, true or false . Guest he always wanted to do things better, but what this goes to show is that Human Emotions are there and the key thing is to channel them in a productive direction. Thomas edison was mad at the gas man, in those days gas was source of illum nation, he was always flowing behind in his bills and we have a note, my grandfather back in 1920, edisoe note about is this legend about why he invented the lightbulb and it is true. Yes, in essence its true, i wag paying 5 a day to postpone a judgment on my small factoryry then came the gas man, hi cut off my gas, that made me so mad that techniques and technology to see if electricity couldnt be made to replace gas. I stuck to it, but i didnt hurt them at all except lately 40 years. Anger at the gasman who had edison going for the lightbulb and electricity to replace traditional gas. When you get angry, think of how can i make money off of this. Host hi, joe. Caller hi, steve, i would like to hear your critique of the fair tax and whether donald trump would oppose because it would hit big real estate projects so hard . In terms of the fair taxes, its a National Sales tax, we discussed it extensively in the book. The effective rate is not the advertised 23, we explain why the real rate is 30 . If you go to the store and buyf something 100, youre going to pay 30 sales tax, its meant ts replace the income tax and payroll tax, primarily but the challenge with the National Sales tax, several fold, one is just political, when you say 30 rate people recoil. You can talk about embedded prices all you want, they just think, oh, my god, when i buy a new house im going to have to pay a 30 tax. Yes, you will. And so thats a challenge. Another challenge which is also very important is the 16th amendment to the constitution. Sixteenth amendment allows washington to impose an income tax, if you dont repeal the 16th amendment to the constitution, i guaranty youll, youll have both income tax and sales tax. In europe they have high incomei tax and they have valueaddedhi tax, sort of a sales tax. And so you have to repeal the 16th amendment. Then you to challenge of compliance. D its one thing to put a tax on a product, but what abouthat services. When you get high rates and people have a huge incentive to get around that, a kid comes and cuts your lawn, youre going to pay a 30 of tax on that, ia dont think so. We talked about the fair tax says theyll put 30 tax on a new house, but not on an existing house. Well, then you get into a problem defining what is new and what is a traditional house, take a traditional house, you gut the thing, keep the facade maybe and redo the whole thing. Does the 30 sales apply to that . You will have to deal with the thorny particular questions. Who collects the tax, the fair tax people, sales tax people want the states to collect it but theyre only going to pay one quarter of 1 to collect the thing, not much of incentive. The state will make sure they get their tax but they dont care about uncle sam. And so you take the 30 rate, you combine it with some states like california, 8 to 10 , people just think 3040 tax very hard sale and you have definition problem, the definition on the sales tax, if you buy something for the business, you dont pay the sales tax, thats what the fair tax people say. So lets go to home depot, buy some lumber, im using it to buy for my business, who is going tk make sure you didnt do it for Home Improvement and use it tor sell something online. E. You have real thorny combined problems, you can probably get around these and i want change now and the flat tax has been done around the world, we can do it quickly, maybe fair tax can be done with education and the next generation, but we need action now. Host so if someone wants to buy your book, which of your books would you recommend . Guest well, all of them, they make [laughter]o to guest in terms of the political season, the reviving america explains in a very straightforward way three big things that need to be done and weve got to get these issues out there, not just in this election season but next year, on the federal level and also on the state level and health caren you know, 20 of our economy, its the most personal thing possible that effects all of us clearly its not working and the whole idea and this is where the candidates fail, you can turn what looks like a hopeless complicated mess where the bureaucrats seem to play, whack, whack whack, into Something Dynamic like hightech where we all come ahead. This is exciting stuff. Host from your book money what kind of society sells a lifelong burden of indebtedness to people inexperienced withie money who are at the beginning of their working lives, you mention college . Guest well, even two or three years ago college debt was begin to go emerge as an issue but now its well over a trillion dollars. And one of the things that has happened with all good intentions is that as cost went up, government came in, subsidize loans, pel grants and the like and what did it end up doing, it end up raising tuitions and so youre on a vicious cycle, you look at the growth of administrative costs of these institutions, thats a tale tell sign when that goes ua faster than Teaching Research and theres a lot of bloat out there. Nice big buildings and swimming pools, very nice but not the essence of learning and the students coming out of college, specially graduate schools is g the way you really see it where