we knew that if biondo industry collapsed in the sun burgett do a comment not reorganizing, that liquidating, we nail despite what they said at the time, that we would permanently lose a million jobs related to the industry. so we told the industry, shape up, reorganize. and if you do, we will help you. not popular. we also note that we needed to restore wall street to its proper and critically important role of allocating capital business to industries that can be used most efficiently. we knew we had to get the deficit under control and deal with the single biggest writer of the chassis that, health care cries. and ladies and gentlemen -- [laughter] we knew we had to restore protections for workers in unions. yes, unions. [applause] they've built the middle class. so we sent in the lrp. we made them take up their blackshirts and put on stripe shirts and directories again as they were supposed to be. and folks, results are clear. instead of hemorrhaging 6.5 million jobs a year before we got her program in place, as debbie pointed out, we have created 2,600,000 jobs. 19 consecutive month of private or growth. not enough. instead of losing 1 million jobs permanently, we have added to the last year 111,000 auto jobs. general motors and chrysler are healthy, and pay enough for government loans in the american people the first time in 23 years according to jd powers thinks that americans make better cars than foreign cars. [cheers and applause] and instead of eating able to continue to repackage toxic diet and selling it to a suspect in investors, wall street areas are now required to be transparent. ladies and gentlemen, i love these guys who talk about capitalism as if they are for it and we are against it. the entirety of the capital system is based upon transparency and some might, especially when it comes to wall street is the best disinfect and in the best cure. and ladies and gentlemen, and set of long-term debt increasing as predicted by a hundred billion dollars over the next 10 years because of health care costs 1 trillion in the second decade, we pass health care reform and literally been the cost curve. and in the process, provided 30 million americans that didn't have access to health care health care. [applause] folks, as debbie said, in the process of the leadership of l. nelson and david, we eliminated "don't ask, don't tell." we passed slowly let her act for equal pay for equal work. we cut private banks out of the middleman, saving taxpayers $60 million in student loans. that is, what we we did at home. but beyond our borders, as president obama said last year -- last week i should say, the tide of war is receding and set of having 150,000 combat troops, when we got elected, president obama is saying the iraq, literally, not figuratively as bill will tell you. and folks, he said, get us home. by this christmas, 150,000 americans will be out of iraq and we will end it. this war in iraq. [cheers and applause] and in the process, light behind a democratic government for the chance of serving as people. and maybe the most important thing president obama did was refocus our eyes in their power on the prize. osama bin laden. instead of being a war that the last administration that aren't and let it drift, we are now focused on succeeding. we have literally eviscerated al qaeda. osama bin laden is dead. 30 for the top al qaeda leaders are gone, including number two and including anwar al-awlaki, anti-american cleric who was planning these attacks. instead of going it alone in libya, we present to a strong enough to enemy and wise enough to consult and future allies. as a consequence, gadhafi instead, libby is free and not one american soldier lost their life. [cheers and applause] in short, we have literally restored american image around the world and put our country and economy in the path of recovery. the folks come and the only way i can describe what happened next is republican obstructionism. i have served in the senate a long time. this bill will tell you over my career, it is many friends in the republican party as the democratic party. i can say without fear of contradiction, no republican in the senate ever doubted my word and there was no one i was unable to work with. ladies and gentlemen, this ain't your father's republican party. this is a different deal. [laughter] just as we are returning the economy. these guys started playing roulette with the national debt, playing brinksmanship. they took charge of the house. they didn't want to just stop overdoing. they want to undo everything that we had done. some people think this republican obstructionism isn't about ideology. other people think is just about politics. i believe that for the american people to decide. but i know one thing. it doesn't matter which it is. they are standing in the way of progress. [applause] folks, as a student of history like many of you, back in the 1940s the next year is finding the face of economic crisis defector or on the horizon, he found that almost everyone of his legislative efforts, including the entire new deal were being stopped by republican congress, led by bruce barton from new york, joseph martin for massachusetts and hamilton fish from new york. so when roosevelt types about everything he tried to do, everything that was stopped, he would list what he called, and i quote, a beautiful rhythm of opposition, martin barton and fishing. today, i can say the remains of beautiful rhythm of opposition, theater, cancer and mitch. [cheers and applause] folks, they have a different theory of the case. they actually assert and might i suspect they believe that the recent banks are lending and they are flesh and design expanding notwithstanding the fact that corporate america psalmist trill trillion dollars in nonsense capital that they could spend, they think it is because they are not spending and lending because of regulation, because of taxes on the wealthy and because of uncertainty of health care reform. so their answers shouldn't surprise here. they think we should once again to regulate wall street, but the cowboys back in the fat -- no, literally. if you didn't know better, they come in on america having collected information. if you do know better, you'd didn't i was making this up. they not only think we should actually keep the bush tax cuts designed to expire for the top 1%, but they believe we should increase the tax cuts for the wealth he asked. they believe the answer to the deficit is to repeal health care. without realizing or technology that will increase the debt value for $100 billion by 2022, 2021 and another trillion after that. in the process, eliminate insurance for 30 million people who need it. boehner, cancer and mitch. listen to what they say. literally, this is important. speaker boehner is a friend of mine. i personally like him, literally i get on with him as most of my colleagues here can tell you. he said our efforts to relate the financial industry and the whole wall street accountable was quote like using a nuclear weapon to kill an ant. i pointed out to him that that aunt took 8 million jobs. speaker boehner [applause] speaking to the economic club of washington d.c. in an extensive and well ordered speech said, and i quote, we need to liberate our economy from the shackles government has placed upon it. folks, the last time we liberated the economy, we put the middle class in chains. leaders cantor, he said we can't respond to major disasters like hurricane irene or fled certifiers unless we quote, make sure there are savings elsewhere. and guess where they find the savings. health care for the middle class, college affordability, renewable energy. and my friend the republican leader, and it connell said quote most important thing we want to achieve is for president obama had to be a one term president. folks, this is serious that it's not just boehner, cantor and mitch. it's ryan, romney. they all sing from the same in delaware. social security quotes a ponzi scheme, a monstrous lie to this generation, and of quote. i might be repeating that 6000 times in florida. medicare, the equivalent of getting taken for a ride. boucher as they. foreclosures -- we just heard romney. he said, quote, don't try to stop the foreclosure process. let it run its course and hit the bottom. he wasn't raised in my neighborhood. i'm serious. i think they just don't know the people i grew up with. i think they just don't know what the american people are going through. and the guy you know well, governor scott -- deep cuts in education. voter suppression, arizona style immigration law, note to $2.4 billion for high-speed rail. the list goes on and on. and what your governor is doing here is exactly what republicans want to do with the entire nation. and that is not hyperbole. not a joke. an informed policy -- they want to stay in iraq. is not kind of fascinating? listen to them now by the way. they are so-called foreign policy experts. they want to stay in iraq. and one of them, governor of texas he was willing based on what he said to send american military troops across the mexican border into sovereign state of mexico to deal with their problem. folks, i know this election is not going to be about her policy, the latter or or maggie there's a minimum three and under one has to cross on their mastery of security informed policy for the american p. think they are remotely eligible be president. these guys a long way to go. [applause] eating now, my father always used to say, joey come in numbers to a big man. it doesn't take much. yet, every republican candidate for president, after the coffee was killed congratulated nato and didn't mention the u.s. commitment to u.s. forces. folks, even though this mission could not have been possible without the american aircraft, american coordination, and american intelligence, many folks, including your junior senator at the time to congratulate the french and british forces while they criticize the president of the united states of america. this is not your father's republican party. this is a different place, folks. [applause] folks, this next election is not a referendum. it is a choice. and we're going to make that choice clear. when i got elected as a 29-year-old kid to the united states senate, shortly after i was the lack did and 73, sworn in and 73, my great friend and phil is is how you use on my closest friend and confidant, teddy kennedy, invited me as a 31-year-old kid just the massachusetts dinner and boston. i will never forget i was in coakley h-hotel getting ready and nervous about speaking in front of senator kennedy and the first big major dinner as a senator. and i was putting on my time and i was watching the television, the evening news, the 6:00 or 6:30 news in boston. there's a mayor named named kevin white was a phenom that got elected in 1970 assorted to john lindsay of new york and he was having a little trouble and he was up for reelection. as he walked out of his office to tackle a press grabbed him and said okay wiseguy come in not doing so hot now. what's going on? on never forget what kevin said. he put his hand out. i did know him. his hand on subplot, don't compare me to the old whitey. compare me to the alternatives. ladies and gentlemen, dare not to compare us to the alternatives. so folks, in the face of this republican obstructionism, i have hearst reporter hearst reporter say when it should sit down with the republicans. we sat down with them for two and a half years. they can't deliver their own party. so we have decided, we cannot wait. the american people cannot wait. we cannot continue to be subject to. for what they are doing. so what do we do? we introduced a jobs bill. unless amongst every independent validator acknowledges what created close to 2 million jobs, generate economic growth by 2%, to keep 400,000 teachers, cops, firefighters on the jobs this year. instead he said, it would cut taxes for 94% of american workers by roughly 1500 bucks. eshoo said, does form a overseas and six mustard gas. and neighborhood i lived in, that not her's. [cheers and applause] the president and i have reached a conclusion about the obstructionism. we've got to try to go to their heads. we've got to go to the people. we cannot wait. the american people can't wait. we can't wait to address foreclosures so the president's executive order to get more than a million folks a chance to refinance their homes. i'm 6% to 4%, saving a minimum of $2000 a year. in my neighborhood, that's real money. we can't wait to address the affordability of college. the president announced he's going to let college graduates cap fared lot at 10% of their income. that's going to help a lot of people who are being crashed right now by the weight of their student loans that. we cannot wait to innovate new companies and incubate them. that's why we announce today that we are speeding up the process of getting are in the absence of federal labs, into the hands of businesses that can commercialize and. we can't wait and we are waiting because that ended the day, it is about dignity and respect. ladies and gentlemen, it is about restoring the middle class. they have been clobbered. it is about putting mothers and fathers in the neighborhoods we all grow up and once again in the position should be able to look into their child die and believe what they say when they say honey, if you work hard, if you play by the rules, if you get a good education, there is nothing you can't do. they doubt it now. it's simple. it's simple. the test we applied. we will measure two years of our effort in terms of whether or not american moms and dads can turn to kids and say with some certainty, honey, it's going to be okay. that is why we are not going to relent. that is why we are not going to relent. that's why we believe the american people are going to return us to office in 2012. [applause] folks, when i began this speech, i talked about the longest walk. we are determined to replace that walk with a different kind of journey. the journey that restores his father's dignity by allowing him to send his talented daughter to college, knowing she won't have to spend the rest of her life paying for her education. a journey that allows a woman to take a new job, where she will be paid the same salary as demand for the same work and a salary that will allow her to support her family. [cheers and applause] folks, we've set america on a different path come a new journey, one that our friends are trying to obstruct, one that allows us to lead the world in the 21st century as we did in the 20th, where we are much began a nation of innovators, educators and builders. the policies of the last administration and the obstruction of this republican congress have not a lot of people out there feet. folks, it is long past time we get back up, that we stand up, that we reclaim that every american that was the birthright, the american dream, that if you get them a chance, is nothing that they are incapable of accomplishing. there's only one way we can do that. to do it together and to make sure that we went. because folks, the choice is stark and clear. i am not exaggerating when i say -- and i've said this and i was accused of bringing up bush. i respect president bush as a man. i thought his policies were terrible. but ladies and gentlemen, name me one major initiative on taxes, on jobs, on wall street, i'm foreclosures, on promoting innovation, on infrastructure that republicans for that is any different at all from what was done in eight years when they controlled the presidency. i cannot find one. folks, when i got elected in 72 as a kid, i was described as an optimist, even an idealist. but i was neither. i was a realistic young man then as i am an older man now because my optimism then and now is the piece of naïveté. literally -- think about it. remind yourselves. it is based on halogen or knowledge history of the journey of the american people. we americans know, we do not have to accept the situation we cannot dare. we literally have it within ourselves to determine their own fate. we always have. we've done it in the depression. we did it after the civil war. we've done it throughout her life as a nation. so folks, today i look at a live view and say, i am more optimistic today. i am more certain about america's future than i have ever been in my life. we are better positioned as a nation relative to the world to capture the 21st century. i just spent 10 days in the far east. president who i'm president iraq obama asked the new incoming president to get it to know each other. we spent four days traveling the country. people thought when i won in august is going to explain america's situation. i didn't go to ask for anything. it pointed out how we hope they continue to succeed because stability in that part of the world is important. but i reminded them, their economy is one third as large as ours. they own less than 1% of the financial instruments of the united states of america. ladies and gentlemen, it in 20 years to get 20% of their population out of poverty. they have no safety net because it be a poor policy one child. that one person working for every four that needs to be supported. ladies and gentlemen, remember we are. we were then, we are now in and a better position than any nation in the world to dominate the 21st century economically. there is a reason why in the midst of all these crises every nation continues to invest in u.s. treasuries. why? we are the most secure, the most certain and the most capable nation in the world. so folks, it is time to stand up. it's time to fight back. it's time to reclaim our heritage and its time and we are ready. we are looking for this site. the future of our country depends on it. so folks, join us and we will deliver. [cheers and applause] thank you all and god bless you. and most of all, may god protect our troops. thank you. