Transcripts For CSPAN Bill Clinton On Public Policy 20140504

Too the story printer the story. That is not necessarily mean it will happen but it does put more pressure on the doj to look at this. There is word that senate may take up the keystone xl pipeline and the call for the opening of the pipeline. What is expected next week . The fascinating politics, a lot of democrats are up for the approvalpport of keystone. Most of the credit leaders dont view the question will be is this a nonbinding or binding vote . Itn if it is a binding bill will not give the democrats cover. Itgives them clinical cover is not a done deal yet. Things for the update. Thanks for having me. Senator jon holden wants the senate to vote on legislation requiring approval of the keystone xl pipeline from canada. The north Dakota Republican is our guest suite on newsmakers. He details his efforts to get the pipeline approved. You can see the interview at 6 p. M. Eastern here on cspan. The woman went off and became these incredible successes, not only did they not only were they the first women stockholders and the world to , theybrokerage firm became lectures when they spoke. O 6000 people they were really very famous based on the beginnings with. Anderbilt the family kept threatening them with blackmail. The mother started this whichlous court trial in victorias husband want to put her in in the same asylum in an insane asylum or kill her people the sisters had been trying very hard for two years to hide all that. They were reinventing themselves. They were not police but educated but they said they were. They were reeling were willing to wreck their whole life. They had some really rotten characters in the family. Fixarbara mcpherson myra acpherson on cspans q and a. Bill clinton graduate from Georgetown University in 1968. He returned to the school to speak to them about Public Service. He touched upon the Affordable Care act and the Budget Surplus during his presidency. He also detailed his attempt to reach a Police Agreement a Peace Agreement between Prime Minister benjamin not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and yasser arafat. [applause] thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. It is great to be back. I want to thank hillary for coming with me today. It has been a long time. [applause] she has not had to sit through one of these in ages. [laughter] i think there are a lot of my former classmates and friends who are here. I thank them for coming. I want to mention that my chief of staff is here. She is a georgetown alumna. She has been pushing for me to put this on the schedule. Thank you for being here. To remind me that if i had been a catholic, i could have been a jesuit. [laughter] i can say this. I was americas happiest protestant when the new pope took his holy office and i had and thrilled by that and i think all the jesuits of the world should be very proud of him. As the president said a year ago today, the state, i gave the first in a series of lectures on composing a life in Public Service weather in elected office or government job at any level or as a private citizen seeking to advance the public good. I tried to organize these talks around what i said i believe to be the four essential elements required for effective service. A deep interest in people, especially those who are different than you are. A clear purpose for the service, and an idea about how it can best be advanced through government or the private sector or the nongovernmental sector or all three working together. How before you can advance your service, you had to determine, develop, and then implement the policies that will be the instrument of your objective. How do you do that . What are the problems with it . Fourth, how do you succeed . How do you turn your good intentions into real changes, and whether you have to win an election or not, theres always politics involved in that. I decided after thinking about this, and particularly after the last talk when i spoke about how i came to be interested in people, that we should put the purpose part off till the last, even though its really the first thing, because it will make all the rest, i think, make more sense in that way. I think that its very important to understand we live in a time when, for a whole variety of reasons, policymaking tends to be dimly understood, often distrusted, and disconnected from the consequences of the policies being implemented. I have felt that most intensely in the development, the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care act, but i also feel it in many other areas as well. One of the problems is that if a policymaker is a political leader and is covered primarily by the political press, there is a craving that borders on a date if to have a storyline. Then once people settle on the storyline, there is a craving which borders on blindness to shoehorn every fact, every development, everything that happens, into the storyline, even if thats not the story. So for all of you who are students here, the first thing i want to say is, i spent a lifetime really believing that policy matters. That there are different consequences to different sets of ideas, and that they matter. And therefore, the debates are important, the disagreements are important, but its not very helpful to overlay them with too much cynicism and pretend that it doesnt matter and that its all just a roll of the dice. I just dont believe that. And so today, what i hope to persuade you is not that everything i did was right, because it wasnt, but that all the policies that we developed, we developed with a certain set of objectives. We spent an enormous amount of time on the details, for which i might say i was made a lot of fun of when i took office. Why is bill clinton spending all this time on the farm program . Thats not what a president does. But this is really, really important. Because it affects people, and it determines whether your purpose can be advanced. So i decided, i just picked three policies. I started to talk about americorps and Student Service because this is the 20th anniversary of it, but i think its impact, its return on taxpayer dollars and the number people it mobilizes, the fact that we have had far more people serve we had more people serve in americorps in the first five years than in the history of the peace corps. The main thing that frustrated me was that until people actually needed them, a lot of people didnt know much about the americorps programs. But i decided not to do that. I wanted to talk about three policies today that i discussed in the first talk a year ago. The implementation of our Economic Strategy in 1993, anchored by the budget. The welfare reform bill, which was highly controversial at the time, and remains so, and our efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace in the middle east, which has taken on new urgency in view of all the things that are going on, and which took up a lot of secretary of state clintons time when she was in office. So lets begin with the economic program, because thats actually what propelled me into the race in 1992, and the primary reason i was elected. When i was elected, we had already more than a decade of stagnant wages and a declining middle class standard of living. Many years, poverty was rising instead of going down. The things we thought were guaranteed right at the end of world war ii all the way through the 1960s, that we might fight about civil rights, vietnam might be a catastrophe or a great idea, depending on what you thought, but at least we knew the American Economy would be there. At least we knew that every year people would make more money than they did before, that families would be better off, that children would have more chances, that poverty would go down. Its hard for all of you to imagine that, but when i was a kid, that was taken for granted. Even in my state, which was one of the lowest income states in america, i dont know that i ever met anybody who wanted a job that didnt have some kind of job. We thought that thats the way america work. By the time i ran for president , people didnt think that anymore. And we had been, for 12 years, governed by an Economic Policy which propelled president reagan to office in 1980. Republicans call that supplyside economics. The democrats call that more disparagingly trickledown economics. But the idea was that the economic troubles we had in the 1970s were caused by the strangulation of a regulatory state, the inefficiencies of unions and government trying to hold onto past economic arrangements which were no longer relevant, the need to deregulate to the maximum is 10, and most important of all, to make taxes as low as they could possibly be on what the second president bush always called the wealth creators, the highest income people, because the more money you gave them and their business entities, the more they would reinvest, create more jobs, and create prosperity. And we had been doing that for 12 years. When i was governor of arkansas, during this time, there was quite a lot of prosperity in the 1980s on the coast with the beginning of the rise of the hightech economy. Along route 128 in massachusetts. Here in the d c area with the interconnection companies, and obviously in silicon valley. The 1980s were tough for the middle of the country. You had great industrial cities just hollowing out. The farmers had a very tough time in several of those years, and a lot of people thought manufacturing was going to disappear from the country. During those years, i tried to follow a strategy that was really quite different in some ways than the reaganomics strategy. I did believe we had to keep taxes low if we wanted to compete for jobs, especially since our state was already a low income state, and we had a very good budgeting system which made it illegal for me to spend more money than we took in for more than six months in a row. If