you have a mini mortgage and no house to show for it and right now because of these mistakes we have been making a market and keep in the government and the government has incentives where if you work in government you get a faster pay ah forgiveness than if you work producing things from the private sector which is bizarre. We want people to produce thing. So its bad all around. By the way, it can be done in terms of controlling costs and parents are begin toning to wake up on this. He is successful executive in the private sector, very successful governor where he turned a state that was in trouble into the triple h. A credit, no energy, no hightech, real hard work because hes been able to put in the system and under control expensings and i think almost five years now it had no tuition increases. If you look at phenomenal tuitions increases, most of them are 60,000. Perdue is 48. No more tuition increases, it tells the story. The Admissions Department said this will hurt us attracting students, he said, what do you mean, if our price is less than others people are going to think we are an inferior institution because why are we cheaper, must be we are not as good. Now its the opposite. Can we say again theres going to be in tuition increase because a lot of the kids we want to get would love the idea. We have to get pressure from parents and others. P you dont go in institutions and carve out a lot of fat, so you have to get people inside to work with you, putin centives inside to cut out the unnecessary costs. Over time it adds cost. Thats the model of perdue. Host youre the father of five daughters, you figured out how much youve spent for College Education . Guest i dont want to know. U [laughter] but the thing is parents want to do it, but i think now proposed Admissions Department to president daniels is that parents are saying what are we g getting for this money what are you getting as a student and that leads to pushing kids to do more economics, more business, but you also still want to have a system where they can do the humanities. Steve jobs understood, theyreen intermingled like marble in the animal. The famous nobel prize, he create it had green revolution which saved tons of millions of people from around the world from famine. I remember him giving address to students 20 years ago and he said to students, he said dont specialize too early or if you do, make sure you take courses outside your comfort zone because he said you never know what you might need to draw on in life. When he started to make the breakthrough in the green revolution, he said i needed about economics which i didnt study very much, i needed to know about politics, all these things that were outside of my immediate sphere, i had to draw it. E so see it as a way of exercisins the mind and one thing perdue does, i think i get this right, daniels discovered when he went there, they had core curriculum but 363 courses. So what he did was put together a package of courses. So you take real humanity courses because most of the kids that go there are engineers, major in engineering in one sort of another but as the incentive of taking this package or course here that might be easy, tryingk to go to class on saturday or sunday, whatever, if you take oa that package, you get a certificate, you complete it had course, one extra thing that you can add to your workforce. College is right for entrepreneur innovation. Host john, ocean springs, mississippi, youre on the line with steve forbes. Caller im interesting in your thought on obama healthcare repeal and i wonder if you looked at the bush care Prescription Drug program to be repealed. That program cost about 70 billion a year and has the highest drug costs in the world, i believe. I have the va programs and when negotiated drug prices we get half what the program has because the bush plan has no negotiations in it. [inaudible] host lets get a response. Thank you, john. Guest in terms of what they call part d of medicare which is the drug plan, i think thats it, maybe its part c, but anyway, the challenge there is again the whole medical system, Healthcare System does not have real free markets. And one of the things that needs badly needs reform is the whole area of approval of new drugs, food and Drug Administration largely still has mentality of the 1950s, for example, they love Clinical Trials which back then made sense but for a lot of the new drugs today for cancer, why should you to take a placebo when there might be something already there that can help you out with the disease that can kill you . And so theyve got to radically reform and i think if you get effective reform there and so you dont have to spend 2 billion to bring a new drug to market, which is what you have now, when you go overseas, for example, those countriesas when they buy drugs from our companies here in effect get at low cost because they dont pay for the research and development. 