Eating breakfast, but its time to get started. Feel free to continue eating. Breakfast is important, but welcome to the Nations Capital. Were very pleased to welcome you to d. C. And to the academys annual meeting and Public Policy forum. Id like to extend a special welcome to our firsttime attendees and particularly to new academy members. We hope that all of you will find our program over the next day and a half informative and stimulating. I would encourage you to take some time to connect with each other and interact with our speakers, so you get the very best and the very most you can out of our time together here. Were very proud to offer a tremendous lineup of speakers. They represent a wide range and deep range of Public Policy issues and professionalism issues. What better place to do this than the Nations Capital . And just days before a national electi election. Was halloween recently. I hope we were all scared a little bit in a positive and lifeaffirming way. Many of us fin
I believe he expressed an interest in joining Law Enforcement and were tracking that down. Tast been reported, again, we are following every lead. Im going to go to this gentleman here. [ inaudible ]. I dont have that information for you, sorry. Ultimately, were trying to obtain the autopsy reports for anyone who lost their life. And ultimately, his and depending upon the information there, we will see if we can release those. [ inaudible ] you know, whenever you look at someones motivation or intent, whether theyre living or dead, you look at their actions or activities surrounding the event. You look at what they said, you look at what they did. And come up with the interpretation. We do feel as we continue to build a time line and chronology and build his life well be able to determine this. I cant tell you if well be able to narrow it down to one motivation. This was clearly an act of terror and act of hate. Im going to go to someone who has not asked a question and come back to yo
That discussion for davids i think we really have to all think very seriously about it not just in our normal thinking about longterm fiscal policy that we have had for the last 25, 30 years but in terms of what has happened in fiscal and Monetary Policy in the last seven or eight years. So on one hand i think much of the premise of what we did in the 90s was precautionary savings. You can see that we have to project not only that you might have a down turn but that you might need a stimulus effort and what that does. The other side of that, though, is that to look at the other extreme, germany, where a bias towards this has been one of the most harmful things in the world. And where i just think that in fact, i believe that we have some Great Central bankers here, that we are seeing heroic efforts by bernanke, kohn and others, draghi. They are efforts that are exceptional things that Monetary Policy has to do because fiscal policy has completely failed in europe, is trying not to fail
I can add on both of those, just take that as another example and what is uncertainty. That matters a lot. You can get different results. You need to have that on the bigger issue of uncertainty and ambiguity, one of the things we havent talked about at all is what the view of the nation should be regarding uncertainty. When you move away from the standard and expected framework or even within that we have to have the government be riskaverse. Once you move into areas where there is not ambiguity and this shows up in Climate Change policy, we have to take a 0 3pvstand. My Technical Work goes in analysis of social policy. You have to take a stance of what the right answer is. Thats as well. Im interested in that point. There may be circumstances where the government is in the National Interest to respond to uncertainty by taking action now. I have a paper that came up with the journal on the effect of infrastructure. The big uncertainty is whats the effect of government spending. I cran