i did that, my chief Financial Officer and i could be found guilty of a misdemeanor. For a system going back to 1948. As result of which, we were cutting spending all the time, and not just at budget time. We never had any mass layoffs, we never had to abolish any big rogue rams. If we had the money, we invested it. If we didnt, we didnt spend it, but we had a flexible system which enabled us to operate, and we relentlessly worked on developing our education systems, our Training Programs and our attraction for new investment. In the 1980s, there were only eight states which gained manufacturing jobs, and my state was one of them. We worked on it. But i can also tell you that i learned that it takes a good while to repurpose an economy, and when i ran for president , in the previous 10 years are Unemployment Rate had been below the National Average on he wants, but in 1992, and a happy political coincidence for me, we led the country in job growth throughout the year. We were always first or second in every month. But i developed a very different theory about what makes an economy grow. When we started practicing supplyside economics, this country had never before in its entire history ever deliberately run large structural budget deficits in peace time in times of growth. So despite the Current Congress deriding president obamas Stimulus Program, basically we had an eight year long stimulus ride. Driven primarily by big increases in defense spending and large tax cuts. The reagan tax cuts were so large in 1981 that about 40 of them were actually clawed back, and in only eight years we still tripled the debt of the country that we had run up from the beginning of our existence to 1981. And when president bush came in, he basically, the first president bush had to serve president reagans third term in economic terms, that if the ideological and institutional Political Support to supplyside economics was so deep, there wasnt much that could be done about it. Finally in 1990, the Democratic Majority Congress passed the bill to try to start doing something serious about the deficit and the debt. They had some modest tax increases and some modest spending cuts. The most important thing in that bill in 1990 was the socalled pay go provision which said that unless it was an emergency like the financial crisis, which congress could recognize, or a Big National Security emergency, in normal times, if congress wanted to spend money that went beyond the Revenue Growth that was projected, they would have had to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else, to try to turn this trend around which had then been going on since 1981. It was a good thing for president bush to do, but the reaction in his own party was for roches. Newt gingrich led a revolt against the republican leader in the house, bob michael, and he was deposed. It led to the beginning of the pretea party movement. Economics is not theology, folks. They had convinced everybody, including middle class people that their incomes were stagnant because they had been so crushed and their wealthier neighbors had been so rushed by the burden of the state. It led to the rise of Newt Gingrich and orson president bush to give what i thought was a very said speech at the Republican Convention saying he had made a terrible mistake in signing this budget bill and he would never do such a terrible thing again. Now if you read the press, generally people think it is one of the three or four best things he did. I thought he had done a very good job in most of his foreignpolicy work, he signed the americans with disabilities act, he had a better environmental record, and my point of view, than his predecessor, but he was stuck with this Economic Policy. And i thought the most important thing i could do was to reverse it. And it began with the budget, which is far more than just numbers. The details matter. So let me begin by saying i put out a booklet in the primary and then al gore and i reissued an economic plan in the general election, and we began to work on what would be in the details of the budget. And it was a very interesting process. We debated all kinds of things, and you may find this amazing because Interest Rates have been down so long. Even the democratic economists assumed during the transition period that if we got unemployment below six percent, we would have terrible runaway inflation. So we had these arguments at the Governors Mansion in arkansas. I said no, we wont, because productivity is high and our borders are more open than other countries. If we start charging too much with inflation, competing products will come in and we will drive prices back down. Even my own advisers looked at me like i had been temporarily deranged. Let me hasten to say, that is 4 inflation with high unemployment. When workers get discouraged, as they have quite understandably in the aftermath of the financial crisis, then the Participation Rate tends to go down. The Unemployment Rate may not be comparable from one year to the next. It really depends on what the level of work force purchase a patient is. Anyway, what we decided to do was first, to figure out what had caused a slowdown, because there was a marked slowdown in the economy in the bush years, and we got into a recession and got out of it. We could not just shake out of it. Why was it worse since the Economic Policy had not changed from the reagan years . Basically, what happened was, it was the first time in American History in effect we went on an eight year Stimulus Program and then a tenyear Stimulus Program in peace time with Economic Growth. If you keep borrowing all that money, eventually you have to pay higher Interest Rates. And a higher Interest Rates were crowding out private investment. So we decided first we had to get the deficit down, and secondly, we had to do it in a way that people would know we were serious. So all this is in 1993 dollars, so we are talking about a lot more money than today. We had to have a plan that would credibly reduce the deficit to 500 billion over a multiyear period. It meant that are estimated revenues and spending had to be credible. Something that had been shredded in the 1990s by socalled rosy scenarios where you would always assume when you did your budget you are going to get more money than you would. You always assumed you were going to spend less than you knew you were. I said i want to reverse this, i want to assume we will get less than we think we will and assume we will spend more than we think we will, so the numbers will be better. And we did that. Just announcing the program, especially since the chairman of the Senate Financial committee, lloyd benson of texas, agreed to be my first treasury secretary am a had a huge impact on the bond work it, and Interest Rate started to drop in investment started to pick up. This bill violated all the orthodoxies that had governed the country for 12 years. We raised personal income tax on people with the top 1. 2 of earners from 33 to 36 , where it had to remain until it was cut, and the president obama allow the cuts to lapse and then the Affordable Care act levy on top of that came in. We raise the Corporate Income tax from 33 to 35 above 2 million. The difference between that day and this is when i did it, that 35 was exactly in the middle of the Corporate Tax rates of all the other rich countries in the world, the ones we compete with in the organization for Economic Cooperation and development. Today it is by far the highest in the world. Everybody else has opted for a lower rate with fewer deductions. So you had this bizarre situation in america where one of our Big Companies a couple of years ago, exxon, paid 17 in real dollars him a while a lot of our big manufacturers paid near the maximum, Companies Like dow. But it was very different then. I wanted us to be competitive and right in the middle. Now you should know we are also the only rich country that taxes repatriated income. That is, if you earn money in ireland, you only pay 12 . If a Company Brings it back to america, they have to pay the difference between 12 and 35 . Shouldnt surprise you that there is more than a trillion dollars in Corporate Cash by American Companies hanging around oprahs. And you should ask yourself if you had responsibilities to your shareholders or customers, your employees, would you bring the money back if you could conveniently keep it somewhere else . Its a big issue today, but im saying this because it was not an issue then. There are a lot of companies that didnt want to pay it, but it is not because it would not put them out of line competitively with what is going on in the rest of the world. We also passed in the house americas first carbon tax, which al gore had recommended and which i wanted to do because i wanted us to get a head start on tackling climate change. 