2billion that went into create the drug. So if we get reform there, you youll get more drug makers. Right now a company that starts out with a promising drug, often has to sell out or partner with an existing drug company to get through the maze of the fda which ends up costing us. S so again, that would be right for reform and what george w. H bush did on that part even though the cost came in below estimation, is one thing where government didnt underestimate the cost, youre right, that its a whole part part of the whole problem and cause a lot of anker among republicans which eventually led to their defeat in 2006. So, yeah, more free markets, more consumer Patient Choice anm we will get, again, it sounds utopia but it will work. We have seen pieces of it where you will get more for less. Host jim, anchorage, alaska, hi, jim. Caller hello, steve, thanks for taking my call. I have a small question concerning health care. Currently when a person is discharged from a hospital he or she can receive bills, one, two, three, six months a year later and these bills from the labs, the doctors, the hospital and theyre also hard to read. It looks to me as though with computers and if all the groups that bill knew this that when that patient left the hospital they have one bill they would have their bills there on time o and the patient would more easily know if the charges were applicable to that particular operation or whatever, i was just wondering what do you see as impediments to this type of billing . When you get a car fixed, you get one bill, you dont get a bill for the nuts, the bolts, the person thats working in some place else, you dont get different costs coming in and i just wonder your thoughts on implement in such procedure. Guest the patient is really not the customer but the third parties. Government and large insurers,t the Insurance Companies and employers, and if you ask if you go to a hospital clinic today and you ask what a treatment is going to cost anda because weve grown up with thel system, we dont realize howha strange that is, you get a strange look. Either youre unsured or youre crazy. Why would you want to know the price . Whats it to you . Insurance will take care of it and we will send you if you owea anything. They want to keep you passive and ignorant and thats the way the system is geared whereas if you start making reforms where the patient has that consumer power, they know they have to and youre going to be saying yes or no on whether they get paid, theyll be a lot different attitude even with computers today, you cannot read unless you youre a genius the bill that is you get. And you try to file for a claim, you feel absolutely lost and bewildered and no hotel or as you pointed out a car repair would dare give you a bill and because its thirdparty pay and not you the patient, you end up getting, they say, well the Insurance Company takes three months to decide how much of the 500dollar thing theyre going to cover and how much youre going to cover. They have over 20,000 different diagnoses, whatever they call them, so you have to talk with your doctor. If its one kind of particular diagnosis, insurance wont cover it or maybe only cover 50 but its almost like it they cover 85 . Its an insane system. Thats why we have to get it simplified, thank you the consumer and you wont get the crazy situations, youll know in advance when youre in charge the hospitals in advance, the clinics in advance will tell you, this is what its going to cost, you see little signs in pennsylvania, theres a hospital chain called geisinger and several years they instituted, legally they cant call them warranties but in effect, if they dont do something right, the procedures is on them. If they botched in the operation, the next one is on them. And you think in a normal market everyone else would quickly have to do that with the automobiles, if one company says we will give you a 10year warranty, the others quickly follow suit. That doesnt happen in health care because its thirdparty pay. And not you the patient. And so you get get hospital rooms who look like an old boarding house, everyone jammedl in and its weve grown up with it so we dont realize howo unnecessary and crazy it is even though a lot of the equipment is fantastic and a lot of smart people, the system itself is just not working. Host gary is calling in froo lopez island, washington. Hello, gary. G caller hello, steve. This is your friend from freedom fest, we did play stage togethers. Guest none of us are in hollywood. Caller on the state level some state legislators are advocating goal gold and overseas Central Banks like russia and china and so many others are favoring gold over paper. Is it possible that that kind of a creeping gradual gold standarn will start internationally and here in the United States . Guest well, i think getting a Gold Standard one is and this is one reason why we wrote the book, is so the people get an understanding of what the thing actually is and not the myth incrusted thing that we are told by economist. Its very simple. Its like having a ruler with 12inches. It doesnt restrict the size, it means you have a basis of measurement to make it possible to do construction efficiently and safely. Same thing with the economy,ve having a Stable Currency. And so the idea framework is beginning to be laid. The chinese have been studying this for several years. Nn i wouldnt be surprised over the next decade they dont mess up Economic Reforms theyre trying to do now, china goes to a Gold Standard before we do. Theyre begin to go realize the necessity of a Stable Currency and so i think, yes, its beginning to happen and the more we get people studying it, what it really is and what it isnt, i think youre right. It will happen and state level, states can contribute to it byo doing what utah and others have done and one of the things weyo can do follow the meantime ine this country is remove the barriers against alternative