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> democrats, how was that? [cheers and applause] what we are going to do is get five minutes for them to bring our dinner. and then we are going to continue in our program after we get everybody served. i need everybody as quickly as possible to get back to their seat. get back to your seat and we left five minutes to get you served and then we'll continue our program. five minutes and i will continue to program. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> former president bill clinton spoke at georgetown university today and talked about his administration's economic policy. this is pertinent and at georgetown university hosted by the clinton foundation, just under an hour. >> i have been given the honor of being the person meeting the governor's motorcade. i was very excited about this prospect. the reality is that it's a little less glamorous period consisted of state in the park and not on a cold november rain storm in boston with the wind blowing and waiting for cars to arrive and then i got to wait the cars come to show them to park and that was the end. i was greeting the motorcade, not the governor. but here i am speaking for the first time that day, his energy, his hope for the future, his optimism that came through and he inspired me. inspired me to cut some classes, not go to school if i'm spring and winter and go up to new hampshire and work on his campaign. and that they are, i got a great job. i got to go door to door, knocking on doors, looking for people who might vote in the primary and distributing what is a revolutionary new type knowledge is, a vhs tape with his bio on it. it looked some day like this. it was the first time it had ever been done. bill clinton understood and innovation. on election night in new hampshire, i had another job. the station in the sun room where we wired up a bunch of lines and we're getting calls from every courthouse in new hampshire about the result is that came in. and when they did, it was my job to take a piece of paper and run. yes, physically run from there to the suite where the governor was staying. now, why would she run that information over there? because at that point, we didn't have a iphone's. we didn't have cell phones. all we had were 10 issues. now when i got to this week, i handed that piece of paper to make key kantor. that is incredibly apropos of what we are going out today because at night when bill clinton came back in the first primary election and when those men, mickey kantor and bill clinton went on to serve in government and man is the first secretary of commerce, we began the notion towards the global economy. they were leading us to that economy where we saw global production and global innovation. and they pushed open the borders with aipac, wto and nafta. the minister of innovation so much faster than it could've come if we decided to go it alone. what did we see? we saw developing cell phones and no kids in line and the blackberry come from canada. this is not the way we communicate. and what did we see as a result of that? what happened today? the two most advanced makers of those devices that we would call cell phones, now they even knew newer names are american companies that no one in the country would've imagined would be making sounds when bill clinton was elected president. apple and google. they are the world leaders in innovation. they're the ones driving a ford and it's all because of the decisions they make to drive the global innovation. and i have come, but it would not come today without leadership that drove us into the global competition. and we won. we are the ones with the leaders as a world of that position. [applause] as much as i love my job as a runner, i decided after you graduate from college, which i did manage to forgive you decide to go off in the campaign, go ahead and finish. i decided i needed a new job. and partially as a result of the hope and optimism though clinton inspired me, i became an internet entrepreneur. i started my first company in my apartment at night after he went to work and we grew those businesses, taking advantage of new possibilities bill clinton mh. as an entrepreneur, i learned something bill clinton hurting you, that american economic success is built on innovation and great innovation is not an accident. it comes from the public and private tours for together. and we look forward during world war ii with sonar and radar and penicillin and atomic energy, it wasn't an accident. when we went to the man and tackled dozens of problems we've never even thought of, solving that wasn't an accident. for the last 50 years when we watched devices and drugs and innovations in health care system take us forward and extend our house, that wasn't an accident. over the last 20 years, while we watched what the defense department started as arpanet moved into the internet and the world wide web and all the innovations that have come behind it, that wasn't an accident. and all those cases the government was funding the primary research and development in getting us through the overwhelmingly expensive, risky and taunting first i said, the to private enterprise to come along and build on top of that foundation. that's a bill clinton knew about taking us into the global economy and that's been about trading the internet forward. we heard so many people talk, but it was something decisions matter. he also knew to have a thriving economy had turned us. we've heard about it all day long, but i'll talk about two investments he made that didn't you mention it today. one of the public site here. went forward and put money out so they could hire 100,000 new police officers and put them on the eat and our cities. many of the students here don't remember the 70s and 80s, when our cities are failing, people were fleeing in crime is out of control. but i do. that's when i first moved to the big cities. president clinton invested in place and turned it around so we have creative classes fought in the cities, driving innovation which powers our economy in san francisco and boston and new york city in right here in washington. he also made an investment has to come in the area. and that is where the jobs and wealth are created in our economy that allow us to do things want to do in government. he passed the telecom act of 1996 to open up competition in the telecommunications space that saw the biggest booms in history and investments in the infrastructure we need it. as a result today, we've got high speed and that's almost all of our country because the investment was made in response to his policies. that's what is leadership did that drove the internet economy forward. he made on these investments while balancing the budget. it is hard to imagine today in the congress and within two years ago, it's hard to imagine the environment when they said was 10 years ago. many people they had it for 10 years old when we have the surpluses. we do pass to a future that was fiscally responsible and that was the result of the hard work of other people use on this teacher today. there is one more thing i want to mention that i think that left out of much of the panel as it often does. and that is the renewed sense of hope and optimism that president clinton brought to our entire nation. it inspired me to go start businesses. it inspired a whole generation of new entrepreneurs to go out and take that leap of faith, to quit their jobs, take the risks, innovate and create the new industries that drive our economy forward. however president faces a different set of circumstances and challenges. there is no cookie-cutter solution to drive an economy as complex as ours. in 1992, bill clinton made choices to embrace innovation, leave the world forward to a global economy, bring the public and private sectors together invest in america and balance our budget and to do it all with hope and optimism about where we were going. the results speak for themselves. 22.9 elliott new jobs. reductions to people living in poverty, 4% unemployment, real wage growth for all americans across every income bracket and ever more connected global world. it is my great honor to introduce the 42nd president of the united states, william jefferson clinton. [cheers and applause] [applause] >> thank you very much. thank you. [applause] thank you very much. thank you. [applause] thank you, please, thank you. thank you very much, president degioia for bringing me back to georgetown. i wanted y'all to hear him than i thought the students could identify with him. he did start out with me 20 years ago. two years ago -- actually less than that, a year ago and the monday the day before the election i was with him and his congressional district in upstate new york and we had 1200 people for a backrest at 7:30 in the morning. and i thought that maybe he would escape the tide of 2010. and he didn't. scott is my 2010 version of what happened to marjorie in 1994. people got a fever. the only elect democrats and things are screwed up. [laughter] and they want to feel fixed and they didn't feel fixed yet, so in this sort of antigovernment fever, sometimes people are swept from office who shouldn't be. i hope i live long enough to see him go back to congress because he really understands the economy and the country. and i am delighted he is here and honored by his introduction. he was asked today because my stafford mize when i came back, back i introduced me to speak at his rally and in three minutes he showed he understood more about the economic strategy we pursue a 90% of the people that i talked to you. the thank you. i want to thank all the members have made. thank you, bob rubin for speaking and thank you erskine and john for moderating the panel and all of you who participated. i was so proud all over again. you know, basically i could have had a lobotomy and succeeded as president because of them. they were so good. and you saw that. i am very grateful to them for being here and for all of you who are part of the administration that are here who weren't on the program. i would like to thank georgetown for letting me come back here to where we all began his 20 years ago with the three speeches i gave, outlining a space at the philosophy that driving the campaign. one of those speeches is reprinted in the program you all have. and then i think you have this little page, which summarizes most, but not all of the thing sweet day to try to drive the economy. and i'd like to especially say i am grateful that professor wins this year to a snipe economics professor in 1967. [applause] 1967. and he adds -- [applause] i'm really proud of him for many reasons. he is an egyptian in office and egyptians interjections interior square ought to be modeling him. in 40 years after i was his student, i saw him at the georgetown contribution to the multi-university complex in qatar. and it was great. so we've been friends a long time. thank you for being here. and i want to say one other thing. at the at the end there, gene sperling was telling you about the run after the government shut down, which led to all the cooperation later. and he mentioned that we had a big fight over medicaid because the republicans basically wanted to end the guarantee of health care to poor people and just cut a check to the states. and i wouldn't do it. and i did say to dick armey, who is basically at that point, he and newt gingrich and tom delay were in the oval office with the democrats, with. and i did say to dick armey when he was getting very macho with me, that he would have -- i told him, you've got to understand, i don't care if i go to 5% on the polls. you have to give somebody else to sit behind that desk before you get this done. and so, all the democrats were thrilled. you know, our liberal base always thinks the president is going to cave. just like the conservatives are always afraid the republicans are going to cave. so anyway, we had this meeting and then they left. the meeting was adjourned and the democrats hung around afterwards. they were all so happy and al gore and then looked at me and said you know, that was really great what you said, but he said i think you should've told them that you are going to hold out even if he he went all the way to zero. why did you stop at 5%? [laughter] and i looked at him an asset now,, forget to 4%, i am going to cave. [laughter] so, i say that because the one lesson of all of this as he got to keep your sense of humor here. and i was aided and not because in 1999, at the very end of my term we celebrated the 30th anniversary of america's well, name when we had an astronaut walk on the moon. a surviving participants came back to the white house to meet a wonderful event and nasa actually brought a vacuum packed and moved back that was carbon dated at 3.6 billion years old. and so, every time you see the present entertaining a foreign leader, you know they are daring there's two chairs in the roundtable. so when you meet with the other people in congress, you either meet in the cabinet room from what you've all seen on television or you are in the oval office, but the president is not sitting behind a desk. he said in the chairs and everybody sits in the soap is opposite and there's a table in the middle. i put them in iraq on the table. and every time the temperature started to rise the last two years of his very wait a minute, guys, look at that rock. that rock is 3.6 billion years old. believe me, we are just passing through here. [laughter] so everybody just take a deep breath and let's figure out what we're going to