21 years ago we passed the carbon tax in the house. Alas, in the senate, we couldnt pass it because carbon had more friends in the total vote. We had already had two changes. Then we had tax cuts. The most important one to me by far was doubling the earned income tax credit for working families. It had a big impact. I also proposed a middleclass tax cut that was modest but real, and the creation of empowerment zones in areas of very high unemployment and low income to induce more investment there to try to create a normal economy for people who had really been totally left out of every good thing that happened in the 1980s. Then we were told late in the process that the deficit was going to be a lot bigger than i thought. This is the first thing about policymaking. If you care about the details, the have to be calibrated to the circumstances. Now, i had two choices. I could pretend like i didnt hear that report. Believe it or not, a lot of people have done that over the years, just pretend you didnt hear it. Or i could change the budget. This whole thing would have been pointless from an economic point of view if we didnt drive the Interest Rates down. I changed the budget. We cut a little more and had to take out some of the tax cuts. And congress changed the carbon tax to a gas tax. And so i decided to take out the middleclass tax cut because i knew that if you got Interest Rates down, middleclass people would save more money in lower Interest Rates than we could ever afford to give them in a tax cut. In 1993, that averaged saving 2200 in lower interest cost on home mortgages, car payments, credit card payments, college loans. And it was enormous. So i think i made the right decision, but it was hard to do because i said when i was running that this would be part of my economic plan. So will you be accused of breaking your commitment . I commitment was to restore broadbased prosperity. To give people a chance, and the circumstances had changed. Had i just said im going to keep my commitment, one congressman came to see me and tried to get me to get rid of the gas tax and go back to the middleclass tax cut and get rid of the earned income tax credit for lowincome working people because he said were all going to have to run in 1994, and they dont vote in midterms. The intersection of politics and economics. By the way, here is absolutely right. I thought it was wrong for america. We had to get lower income families up to a decent standard of living. I deferred the middleclass tax cut until we passed the balanced budget act in 1996. And you know the rest, it worked pretty well. So we did that. Now the thing i want to emphasize is that it wasnt the only thing that we did. In that budget, we really tried to dramatically increase investments in certain areas. Beginning with Early Childhood education, we added 2 billion a year. We tripled spending for dislocated workers, people that lost their jobs through technology or trade, to try to prepare them to take other jobs. Even when unemployment went way low and there were fewer dislocated workers, we kept doing that. We are still not very good at it, particularly if they live in small towns or rural areas. What would you do to restore the economy in rural West Virginia or eastern kentucky, or the mountains of north arkansas . Or the rio grande valley, or the mississippi delta . What about the native americans that live on reservations who dont have gambling . They are still the poorest americans. So we tried to come to grips with all this, and it required some investments. We were on track to double investments in the National Institutes of health. We finished by the time i left office sequencing the human genome. We spent a lot more money on other kinds of research and development, and especially on Information Technology. In the balanced budget act of 1996, which most people know about, which we passed with republican majority in congress, a one the congress in 1994 in no small measure because of the economic plan. It was a shock to the system. It was like being taken to the dentist and pulling your teeth without novocain. They said we have been living on sugar since 1981. You cannot go pulling our teeth. We dont have to go to the dentist. It was ugly out there. And people didnt feel the benefits of the program by 1994, but they knew what had happened. So we lost the congress. By 1996, after the republicans had shut the government down twice and the American People try to put their pretea artie budget in place and do some other things i didnt think much of, we passed the bipartisan balanced budget. It did have a middleclass tax cut. It had massive increases in the budget and outside it. We had the biggest increase in college aid in 50 years. Since the g. I. Bill. And we had the first money since harry truman to help schools build new schools and repair old ones because we finally had a class of young people in our Public Schools, including many of you, bigger than the baby boom generation. What we had the highest percentage of Public School students we had ever had his parents were not property owners. So it became very difficult to pass local property tax levies and states all had to run on balance budgets, so we had some money and we committed a billion dollars to a School Construction program. We went from zero to 1. 3 million young people in afterschool programs. So that they could keep their learning going. We did a lot of other things, so this is not all, we invested some things. We tried to accelerate the tech boom that was underway into spread it to other areas of our national life. Telecommunications reform act i signed by general consensus, and created hundreds of thousands of jobs. It kept the opportunity to go into business in the telecom area available to Small Business people and entrepreneurs and did not let them get choked off by big players in the game. And we came a long way toward connecting all of our schools to the internet. We went from 35 to over 90 with connectivity in those few years. Connection costs for hospitals, schools, and libraries. We were investing in things we thought would speed up what was going on, and it was really easy in the balanced budget act because the bill in 1993 had done twice as much good as everybody estimated. We had no rosy scenario. We underestimated its impact. The growth was greater than we thought. So the balanced budget act of 1996 was an easy bill. The most important thing we got out of it or the future is something that is at the heart now of the expansion of health care under the Affordable Care act. The establishment of the Childrens Health Insurance Program was the biggest expansion of health care since medicaid, and almost immediately we had several million children getting Health Insurance. To get that in all that education aid, i had to make a compromise. I dont know how many times i have read from the left or criticism about what a slug i was to sign the balanced budget act of 1996, lowering the Capital Gains rate from 28 to 20 . I did it, but it was the price i paid to get the Childrens Health Insurance Program and all that education stuff in the budget, and i would do it again tomorrow in a heartbeat. When you are not alone in a room dictating what is going to be done, sometimes other people have ideas too, and if you want what you want, you have to give them a little of what they want. And it isnt just politics per se. It is integral to the process. You are free to decide that you think i made a mistake, but all the people that say, you know, what was bill clinton doing getting in bed with wall street and lowering the Capital Gains tax . He was getting 6 million poor children Health Insurance coverage. And you just have to ask yourself, it is the price you want to pay. I would not have done it in 1993 because the deficit was too big. We were balancing the budget. We subsequently got four surpluses in a row for the First Time Since the 1920s. [applause] but even there, we had an investment strategy. So you had to control all the other spending to target what you wanted to target. And the people who thought something out should have been targeted criticize you for it. Now, the storyline of all this was very different than the story i have just told you. The storyline was basically twofold, and it hurt us in the 1994 elections. The storyline was Something Like bill clinton raised taxes but not middleclass taxes. Therefore, unlike our heroes of the last 12 years, he is a tax raiser and he didnt even give the middle class a tax cut. The storyline was designed to create the impression that i hadnt kept my commitment. So a man i had never met, who turned out to be americas most foremost scholar, thomas patterson, who was at the Maxwell School of syracuse and i believe is now at harvard, he wrote this article saying what is going on here . He said president clinton made more commitments, more specifically, than any of the last five president s, and he kept a High Percentage of them. The American People should think that finally got somebody in here who thought about what they were going to do and kept their commitments. Instead, they are being told every day that he is a slug because he failed to pass health care, which is another way of saying i didnt have 60 democratic votes to break a filibuster. Underneath, all this other stuff is going on and the storyline blanked it out. Nobody said the guy did it in reverse. Trickledown economics, that was a pretty good hit. Or that we had these programs to do away with poverty. So it was challenging, to say the least. But the most important thing is, did it work . In the end, that is the test. So we got a few charts here. The first chart up. I love this. Ross perot used to do this all the time. It drove me stark raving mad, but i decided there was something to it. So president reagan had very, very good job growth. For the time. Before him, if you go back all the way to the early 1970s, 1970s, the only person with better job growth was jimmy carter, who had very good job growth, but low income growth, in real terms, because inflation was so high when he was president. So he had 15. 8 million jobs. We had 22. 9 million jobs. You could say clinton was lucky, he caught the tech boom. Clinton was lucky, he came out of the recession. I hope i have convinced you it wasnt just me. We had a whole team of gifted people working on this. But one thing you cannot explain away is the difference in the Poverty Reduction numbers. That is the single most important number to me in my eight years as president , personally. In all the socalled prosperity of the 1980s, only 77,000 of our fellow americans moved from poverty into the middle class. In the 1990s, 100 times as many, 7. 