currencies. So if you want to establish your own currency, youre free to do so and you dont have to worry about the fbi throwing you in jail. Thats not counterfeiting, thisw is an alternative currency and specially with hightech, it becomes more and more feasible. So remove all those barriers, tax barriers, regulatory barriers and something mightri emerge in the marketplace that we cant even conceive of today. Host here is a text message from the 717 area code, i think thats pennsylvania some where. Mr. Forbes what do you think about bringing jobs back from china . Guest we dont bring jobs back, as we outline in the book, Foreign Companies will be investing here on a level we cant even imagine. We have a little a flavor of that in the 80s when we started to move ahead in the rest of the world. Chemical companies are coming here now because we have lowenergy costs and you get the right environment and capital will flow into this country. Who knows in terms of manufacturing what will be done with 3d printing and other technological advances. S with dishes and the like, but now with Laser Technology they can be precise in a way and cheap in a way where you can make close that are now done in a third world and you may able to do a. You wont need many people, but Laser Technology is very promising. Instead of thinking of us losing, creating, i want an environment where Everyone Wants to come here because we make good currency, good legal system, good tax system and you want to be here. People when they look at their uncertain governments they are around the world even now with all of our troubles, we are in trouble, but we are better off than most of the rest of the world, which is why they want their kids to go to school here and why they want real estate here. They realize this is a they realize this is a safer pathways that just aboutn the h anywhere else in the world . Host the most recent by stephen ford steves forbes. , the new birth of freedom vision for america. Host a place and video that you can see there and you will know what is about. Eight from march of this year. Forbes puts me down at 4. 5 million net worth. Im not complaining, but its more than that. Why is it that forbes raised me 400 million this year . I should be happy and i am happy. When difference does it make, but why are the forbes number so much lower than the value of what i built . Host what was that about, mr. Forbes . Guest guest donald trump always thinks we underestimate his wealth and we go through this every year and the essence of it is putting aside various properties. The essence of it is that he thinks we should put several billion value on his name and in terms of how we value wealth we say you monetize it and then we will counted as value. We do this for everyone, not just donald trump, but opera and others. You may have value, but you monetize. Thats the big difference, but he is irrepressible. I have to tell you a story, shouldnt, but i will. Its in the magazine. We did a story on his wealth last fall for richest list and he disputed as he did there , thinks its much more. So, the editor went to his office, the same day up the pope was in new york , so trump tower has a balcony and went out on the balcony and a lot of latinos were down there and so there were cheers for donald trump, but some boos as well and trump turns to the writer and said c, 90 , approval. Then, he says this shows also you underestimate the value of trump towers, the pope goes this building to begin his new york parade. Its like steve jobs, trump tries to make the world as he makes thinks it should be. Its can be a shortcoming, can also be a source of strength. He sees what he wants it to be and thats what has made him an real estate and why he has these buildings. He made it happen. Em, by the way, whatever youpe think of him, one reason he succeeded against all expectations and people think they knew him because hes been on 10 tv four 10 years, so people that they knew him. He started out with higher rent name recognition than jeb bush. Whats also helped was because hes an real estate. A building just doesnt happen. So, people could see. He made it happen. You dont give a speech at a building and a building rises that. He made a happen and thats what gave him that initial credible and. This is more than software. You can see a big building, a big bridge or golf course or whatever and thats what gave him his original authority. We were discussing earlier, his challenge now that he has the nomination locked up is taking it to the next step in recognizingow w everything he says now will be examined. He thought he was examined earlier, he aint seen nothing yet to what they will try to do to him, so he has to put that Team Together and make it to the next step. Host where did the forbes 40 come from . Guest came from my father back in the early 80s. Thought it would be fascinating to see who had it. Who was losing it, who is making it, what areas it was coming from andd so he said to our editors we are going to do the 400 because back in the late 1800s man had the 400 of the new york most powerful people in the senate like a good number, so my father went with it. And our editors that him tooth and nail. They said this is not like a publicly traded company where you can add up what shares are worth and what capital companys capital is in that type of thing here we do this, cant be done, so finally my father said, if you are not going to