do. [applause] that moon rock did more to lower people's blood pressure than any medicine devised by any pharmaceutical company anywhere on earth. i would like to close by just saying a few things. first of all, i am deeply grateful for what has been said and the contributions that have been made. but when i came here in december in 1891 and november, the country had at that time manifestations of many of the underlying economic realities that are crippling us today. it was already obvious we were undergoing a big increase in income inequality. and so, it is so easy for me to make speeches around the country and around the world because i get to say the same things i've been saying for 20 years outdated. it is not healthy for a country that depends upon the idea of opportunity come to the idea social mobility, the idea that having a job or starting a business is way more than just earning incomes and stained a field day. it is fundamental to human dignity and the fire of human imagination. and so, when we have 9% unemployment and you know it's really 15, at the labor force participation rates at the same today as they were in 2000, they need is bigger than that because there's so many people who aren't in the numbers because they have part-time jobs. they have full-time jobs. it's about more than the economics. and they think it's important to say that. because if like me you were born around the end of world war ii or for the next 15 or 20 years and you sort of just halfway intelligent and halfway diligent and he showed up and went to school, the one thing you never have to worry about was whether you could stay gainfully employed and support yourself. and the first job i ever had was cutting lawns when i was 12. i talked my way into a job with the guy that owned a little grocery store across the street from my house when i was 13. i talked him into letting me say to my very first small business, used comic book stand. where i sold all these mint condition used comic books and made $300. i thought it was a billionaire and it was the single dumbest decision i ever made in my life. [laughter] if i had saved those comic books, they'd be worth a quarter of a million dollars today. [laughter] but anyway, i did it. by the time i got out of college, by the time i got out of us quite and seven more things and since then, not counting my foundation work, my chair were, i'd send my more things for a living. i never had to worry about whether i could make a living. and i think it is very important that we acknowledge today what it does to the country if a substantial number of decent people who are perfectly intelligent and perfectly able to be productive in perfectly willing to get up every day and do at their slowest to do, go months and months without jobs or weighed down by paralyzing that an even more by paralyzing doubt. because what doubt does as it keeps you from playing the game. you guys watch the world series game last night? by the time it got to the end, i didn't want either one of them to lose. why? because they decided they would play the game to the end. most people would have been broken by doubt if they had gotten banged around the way st. louis did, mostly by his wounds. [laughter] which is how most of us get banged around. they just kept playing the game. so, i wanted americans to feel good about our country again. i wanted people to get up in the morning and feel like they play the game. and how did james and pursue their dreams and that their kids would have a chance to choose their greens. and we designed this economic plan for the realities of that time. but the values behind a committee idea we needed a society, where there was opportunity for all, which said another way of saying we should start shooting for the share prosperity, that there was responsibility for mall, which is another way of saying we all ought to carry some loud, but there is opportunity for all, which is another way of saying we can't afford to be divided. we need to create an environment that widens the circle of opportunity, that includes more people in our family. and in my opinion has a totally different attitude towards immigration than a lot of people do today. i do think americans are being cut out of work because they are illegal immigrants in the country. i think it's a big mistake. [applause] bug, and is very important to recognize that basically has he hurt from these two panels, our economic strategy began, but did not mend with trying to get a hold of the dead and turned around the deficits. and he plays the chances in life by passing the earned income tax credit. most everything that was said to appear is consistent with my memory, except one thing with bob rubin. the reason the senators were saying, as laura said, they wanted a $500 billion reduction in the dead is that so you're all being told by the bond market people. and i used to give rubin on shirted how come the and why should a 30-year-old bond trader be able to force me to raise the gas tax and puts my congressman in danger? why should they say we won't take it seriously until we see the middle-class and his men pummeled for 12 years, suffered just a little more so wall street can save counts? and we had all these people, these talking heads unrespectable networks that people foxes are so liberal were saying bill clinton is not a serious president unless he really sticks it to the middle-class. that's how you prove you're a really reputable person. it ain't like these people had their income going on for 12 years in real terms. show us you are a real man and punish those people. you're laughing, but i'm telling you if you could go back and look at the commentary of the time, it was to be revolting. i was out there living with those people. we were one of only eight states in the last eight years i served as governor, the crew manufacturing jobs. i knew what was happening to people's lives out there. i say why do these people in washington saying that a remand accused don't stick it to the middle-class? could it be or not in the middle class anymore, those who were saying that? but anyway, it was a weird time. and bob, i have to acknowledge the lack of presence here of the man who was handling our congressional lobbying after a very brief battle with brain cancer, but we had a memorial service for him the other day. he was a very funny guy. so you'd say, how mike going to get to the votes to this? urban markets as the bond markets as we've got to bring the deficit down $500 billion. and the pastor looked at me and said tummyache and how many does the bond market has. and we had all these conversations. and then, we have the crazy thing with the bg tracks that the senate would vote for because it really was a carbon tax. it was really a carbon tax. and it was not concentrated on gasoline. it was spread broadly throughout all energy use. it would've been much easier to pay, much less burdensome even though the gas tax didn't amount to much because the oil prices were so low on gasoline prices were. so, marjorie had to walk by a plant because you have some of these congressmen say well, i said i wouldn't vote for gas tax. i'm not going to do it even if it thinks the administration keeps the economy in recession. i'm not going to do it. so, there was a lot of crazy stuff, but it's important to back up and see the big picture. the big picture is this. we had a growing middle class and a booming economy. although reassembly sessions in the end of world war ii until 1981. in 1881, we began the era of antigovernment. president reagan's immaculate dress up in this area the government is the problem. .. we did something our country had never done before. we had never consistently run big deficits in peacetime before. not ever. and in the beginning it works because we only had a trillion dollar accumulated debt in 1981 and almost all of it was held by americans. so we could take on some extra debt. and from 1981 through 1992, we took on debt. we went from a 1 trillion national debt to a 4.5 chilean national debt as it turned out that both parties in the white house wanted to keep on spending and stop paying for it. and it was great. that is like going to the candy store and eating all the candy you want and you never have to go to the dentist. the problem is, and i guess if i were totally cynical i would be happy about this because that is what elected me president, because it amounted to a decade-long stimulus program. not like president obama's much defamed stimulus program which actually worked much better than people thought it would. i will say more about that in a minute. it amounted to a decade-long stimulus program and it worked fine for the first eight or nine years because we had never done that before. in normal economic times. but then, the competition for money between the private and the public sector got sufficiently biggert -- vigorous and interest rates went up and the value of the dollar had to be kept high, so we could attract foreign investors to buy our debt and it was a killer for american manufacturing jobs. and the first president bush had to bear the burden of what he had rightly first called the new economics. and i guess i felt bad about it at the time. you know, we have become very good friends since we have both been out of office, but i liked him at the time. it was a cruel historical irony that he had to bear the brunt of a theory that he knew was wrong in 1980 and said so. because it violated the laws of economics. people asked me all the time, what great new idea did you and rubin and your whole economic team bring to washington? and i say arithmetic. [laughter] me and einstein, man we really broke new ground. [laughter] i just figured it to went to us for it probably would still be by the time he got here. we are laughing now because it is very dear -- very different now but the underlying goals of building a society of shared prosperity and shared responsibility and a community where everybody plays a role, that is still the same and it is more important than ever because the world is going ever more interdependent. so the first part of our effort was to, we took a gamble that if we come even though the economy was weak, that if we cut spending and raise revenues, that it would lower interest rates enough that there would be an investment boom and a private sector led growth. 90% -- 92% of the jobs created in those eight years were private sector jobs. it was the highest percentage in 50 years, and because there was more growth than we thought, the budget was 90% balanced by the time we had the balanced budget bill. that is one of the reasons are erskine could get from the republicans the children's health insurance bill and we could give to them a reduction and the capital gains rate and we could both agree on a child tax credit and more credit for adopting children and special needs children, because the work was done. i saw a hilarious article in one of the press outlets of primarily the conservative outlets trying to show that nothing we did have anything to do with balancing the budget and they pointed to a congressional budget office study starting from, looking at 1997 through 2001 saying the net effect of all that just in the numbers was to add $10 billion for debt, which is like 3.5 cents compared to what the numbers we are talking about today. all they did was prove how important a vote in 1993 was. that was the work that balanced the budget or 90% of it so all these people who were saying it didn't, the point is by then we had different growth estimates and we had a very good talents budget plan and they produced for surpluses four surpluses in a row. but the american people i don't think, and this is probably my fault, although i did my best, and may be our interlocutors never understood there was a difference in investing grow economics in trickle-down economics. and so, in 2001, in the face of all the evidence of what works better, we went back to trickle-down economics and doubled the debt of the country again before the financial meltdown. and so, the question that we face today is, what is today's version of getting back to shared prosperity and shared responsibility? and i would like to say just a couple of things. first of all, and i wish i had been able to make our economic plan permanent, but especially after -- for which i did give my firstborn to her son and marriage for which i'm very grateful. but, it didn't and it didn't because there is a persistent appeal to this antigovernment philosophy. you know, what did bruce reed say, the idea that the government would mess up the generals. is still alive and well, and part of it is, it is the core of our history. we were after all organized in reaction to an unaccountable overreaching british empire. we did after all have founding fathers who thought the most important thing they could do is to both limit and divide the government, so they decided to give us the bill of rights, executive legislative and judicial branch and state and national government. so they were worried about abuse of power, and every one of us, number one, believes criticizing the government is part of our cultural -- virtual right of citizens. and we can all think of a tax we thought was too high or regulation we thought was or beneficial effect went overboard in the exercise of authority, everyone of us can. so, we americans are always of a divided mind about how much government is enough and how much government is too much and the dividing line between enough and too much has traditionally at least in the modern era, defined the parameters of the debate between liberals and conservatives or republicans and democrats, but this dominant undercurrent since the 1980 election that government is the problem has been an irresistible paradigm for people discussing this and reporting on its. i still read the papers and i see a conservative is defined as someone who takes the antigovernment position, whatever that is. no matter how radical it is, no matter how can an conventionally conservative is in there for anyone who with that becomes a liberal. it makes it easy for reporting but it is a distortion of the traditional political philosophies. and it was one i was trying to bring an end to with those three speeches here and with the way they govern, trying to break out of the government as a solution and the government as a problem. so as you look at a problem that the president faces today, the dilemmas that members of congress face today, i would like to for state the obvious. the particular solution we pursue is not appropriate to this particular moment, because the problem is different. we have high interest rates, low growth and an overvalued daughter and -- dollar and a dying manufacturing structure. interest rates are zero and there is no demand. do i still think the debt is a problem? i do. do i think we need a dramatic action to respond to it? i do. i believe erskine bowles and senator alan simpson basically did quite a good job with the of bowles-simpson report but remember what they recommended. do this with vigor and once you get growth back to the point you know you are not going to throw us into a recession so thank you erskine for what you did on that. it was a great thing. thank you. [applause] but there are some things that are relevant. i went back and read some of the things i said when i was trying to raise taxes on upper income americans. and when we raise the corporate tax, i bragged on business. i brag on people making money. i said the only people i am upset about are people taking advantage of the tax code and shedding jobs down here and getting rid of them, but i bragged on the idea, we should never be against success. one of america's greatest