7 Million People, did. That was policy. [applause] interestingly enough, the conservatives always said they hated the government, but the size of the federal government expanded by nearly 200,000 under president reagan. We maximized the use of technology, thanks to al gores reinventing government program, and we reduce the size of federal government by to 347,000 by the time i when i was in office. We were doing what we should have been doing for years, using the benefits of technology to increase the benefits of government. Lets go to the next slide. The most important thing i will say again is thats not the next slide. [laughter] the most important thing i will say again is, we had then what we have to do now in more difficult circumstances. We had to restore broadbased growth. You can have all the Economic Growth in the world and if only 10 people have it, you dont get very much. Let me just show you this. You see where it says Clinton Administration . Locale steep that curve is for eight years. That is median Family Income. That is the one in the middle. Between 1993 and 2000, in 2012, median Family Income increased 17 . From 57,800 to 67,600. You have to go all the way back, let me just show you here. You have to go back to the 1960s. Lets go to the next slide. You should always ask if you arent in an economics class, dont let anybody tell you what the average is. That is like you ought to be able to put one foot in boiling water and one foot in freezing water and feel just right. [laughter] [applause] the average is great. What you want to do is put your foot in the median water, the one between a hot and the cold. Here is the most important thing. The typical way income is measured is in quintiles, the lowest to the highest. So this shows you why president reagan only had 77,000 people move out of poverty. In income now these are averages, but they are within a tighter screen. The bottom quintile averaged. 7 increase in income. The second, seven point eight percent, the third, 9. 7 , the fourth 12. 2 , and the top, 22. 7 . Keep in mind all these people over here started with higher incomes in the first place. But the point is, you do not have to have unequal Economic Growth. You can have broadly shared prosperity, but it requires policy. You have to have a deliberate strategy to do it. And the policy that would produce it today is slightly different than the policy that produced it in the 1990s because of the aftermath of the financial crash, because of the continuing acceleration of technology to dramatically increase productivity, to the point where its hard to create more jobs than are being eliminated every year. In rich countries and for a lot of other reasons. But it shows you that you can do this. You can have broadbased prosperity. And drives me nuts when i read all this, saying ever since the 1970s when inequality has been growing. That is not true. Inequality grew in the first year and a half when i was president , by the way. This understates how much was done once the whole economic row graham kicked in. We had increasing inequality through the end of 1994, and then from 1995 to the end, it took off. Lets go to the next slide. I think this shows you how concentrated it was. This is the socalled 5 slide. No, this is more important for right now. This shows you how america changed. Its important for me and everybody else to knowledge that this growing inequality started before trickle down economics, or supplyside economics, but was accelerated by it. If you look in the nixonford years, we had a Democratic Congress and two republican president s, both of whom would be far too liberal to get nominated today. But they had right there you see it is almost identical. The bottom fifth grew almost as much as the top 50 in those years. Its pretty close, and you have to understand, if jimmy carter had 2. 8 million jobs in four years. He did a lot of things to try to get jobs, but inflation was so bad, it made it look like nobody was making any money in real dollar terms. So those numbers are low because of the inflation. You are familiar with the reagan numbers. President bush had a decline in both, but i believe you should see that in terms of the other eight years. Sooner or later, the wheels had to run off of running these big deficits and letting the Interest Rates go up and generate jobs potentially, there was a limit to it. President bush, believe it or not, this is both a compliment and a cautionary tale. When president bush ran for office, the second president bush, unlike the first president bush, he was free to decide what he wanted his Economic Policy to be. He basically said vote for me and i will bring you back to supplyside economics. The rhetoric was clever. I will give you the same thing clinton did with a Smaller Government and a bigger tax cut, wouldnt you like that . I am a compassionate conservative. He believed that reagan was right and i was wrong. Thats what he believed. And so we went back to financing two wars on borrowed money and financing a tax cut for hillary and me on borrowed money and spending more than we were taking in. And the consequences were there. Put that chart back up. I want to make full disclosure here. I attempted to get these numbers, i just havent been able to do it, to stop on the day of the financial crash. So that no one would say i was being unfair, not to him, but to the theory that i am advancing to you. I couldnt do it, but pretty much the numbers would be the same. They would just be slightly smaller. Because a lot of the damage of the financial crash was done at the very end of his term. It didnt occur until he was almost out of office. But what happened in those years was, all of our growth before the crash was from housing, consumer spending, and finance. And median income, the one in the middle, was lower than it was the day i left office before the crash, which is why you see these income numbers. In other words, there is a very significant limit to how much you can grow the economy by cutting taxes on high income people, and even by spending money, if you dont spend it very well, in the government. You have to have a Clear Strategy on harry are going to spend your money and you have to have a Clear Strategy on what tax policy can be. But there is no inherent virtue in taxing anybody, but there is an inherent virtue in raising the money that you have to spend to build a Decent Society to take care of people who with snowfall of themselves cannot take care of themselves, and to do the investment that has to be done publicly. Now, there are all these businesses, hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits and have spun out of the human genome, but the first 3 billion you paid for as taxpayers. And had you not, we would not be where we are. We wouldnt know what the primary genomic variances are that put young girls at a high risk of Breast Cancer at an early age, a discovery which literally could in death by Breast Cancer and end mastectomys. We would not be where we are in learning about parkinsons and alzheimers and all these other things. We wouldnt have the level of sophistication that allow those Johns Hopkins researchers that may have found a way to end heart attacks. A little late on that for some of us. [laughter] we are laughing, but this is important. It matters. It is not just spending and tax cuts. Its what kind of tax cuts and how much, and what kind of spending and how much. The details of the policy matter. They will have consequences. So lets go to the next slide. They lost it. [laughter] this basically says what i told you before, but if you look at this slide, between the poorest and the wealthiest 20 , it shows you that there was almost no difference in how they did under nixon and ford. Carter had some difference. The biggest difference but light years was under president reagan. Then the two bushes had almost identical differences, and the only time the poorest 20 had a bigger income increase was in the 1990s, a 3 difference. Go to the next slide. This just gives you an opportunity to see how wealth was being concentrated. That big turquoise number, that is the top 5 . We had to simplify the rest of it, but you have the lowest fifth on the right, the middle fifth and the highest fifth, and on the on the left, i mean. On the far right we have the top five percent. In the nixon for years we had the most progress in that he, that is the biggest gain on the bottom. President carter, those numbers just mean that basically everybody inched forward together. The last two numbers are the top 20 , with the one on the right being the top 5 . You see here, the thing im proudest of on these numbers when we were there is that our bottom 20 actually had in percentage terms about the same gain in income as the top 5 did. This is really important. This is the kind of stuff people say this will never make the evening news. Nobody gets shot, there is no drama. These are millions and millions of peoples lives. This is what policy means. Go to the next one. The next one hold on. In closing, here is what i want to say. We had a plan that restored fiscal responsibility, increased investment where it would do the most economic good, instructed the tax system to live middleclass wages and reduce poverty by moving people into higher paying jobs. We pursued it for eight years through different circumstances with both parties, and i made deals when necessary. We will talk more about that next time. But it worked. And today, its harder because of the crash. Its harder because now, a lot of the Information Technology that helped me so much may be producing so much productivity so fast that it is more difficult to replace more jobs than you lose, than it was when i started. It is more difficult because of the level of competition and almost desperation all over the world. Theres is a world job shortage, especially for young people. But its easier for us because of the energy revolution, we are producing more of our own energy now, and because of our other strengths. Of our own energy now. And because of our other strengths. We still have the best network of Higher Education in the world. We are still the youngest country of all the major competitors except for china. 