do it on going to take money and do it myself. So, finally they got together and put the Team Together and started to do its. R as we made clear, these are estimates. Some cases you get cooperation in some s cases you dont. You talk to bankers, you talk to competitors and get a good idea of linkage. My fathers hunch was right. The volatility each year you have five, 10, 15 change as people move up, go down and who is on and who came off. Ars ago energy sector, obviously a lot of those people have taken a huge hit, so its the the churn is amazing. Up pil you see the same thing around the world. We think of the wealth as piles of gold. No, its here today gone tomorrow as we found out as with the price of oil. Host do other people like donald trump dispute are once again the list the list . Guest donald not only wants to be on the list, he thinks we never get it right and we are always too low even though we have gone up. Several years ago it was up 2 billion and he thinks its for now he thinks it should be eight half or 10 or pick a number, so we are always 50 behind in the way he calculates it. But, a lot of others want to be off of it. T i think a classic case in terms of complaint was a fellow who called up several years ago furious and it wasnt so much our estimate that he took issue with, it was that he was on the list and he was in the midst of a divorce and did not want his wife to know we had. [laughter]er] guest we found it. Host who is Sabina Aikman . Guest my wife. We have been married now almost 45 years. We met 46 and half years ago at a party. An sitting next to each other. Amazing what chance plays on these things and i being a smart alec offered her a cigar. We read a posh club and without missing a beat she took it, lifted up and said if you want to play that game i can to. Man host and you have 5. , we are involved in forbes media . Guest right now one. Moira heads of the womens side and various conferences. Just had a successfulce. Womens conference and the other two scattered around the country. One is in dallas. What is in seattle. T t but, they all got through that team years thanks to their mother. One thing i would recommend for parents, especially with teenage daughters, one is the mother, brace for it. R you get more than the father does. And remember in a very different context what lincoln said, this tosh shall pass. Host scott tweets into you fathers day is coming up. What do you miss no space are dead the everyday interaction. He was one of theseyour originals who you neverst knew what was going to come out of his mind. He was always thinking, always saying things. So it was constant peer people, they say, are addicted to their handhelds and we were always wondering, what will he come up with next that we would not have conceived of like t the issue of the 400. I and he was intrepid. Talk about motorcycles. I wouldnt go right one. Are led to look at them. They are beautiful things, but as he got older he rode to the more instead of less. In his late 50s he started to go to newe york on a motorcycle and even worse, he started to write in the city. New york city straits with the potholes. Rol you had generation role reversal with the kid telling the father, dadr, these are dangerous. Be caref you can hurt yourself. Yet to be careful and he did have at least three serious accidents on motorcycles and one nearly killed him. M. Did not stop him. Host and he gifted one to elizabeth taylor. D it guest purple. She was coming out with purple passion, i think it was, perfume. Yes, that kind of gesture, yes. He loved to do that. Host do you still have the plane or the ship . Guest we dont. The plane was a 727. Talk about fuel consumption. No, it does not work. In the boat, no. Six years ago it became plane that was good for advertising, getting business if no one else had one, but it had lost its ability to attract business and so scottish flood came and. Costeffective, no. Beautiful, but not cost effective. Again, that gets to the tools, change with the times. Host next call for steve forbes. Dave from ohio. Yoller good afternoon cspan and the wonderful cspan audience. Good afternoon to you, mr. Forbes. Guest thank you. Caller im a reader of your magazine the last 50 years on and off and its given me some wonderful ideas. Guest thank you. Caller going onto Social Security, emily a bit upset because if i talk to 99 out of 100 people, everyone thinks it will not be there. They think its going bankrupt and they are so misinformed by i hate to say it, and a lot of our media. Now, the question isw,he this and i will draw the picture. You remember in the early 80s when greenspan, tip oneill and Ronald Reagan in a o day or two Social Security headache 50 billion surplus. In other words, it was close, but not bankrupt, but close. Today, that surplus is close to 3 trillion. Now, you started off in the program and your daughter grandfather said money should bring happiness, not pileup. Dont you think it would be a wonderful thing for our economy that theop people who helped get the surplus, mainly the baby boomers, now get additional benefitse before someone comes in and takes it and literally steals it . Your thoughts, please. Guest interesting question and the sad news is that the money has already been stolen. Its already been spent. That 3 trillion surplus with the socalled trust fund, the trust fund in name only. The the only thing that trust fund has our ious, nonmarketable from