characteristics is that we don't resent people who do well. and i was raised in a culture. when i was a kid, if i ever looked like i resented somebody who did something better than me, my mother was likely to spank me. i mean as a kid, we were taught that it was a character defect if you resented somebody else for their own success. you should applaud their success and pull for them and expect -- abraham lincoln said it did america good to have wealthy people because it -- on the other hand we know as an economic matter if we need to pitch in and do what we can, then those of us who have gotten all the gains of this decade just as i did ask people who have gotten all the decades in the 80's should make our contribution. that is the contribution we can make. and one of the things that bruce reed said i would like to ask you to keep in mind, when every debate the president and the congress are now having. one of the reasons that i asked marjorie to cast the vote in favor of the economic plan, one of the reasons i put a lot of our members on the hot seat and they lost their seats by voting for the assault weapons bill and the band ban and the brady bill is that in every well-developed political system, the present in the and the past are always better represented than the future. the future doesn't have as many votes. the future doesn't have as much money. the future doesn't have as many lobbyists. and no one can be elected to represent the future who has more freedom of movement than the president. the president is subject to the lobbyist, subject to the pressures, subject to the neck of bad but at least you have a big megaphone and you can talk to the american people. you can travel around and no one else can speak for the future if the president refuses to. but, i don't want to kid you. died caused a lot of people in my party to get eat for voting for the economic plan or voting for the assault weapons ban or the brady bill, principally. and i lost a lot of sleepless nights. and i still think about it. and i wanted scott murphy to be here because i want him to be one of the ones he makes a comeback because he is simply too gifted to be a casualty of a momentary snits of antigovernment fever that gripped us in 2010. look, we have got big things to do. i appreciate the fact that the president is still trying to reach out, but also now you know, striking his own course. i like the jobs plan. i think it would help. i like the student loan plan, which is a national system of what we made optional, the direct loan program. you see all these kids dropping out of school and student loan default set of record rate and all that. that is because college costs went up 75% after inflation and everything that i did in my second term with the biggest increase in student aid since the g.i. bill and then the 27 -- 2007 congress passed another huge increase and it was all blown away by the cost and the condition of the economy, so the president supported and the congress passed and he signed a national direct loan plan which was supposed to be put in 2014 and now they are going to try to move it up as much as possible in 2012, which basically says every college student in the country, you never have to drop out of college again, because of how much money you have to borrow because you can pay it back for up to 20 years and no more than 10%, not of your total income, of your discretionary income which means that won't include your basic living costs. [applause] so you were looking at five or 6%. this is a huge deal, because unemployment among college graduates today is happen natural average, 4.5% and for people with postgraduate degrees it is 2%. so, this is important. i support the president on that. i support what he is trying to do with the jobs plan. i think that we should try to figure out a way to repatriate some of this corporate cash and use it to fund the infrastructure bank and it has bipartisan support in the senate. maybe we can get it through. we ought to be taking private capital and sovereign wealth investment and anything else in an infrastructure bank and put the american people back to work. i personally think we have to retrofit every school, every college, every hospital, every auditorium, every museum, every relatives billy unencumbered commercial building in the entire united states over the next few years. i'm very proud of my governor andrew cuomo who just signed a bill allowing the cost of retrofitting to be put on the alleged trick bill of every new york homeowner in a way that allows you never to pay more for your utility bill to pay for the retrofit that and many were paying before. another which you just pay it through the savings, and i think we ought to do that. the last thing i will say is i'm encouraged by the fact that fannie mae and freddie mac have apparently agreed to let some people refinance their mortgages down to the 4% level, a million or so, but there are 20 million americans who have not defaulted, who have relatively small amounts of mortgage money out, $150,000 at an average interest rate of 5.6%. the mortgages around by the government. if they let them all refinance at 4%, it would put 35 or $40 billion a year back into the american economy and stimulus with no deficit spending and no tax increase and it would help to stabilize this. i think for whatever it is worth to get back to a full employment economy, we are going to have to clean the mortgage debt required just think until we delivered quicker, don't think it can be done and that means somebody's going to have to come up with more money. the federal government has $50 billion in t.a.r.p. money. i know it is politically controversial because some people believe we shouldn't be helping people that never should have taken those mortgages out in the first place. the problem is everybody has been heard of this now. everybody. there are people who didn't do anything wrong when they took at their mortgages and their house is worth less than their mortgage. there people who have never missed a mortgage payment. but in general, i strongly support what has been done. remember we got our job growth as they all said and it's got if scott amplified, by accelerating information-technology and trying to spread it into every other aspect of american life as quickly and as deeply as possible. hear the here the president outlined a strategy of doing that with green tech, which no matter what you read in among the skeptics, green tech jobs have grown at twice the rate of overall employment in the last 10 years and account for $54 billion in positive trade balance for us. and bring them back manufacturing jobs which we can now do as long as they are high-end jobs, and doubling exports and an infrastructure. so i support this plan, and it is not inconsistent with bringing down the deficit. the only other thing i want to say about it is this. and only neira got to address this. the real problem that the congress will have in dealing with the projected rise in health care costs is the difference between what is good policy and what is the score of old and we still fight this all the time in other contexts. the best health care policies would help of private health care system just as much as they would help the budget of medicare and medicaid. i will just give you one example. the geisinger health care system in eastern pennsylvania has more than 700 doctors. if you enrolled in the geisinger program they promise you among other things that if any medical procedure is performed on you, and if there is any problem with it that requires you to go back to the hospital within 90 days, you can go back and they will pay for it all, and your premiums won't go up, your co-pays won't go up in your deductibles won't go up. how can they afford to make such a promise? since returns are such an endemic part of american health care, because they operate on a best practices manual which is continuously updated which all 700 doctors have sworn to uphold and they implement it. and guess what? their error rates drop to almost zero. there might've hospital readmissions has gone down and the inflation in their health care costs has gone way down. that is just one example. pennsylvania was the first-aid in america to require all the major hospital providers to report both the results of their procedures and the costs and for three years running they have found there is absolutely no correlation between what people pay for health care and what quality they get. that is the biggest correlation in hospital x, y or z decide whether they have uniform sterilization procedures is how many of these procedures are done in the more you do the better they get added. the better results you get. so i would just say that i would like to see both parties in congress at least and erskine's reports -- writes about this, how we should accelerate the authority of the secretary of health and human services to implement these money-saving changes and i would like to see them not hogtie themselves and do something on health care which might be unfair to fixed income people before we see whether or not we can bring our health care costs closer to our competitors because we have the levers to do it now. i have already said more about this than i meant to but i don't think it is healthy just to live in the past. these things i have said are consistent with taking the philosophy we have been, shared prosperity, shared responsibility, a community we are all part of them going forward. i was thrilled to see that congress passed the trade bills with korea and colombia and panama and i know a lot of people in my party think it was a mistake, but i just think it is wrong. look at where our trade deficit is. our trade deficit is 50% in energy and ports and 50% with countries that we don't have a truly comprehensive all-encompassing trade agreements with. when you negotiate these things and you enforce them, the thing i really loved about, mickey didn't say this but he and charlie negotiated more than 300 trade agreements but they also enforce them. and then we got back into the business of being in debt. so we were borrowing money from the countries that have the biggest trade surpluses with us and it became more difficult to enforce our trade agreements. because nobody gets to slog their banker. [laughter] you know you wouldn't do that either. so i wanted to talk about these things because i think that is, believe what the president has tried to do is to apply these principles of sharing the future to put us back into future business and to make it a shared future on both the prosperity and the responsibility side of the ledger to the current situation. and i believe that there is evidence that some members really would like to see this happen. we can still have an election next year. we can still argue about who ought to be elected and we can still argue about who has the best ideas but we are in a -- here and we can't just up playing the game. we need to up our game and again, it tickled me to see all those commentators on baseball saying that was the greatest world series game ever played last night. it certainly wasn't the prettiest. you know, st. louis made too many errors and texas pitched too many walks. the reason they thought it was a great game is that they played all the way to the end. so if you ask me, did we make some mistakes? we probably shouldn't talk if we were being -- yeah we did, we made some mistakes. could we have done this that or the other thing better. probably. if you keep score about whether the future was advanced, i got tickled henry was still speaking in his delicate way, that he wants god an article for me which i treasure and 93 or 94 called clinton's stealth antipoverty policy. he was the enforcer of our stealth anti-property policy. if you look at the hope 6000th roe rim and the other things we did to live people from poverty, it is still what i'm proudest of all. hundreds move from poverty to middle-class in our eight years and poverty increased and the other years on both sides of it. all that matters when you finish this, all that matters is whether people are better off than when you started and whether kids have a brighter future and whether things are coming together being torn apart. the rest of us will all seem like a passing era tent, and i know i'm old enough now to know that the intelligent people in the congress in both parties have to know it. so i would just ask them all to go back and remember number one, you have got to share the future. the burdens and the benefits. until we get back to that, we are not going anywhere. we cannot sustain this level of inequality. and number two, there is not a single solitary example on the planet of a truly successful economy that is pursuing this militant antigovernment theory. you can be a little to the right and a little to the left that all the successful countries have both a vibrant private sector and an effective government. i was thinking about that today because i knew we would bring up the btu tax. in 1991, two years before the btu past, a conservative government in sweden passed the most unique of all carbon taxes. it was 100% refundable. the government said, we are conservative, we trust people if they actually knew what carbon was doing to our economy and with the burden was on the climate, we'd trust them to make a good decision. and i'm sure my counterparts in sweden said, are you out of your mind? you are going to take $5000 from bob rubin and turn around and give him a check for $5000? yeah am i trust him and guess what? the trust was well-placed. so they grew their economy 50% with no increase in greenhouse gas emissions with 100% refundable carbon tax by simply showing what the burden on the environment and economy and health care of the country was, by putting a price on it and showing people and giving them their money back. lo and behold, they made intelligent decisions. that is the sort of conservative liberal debates we ought to be having in america. not this antigovernment thing. i was proud of many things but when i left office i was very proud that the confidence in the federal government had gone up again, that people saw it as a positive force in our life, not the answer but a partner. i was proud that we had moved 100 times as many people from poverty to the middle-class but more than that i thought people could have their dreams again. and think about tomorrow again. so i ask you again to ask yourself, is it better to have a partnership or an antigovernment strategy? is it better to believe in investing grower trickle-down? is it better to believe in shared prosperity or you are on your own? i don't think it is a close call. we are so nervous about whether we have too much government that once in a while we just slip the gasket and then we have to deal with the aftermath for a while. everybody needs to calm down and do what we know is best for the future. thank you very much. .. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you all for being here today and many thanks to the distinguished handle for coming a long distance as well as for being a part of it. they also want to thank john's piano. i think you will really give us a great sense of the budget battle of 1993 and how that framed president clinton's early years and really set the tone for the broader struggle to drive growth and opportunity and jobs throughout the night teaming these. i know i remember the president's acceptance speech at the 1996 democratic national convention when he spoke about seeing his job as building that bridge to the 21st century. now for a lot of people, that was new information. for those of us in this panel, it was old news. every day i think he came and taught to us about a simple work in his emission of his presidency. and that was to manage this transition between the cold war industrial mind that that it dominated thinking from a 1950s to a new platform. and that platform would embrace change and you would embrace the spirit of innovation, which i helped create a lot of patented technology that came out in the 1990s india would empower america to compete and compete successfully in what is today a knowledge-based global economy in an interdependent world of the 21st century. well, you guys all had the responsibility of taking this visionary station and making it real. he ran the department come to you in the agencies and you have to set up the gold, object isn't timely to make it real. let me start with jeanne. can you give us a sense, since you are so heavily involved in not only the policy, but also the execution of the challenges of governing when the economy was evolving so dramatically? >> well, i think as bruce said, we had the president had caressed it fairly clear three-part frame, which was the need to restore fiscal discipline, trust in government. secondly, to have an aggressive investment in the future, which is very much based on his vision of the transformation into the 21st century, skills, technology, innovation. in the third, which was to embrace globalization with a human face, which was the president's expression is being greatly foreseen that this actually became harder after we left as the globalization put more pressure on the tensions between competition, fear supply-chain and being able to establish that was working to lift families and workers as opposed to race to the bottom. and i think he really foresaw that and it infused everything we did. i see no more than anyone, erskine, the first thing we have to do is obviously get the balanced budget agreement. it's interesting. if you look at what allen and laura were talking about, vice president or used always like to say that the 1993 deficit reduction was the one example of the law of unintended consequences. we actually thought this could lead to an investment led recovery, that there'd be a drop in interest rates, that there was an insurgency that if overcome could fuel investments. when i became nec direct your at the end of 1996, beginning 1997, 65 and laura, we face a little bit of the opposite, which was the markets had no sound that they would be a balanced budget agreement. so what i would hear from people is if you fail, there will be a negative surprise that in interest rates were low, that there was enormous confidence that even though the president -- and no, i believe that had steve forbes not searched in the primaries and 96, president clinton would've cut the deal with bob dole in the spring of 96. we had to come back in 97. we have deists pressure essentially to maintain calm and sonata the supplies of getting the balanced budget agreement. so that was the third day we had to do. for us, obviously it's never just getting the budget rate. we wanted to again infuse those values. we got the first child tax credit. and as you know, we did it in a way that annotated sewing tom earned income tax credit recipients increase innovation and rewarding work. we were able to get the first major expansion of health care through the chip program as part of that. so that was the fiscal side. on the open market side, that's where the president very much sixty-day, but he felt frustrated at times as well because he wanted to be a little put together this compact, more robust with open markets becoming more serious development in poorer countries and a more significant investment in workers in training. i think we push in those areas as far as we could, but it was never quieted his vision. one of the reasons he went to doubt those at the end ways to make sure understood the full depth of our vision. but we push never really caught on the international site into a stage, child labor we pushed where he could. we did the one-stop shopping worker training programs came in 1997. it was not as robust, but we always had that since we were pushing in that direction. you had to have the education that had to be part of both the investment budget. the investment sense as well as globalization that the human face. i think we also saw very much in everything we were doing that we were not only doing the kind of normal education accountability standards, but we are looking for the education that was cannot did to have to save rich into the 21st century. we discover things they could do. we couldn't get a new authorization, so we took existing authorizations and built up a huge technology initiative and we got up to 750 million we made great progress in areas like that, the basic notion the president took a very hands off development of the internet was one of the huge things that happen. over and over again can i see is says they to say never in a million years would have thought you could have an innovation like that and the government would know when to keep their hands off and let it develop. so is very much that vision. the last thing as you so many people appear. i give the president credit for this. the president didn't really like this concept, which was there was a rate of unemployment that could only go down at the time, laura, 5.5% to 6% without feeling inflation. doing an intervention. it's the only intervention on the atomic team. laura and we came to say, you just have to stop saying this. at 5.5%, inflation goes up. every economist says this. the president said the outcome i know that's what you guys think, but you're wrong. and larry summers and i had debated whether it was the president actually having insight or was he just lucky. and i actually think there was -- i think it was an interesting thing when a new rulebook is being written, with the old researching jane, who would know? in a strangely, the president of the united states is meeting while the rest are back at home having meetings, he's out there talking every day. and i think he had a sense before most of us did that there was something happening and how people are managing inventory, supply chain and had come and say you're not talking to the people i am. he very much did foresee something profound was happening. and going to alan's point of course, presidents always get postwar credit and more blame than all deserve in the. but the issue is coming to push in the right directions? to you laid the foundations? he laid the foundations of economic confidence. he laid the foundation not this was an administration that wanted to promote the super information highway that she wanted to support globalization and find a way to do it. those are the things that lay a foundation menu maker let. there was a tipping point moment, where things could have gotten worse or you could feel a positive cycle that turned out to be fantastic. but you have to judge a president and it turned with a hand they were dealt, did they know things in the right direction and lay the foundation? when you look at the three fundamental priorities and shifting the economy to the 21st century, there are things we are dealing with it turned out to be heard her after heard her after we left and globalization, we certainly didn't have to deal with the recession since the great depression. but acting for the hand we were dealt, what the president laid out as an organizing principle of what we focused on absolutely health to produce what was an unprecedented. a shared growth, shared income growth, shared prosperity over the last hundred years. >> you know, i remember when we were negotiating the bipartisan balanced budget in 1997. if president clinton never saw that the favorite to take exercise, he wanted to balance the budget, but he always told us we have to balance it in the right ways with our priorities. and i can remember coming back to the oval office after one of the final negotiations with anchorage. and to get that done, i do spend months and months lockstep with gingrich and lott. you only allow. [laughter] but a remember he said, did you get it? and i said yes, sir, we did. and when we got the expansion of the earned income tax credit can make for pay and we got health care insurance for 5 million poor kids, he just put his arms around us and that, and that makes a difference in people's lives. and that's what drove this economy in the right way. there are one of the things that you worked on the domestic policy council that a senior adviser to the first lady. the whole education reform effort. president clinton did so many great things in education reform in the direct student loan program to creating real public school choice, going from one charter school when he came into the office to two dozen when he left. but what i thought was amazing as he was the first politician i ever met that truly understood the juxtaposition between education and economic development. talk to us about what he did there and what his policies were in with the effects are. >> you mentioned two initiatives. the one thing i want to focus a little bit on and come back is what was remarkable is that the president had an experience as governor that help shape his views of education and much of the work we did was focused on the work that he had done as governor in 1989, really focus in the country's attention in a bipartisan way and high standards. and the movement that we have had over the last 20 years to ensure that we are raising our standards and goals for everybody, that we are ensuring that we can compete in the global economy because we are focused on ensuring that those standards are moving in the right direction and there's more and more public pressure and not where we got started by the president when he was governor and something he carried through in a spurt on goals of 2000. anon they say, education is a partnership between the state and federal government state, local and federal governments. the federal government's role is more limited. but i think what was remarkable as we change the conversation in education from being something simply about local schools and state budgets of the national enterprise because as jane mentioned, president saw these investments as part of the way the united states compete in the global economy. and i think it is one point to mention about the different visions that we are seeing today with these kinds of investments in the future. you know, the president was confronted in 1995 in the budget negotiations with the republican congress with the strategy similar to the republican strategy today which is a cut everything and thereby grow the economy. against that effort we were able to see greater and maintain those investments as well as grow them in the future. and i think part of the reason why we had the growth we did was obviously because of the tremendous foresight of the president and 93 plan. but also we have the rejection of the 95 budget that the republicans wanted to adopt. and i am thankful and i think we look around the world today, we see that as a disaster for other countries like britain and would've been a disaster for us as well. >> president clinton always talk to us when he talked about education. it was the key to the future of a country that he didn't have a highly educated trained workforce, there was no chance they could succeed in what would be a knowledge-based global economy. and he stressed to us so many times that if you set your standards here, that's what she did. boy have been here, people would perform beyond even their own expectations. broadway, in your work at the department of transportation, maybe this came from his time as governor. but you know, most people in public life when they talk about infrastructure talk about a preachy or for a road they are, that president clinton saw it more as a broader approach. describe to us the approach he brought to the infrastructure and how it helped the economy growing create jobs. >> clearly he saw it as nothing concrete asphalt and steel. but actually access to opportunity, whether that's a good education, good job with access. to use transportation themes and images metaphorically all the time. the british at the 21st century. i think one of the key challenges at the d.o.t. was to come in line with that broader vision of transportation so we would be talking about more than just concrete asphalt and steel to think we were able to accomplish that by actually getting those from you on a number of counts if i may, mr. president, you wouldn't notice her cabinet officials, but we try to influence your state of the union address. and we usually want to have something we're working on mentioned in that state of the union address. but we well, i tried that with erskine. in one sense, and no avail as it relates to my approach to try to get a project mentioned. and it can be a big project. the big dig in boston or the alameda corridor connecting the two ports of long beach and ally in california and their importance to our global economy. and it was just no no no. but then he came back to some pain. and this is in the 1998 state of the union address, where it says that there has been a new approach to getting our economic house in order. and it's getting the budget right, but also strategically investing in those things that will take us into the future. education, health care, environment, type allergy and transportation. and that was a win for us because what we did was we took your state of the union address and we basically mirrored all of the things we were working on a transportation to connect with those initiatives. so with welfare to work, we were the two in welfare to work. access to jobs, right? many individuals in urban communities having to get the jobs than suburban or rural areas. so that's how we may transportation resonate. the other thing now is we start to go beyond just the political team that you establish a d.o.t. and to actually connect all of those career staff members. when you talk about a static d.o.t. 100,000, that's a lot more than the political staff. we made the case to them that we were going to try to get their numbers, meaning the bills passed that we need, but at that time we hadn't passed t. 21 for air 21 can a major aviation bills of the surface transportation bills. we had to get them to buy in. what we said was, we are at the table, not on the periphery. we are there with discussions about education and health care environment and type knowledge in transportation and we want you to help us make sure that with that opportunity we've got something to say. and so we actually engage the career staff to work with us as a political sat and think though about transportation and really make the case it's about more than concrete asphalt and steel, but it's literally the means by which we pursue happiness, by which we get to a quality educational opportunity, quality job offer entity. and sometimes it is the way that we envision difficult decisions that have to be made so in the words of frost cometh the tumor reversion in the yellow words in the words of james weldon johnson at the stony roads. by approaching it that way, not only did we gain a seat at the table, we're able to pass major legislation. we also took seriously strategic plan initiative of reinventing government, performance plans initiatives and our servers at number one in government because we took the effort seriously upset with this opportunity to be at the table, let's make sure that we have learned every right to be there. >> erskine, i can see both their amir shot to try to influence state union. i can see it on their faces. >> i learned pretty early one of the key rules of the chief of staff was the word now. you know, you are right. the president