20 years from now we were going to be younger than china if they hadnt changed their one child policy. The details are not clear yet so we still may be younger. But thats why Immigration Reform is even more important today than it was 20 years ago when i was president. Because having lost it, i can tell you, youth matters. It matters. The fact that, just look around this room. The fact we have all this diversity and all this youth and all this brain power is a massive competitive advantage. Its harder because we want to do something about the deficit, but we actually should be investing. Long as Interest Rates are lower than inflation, general rule of thumb, if Interest Rates are lower than inflation, no matter how upset you are about a deficit or a debt, you should focus on growing the economy more and driving Interest Rates up so that you can actually lower the deficit if you cut spending and raise taxes. Now i supported it when president obama decided and fought for the right to let the tax cut on high income americans that had been elected back in the bush years expire because people then, our income group have enough disposable income that it didnt change our Consumption Patterns much so it didnt contract the economy very much. But right now, if you did what i did in a heart beat in 93, if you did exactly that and you cut spending too much or you raised taxes too much, instead of investing in an Infrastructure Bank and enticing companies to return some of this Corporate Tax to america to put america to work, it wouldnt work. You can only balance a budget if you have adequate revenues, adequate spending restraints and adequate growth. The country needs growth. Then everybody will do well. Hillary and i and some of our friends in this audience who live in new york probably pay the highest aggregate tax rates in america, and i thank god every april 15th im able to do it. The family i grew up in you could tax me at 100 and we couldnt bring growth back into the economy enough to balance the budget. Its got to be a growth strategy. As long as people in the top 1 to 5 are making the lion share of 90 or more of the money, we ought to pay the lions share of taxes that Willie Sutton robbed banks. Thats where the money is. But not just for the purpose of lowering our incomes. Its for the purpose of having some balance in this country that should be part of a strategy to restore broadbased growth. I can guarantee you, every person i grew up with would far rather have a pay raise and a Better Future for their children and grandchildren than any begin tax rate on any given individual or company. This is all part of the strategy. The progressive goal should be shared prosperity. And we have to think about it in terms that are relevant to today so if i were making these decisions today or trying to work it out, i would have to admit that not everything we did then would work today. But if you start with a goal in mind, thats the lesson of this whole thing. Thats the lions share of what i want to say. Start with a goal in mind. Broadly share prosperity. Identify the problems. The Income Distribution is too skewed. There is too much inequality. Its a severe constraint on growth, and it is. It is a huge constraint on growth. Spending 17. 8 on health care was a huge constraint on growth. Again, i dont want to talk about this today i want to talk about it more in the next lecture on politics, but when the president signed the Affordable Care act we were spending 17. 8 of our income on health care. No Richer Country was spending more than 11. 8 , thats 1 trillion a year. Whatever you think finance did in the crash or what Big Companies are doing not giving their employees pay raises, there are massive numbers of Small Businesses who would have loved to give their employees pay raises who spent the money on their health care premiums. So obviously, its even worse now, right . Weve got 8 Million People enrolled in the exchanges and another 3. 5 million already covered by Medicaid Expansion on our way to 5 million, should be on our way to 10 million, but those other states dont want to participate, which is one of the alltime bad economic responses. Virginia has a study commissioned by the republican legislation, the Republican Legislature that says they take the Medicaid Expansion. It will create so many jobs and save so many jobs and increase productivity so much that the budget of virginia even when they have to start paying the match will actually be improved by 1. 5 billion over a decade. And theyre still not going to do it even though theyre going to make money on it. And there is this idea abroad in the land that this is all for poor people on welfare. They are covered already. They were covered before the Affordable Care act ever passed. This is for lowincome working people that cannot afford it, but heres the main point. You know what were spending on health care today after four years of implementing this law and millions more people on it and seniors saving 10 billion in drugs . 17. 2 of our income. In other words, were getting closer to our competitors because we are delivering care in a more efficient way. And were wasting less money. Thats policy. Its all that boring policy that you cant claw your way through the storyline to get to to save your life half of the time. Policy. Now, i want to do two other quick ones to make the point. And also to talk about the positives and the negatives. Lets take welfare reform. What was the problem . The Welfare Program was developed to be a temporary assistance to all but young widows with little children when there werent many women in the work force. Over time for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was changes necessary Family Structure it became sort of the lifeline of millions of people and it took generations out of the work culture. The storyline when i signed the welfare reform bill was, well, the republicans really got clinton. They forced him to sign this horrible bill because he wants to get reelected. The facts were different. I had been working on welfare reform since 1980. The first politician i ever heard talk about welfare reform was robert kennedy. Right, frank . He worked for him. I was a governor in 1980 when Jeremy Carter got the authority to give five states experiments to change from an incomebased system for poor people to a workbased system. I applied and we were accepted. By the time i was a senior governor in the country in the late 80s, i worked with the Reagan Administration on a welfare reform bill. Heres the only thing you need to know so you dont forget about the people. We were about to pass this bill. I had a big forum. For the governors in washington here to go lobby to congress, and we brought in all these people that had been on welfare, including a woman from our native state arkansas named willie harden. I said lilly, she had been talking to all these governors and looked like she had been doing it all her life, very comfortable. I said do you think this program should be mandatory . She said, oh, yeah. I said, why do you think that . She said, because people like me are scared. We dont think we can amount to anything and well just stay home and watch tv unless you make us get out there and get job training and take a job if we can get it. I said are you glad you went to work . She said, yeah. I said whats the best thing about it . She said, when my boy goes to school and they ask him what does your mama do for a living . He can give an answer. Ill never forget that as long as i live. This is what it means to me. I thought there were a Million People we could move from welfare to work. To be fair, people in my own administration said this will be a disaster, there are just too many people that will never get in the work force, youre going to increase poverty, its going to be horrible. Okay. So we go through the first years of my administration and i decided along with donna shulela, president of the university of miami, we would give states experiments of waivers to start putting people to work. By the time the bill passed, about 90 of the people in america were covered by welfare reform proposals because we had given 44 of these states waivers. We knew what would work and would wouldnt. So if you go back and read the history of this area, bill clinton vetoed the first two bills because they were terrible for poor people, then he caved at the last because after all, it was an election year. To be fair, two people who worked for me, one of whom became the dean of the Kennedy School at harvard, who became, who resigned and i applauded them when they did. I said, you know nobody can be sure how this is going to work. And thats what you should do in Public Service. If you can no longer in good conscience implement a policy thats within your reach, people should resign. They are good people and i applaud them. Now, one of them later said when i went to harvard to speak that i had been right and he had been wrong because of the results. But its a little more complicated than that. The welfare reform bill basically said if you can work and is there a job, you have to take it, but you have to if not, you have to be involved in some training or preparation program, but theres going to be a lot more money to help you manage your parenting responsibilities and work responsibilities in childcare and transportation and a lot of other supports. So lets start with these charts. Lets show the charts. I vetoed the first two bills, welfare reform bills because they wanted to block grant, medicaid and they wanted to block grant foot stamps and let government not give poor people and their kids food and medicine. They wanted to cut the School Lunch Program. It was terrible. So the story line, if you read and he vetoed the first two then just coming up on the election. These are 16 changes i got from their bill. After two vietnames, including gaurn teed medicare, 4 billion