thattthe us treasury department. Social security money comes in when our payroll taxes going, they are immediately spent in the get on iou to the Social Security ministration. Thats why you remember five years ago we nearly had a default on Us Government bonds because we were going to raise the debt ceiling ande there were fears people would not get theirf Social Security checks. Well, if you had a 3 trillion surplus in marketable government securities, that would paper benefits for four or five years, six years. But, the money was not there. It had already been spent. Now, if a private company did that, took money from the workers, spent eight and then gave a nonmarketable iou , those executives would go to jail. But, in washington is considered high finance. So, with that 3 trillionon, to it does not exist in one of the things i hope the next president will do is take some of these nonmarketable ious and substitutes salable government bonds. H take them out of the Federal Reserve. Its complicated, but i think it can be done, so if you do get a crisis again you dont have to worry about people not getting their Social Security checks. Now, that 3 trillion also is supposed to be reserved like a pensionon fund or a 4o1k for future benefits. Its not just for those on the system today, but not only pay what they did today, but make sure the reserves are there when revenue start to come in less and i goes the baby or generation as they retire. Those are supposed to be reserves like pensions funds and 41ks and the like, so in terms of Social Security the key thing is we do have enough wealth in the economy to pay for the current promise benefits for those on the system and those that will go on the system for the next 10 or 15 or 20 years. The problem comes with younger people, people in their teens, 20s, 30s. It will not be there for them because itsll no payasyougo. There are no real reserves there. L so, thats why, i think,k, for younger people they should put in the system were part of their payroll tax goes to their own personalo account. Plenty of rules and regulations about diversity, diversity diversifying and i cannot spend it, but it is their property. Right now, those benefits you pay in each year you get a notice from Social Security saying what you will getnot under certain assumptions. You think this is money that is there, it isnt. The courts have ruledi that you dont on that money at all even though you contributed to it. They make it sound like its yours and so i want a system especially for younger people where they actually own that money come on thosetuown assets so politicians can play games with itt like they do now where they say theres a two half or three trillion dollars surplus that it does exist we shouldnt do that to future generations, but in terms of the system today if we get normal growth rates in this country, normal productivity, the system or as and for the next coming generation is there to pay the promised benefits. We continue to make idiotic mistakes, which we have done in recent years then there will be nothing there forbe anyone, but so, thats why think we need to get these reforms in so have the resources there to meet the promises to our generation and the next generation, but also t bring in a new system where return again like healthcare, liability into an asset because when kids get their first parttime job and start accumulating this money that money is invested whether you deposited with a bank or indexed fonder whatever y you do with it it gets invested and macros the economy. Host email to you, mr. Forbes. Flat tax is meant to make the rich get richerj , just like whenk reagan reduced the top rate from 70 to 40 . To give to the millionaires, 300,000 reduction in tax on each successive 1 million in income. You are looking at things through the eyes of the wealthy. Guest im looking at the eyes through someone like most americans who want to see this economy grow again. So, people who start with a better least have a chance to get more and as lincoln put its improve their lot in life and right now, we have a stagnant economy. Who gets hurt the most . Os incomes are not risingfo for low income people. They are not rising for middle income earners. We dont have the upward mobility we have had in the past, which is whye we at the political frustration today, so i flat tax and thats why it works around the world it enables an economy to focus our resources in our brainpower on productive things instead of this idiotic tax code. So, in terms of growing incomes by the way, john kennedy, we host talk about Ronald Reagan, john kennedy reduced income tax rates across the board about 23, 25 including the top and so you could accuse him of favoring the rich, but whatnn kennedys tax cut when they were finally enacted in johnson led to the booming 1960s. Reagans lead to thehe booming 1980s. We agree millions and millions of new jobs, including more highpaying jobs instead of these parttime jobs yeah, you are counted as input, but you are not getting what you are worth, so we went to get the dynamism of a growing economy. Flat tax is one great way to do it and as for tax lawyers and irs agents, even though im a conservative i would support job retraining or perhaps urge them to go and work for uber, something useful. [laughter] host becky kurt laseak in palm desert, california. Who is the smartest person you know in or out of governments and whats the best run us city and