always wanted to make sure. he wanted us to be fiscally responsible. he wanted us to try to balance budget, but he said you have to remember we have to invest in the future. we have to build that bridge to the 21st century. one of the infrastructure projects a lot was what i proven product is investing abroad have access to the internet. our members the french-american infrastructure of the 21st century. he also said we had to invest in high value-added research because that would create the jobs of tomorrow. henry, you had a kind of rough go for a while when the president talked about the area of big government is dead. and you are able to effectively manage such that we were able to do more with less in housing. tell us how you did it. >> well, erskine, when you talk about the breach in the future, you know, that sort of a concept of chronology because it was thought of his preaching to the next century. but there is always to me a frame in the president's. and logic in history that was about social justice and fairness and sharing the civil rights agenda. that makes democrats. they are democrats because they are the children of franklin roosevelt and the new deal and president kennedy's articulation of it but martin luther king. i had the opportunity to deal with the president a lot of years. he would come to san antonio to take him and he invited me to arkansas and hillary did to delurk on health care clinic issues in rural areas. this is a person who was articulating because it is a different kind of way to bridge the growth issues in economic issues and involve social justice agenda. it was the outrage to the cities, which is so troubled. iowa cell there was a clintonian fmap well, it kind of a two-fisted agenda. i used to talk about it is a good boxer doesn't have one punch, but at least two punches. one punch was what we've been talking about in the last panel, which is growth. democrats were not good at talking about growth. republicans were thought to be better at managing the economy generally. as you heard in the last panel, the rubin bentsen agenda if you will but getting to balance and fiscal responsibility with a thrust for growth was clearly key in one of those punches. but it made possible the second punch, which is how do you then make that work for people. it's not growth for its own sake. it's not gdp just to watch it grow. it's to make it work for people. it provides the wherewithal for students who were present. it provides the wherewithal cu can make other things have been it's not just social programs, but it's way too make the economy meet people. problems like manpower tblems lg problems like manpower training and school performance we've been talking about in college financial aid and an idea he wit, homeownership to give people the opportunity to build some weldon has been out or an worker dislocation adjustments as people lost jobs in one part of the country needed to be retrained. not just programs, the systemic change is like changing the welfare program in the public housing system and focusing on teacher training and providing support in policing, so that is kind come down in the cities, opportunities could be increased. so to me, these were out two sides of a barbell. there's a growth agenda, but again not growth for its own sake. it is to feel the capacity to have these programs. these programs we see as essential to sustaining the growth of health. so the whole essence of clinton-gore economic stimulus always bad, that, those two sides. working together, stay together. and as you say, there were other elements of this that made it palatable, like the assignment the president gave to the vice president in reinventing government to figure out the third way of kind of discussed in those days is not growing, but deering the current growth and not virginity in the right direction. those are all concepts that were all articulated by the vice president and others. >> and made an enormous difference. they key, you had two jobs at ustr internet commerce and you were heavily involved in the passage of a free-trade agreement in the with china. the president believes would bring new jobs. tommy the effect that had on the economy. >> thanks, sir. i'm just happy to be here. first of all, when jean is throwing the campaign and 91, we both were over six feet tall. i just want you to know that. last night so if any of you want to be short in stature, just work for bill clinton. first of all, i am so grateful to be a kid with my colleagues who i admire so much and learned so much from. you couldn't gather a finer group of people in one room with the exception of the other. and i'm grateful that. second, and really grateful and bruce lindsey will understand this. after 32 years of friendship, you have two sit and listen to me. [laughter] [applause] let me just add the platform laid out by both channels that's so impressive. we were going to engage if you look at the georgetown speeches, all three of them, which the opportunity covenant community of course but engagement, the new world, globalization we had to take could manage. they're a number of ways to do it. first of all us balance our budget. bring people out of poverty which is 15% to 11% as i recalled the production poverty in u.s. history at any time. take the people in america who are doing well and let them grow. african-americans, over 30% growth in their income. latinos over 24% growth. women together in the economy. those are critical invest in technology and infrastructure in programs you are talking about. once we were strong, how we were going to engage the world, boulder markets, create jobs, create advantage of this global economy. i will tell one story that bruce lindsey and i were talking about earlier, president clinton. in august 1992 in the campaign, you are faced with the very difficult decision. the question was whether you'd say to nafta, the north american free trade agreement, no without paper environmental agreements are yes, but we have labor and environmental agreements. that may sound like anyone's. it is not at all because on that road in ohio and michigan would go into the clinton camp or not. if ohio and michigan did not go to president clinton, we would not win the campaign because despite myself and bill clinton we were going into florida. if you remember that conversation. so that's what we had to do. we had many arguments about it. this gentleman sitting in front of you has the guts of anyone you've ever met because he put his whole campaign on the line. he knew nafta was the right thing to do. if you're going to teach in the world, we had to start with their own hemisphere. and he said yes, we will have environmental and side agreements. we got them done, a trade agreement and environmental agreements attached was the beginning of 300 trade agreements in the eight years. i was lucky enough to a showing as wikipedia would've never gotten any of them. the fact is that if you are going to have a rules-based trading system, if you have an open trading system, not free trade. free trade is misused and abused term. we need openable systems. bill clinton began talking about that long before 91 of three speeches here, president degioia. he taught to 1992 in los angeles at the world spirit council and set the state not just for those of us who work for him, but setting the stage for the world to understand the u.s. is going to compete, not retreat. we now see what the product is in the nation in the face of the earth we were when we started. [applause] as usual, my job is to get this program back on time. [laughter] can you talk to us before we go down a little bit and the progress we made? >> so, obviously president clinton took for a data program was part of the veggie tales that gene in new all negotiated and it was one of the most progressive hallmarks of the president tenure because it was the largest extension of health care in 30 years at that time. from an economic impact, it's really twofold. we know a continuing challenge in the country is when the challenge we face today for many families is the biggest reason people go bankrupt because of health care costs. that's a dramatic reduction in not because parents now and families have to go bankrupt because of their children health care costs. it's hard to imagine we could live in a country where children did not health insurance. president clinton right of that with his team. the most important night, we forget anything that comes across in today's debate around these things. medicaid are vitally important to budgets. and you know, when they look at debates today, you know, medicaid are one of the best ways actually to help address some of our economic challenges because the money gets spent very directly. so when these programs are threatened, how we should also wreck as should cut programs, but economic growth. and i don't think that's exactly the reason we did this program. they were actually in keeping with secretary, sayre mansion, which is the importance of having not only economic growth, the policies that speak to how we should be as americans and solve challenges together and also ensure we are writing the injustice is better all around us. i think if it wasn't for president clinton and hillary clinton's work in 93, 94 and the astro, we wouldn't have the progress he made an health care sense. >> erskine, i just like to add. i can say this. >> is over there. he just got out of your sight. >> i wanted to say something that would sound like pandering with as i sat with him sitting right here. what i want to say is a big part of the economic leadership we had is just leadership and that president clinton i think of this is important for students here at this as a take away from a session like this, it is his natural instinct to be optimistic, an essential part of this program, okay and a subset of that optimism was a believe we have to work at all the time. so when there was a temptation to play a political card to take a shot at somebody or some other approach. he is in sync with us right thing, let's do the thing that will work. let's may be called small ball on indication but let's do something. i don't know how many times i heard him say we just got a show up every morning and have it crash. and so, what i am saying is you can't have an economic program in the abstract. it's not dry sandpaper. it is filled by the instincts, motives and leadership capability of the person driving it. you were lucky to have that in place. [applause] >> your absolutely right. i can't count the number of times per second and the company is trained by the east house. if you don't believe the president does that's going on in the country, he would read dozens and dozens of magazines and newspapers and in some article he tore up the newspaper and some in oklahoma who had gotten a raw deal and he gave that to me and go fix this because that's what he felt was his job every day, to wake up and come over there and make america a better place. he didn't care how small or how big it was, he wanted to do something positive and it was leadership. [applause] >> jeanne, we'll close this down? and 90s are not a time where there was a lack of partisanship. people talk about a lot of tough partisanship today, but i still cuts and scars that should do. tell us which you attribute the progress, particularly in economic issues that we made after the battle of 1993. >> well, you never want to look back with rosy colored glasses. it was pretty brutal and night to 95. we all know that. a lot of people say what brilliant strategist who were on the government shutdown, except that we were trying to shut the government down. the president was trying to get an agreement. we were trained to work in that context, but we were smart they think strategically and letting people know we were the reasonable ones trying to get an agreement. and the failure of the agreement was really the failure of speaker gingrich and then and be able to move more to the center in the way that -- in the way bob dole would have been willing to do in the senate and is also one of my favorite moments of the presidency that a president was willing to shut the government down and he was really over the new discussion everything says medicare, but it is the medicaid discussion with the majority leader armey that day, when the president said i don't care if it all comes down around me or we go down to 5%, we were not going to do the black ranching and is medicaid. and that led to the government shutdown. of course i don't think any of us knew how that would turn out and was not our goal, was it some great strategy. but i do think the public responded by essentially punishing the party they thought were the most recalcitrant. and what was lease was people are caring about public opinion. if they refreshing that when people were moved by the end of 1996 when we started the second term, there really was what was great about that. was at that point the president wanted to get in a balanced agreement and he was willing to regardless of the politics do that. you have a republican majority at that point that essentially did want to give out a showing they could work with this president. i think that foraged, the moment where there really was among the leadership, self-interest and wanting to get better. president clinton said to me recently, remember that seemed kind of hopeless in september, october 95 then you go home to turned around. obviously you hope that would be a less than four right now, that while it seems there is a portion of house representatives demand from public opinion would turn around and should give us some hope. the one experience we've had been as relevant today even though it doesn't always work is a history of getting difficult bipartisan agreements is really when you get the leadership of both sides and both houses in our room. it doesn't always work. as he saw over the summer, it is the only chance you have. the 93 experience, you know, one thing for 93 that was maybe not the best phrase, but you got btu. he took a difficult vote in the house of representatives and the other house decided, you know, to not even put that forward your seat took the difficult political vote, which are vote on the line and then it didn't even have been. members of congress are very conscious of that. they don't want to take a difficult vote, put their careers on the line and then find out the other house is not even going to bring it up. so what we did in 97, where we first had the process with yourself and myself in frank and john hilley, where we met with domenici and kasich and the democrats, we were all there. and what that loud for was the same thing that happened in 1983, with tip o'neill and ronald reagan is a moment where you can hold hands and jump together, we reach an agreement and everybody knows i know there'll be political cover on both side and i know both houses support that. so whether or not the negotiations over the summer or whether the super committee bears fruit, that is still the most promising way to get an agreement and i think 97 really showed that. i think the other positive is one that does happen, you do build a bit of personal trust and that can seem hard to believe at times and people are such tough adversaries. but you do work together and not just create windows that open. i think the fact that sometimes we had to work together on some of the trade agreements built a certain report. i think the report about us when we passed the new markets tax credit to reach out to speaker hastert and pass something in 2000 in an election year with the support of the speaker of the house that is not tens and tens of tax incentives and the low income communities that henry sought to shield by secretary of hud. i think that we went through the worst and you can't always solve it in the room, but i think it's right to be on the site of trying. i think in the end of the day i would think the public ultimately i like parents in the front seat with her kids are arguing in the backseat. when you're in the kid in the backseat, you figure. scared whether -- to let the better side. actually, the parents just want you to get along. and i think ultimately the public does really want everyone to work together. if you can make clear that as president clinton showed a 95, you may not bear the fruits of that immediately, but over time, the public rewards those who are trying to bring everybody together, who are willing to compromise don't see that as a dirty word. again, just make the point, you almost had a balanced budget agreement and 96. that is how quickly things turned from october, november of 95 to the president. you should've seen president abdul sitting alone in the oval office with notepad doing the numbers. they were literally cutting the deal alone until politics to bob dole away from doing that. that turned, but ultimately did create the environment and 97, where he started the year with a clear mission we knew, erskine, get a bipartisan agreement. so it can take a while co. v. happy year or year, what happened between 95 and 97 under president clinton leadership i hope will be the model for what will happen in this period of time as well. >> nothing in the world positive happens without leadership. public service is a great honor and president clinton on behalf of all 12 of us had a chance to come up here today. we thank you for giving us a chance to serve. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> next month, the joint deficit reduction committee called the super committee will issue recommendations for cutting at least $1.5 trillion for the deficit over 20 years. his discussion of the urban institute focused on how those cuts that affect children. pbs senior correspondent judy woodruff posted this 90 minute event. [inaudible conversations] >> to wanting to go ahead and start? it's working. hello, everyone. i'm judy rose of the "pbs newshour." i'm so pleased to be here at dearborn institute. we run privileged to be a board member to participate and a discussion that is near and dear to my heart and a subject that is far too little attention in the national discourse. i think it gets too little attention and around the country. whether it's because children don't vote and they don't have the voice in the halls of power, whatever the reason as, it is undeniable that americans at the other end of the age spectrum have far more influence than do the youngest americans. so i think this topic the nation's priorities and children how well they go together could not be more timely. we have a fabulous panel here to discuss up for the next hour and a half. and i feel privileged to be part of this conversation. i would say to kick it off, there's no better evidence of how timely it is in the news that the administration has granted california a waiver for its medi-cal program, california medicaid, which essentially means it's going to be harder for millions of californians to count on that program and many of those are children to get this sort of help in medical care they need. we know that 74 million american hands are under the age of eight team. we know children are poorer than all other age groups. but again, in the sounder theory of today's budget battle, the word children doesn't get mentioned as often as conversation that social security and medicare. the deadline we know for to super committee, less than a month away. we know the election such as the white house or president, much of congress, governors mentioned the statehouse is just a year away. the new urban institute, children in the room should have a copy of asher's seat and those watching on television will be able to go online on the urban institute website, www.urban.org the publication is titled, today's children, tomorrow's america. six experts face the facts. and that document, experts from diverse disciplines tackle a simple to stay, hard to answer question. how can solutions to our national and state budget get the facts about children in the united states. and in their approaches to each one of these writers wrestled with presents and approaching economic and demographic challenges in different ways and bring very different experiences to bear. we are going to be testing observations during our conversation over the next hour and a half and we are so privileged as i mentioned to have such an extraordinary group of scholars with us today to talk about this. i'm going to introduce starting on your right. on my left is charles cobb, president of the committee for economic development. he served as deputy assistant to president george h.w. bush, were domestic policy working on economic, education, legal and regulatory matters. as an assistant general counsel at the office of management and budget and deputy under secretary for planning, budget and evaluation at the department of education. sitting next to charles is olivia golden, and the two fellow here at dearborn institute. her research focuses on human services programs, helping children and families. she has been director of state operations for new york state governor, child and family services v. and has been his secretary for children and families of health and human services. seated next to olivia between olivia and the is robert reischauer, a familiar face to everyone, president of the urban institute. he was director of the congressional budget office or 1989 to 1995. bob is of interest to all of us today as one of two public trustees of the social security and medicare trust funds and he brings that experience to bear in his observation. moving on to my right is former congressman, james kolbe, senior transatlantic fellow at the marshall fund of the united states and a senior adviser to mclarty associates. he did serve as house of representatives from 1985 to may 2007, representing the tucson -- tucson arizona area. he was on the appropriations committee for 20 years and share two of the subcommittees. our next panelist is margaret sands, institute fellow at dearborn institute and director of low income working families project. previously vice president for governance and economic analysis at the joint center for political and economic study. one of our panelist is coming. he has raised scheppach i'll introduce the money arrives. we want to get her conversation underway by hearing for a few minutes from three panelists to put their ideas out there and we will discuss what they have from other panelists afterwards. bob reischauer, i'm going to ask you to kick this off. cannot thank you earn much, judy. analyzing federal budget policy fix social security so you might wonder what i'm doing a pure sitting along the child policy experts rather than sitting down for a should be among the learning. to answer that question is about a month and a half ago, olivia came into my office and said she thought the institute should sponsor and focus the attention on what's happening as we grapple with our current fiscal problems, both economic weakness on long-run fiscal unsustainability. i thought this was really a great opportunity and i told her that when people ask me the questions of what's the biggest challenge facing this nation rather than saying something about taxes or badges or health care. i always say really i think it's making sure children of today will be the productive citizens and workers of tomorrow. so i jumped the chance to participate in this and of course as president take a certain ability to propel myself from the audience that i'm in right now. i'll let you know a whole lot of the policies have focused on how to get the economy growing again, how to boost incomes over the long run. most of this debate has focused on what should we do about policy in which we do about government regulation? should we invest more in infrastructure? should we do innovative things to spur new technology? .. by our society the workers are going to lack the skills they need to compete successfully than increasingly competitive global marketplace, and you can look at this by comparing some of what's the situation facing the now versus in the past and you come to the conclusion that it doesn't look so hot. a longer portion of today's kids are spending at least part of their formative years in disadvantaged circumstances. medicaid pays for about somewhere over 40% of the birth in america indicating that lots of these kids are starting out at a disadvantage. one in five children last year were living below the poverty line and that happens to be a higher fraction of kids in all but two years of the last 36. so this is not an area where things are looking good and we know now which we didn't know 30, 40 years ago that young people who grew up at the circumstances have much less chance of getting a job that is stable and adequate to support a family when they are adults. in addition, you look at the situation and fewer kids are growing up in circumstances where they have two parents who can share the burden of child bearing which are increasingly complex. in 1970, 85% of all kids were in a household situation where there where two parents. less than 70% today. and on top of that, because of the changes and our values and patterns, a much higher fraction of appearance or in the work force, particularly women who might have spent more time devoted to getting their kids to do their homework rather than watch television or what ever. for this generation of children growing up also the educational system really isn't quite what it used to be. different ahead patterns of birthrates across states means larger fraction of kids now are growing up in states that haven't placed a very high priority on elementary and secondary education. they are the ones that have lower spending per kid and test scores and achievement levels are not as good and when you add that sort of cyclical problem that's happening now which is states and localities are under a lot of pressure from the revenues and other burdens and you see that how they are responding is to cut back the length of school year, the length of the school day, the number of subjects taught and things like that you despair when you realize what is happening in korea, taiwan, china and the places the we are going to compete with. about 46% of all kids now are in ethnic or racial minorities. that's about double the fraction of the mid-1970s. they are going to face discrimination. we also know dropout rates of some of these minorities are relatively high and lead to less training. you put all the things together and you say what should we do and the answer is simple. we have to put a shoulder to the wheel and get together a comprehensive and integrated investment strategy for children , one that will direct resources to the traditional assistance come augmented early childhood education, more of an emphasis on effective k-12 programs and support for those kids who are going to go on to post secondary education are either in technical school or academic settings but there is a big obstacle to this and that is that historically we have placed the managerial program addict and a lot of the fiscal responsibility for things that affect kids that the public sector does the state and local level and these governments have neither the will nor the wallet at this point to engage in a massive kind of intervention that i think is needed. what that means i think is the federal government is going to have to step in and take the lead, but we all know that the federal budget is also under extreme strains and there is a whole lot of folks who want to scale back involvement of the federal government especially areas like this. i think the would be a huge mistake because the consequences of the failure in this area don't end up largely of the state level. the end of the national level. we as taxpayers and citizens bear this burden if it comes to the poorly educated individual who can't get a job migrates to other states when they fall through the cracks and can't earn enough and federal programs and picking up the income support and the nation as a whole suffers. so i think that as the super committee and congress leaders see how we get on the fiscally sustainable path at the same time they should spend as much time thinking about what it would take with respect to an investment strategy for children to ensure that once we are all on that fiscally sustainable path we are of such a low level that the standards of living are not what we have come to expect. >> thank you very much. a lot to provoke our thinking this afternoon. margaret? >> thank you. i would just like to build on some of the things in particular children who are persistently poor. we get figures every year about the number of children in poverty but that only is one place and time when the children might be poor but about 10% of children are persistently poor devotees they spend at least one-half of their years between zero to 18 living below the poverty line. that's true in terms of a study that two of my colleagues have looked at this issue and are continuing to look at how it changes over time but in their study, the sound of the 10% of children who are persistently poor about 40% of american children persistently poor and we mentioned at least one-half of their childhood in poverty and for many three-quarters or more of their years in poverty. the consequences and early adulthood and mostly if we can look at that group beyond early adulthood are detrimental to the succeeding generation. they have lower educational attainment, they have lower employment in their late 20s and their colleagues who are persistently poor and among the young women they are more likely to have had a team which means it is going to be harder for them to provide for their children. now, if we think about this hard and we want to say we want to do something positive for children when we would ideally think of a generation strategy that is we are going to make the parents more economically self-sufficient so that they can provide for their children and provide a better environment but that doesn't always work out on their own and would be more thinking about it in terms of public policy. set a minimum we do need to help children so that we can make them economically self-sufficient as adults and also try to ensure there won't be a third and fourth generation growing up in poverty thereby extending the detrimental impact in terms of an economic productivity as well as the wellbeing of their children and their families. there are several strategies to talk about and i'm sure we will talk about some of them and that is to look at some of the problems that young children face thoughtful. one has to to with stability and child care. we expect most parents not to go out and work. that's the current projection mothers of young children will not stay at home they will go out in the workforce and their children will go into child care, but the work that we have them also another low-income working families project is to look at child care choices available to low-income families as they try to combine work and taking care of their children's needs and these options that the face are pretty limited. often the work in june to become jobs that have a dramatic work hours and that means 925 isn't necessarily available to them. if they have language issues they may be looking for child care centers where the language available if they prefer that their children learn english they would like to make sure