Transcripts For CSPAN Washington This Week 20111105

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> good afternoon, everybody. i want to begin by thanking my friend, president sarkozy, for his leadership and his hospitality. and i want to thank the people of cannes for this extraordinary setting. over the past two years, those of us in the g-20 have worked together to rescue the global economy, to avert another depression, and to put us on the path to recovery. but we came to cannes with no illusions. the recovery has been fragile. and since our last meeting in seoul we've experienced a number of new shocks -- disruptions in oil supplies, the tragic tsunami in japan, and the financial crisis in europe. as a result, advanced economies, including the united states are growing and creating jobs, but not nearly fast enough. emerging economies have started to slow. global demand is weakening. around the world, hundreds of millions of people are unemployed, or underemployed. put simply, the world faces challenges that put our economic recovery at risk. so the central question coming into cannes was this -- could the world's largest economies confront this challenge squarely -- understanding that these problems will not be solved overnight, could we make progress? after two days of very substantive discussions i can say that we've come together and made important progress to put our economic recoveries on a firmer footing. with respect to europe, we came to cannes to discuss with our european friends how they will move forward and build upon the plan they agreed to last week to resolve this crisis. events in greece over the past 24 hours have underscored the importance of implementing the plan, fully and as quickly as possible. having heard from our european partners over the past two days, i am confidence that europe has -- i am confident that europe has the capacity to meet this challenge. i know it isn't easy, but what is absolutely critical, and what the world looks for in moments such as this, is action. that's how we confronted our financial crisis in the united states -- having our banks submit to stress tests that were rigorous, increasing capital buffers, and passing the strongest financial reforms since the great depression. none of that was easy, and it certainly wasn't always popular. but we did what was necessary to address the crisis, put ourselves on a stronger footing, and help rescue the global economy. and that's the challenge that europe now faces. make no mistake, there's more hard work ahead and more difficult choices to make. but our european partners have laid a foundation on which to build, and it has all the elements needed for success -- a credible firewall to prevent the crisis from spreading, strengthening european banks, charting a sustainable path for greece, and confronting the structural issues that are at the heart of the current crisis. and here in cannes we've moved the ball forward. europe remains on track to implement a sustainable path for greece. italy has agreed to a monitoring program with the imf -- in fact, invited it. tools have been identified that will better enable the world to support european action. and european finance ministers will carry this work forward next week. all of us have an enormous interest in europe's success, and all of us will be affected if europe is not growing -- and that certainly includes the united states, which counts europe as our largest trading partner. if europe isn't growing, it's harder for us to do what we need to do for the american people -- creating jobs, lifting up the middle class, and putting our fiscal house in order. and that's why i've made it clear that the united states will continue to do our part to support our european partners as they work to resolve this crisis. more broadly, we agreed to stay focused on jobs and growth with an action plan in which each nation does its part. in the united states, we recognize, as the world's largest economy, the most important thing we can do for global growth is to get our own economy growing faster. back home, we're fighting for the american jobs act, which will put people back to work, even as we meet our responsibilities to reduce our deficit in the coming years. we also made progress here in cannes on our rebalancing agenda. in an important step forward, countries with large surpluses and export-oriented countries agreed to take additional steps to support growth and boost demand in their own countries. in addition, we welcome china's determination to increase the flexibility of the renminbi. this is something we've been calling for for some time, and it will be a critical step in boosting growth. finally, we also made progress across a range of challenges to our shared prosperity. following our reforms in the united states, the g-20 adopted an unprecedented set of high- level financial reforms to prevent a crisis in the future. we agreed to keep phasing out fossil fuel subsidies -- perhaps the single-most important step we can take in the near term to fight climate change and create clean-energy economies. and even as our countries work to save lives from the drought and terrible famine in the horn of africa, we agreed on the need to mobilize new resources to support the development that lifts nations out of poverty. so, again, i want to thank president sarkozy and our french hosts for a productive summit. i want to thank my fellow leaders for their partnership and for the progress we've made to create the jobs and prosperity that our people deserve. so with that, let me take a few questions. i'll start with jim kuhnhenn of ap. >> new jobless numbers today back in the states. you're on a pace to face the voters with the highest unemployment rate of any postwar president. and doesn't that make you significantly vulnerable to a republican who might run on a message of change? and if i may add, given that you have just witnessed the difficulties of averting economic