state . Guest guest the best run city and state. In terms of smart people, one of the things is there are a lot of smart people. The key is, its not enough to have the smarts. You also had judgments and willingness toan learn. D a a lot of people who have iqs that could boil water, but who cant seem to translate it into doing Something Big. So, yes, a lot of brain power, but they come to conclusions that i disagree with. So, that is the nature of life. Its not enough to have brainpower. You have to have a lot of otherf characteristics. By the way, people can also focus on a particular area and do very well even if someone would say, they are not boiling water with their iq. Thats not the key thing. I think in the early days we were gettinggr back to it in terms of computer programming. That takes brainpower, but they dont care if you know how to do it if youre really good at it and you were a kid and started to get into this, they dont care if you finish high school or finish college. You can do the job and they want you. Some of these jobs, 10000 month. 10000 a month. 100,000 signing bonus. Hundred thousand tinynot hundred thousand dollars in stock options. Its not the degree, its how you apply what you have that i think we will see more and more of in this economy. In terms of the dynamism of the economy, thatsom how we get ahead. Again, you gettrepren entrepreneur, people doing things that come from the most unlikely areas, middle agewho milkshake machine salesman who inventeddern the modern Restaurant Industry or henry fordwho who could not run a Corner Grocery store helps create one of the greatest enterprises in the world. Its amazing story that unfolds. Host to take beckys city state question. Do you have anything that comes to mind or politician you admire greatly today . Guest well, i mentioned he was former governor of indiana, Mitch Daniels who demonstrated in indiana, over relentless work, not just one big day, but relentless day to day work that you can do a government should do, do it more efficiently. Reduced taxes and turn a state that should have been a basket case into one of the best Credit Ratings in the country. On the opposite side, you take the word grease and translate it into english and you get illinois. One of the worst rated credit states in the country. Chicago is about to go t broke. State, a great governor,t but the Legislature Just isnt loblaw land and believes you have to weigh that revenue, so its a disaster. Pl so, i think Mitch Daniels is an example of what can be done with good leadership. Illinois, what happens when overtime, a series of bad decisions made. By golly they come toh bite and i will give a good word to people dont seem to like him anymore, but scott walker in wisconsin. Those reforms are starting to really kick in. He took a lot of grief for them. I dont know why that campaign was so disastrously run, but in illinois i mean, wisconsin he did real things to request causes always been a Laboratory Whether its a progressive era, welfare reform, Tommy Thompson 80s became the basis for clinton welfare reform in the 90s and what walker has done, so thats what federalism is supposed to be about. See what works and then maybe do it nationally. Host just a few minutes left with steve forbes on the tv. Bobby from south carolina. Caller first time caller. Im kind of nervous. Im 50. When i was 45, my familyse has a history of Heart Disease and to play golf the week before, through batting practice through 16 in 19 youre olds and played softball, but that friday i had aa heart attack when i was 45. Host i apologize, bobby, but wf are running out of time. If you could get to your question for mr. Forbes. Caller i will write him. Host thank you, sir. Thank you for callingha in. Ron is in hampshire. Hello, ron. Caller thank you for taking my call. Steve, what to ask you about the tax implemented with the uniting amendment. Its a flat tax, but has no exemptions that no deduction that all, soy revenue neutral flat tax with those conditions is about half a percent and the tax is everything the advantages are it gets raided the distortion of our Current System the other taxes the intermediate sales and would have side effects like discouraging highfrequency stock trading and making longterm investments more tax efficient in the forward only pay half a percent on their income, so i was wondering what you thought about that tax. Guest anything that is low is music to my ears, so if you want to send me more detail on the and we do have to get rid of the 16th amendment of the constitution, something where the tendency is whenever you bring in a new tax it stays any other taxes stay and its very very hard to get them down once they are implanted, so lets mem know what the ideas. When you say tax everything that encompasses a lot of things i want to be sure i know what exactly we are getting into. Thank you. Host neville, cleveland, ohio hello. Caller i would like to ask whether your client has got any opinion about florida the. Warren buffett and billa gates a lot about philanthropy and i have not heard mr. Forbes he same thing about this. Does he have an opinion about the way wealthy people distribute or pass on their funds to other people, other groups, other nations. Host what do you think, neville i mean, what do you think that you should be what is your point . Caller my opinion is that Warren Buffett and bill gates are setting a fine example. Host thank you, sir. Guest