in child care money that wasnt there before, a work perform bonus. We allow people to take Welfare Benefits and give them to employers as wage supplements to give people jobs. I itoea vetoed the we got th back. The School Lunch Program we got back, and lots of other things. Go to the next slide. The point is we were having this dazzling policy debate, including the republicans on the other side who disagreed with me that really thought the government would be so much more efficient, they didnt care what they got rid of. Let me decide based on the facts of the poverty in each state. But as we all know, different electorates show up in different elections, and the people who are elected may or may not need to respond. Heres what i want to say. There were two provisions in the final bill i signed that i hated. One was a fiveyear lifetime limit. I had no problem with it except it should exempt all recessions. Its not your fault. And we never it wasnt a problem the first time, but its the terrible problem after the crash. Look on the left its how much money we spent after welfare reform. In the aggregate on poor people. After 2006 when the congress changed hands again, how much more money was spent. Go to the next line. Heres what happened to poverty rates in those years. It went down most where it was highest in central cities. It went down least where it was already lowest in metropolitan areas outside central cities, and it was a Pretty Healthy decline in nonmetropolitan areas. And the welfare reform bill was a part of that. Go to the next slide. At the top the welfare roles declined by approximately 50 in four years. Four and a half years from the time i signed the bell, and then by the in my last budget that date it had declined over 60 . One of the things that i was criticized for, and you should all know this, this is policy. I dont think he ever read it in a single article. How could bill clinton take away from poor people their minimum monthly benefit, and heres what was never any of those articles. I bet most of you didnt know this. When the welfare reform bill was signed, it was whatever the state was paying in 1973, 23 years earlier. The only protection in federal law was you could cut your Welfare Benefits, but not below what they were in 1973. So that the lowest states, the family of three in texas and mississippi got 187 a month. The red state, vermont, got 655. There was literally that kind of so it seemed to me that having more flexibility and letting them use the payment on wage supplements was a good thing. Now, go to the next slide. I have to admit that i never dreamed there would be governors who would want to eliminate the income supplements altogether. He didnt get the last one. Thats what he was trying to tell me. Right . There were. So i did not foresee that. I didnt foresee that its way the Tea Party Wave that would believe one more time that poor people are the problem in america. What welfare reform did prove i want you to remember this is the last and most important thing. Almost all those people want to go to work. When you leave today, if you were here at the other lecture and you want to pair the people with the policy, dont forget lily. The most important thing about her going to work is that when her son goes to school and asks what does your mother do for a living, he could give an answer. So i think my conclusion about welfare reform is its different from the economic plan. My conclusion is a lot of that is still relevant to today. It did far more good than harm, but now given the change of climate and the aftermath of the crash, the poorest welfare families, about 15 of the total, are worse off. We should do something for them. We ought to all of us who supported it, should admit that. The other 85 are better off, and we shouldnt have a fiveyear time limit that includes prolonged recessions. You should just total the running of the time. You dont have to pay for this six months or this nine months or this year. It was too severe. Thats my conclusion about that. You can draw your own. Let me just say a few words about the middle east Peace Process because theyre relevant to today, and i think i almost never hear it reported accurately. I think its worth your knowing. When you do domestic policy, you have to make agreements with other people in politics and Interest Groups and with your conscience. When you do Peace Processes, you have to realize i dont care how much you know, how much youre involved, and how much the immediate media treats it like its yours to win or lose. Its not about you. Its about them. No president , no dup low mat, no anybody can want anything for anybody else more than they want it for themselves. So when i go to ireland, they think im pretty great. But they deserve the credit for the irish Peace Process. The albanians think im pretty great because of kosovo. The Bosnian Muslims and christians in bosnia, they like me. I hope someday the serbs will forgive me. But in the end all these deals are done by the people themselves, and they are the ones affected by it. This f they do decide to take the leap, to minimize the risk. Thats our job. So policy making cannot solely be judged on whether somebody else makes a decision thats beyond your control. And you cannot enforce these things. Let me tell you briefly, and i will make it brief, but its important what happened in the middle east Peace Process when i was president because its relevant to where we are today. Number one, the agreement signed in september of 1993 on the white house lawn reflected what the parties had done themselves in secret meetings in oslo. Representatives of israel and the palestinian authority. They wanted to do it in the white house because both sides trusted United States. I was a new president. They trusted the United States to be an honest broker and fair and to get this thing implemented. To make sure that israels security concerns and the palestinians political and economic concerns were legitimately met. So we started almost two years later. You have to understand, i work with four israeli prmz doing this, and yas ar arafat occasionally shifting senior team and him. We had a signing of the fist big deal after oslo where a chunk of the west bank, a modest chunk, was just turned over to the palestinians to govern. The greelt included, i think, the agreement for israel to release several thousand prisoners, 5,000 as i remember. And to divide the west bank into categories, category a would be totally controlled by the palestinians. Category b would be palestinian villages that they would manage and oversee, but if there was a terrorist threat, the israelis could move in. Category c were largely unpopulated areas of the west bank where israel still maintained jurisdiction over for security reasons. So we did that. And i have really two points to make about it. We signed it, and we signed nine maps marking all these changes. Three copies of each. In the middle of the process there was a bypass road that looked like the map belonged to israel that arafat said he was supposed to have and rabine and arafat said you got to fix it. This is terrible. We got a big dispute. I took them into my dining room, and i said, no, you fix it. Ive been on that road, but i was on a religious pilgrimage and neither one of you are religious. You got to figure out how to work together. I said but the whole world press corps is outside, and theyve been waiting for us for 20 minutes, so you guys better figure out what to do. This is really important. Imagine this today in ukraine, in any other setting where you are trying to get something done. They walk out. Keep in mind, two years earlier rabine didnt want to shake arafats hand. Ranine said he is right, its his. Im going give it to him tomorrow. I said but the map says its yours. If arafat signs this, it will be binding under international law. Arafat looked at me. He didnt blink. His word is worth more than any ripping catholic. Can you imagine these people in conflicts talking like that teach other today . This is really important. He signed it, and i think dennis ross talked about it in his book. Of course, his word was good. Thats the first thing i want to say. Somehow you have to find a way to establish trust among adversaries. Agreement is not nearly as important as trust. Trust predates everything. That agreement cost rabime his life. He was murdered just a few weeks after that by very angry, young settler who i might add still is revered as sort of a hero in his crowd in the west bank for what he did. And the best chance we had for peace was lost because rabine had captured arafats psyche, and he trusted him. Fast forward 199. We met with netanyahu, who was then the likud conservative Prime Minister. His defense minister ariel sharon at the time was considered to the right of him and still wouldnt shake hands with arafat. For nine days we stayed there. Im pretty sure i dialated every human rights summit and my goal was to not let them sleep until they actually made an agreement. I would go nap in the middle of the day, and i would come back and keep them up for three or four or five more. We had to do something. We were stuck. So at the end they agreed to give 13 of category c to show good faith, the israelis did, and get palestinians up to 40 of contiguous land on the west bank. Problems slowed it down, and barack was shortly elected the Prime Minister, and in 1999 he completed the transfer. The 40 of the west bank that came out of the wide river accord is largely the west bank governed by president abbas today. The base from which he negotiates or doesnt is the case may be with israel. I had been talking to arafat for a couple of years. I said you want to do an agreement before i leave office or not, and he said, oh, my god, yes, if you dont ill take five or ten years more. We have to do it wheel youre there. Its 13 years and counting. They didnt want to come to camp david in