problems beyond your control, what state do you think the economy will be in when you face reelection next year? >> jim, i have to tell you the least of my concerns at the moment is the politics of a year from now. i'm worried about putting people back to work right now, because those folks are hurting and the u.s. economy is underperforming. underperforming. and so everything that we're doing here in the -- here at the g-20 mirrors our efforts back home -- that is, how do we boost growth, how do we shrink our deficits in a way that doesn't slow the recovery right now, how do we make sure that our workers are getting the skills and the training they need to compete in a global economy. and not only does the american jobs act answer some of the needs for jobs now, but it will also lay the foundation for future growth through investments in infrastructure, for example. so my hope is, is that the folks back home, including those in the united states senate and the house of representatives, when they look at today's job numbers -- which were positive but indicate once again that the economy is growing way too slow -- that they think twice before they vote "no" again on the only proposal out there the only proposal out there right now that independent economists say would actually make a dent in unemployment right now. there's no excuse for inaction. that's true globally, it's certainly true back home as well. and i'm going to keep on pushing it regardless of what the politics are. chuck todd. >> thank you, mr. president. clearly, there was some sort of dispute between you and the european leaders about how to fund this bailout. and you, in your remarks, emphasized the fact that tarp was done with u.s. funds, that there wasn't any international involvement here. are you confident now that the european leaders are going to own this firewall or bailout fund themselves, not looking for handouts from other countries, and that they will do what they have to do? and the second part of my question is, how hard was it to convince these folks to do stimulus measures when your own stimulus measure -- you've mentioned it twice now -- is not going anywhere right now on capitol hill? capitol hill? >> well, first of all, we didn't have a long conversation about stimulus measures, so that was maybe two or three g-20s ago. we had a discussion about what steps could be taken to continue to spur economic growth. and that may not always involve government spending. for example, the rebalancing agenda that i talked about is one way in which we can make a big difference in spurring on global demand. it requires some adjustments, some changes in behavior on the part of countries. but it doesn't necessarily involve classic fiscal stimulus. it wasn't a dispute with the europeans. i think the europeans agree with us that it is important to send a clear signal that the european project is alive and well, and that they are committed to the euro, and that they are committed to resolving this crisis. and i think if you talk to european leaders, they are the first ones to say that that begins with european leaders arriving at a common course of action. so essentially, what we've seen is all the elements for dealing with the crisis put in place, and we think those are the right elements. the first is having a solution to the specific problem of greece. and although the actions of papandreou and the referendum issue over the last couple of days i think got a lot of people nervous, the truth is, is that the general approach -- which involved a voluntary reduction on the part of those who hold the greeks' debt, reducing the obligations of the greek government -- greece continuing with reforms and structural change, that's the right recipe. it just has to be carried out. and i was encouraged by the fact that despite all the turmoil in greece, even the opposition leader in greece indicated that it's important to move forward on the proposal. the second component is recapitalization of europe's banks. and they have identified that need and they are resourcing that need. that need. and that i think is going to be critical to further instill confidence in the markets. and the third part of it is creating this firewall, essentially sending a signal to the markets that europe is going to stand behind the euro. and all the details, the structure, how it operates, are still being worked out among the european leaders. what we were able to do was to give them some ideas, some options in terms of how they would put that together. and what we've said is -- and i'm speaking now for the whole of the g-20 -- what we've said is the international community is going to stand ready to assist and make sure that the overall global economy is cushioned by the gyrations in the market and the shocks that arise as europe is working these issues through. and so they're going to have a strong partner in us. but european leaders understand that ultimately what the markets are looking for is a strong signal from europe that they're standing behind the euro. >> so you're discouraging them from looking for money -- outside money? >> no, what we were saying is that -- and this is reflected in the communiqué -- that, for example, creating additional tools for the imf is an important component of providing markets overall confidence in global growth and stability, but that is a supplement to the work that is being done here in europe. and based on my conversations with president sarkozy, chancellor merkel, and all the other european leaders, i believe they have that strong commitment to the euro and the european project. david muir. >> thank you, mr. president. i'm curious what you would say to americans back home who've watched their 401k's recover largely when the bailout seemed a certainty, and then this week with the brand new political tumult in greece, watched themselves lose essentially what they had gained back. you mentioned you're confident in the bailout