one of the amazing thing about the United States is that we see our most philanthropic nation in the world. Tax gifts are over 300 billion a year. That doesnt count the millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars thatt people contribute in terms of volunteer timealmo and that has been true almost from our very een existence. We are also the most commercial nation ever invented and people think they are opposite poles. They are not. Commerce is about meeting the needs and wants of other people, effective forever be the same thing. A many examples, you mentioned gates and buffett of people who have done well in the private sector are also very effective in glory of the peak and what gates is doing in terms of fighting malaria and other diseases, very inspiring and when he is trying to do in education and i think Warren Buffett made aa good point, one of the points buffett likes to make is that in terms ofi if you are a entrepreneur and went to get involved in a raspy, dont go for the things that are even done, what he calls the routes of the easy things. Go for something where you have a high risk ofc failure. Go out of bounds, frontier. Try to make thingst happen. You may not work for a while, just like a new business, most dont succeed, but go on the frontier. Go out of your comfort zone and make things happen that others have not done yet to be effective. So, in terms of the reforms, one of the things we point out in the book on the tax ideas when the American People have more they give more. N pe they dont need to be bribed by the tax codes. Even before we had an income tax, we weree there giving nation and in the 1980s a lot of florida the peak that when reagan cut the top rate from 70 and got a 20 that it would hurt charitable giving. Uncle sam in effect would not be subsidizingunc 70 of the dollar given, but only 28 of each dollar given, but what happened was the opposite. People not only gave more, but the rates of growth fund up as well. When people have more they give it more and this country, Research Shows roughly the American People in cash gifts given about the of 2 gdp a year,t roughly about 350 billion. In good times it may go up a bit to 2. 2 and in rough times it may go down a bit, but its fairly constant, so the bigger the economy the more people give. The more people have the more they get. Host steve forbes we try to do this program back in april. What happened . Guest we had a train accident. i was coming down on the amtrak and outside of philadelphia and suddenly the train came to an abrupt halt, noth the kind of thing normally slowing down a rounded curve or anything. Nythin fortunately, we were in the last car, back of the train. So, we were jolted and our coffee flew into things flew, but thankfully we didnt. The front of the train had real injuries and sadly to workers, how it came that you had people working on a track with a train coming on in this day and age especially, those two workers were killed. So, we are in the back car. We stopped. Nothing was said. I wish they would have a new work on system for where they can say, stay calm. We did not go out of the train because they was a track on one side, track on the other and we were not going to risk that, so about half hour layer there were rumors with people coming back and forth and before thewe First Responders came to say theres been an accident, dont move and will tell you want to get off. About 15, 20 minutesnt later we walked carefully down the steps, went across the tracks, went across the field and thankfully in this town there was at church that had an adjacent gymnasium and we could go in there and waited to see what was going to happen and the Amtrak Police had to manifest to see who was on so they would check names to make sure no one was missing. Yeah, you just dont know in these situations so, we waited and buses came. You arranged kindly for a car for me to get back home since i was not going to get here on time, but they still have not come up with eight definitive report on what happened on that. Thankfully, i was not in the front cars because the injuries would have been very seriousst losin instead of just losing your copy of getting a jolt. Host and you can have on the train today. Good guest train today, uneventful. Host uneventful, good. Steve forbes most recent book is reviving america how repealing obama care and replacing the tax code and reforming the fred will restore hope and prosperity. This is been book tv on cspan2 indepth. Cspan, created by americas cabletelevision companies and brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] host it is sponsored by the chicago tribune. Many local and National Authors you will hear from today and tomorrow. Today, some of the authors include o. J. Simpson trial prosecutor marcia clark who has written a new novel. Coauthor of the Broadway Musical and Book Hamilton the revolution and you will also hear from Seymour Hersh whose most recent book is the killing of osama bin laden, which takes a critical look foreignpolicy of the Obama Administration and much more. So, for a complete schedule go to our website, book tv. Org and you can see the full schedule of our coverage of their. You can also get schedule and behindthescenes updates on a Facebook Page at facebook. Com. bookkeeping or follow us on twitter book tv. We are going to kick up our live Coverage Today with thomas frank, his most recent book is called listen liberal