the beginning because they said they werent prepared, but the palestinian strategy all along, which made sense in the beginning, was to deliberately be not prepared in the sense that they understood that all they had to give was Security Cooperation and ultimately a declaration that the xwlikt kwlikt was over in peace, and they would work together. That was worth something, by the way. 1998 was at the time i dont know whats happened since for sure, but im pretty sure its still the only year in the history of the state of israel when not a single solitary soul was killed by a terrorist incident. It happened. No, no, no, you cant do this. I said okay. Then i said first thing weve got to figure out is what youll take. What youve fwot to have and what theyve got to have. I never expected. Everybody talks about the collapse of camp david. Camp david was a roaring success from my point of view because they have never sat together and talked about all these final status issues and given the United States who had to try to broker a deal, any sense of where the perimeters were. What were the limits . Where would we go . It was that kind of thing. It happens all the time. We set about working for six more months. Finally in december i couldnt close the deal, so i basically said to them i have tried to bring you two to this, and weve talked for six months in excruciating detail, so i will tell you what i think the deal should be. I think they should have a stake in the west bank. The israelis should give them some compensating land, no less than 1 to 3 . They should be able to get 80 of the settlers in settlement blocks adjacent to the 1967 borders of israel. Truth is you could do it on 3 of the land. It was tight, but you could do it. It takes a lot more than that because theres a lot more settlers. They should have a capital in East Jerusalem, and it should be all of East Jerusalem except for the jewish neighborhoods, which should still be a part of israel. There were two big jewish neighborhoods. And a lot of other stuff. Heres what you need to know. After all these negotiations, i intentionally let there be a little play in the territorial things so the palestinians could get a little more because they needed show they did. The israelis would go 4 less, and also, there was 100 land swap. Four and for or whatever. Thats a good thing for them to negotiate. Arafat wanted the israelis to keep the jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and offered to have special security guaranteed ingress and egress on East Jerusalem. They agree odd how to divide the governance of the old city with the jewish and christian quarters going to israel and the muslim and armenian quarters i mean, the jewish and armenian quarters and muslim and christian quarters going to arafat. He was very proud of being a custodian of christianity for the arabchristians. They agreed that they would both occupy the current israeli lookout outpost in the west bank. They would do it together. They agreed on all this stuff. The only thing they couldnt agree on was how to describe the way they had both agreed the west bank would operate. I mean, the Temple Mountain would operate. Or what the arabs call they agreed on what it should be. The muslims had won it since 1967 since israel captured it with the religious group and the israelis proposed to turn it over to the palestinians because of the dome of the rock and the mosque. They agreed that the palestinians couldnt do anything under the temple mount because the ruins of the temples of david and solomon are there, and because of the excavation and other things. They disagreed only on 50 feet of the western wall. Thats where i think israel was right. Arafat wanted to give him the waling wall, and then theres the entrance to a tunnel where if you got in, you could do it mayhem to the ruins of the temples. They pretty much agreed on everything else. The temple mount problem. I never saw anything like this. They agreed on how it would operate, but the palestinians wanted to say they had sovereignty overall of it. I tried to convince them to split the sovereignty or turn it into an international peace. It was as shimon peres, it is the First Political problem in history where there was no problem on what happens, but no one can figure out how to describe it. Thats about it. Barack said ill take it and negotiates to fill in the blanks. Arafat said ill take it in theory, but i have reservations. In the end. This is in 2000. They were ready to give up to give up israeli land, to give them arafat wanted to have all the christian churches. Thats pretty much what they were disagreeing on. Arafat knew that he would have to recognize the state of israel and he would have to give up the unlimited right of return that some refugees would be taken into northern israel who had been in the camps of lebanon whose families had been there for 2,000 years before they were moved, but there could be no unlimited right of return, and i agreed to raise 10 billion or more to relocate all the palestinians out of the camp and the state of palestine and a few would go to israel and other countries. Arafat never said yes. So when i was about to go, he came to see me, and i said ill never forget this because you always read these things about how america is in the tank for israel. I looked at arafat, and he was he and barack didnt get along all that well. First i said stop, stop. I said, look at me. Weve been doing this for eight years. Do you think i care about the palestinians . He said, oh, yeah, much more than the arabs do. He said if i was a jew, would i be in this fix . We would all be going he said, yeah, you do. I said, okay. All you owe me is the truth. If youre not going to do this, i think youre nuts, but its okay with me. You got to do what you are going to do. After eight years you owe me the truth because i can go to north korea and get rid of their missile program, but a president cant just drop in on north korea for the first time in 50 years. It was different there than it is now. I said i have to go to japan, to south korea, and to russia and china. We have to do this together. It will take 12 days, and i only have six weeks left. Its the only time i ever saw arafat cry. He said, oh, god, you cant do that. I said i know i cant because it needs to look like i made you do this, doesnt it . He said, yeah, thats what we have to do. Its very different in private than and so i didnt go. I said you fwot to understand, were giving up the significant opportunity to make the world a safer place. If youre not going to do it, just tell me. I wont say a word. He went through this whole deal about how it would be ten years again. He told two different arab leaders he was going to take the deal. That i just described to you. The details had to be filled in. I went public with this whole thing, and i just had a couple of weeks. We really had the middle of february when the israeli election was going to occur because under the agreement israel had to ratify the Peace Agreement. Because of the intifada which started when ariel sharon went since 1967, which i begged arafat not to start, barack was down to 38 in the polls. Look what they offered him. Lets just elect the toughest guy we can find. To heck with them. Then in the most bizarre episode, he started after a while to start getting active in the middle east, and he developed this road map. You all remember that term . He had an Israeli Government that wouldnt give it to him and an israeli public that didnt trust him. That is the background of all this. With all of our intense involvement, theres still a high level of misunderstanding and a high level of mistrust, which is why it may be the pivotal moment. I ask you to think about that. Did we fail . You tell me. In the four years after i left office, three times as many palestinians and israelis were killed in violent accidents than in the eight years i was there. We always need to get caught trying. Fewer people will die. Just this remember, if you try in any ever did he ever you do to settle the dispute between somebody else, its about them. Not you. And you cant succeed if you ever forget that its about them and not you. [ applause ] thank you. So thank you, president clinton, again, for joining us. Here i have a few questions from students at georgetown and students who are watching us live from the Clinton School of public at the university of arkansas. So lets get into that. The first question is from alicia dua. She asks an important achievement of obamas term has been the institution of the brain project, which is an important advancement for Research University like georgetown. What is your opinion of the future of science and politics and some of the ethical issues we face with Something Like well, first of all, i strongly support the brain project. Its starting off with a modest amount of money, but its an important thing to do. I think its very important to have Public Investment in groundbreaking areas where there is no immediate prospect. Then when you break through the first barrier, other people will take it up. Thats what happened with the human genome. We spent 3 billion of your money on it, and i saw a study two years ago that said we had already reaped 180 billion in economic benefits from Genome Research in america, and thats old data. Thats going to happen with this Brain Research. We are learning amazing things, but particularly important because of the aging of the baby boomers. Since your brain starts to shrink when you are about age 30, dont worry about it because we use such a little bit of our capacity. Its okay. Youll be okay, but since it shrinks, people thought the aging of the brain meant that we would all naturally atrophy intekt intellectually and mentally like we do physically. It was discovered from the first time that you can form new neural connections in your brain in your late 60s, and that this brain growth