plan. are you confident this will actually happen, and if so, that it will work? >> well, first of all, if you're talking about the movements of the u.s. stock market, the stock market was down when i first took office and the first few months i was in office about 3,000 points lower than it is now. so nothing has happened in the last two weeks that would suggest that somehow people's 401k's have been affected the way you describe. am i confident that this will work? i think that there's more work to do. i think there are going to be some ups and downs along the way. but i am confident that the key players in europe -- the european political leadership -- understands how much of a stake they have in making sure that this crisis is resolved, that the eurozone remains intact, and i think that they are going to do what's necessary in order to make that happen. now, let's recognize how difficult this is. i have sympathy for my european counterparts. we saw how difficult it was for us to save the financial system back in the united states. it did not do wonders for anybody's political standing, because people's general attitude is, you know what, if the financial sector is behaving recklessly or not making good decisions, other folks shouldn't have to suffer for it. you layer on top of that the fact that you're negotiating with multiple parliaments, a european parliament, a european commission -- i mean, there are just a lot of institutions here in europe. and i think several -- i'm not sure whether it was sarkozy or merkel or barroso or somebody, they joked with me that i'd gotten a crash course in european politics over the last several days. and there are a lot of meetings here in europe as well. so trying to coordinate all those different interests is laborious, it's time consuming, but i think they're going to get there. what is also positive is -- if there's a silver lining in this whole process, it's the fact that i think european leaders recognize that there are some structural reforms, institutional modifications they need to make if europe and the eurozone is to be as effective as they want it to be. i think that what this has exposed is that if you have a single currency but you haven't worked out all the institutional coordination and relationships between countries on the fiscal side, on the monetary side, that that creates additional vulnerabilities. and there's a commitment on the part of european leaders, i think, to examine those issues. but those are long term. in the short term, what they've got to do is just make sure that they're sending a signal to the markets that they stand behind the euro. and if that message is sent, then i think this crisis is averted, because some of this crisis is psychological. italy is a big country with a enormous industrial base, great wealth, great assets, and has had substantial debt for quite some time -- it's just the market is feeling skittish right now. and that's why i think prime minister berlusconi's invitation to the imf to certify that the reform plan that they put in place is one that they will, in fact, follow is an example of the steady, confidence-building measures that need to take place in order for us to get back on track. norah o'donnell. >> thank you, mr. president. the world leaders here have stressed growth -- the importance of growth. and yet growth back at home has been anemic, the new jobs report today showing just 88,000 jobs added. the republicans in congress have made it clear that they're going to block your jobs bill because they believe the tax hikes in it hurt small businesses. at what point do you feel that you declare stalemate to try and reach common ground? and do you feel like you have been an effective leader when it comes to the economy? >> well, first of all, wherever republicans indicate an interest in doing things that would actually grow the economy, i'm right there with them. so they've said that passing trade bills with south korea and panama and colombia would help spur growth -- those got done, with significant bipartisan support. they've suggested that we need to reform our patent laws -- that's something that was part of my long-term program for economic growth, we've got that done. what i've said is all those things are nice and they're important, but if we want to grow the economy right now then we have to think bigger, we've got to do something bolder and more significant. so we put forward the american jobs act, which contains ideas that are historically supported by democrats and republicans -- like rebuilding our infrastructure, our roads and our bridges, putting teachers back in the classroom, providing tax credits to small businesses. you say, norah, that the reason they haven't voted for them is because they don't want to tax small business. well, actually, that's not -- if that's their rationale then it doesn't fly, because the bill that they voted down yesterday -- a component of the american jobs bill -- essentially said we can create hundreds of thousands of jobs, rebuilding our infrastructure, making america more competitive, and the entire program will be paid for by a tax not on millionaires but people making a million dollars a year or more, which in the united states is about -- a little over 300,000 people. now, there aren't a lot of small businesses across the country that are making that kind of money. in fact, less than 3 percent of small businesses make more than $250,000 a year. so what they've said is, we prefer to protect 300,000 people rather than put hundreds of thousands of people back to work and benefit 300 million americans who are hurting because of low growth. so we're going to keep on pushing. now, there are steps that we can take absent congressional action. and the refinancing proposal that we put forward in las vegas is an example of that -- helping students with student loans. we're going to keep on rolling out administrative steps that we can take that strengthen the