that there's a way they can communicate well. it may be convenient for their place of employment or their home and it may be difficult to find things that meet the need that they have and still are convenient in terms of being able to get their children to day care and get them to work. if they are able to find all of those things are the affordable most likely not without some kind of subsidy. so that's one area that we look at in terms of government support. also residential stability is very important. low-income families, families in poverty frequently have force moves that is they may lose their lease, they may be evicted, and that means when they moved off to their children have to change schools. these are not good for children because some of the issues they might wind up in schools that are not as good as the schools they were previously in and i was at a meeting earlier this month where somebody said they go from crabby schools to more crabby schools and high said that is the view of the circumstances that in the absence of public policy will be to the likes of young people born in poverty. there's different ways of handling it and some of these fallen the federal government perhaps dealing with the residential stability issue but what state and local governments are important players in the education system and we need to think about ways in which the school systems could be improved. my colleague in her piece in this volume talks about the importance of federal incentives to ensure states may not have these things at the top of their pretty could be incentivized to move them up through federal financial support as well as program or regulatory issues. okay, margaret, thank you. bolivia, you are the third kickoff speaker. >> thank you. good afternoon. andrea excited that this paper and the panel are happening because to me what we've tried to do with this distinguished panel of guests and to the moderator is get three different groups that have to be on the same page if we are going to solve this problem to share some information that right now nobody has, and that come to me, people who are experts in children's policy, children's experts and advocates, people in decision making of rules frequently note a lot about the needs and circumstances of children, but very little about the ins and outs of the federal budget order of least they feel they have no access to that. experts, legislative and executive, and to agree to be one of the federal budget, but the way children are funded in many federal programs and governmentally makes it really hard for them to have a picture of how the pieces fit together. and steve leaders in the parts of my life at the state level sometimes are not always to have a good picture of children funding within the states but of course you don't have a national picture and the complexity of the way the federal money troubles to the states can make it hard to make good decisions they're either so my hope is we are getting those things together today to refine going to make four points from my essay in the collection. i will try to push a little closer to the solutions building on some of the diagnosis from bob and margaret but the first point bob developed a very foley is that children's lives change in the last couple of decades in ways that for a substantial number of children make it harder for them to succeed. and that is the issue of poverty come of low-income, low wages, parental on a planet, and the fact that almost half of children are now minorities in groups that have traditionally suffered and a ray of disadvantages. second point i want to highlight is that the process of figuring out what public investments we should make to help meet the needs of children is a lot harder than it needs to be because some of the key information about how the budgets and spending relate to children isn't widely known. the process is that transparent. so to give you just a few examples of things that i think are important to solving the problem, the largest single federal children's programs as medicaid. all of those in the top ten are snap, that's the new name for food stamps and other nutrition programs. several other programs in the tax system from social security, and then several of the education programs that we traditionally think about and some of your early childhood and social service programs. a second or another example of the fact that is important to solving a problem but isn't very familiar is public spending when it takes federal state and local in some ways is the reverse of what would make sense based on what we know from the research when we think about the age of children we've spent far less of the youngest children babies and toddlers in the u.s. children get older even though a lot of what we the from the research is about the crucial role of investments that start early and then continued and another fact which bob highlighted is about two-thirds of the spending on children public spending on children is state and local couple. i would be interested in the rays but i would always think better to leave the federal budget officials think in the annoying interest group, not as a crucial partner whose fiscal well-being is central to being able to invest in children. for those are the kind key budget facts that are really important to solving a problem. 3. i want to make from the paper, which again bob mentioned briefly is that the problem of getting that two-thirds of the state can be spent successful the effectively for children. it's hard right now because of the aggregate circumstances of the state budget. ten reubin's paper gives more detail but overall states aren't back yet from where they were in 2008, but it's even harder because as bob mentioned, the fact some states are losing children and those states, it doesn't mean the children are leaving the they have fewer children than they used to. they are mostly in the northeast and the midwest. states that have larger increasing numbers of children are in the south and southwest like texas, florida, georgia, north carolina, arizona, nevada. many have lower per pupil spending and they have tax structures that make it hard for them to expand to meet the needs of their increase is a number of kids and shift in the kind of needs those children have, flexible as english language learners. so that's a challenge to meeting our future. the final point that i want to make from my essay is that i think that there are practical steps that can help us do better although they face an enormous number of obstacles. i make four suggestions in the peace and i sure that we will talk about those and many others. the first is that we increase the share of spending on education that's federal. now make it about 7%. there's lots of practical difficulties in the way that we can talk about more, but it is also a point that bob made. second, we had investment in the youngest children because there are some crucial opportunities and some specific ideas about what we should do. third, if there is reform or change to entitlement programs that's part of overall budget strategy it's important that we keep in mind the crucial contribution particularly of medicaid but also to a lesser degree social security to children and we think about how to not just protect but potentially build on those contributions. and the fourth suggestion i have is a process suggestion perhaps comes a little bit from my state experience, it's more common at the state level with the federal budget process should include an explicit step each year that assesses spending on children could be more or less elaborate just a children's budget or some work it needs and effectiveness and that that would help us have a focused conversation. but i know that in the rest of this panel we are going to hear from very distinguished people representing all of the different experts that are part of the federal and state budget process and i really look forward to that conversation. >> thank you, olivia. we have heard of lot in the last few minutes from these three experts, and so i want to turn to you first, congressman jim kolbe. you spent 27 years in the congress, 20 years in the appropriations committee now part of a committee for the responsible budget and picking up on what olivia just said about, you know, we would like to see the federal budget process the issue just understand how that process works. how did it work, i don't need to go through the whole thing that gives us a thumbnail of how the decisions get made and whether you think the process is working and how hard would it be that children work adequately? >> i'm not here obviously as a children's expert. i'm not here either as a budget expert but the guy sitting on the other side of you that knows more about this than the rest of us come by here. so, i really should be deferring to him, but i can talk about it a little bit from the standpoint of one. as i listen to this discussion here today, it occurs to me that there are two things at work here. we are talking about a budget issue and then we are also talking about a priority. i don't think anybody in the room or anybody the would be listening would disagree with hardly anything that's been set up here about how important children are. and so, the question is then why aren't children being made the pretty? so that is the fundamental question to the and it comes back to the budget. when you come to the budget it's not just children that aren't getting talked about in congress, it's things like highway, things like cancer research, things like environmental protection. these are all things in the discretionary budget. people are now focused on if not defense which is the discretionary did its entitlement, its revenue and its entitlement. and as olivia pointed out they do play a big role when it comes to children but we can't really talk about what we are going to do for children or make them a higher priority until we fix the entitlement problem because the internal largest squeezing out more and more of the discretionary spending. they are just less and less. they are to spend on whether your priority would be saving the national parks somebody as cancer research or whether the previous children come early children's care if we don't fix them we should all be applauding the congress and the super committee is the least focused on this problem when they are going to focus to accomplish anything or not remains to be seen that the iraq least focused on. it is and -- >> on reforming. >> on reforming and actually making some changes so that we can then perhaps be able to save the kind of discretionary spending that we need in order to make children a priority. that really is the issue. until we are able to curb entitlement spending and it's not just this its revenue and it's a comment, and i recognize that there needs to be tax reforms including to get a high your degree of revenues there, but ultimately if you look to the long-term picture the entitlement is going to squeeze everything out over the long run you simply cannot raise enough revenue to get anything more if you don't fix the entitlement program, and that is medicare and medicaid, social security, those are big ones. you've got others as well. so it's a matter of i think people in congress since the priorities for a children but it's -- they have the mind focus on the other issue right now, and one other thing i would just say is that one of the reasons it doesn't get the attention of the federal levels because it's already been said here it's been largely states that have had the responsibility for children with this addition, foster care, early child care, it's a lot through the federal programs the states that have been implemented in those programs and so it isn't as much on the mind of the federal legislators as it would be a defense program or else would be something dealing with the epa and environmental protection. it is because the states have had the responsibility for it. >> that is a good segue to introduce our next panelist who i'm going to call on her now as i do when reminded we want to ask anyone watching either on television or on the webcast to please send questions you have for the panel because you can get your questions and continent to the public affairs, all one word, publicaffairs at .org to read the next one is raymond. he is a professor at public policy at the university of virginia. frank school of leadership and public policy. he served for 28 years as executive director of the national governors' association. during his time there he worked with more than 300 governors, to tone became president and many have become u.s. senators or cabinet secretaries. so, you have been here. you have heard the tail end of this conversation. but speak to us about what, but on the mind of governors, and thinking about what jim kolbe was saying about the congress saying that the state and local government is doing. what is the mindset of governors when it comes to children's welfare and children's issues? >> it's tough because the sort of continual deterioration in the fiscal situation. i think unfortunately that is going to be a long run problem now. a lot of people say, you know, once we come back to the 2008 revenue level we are going to be okay. i knew little more pessimistic because we've got primitive tax systems which means the revenue growth is not going to be very good. we continue to have the $3 trillion of unfunded liabilities to the area, and we've got the sort of health reform and the increase in medicaid. so i think that there's a lot of interest particularly on the child for the standpoint of the last several years looking at the $150 billion of deficits that have to be filled because most of them have balanced budget requirements. so i think it is a priority but as you are aware it is true as others have said, very little public money goes to the first five years and to the extent that there is any system out there for the early childhood is a very fragmented system to the volunteers in smaller groups as opposed to the state's building it so they are aware of that but it's hard to find the money to actually put it down where it needs to be done to bring in charles now, the committee for economic development where you are has focused on the need to invest in children to get you also seen the budget process in your own experience in the white house, you've seen it tall him become the department of education. what would you add to what we've been saying about the way the process works and how hard it is or isn't to get something done for children? >> first of all i think we can fix this problem right now if we wanted to. i understand that there are budget constraints, there are all sorts of issues the congressman mentioned stating the fundamental problem and it's not a budget or appropriations, its cultural and its political. the cultural issue is the fact that this country simply lacks a strategy for investing in human capital. we don't look at our young people from an investment prospectus, and it's actually across the entire education. in the early years with broad business leaders into the fold to urge greater public private state federal local investments in their early years we under invest in the early years and by the we come by we, the country we like to make fun of all the time, france, gets it right. they are a lot smaller in terms of their economy, but the of the crush system that really is a model for the arrest of the world come and as a result, the human capital investment in young people me in the young people start school, ready to learn. incidentally they have lower incidence of infant

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