i don t know how you are going to make us feel good with almost 400 points down today. give it a try. all right. a couple of things. remember how big a problem is italy? and should we really have gone down 400 points over italy? let s remember that stocks were at 10, 660. we are up 10% after today s slaughter. sometimes the market goes down because they have been up. we are up 7 of the last 11 days. how big a problem is italy? greece schmesh. it s a gdp the size of connecticut. italy atr s the third biggest debtor nation in the world, after the u.s. and japan. italy is, of course, it accounts for 25% of all the debt in the entire euro zone. all right? we need europe because europe counts for almost 20% of all of our exports. here s why you shouldn t be scared and let the speculators panic and sell and stay in.
problem, the retirement. but a relatively in spite of the high home ownership rates, a relatively small percentage of the parents, compared to the 50s and 60s and 70s, were homeowners. and therefore, were direct property taxpayers. so it became more and more difficult to pass school millage rates in a district where you didn t also have a lot of parents who were property taxpayers. then we got a lot of embedded costs in our tax system that we hadn t fully re-examined. and the whole thing is crazy. if you think about the states have constitutional responsibility for education, and many places, the local government s paid for most of it, and they re supposed to have local control, and the federal government zooms in with 6 or 7 or 8% of the total, whatever it is now, maybe it s a little
rely on philanthropy and these huge donor pledges to fix our public education system? why can t that change come from within? and my subset question to you, mr. president would be, if i gave you the u.s. education system as a lump of clay, especially where funding is concerned, how would you design it from the get-go? well, let me answer the first question, and then i ll answer the second question. you shouldn t have to rely on philanthropy, but right now you shouldn t be ashamed to ask for it and to seek it. because look what s happened. we have some time, i think in my second term, we finally got a school population bigger than the baby boomers. and for all of you that worry about america s long-term debt, that should make you feel good, because it means social security is going to be about a 25-year program, after which the demographics will level up again and it won t be as big a
very strong deep roots, and the only thing that s going to uproot it is the people saying, we want our government to represent us. we want our government to make good choices that are based on fair analysis of every policy and every problem. you ll never get that with this type of money in politics. walk us through, again, more lessons from past failures. well, again, i think the other issue with past experiences is that everybody is basically saying from day one, well, you need two thirds of the congress. and we ll never get two-thirds. and they get a few co-sponsors, maybe, and they say, well, we ll never get two-thirds. we re not going to bring it to the floor. it s internal machinations that kept it from getting traction. never any traction to get it to ta floor where there is public discussion of the whole concept, we ll never again there. the other thing that s really
important is we focused on vario aspects of the financial system. what about corporate money, pacs, this and that, not saying the fundamental issue is if politicians take money they are beholden to the donors of the money. that s what i think jimmy jimmy s idea, we had a conversation yesterday. right. it just to a fundamental problem. again, this is the aligned interests of every one of the 300 million americans. even the one whose are winning right now, i believe, are fearful, because they know that the way that they re winning is by rigging the game, which is apparently dangerous. so while the losers are irate, even the winners in this system, i think, are anxious, at the very best. some are actually very afraid. one of the things that i would add i don t know whether you and jimmy williams talked about it yesterday when you were discussing the early drafting, how important is it that anything that not only draws a crisp line across all money in politics, but also draws a