economy. but if we're going to do something big to jumpstart the economy at a time when it's stabilized but unemployment is way too high, congress is going to need to act. to need to act. and in terms of my track record on the economy -- well, here's just a simple way of thinking about it -- when i came into office, the u.s. economy had contracted by 9 percent -- the largest contraction since the great depression. little over a year later, the economy was growing by 4%, and it's been growing ever since. now, is that good enough? absolutely not. absolutely not. we've got to do more. and as soon as i get some signal from congress that they're willing to take their responsibilities seriously, i think we can do more. but that's going to require them to break out of the rigid ideological positions that they've been taking. and the same is true, by the way, when it comes to deficit reduction. we can solve all our problems. we can grow our economy now, put people back to work, reduce our deficit. and you get surprising consensus from economists about how to do it, from both the left and the right. it's just a matter of setting politics aside. and we're constantly remembering that the election is one year away. if we do that, there's no reason why can't solve these problems. all right? thank you, everybody. thank you, everybody. >> tonight, a live debate between republican herman cain and newt gingrich. they agreed to a lincoln-douglas debates. that takes place in houston at 8:00 p.m. on c-span. to watch on c-span.org or listen on c-span radio. until that live debate starts, we will bring you a discussion with james o'keefe on the evolving role of social media. we will show you as much of this as we can. guest: question: will the acorn employees encourage employees to cheat on their taxes? would they give for guidance on how not to get busted by the federal government? and where they differ street tactics on how not to get in trouble with her abusive pimp? >> be careful. keep their mouths shut. keep their eyes on the back of their head. >> yes, yes, and yes. host: james o'keefe joining us now. the president of project veritas. how would you describe what you do? guest: we expose waste, fraud, and abuse in public-private institutions in order to achieve a more transparent society. we do that with undercover videos, creative documentary expos 8s. e's. we feel subjects are more likely to be honest if we do not identify ourselves as reporters. we used hidden cameras. we go into a publicly funded agencies where people cannot have an expectation of privacy in order to reveal. host: do you see yourself as a reporter? guest: reporters have done it before. 60 minutes, nbc datline used to go undercover, targeting private citizens. i do think it is a string of a long history of journalism. host: as far is your style is concerned, how would you describe how you decide to use the pieces of video you use? guest: style. we are trying to make it creative, splashy for the social media age. we use costumes, put music. because technology has evolved, it allows for citizens to do it now. youtube. cameras are very inexpensive. this is typically something reporters have only been able to do. now, with you to, anyone can upload a vido. eo. that allows for us to get our foot in the door. host: who makes an editorial decisions? guest: we have a small team, a dozen or many more than a dozen journalists, citizens around the country that actually go undercover. but i have a small group of people that make decisions on who or what to investigate. we get a lot of tips. people send us organizations that want us to investigate. we have a small team that puts together these productions. host: who makes the final editorial content decision? is that you? guest: yes. host: what is your philosophy when you are putting these things, and how do you get fairness right? guest: one of the things that we do is we release the full, uncut tapes. to accompany our youtube packages. no news bureau i know ever releases the full, uncut recordings. a pulitzer prize winner went through our fall acorn and videos and he deduced that nothing was taking out a contest. we do more than most journalist ever do. host: you've done videos on npr. and the result was? guest: the resignation of the ceo and a congressional vote to defund npr. we did a video on occupy wall street. i pose as a banker. i had a gordon guest: we most recently did an investigation called to catch a journalist. we were investigating turn less turned -- journalists. this resulted in the us being sent a profanity-laced e-mail. a consultant at the new york times talked about the strategy for occupy wall street. host: the new york times has said he is not a consultant with them. is that correct? guest: we released a tape of one of the profs saying he has had consulted gave us. we are trying to find out who is lying. host: with you just go with that one source? guest: we have a source. cnn had a show last sunday where they said, o'keefe makes the erroneous claims. the claim was not made by me. my contention is that, i have the source. he is making the claim. no one reached out to me for comment. the typical thread you will see is that the media plus a willingness to try to cover up what we have to expose and call the but-the media's willingness to try to cover up what we have willingness to cover up what we have exposed and call me a liar. host: james o'keefe is our guest. you can ask him questions about his work. you can call in. host: who finances you? guest: we have a large mailing list. we are completely grassroots. it is a unique thing to have a nonprofit journalistic entity. there are a few like mother jones and the franklin center. it allows me a lot of independence. i do not think i could do what i do for a news bureau. host: project veritas. is that? >> it is our 501 c3 non-profit organization. we are a group of citizens and guerrilla dallas -- journalists who are going undercover and creating