is available to all people and not just geniuses. The truth i i would be better off taking the grandchild to suzuki piano if i dont play piano. That is the studies show that doing something new, even if it sounds simple, is more important to revitalize everybodys brain, like taking spanish when you are 70, than doing a more complex version of what you already know how to do. These things are important. If you think about just the Health Implications of the retirement and aging of societies, and what about japan where theyve been below replacement in population or italy which is below replacement. What if people have to start doing at least nonphysical labor until theyre 75 years old in some of these countries. This Brain Research thing is very important, and then obviously for all the human reasons. Is there some way since hillary has this this fascinating program for Young Children and there were 30 million fewer words by the time theyre 3 years old. 30 million. The architecture of the brain is largely fixed by the time youre 3, 4 years old, 85 of it. What if this Brain Research revealed that we can start the building again . That you can take a 16yearold thats been in prison for stealing a car and give him the tools to create the person that god meant him to be in the fist place . Yes, i think its worth doing, and i hope that subsequent depositeds with that regard and their party will put a lot more money into it. Sngs is something you should really want your government to do. Basic scientific research, basic technological breakthroughs, and i personally believe i know gene sperling, who was my Economic Advisor and has served president obama so well and sandy berger, my National Security advisor, theyre both out here, but i personally would like to see more investment in building the i. T. Infrastructure. We should have National Broadband speeds the speed of south koreas. They average three and a half, four times faster than ours because we have great broadband in place x, y, and z, and then you got long stretches where people dont have it. It has terrific at verse consequences. All that stuff you should be for having your government invest in. You just talked about aging and your last response, so we have a question from vicky wayne and who are seniors here at georgetown. They asked, according to the United Nations population projections, the number of people over 65 is expected to double within the next 25 years. What is the most effective first step of the United States federal government that they can take to mitigate the negative impacts of demographic shifts . The most important thing is keep people healthier longer so when our lives come to an end im not being fas issues here, we would drop like an ideally maintained laboratory specimen. That is that we would, in effect, die with our boots on. That way we would be as physically mobile as possible and our brains would work as well as possible, and that we do nothing to add to the masses cost of maintaining people who need more help that can be avoided. Thats by far the most important thing we can do. Then i think we have to look at whether there are employment option that is people can undertake that wont forfeit the benefits theyve already earned. One of the great bipartisan busy signed in my presidency, i think there was one vote against it in the house of representatives and well over 400 for it. It basically said people over 65 could go back into work if they wanted and earn income without losing their Social Security benefits. It flew through the senate too. All the republicans and democrats said what were we thinking . We thought had he to move people up and out, but when the demographics change, a, you may not have enough young people, and, b, if its not strenuous, its a good thing to have seniors. With where all the seventh day adventists and you have all these 90yearold woman driving around serving the senior center, taking care of old people. I mean, were laughing, but i think that we have to explore what we can all do to be productive and active, and that will help us stay healthy. I think those two things are the most important things. Otherwise, i think we have to find ways to do what the Affordable Care is struggling towards, and thats to keep changing the Delivery System of health care so you can have more prevention and less cure and more continuity of services at the most affordable price. It is best thing is to stay healthy and active and if possible contribute to the countrys productivity at the same time. In your lecture, you spoke about college aid. This question comes from janes colony. He asked i have a large amount of loans coming out of georgetown. What is your advice to students graduating to seek career paths that require more schooling, but also need to pay back loans . I think, first, it depends on how you have to repay them . I think one of the things that president obama did with the congress once we had a Democratic Congress, they changed the federal Student Loan Program so that everybody has an income contingent repayment option. Arent you all familiar with that . When i was president , i couldnt do that, but i did get a huge experiment. I fwot the congress to approve letting every college who wanted to participate in it do it. A lot of the bankers didnt like it because i thought it was a great deal. I thought that that way no matter how much you borrow, you would never pay more than a certain fixed percentage of your income. Usually i think the limit is Something Like 10 of your disposable income after its essentially paid for. When hillary and i were in law school at yale, our class started this income contingent program and we all had to pay. 6 until our class paid its debt off, and thats the best money i ever spent. As long as you can make it income contingent and you can the percentage is limited almost all Higher Education is a good deal. A lot of people have loans from a lot of sources, and since the cost of college has gone up two or three times the rate of inflation for some time now, its difficult. I think the federal government is going to try to rework this, and i think theres got to be a way to get basically everybody in the mccontingency business. Think about this. If you buy a house with a down payment, you are going to take at least 20 years to pay for it unless you are richer than anything. You probably want a 30year mortgage, and at these Interest Rates you want a 30year fixed rate mortgage. You dont think about it. You think your first house is worth more than all your education. Its not, is it . Im telling you, when you are my age, youll be able to remember i remember classes i had with father hens. Im not trying to embarrass him. I was down with my secretary of education, dick riley, the other day in south carolina, and he said that his favorite moment in the white house is when he had all the teachers of the year there, and i rattled off every teacher i had since kindergarten, and they thought i was making it up. Its why do we make students pay their student loan back . On terms and within timetables that are worse than you fwet to buy a house . Or worse than we get if you have to pay off a power plant to awe a utility. We take 20 or 30 years. The most important power plant of all is whats in our mind. For universities its a real problem because a lot of them cant change the Delivery System and do better, but it depends on the economics and student body. They have 85,000 students now, and if you make less than 60,000 in Family Income, you just dont pay tuition. If your family is below the poverty line, you dont pay anything. They just got tired of doing all the paperwork. But do you have to work. They do a lot of not just cleaning up the campus and stuff. They students actually work as assistants to professors and do all kinds of different jobs. We need to figure this out either to make the loan burden easier or to give people a reasonable amount of time. You amortize a home. You get three or four years to pay for a car, right . Your College Education lasts longer than your car does. Especially for some of you. Really think about it. Thats my best thought of this. I think the income contingent longterm gives us a key to what we should try to work through with the private sector loans, and we need to set up something. Theres all kinds of things we can do to make this work. Weve got to do it because i dont care what anybody says, i know that you dont have a fwarn tee once you get a College Education. I know some graduates get a lot more starting pay than others, but the truth is, a, its good for you personally, emotionally, intellectually, and, b, its good economics. It really matters. The depths of the economy after the crash. Unemployment among people with fouryear degrees as well as onehalf the overall employment rate, and unemployment among people with postgraduate degrees was less than onethird of overall employment rate. Its an investment. You ought to be able to pay for it over the appropriate amount of time with a limited amount of your income. A lot of your lecture was about Economic Policy, and you also touched on the Economic Situation in rural areas of the nation. This question comes from tyler j. Bridge. They ask in twailt the recession closed nearly every factory in my hometown of hamilton, ohio. We lost everything. My hunkles lost their jobs at the paper factory. How do you think politics of the federal government can help cities like hamilton, ohio, get back on their feet . I would have to know more about the community, but this is one you know, i told you we were going to talk about this next time, but this is one of these deals where the federal government can provide either tax incentives at direct investments to help. Sometimes you can even solve other problems but the community has to decide where theyre going to go. When hillary was secretary of state she spent a lot of time lobbying for American Companies