videos and putting them on youtube. i am actively recruiting new people all the time to do these videos. host: our first call is a louis, missouri. go ahead. caller: how are you? host: good. go ahead. caller: would this be considered deceit and deception, invasion of privacy? how can you do with what you are doing and get away with what you are doing? guest: we investigate organizations where there is no expectation of privacy. abc news used to win the list of awards from investigating the lives of -- journalism awards from investigating the lives of private citizens. they used to use hidden cameras against private citizens. if it is ethical to use private cameras against private citizens, it is perfectly ethical for us to use them against organizations like acorn and the white house. it is perfectly ethical in that situation. host: does that extend to a law professor's office? guest: if you look at the video we have created, you will see that the individual was sam stein, the white house correspondent from the huffington posts. these are journalism schools. they send their reporters to the wall street journal, the new york observer, the white house. it is completely legal to do it. host: what was the point of talking to be a professor in the first place? guest: we didn't expose a that is on our website. we expose -- we did an expose saying that is on our website. -- expose that is on our website. he told us he goes out drinking at night and that is how he gets information. this is something the public needs to know about. you can see sam stein's reaction. you can compare the two. we need to inform the public about our work journalists and the white house. host: there is a difference between what the professor said and what you said. guest: i asked him if he got his sources dropped. i was interpreting what the professor told me. i asked sam stein a question. journalists always interpret large amounts of information. host: the republican line. good morning. caller: keep up the good work, james. i appreciate what you are doing. what ever became of the acorn organization and those two black ladies who wanted to help you find underage prostitutes? guest: when we did the acorn investigation, all of the employees you saw were fired. we released the video is one at a time. a few days into the release, bank of america cut ties with acorn. the senate and house voted to defund acorn. a corn lost its federal funding after hour video. i know a coin has certain subgroups. they are reorganizing. there is a group in new york called the working families party operating in the same office in philadelphia. they have a lot of the same people reorganizing under a different name. my view is that i do not want to destroy a corn. if there is fraud, it should be cleaned and it should be reformed. my mission is to expose organizations for what they are. hour documentary showed a willingness to engage in an ethical corruption. if the organization can be reformed, registering people to vote is a good mission. host: keith in texas. caller: you hit upon a good gimmick. that is how you go far in life. i would encourage you to do your investigative reporting on americans for prosperity for some conservative groups who actually control the money and actually do some frog that affects millions of people instead of going for the folks that do not have anything. thank you. guest: we have gone after publicly funded, taxpayer and federally funded organizations, which are influential. i am just got started. i have been doing this for about two years in a major way. you will see us go after financial institutions, politicians. publicly funded media entities and people who influence the election process, politicians, medicaid, entitlements, professors -- i think these are all things that need to be investigated and no one is doing it. there are lots of journalists investigating the koch brothers. there seems to be a huge gap. the occupy wall street people are not asked tough questions. there needs to be accountability. analysts -- journalists are not willing to do it. they are friends with the beltway. we are outsiders. you are going to see us all over the political aisle. host: are you going to consider -- are you going to continue to enter government offices illegally? that is pertaining to senator landrieu. guest: if you look at the facts of the case, i entered the building using my real driver's license. i was only inside the senator's office when i identified myself as something i was not. i would ask if they think it is ok to prosecute someone for being inside a politician's office and saying i was waiting for someone. that was my false pretense. i told the senator's staff i was waiting for somebody. for that, i was given a class b misdemeanor, community service. do we want to prosecute people in society for being inside a politician's office. i am surprised that my critics on the left are attacking me in that matter when they are about openness and democracy. i was cleared of all of those charges. the federal judge said there was no felony, no tampering. i was there to ask questions and get responses. host: in maryland, go ahead. caller: i have seen you many times on fox news. how come you did not go after the big man there and expose him? guest: who are we talking about? the big man? caller: he has been over there in england and the controversy there. he never go after the people on the right. on the left. never anyone on the right. host: are you talking about rupert murdoch's? caller: of course. guest: we are going after organizations that mainstream journalists refused to investigate. there were hundreds of reporters digging furiously every day to try to get to the bottom of that story. there are no reporters digging into a corner. the new york times canceled their story on -- digging into a cacorn. we found that npr was willing to solicit money tied to an organization that was part of the muslim other leg. you are asking me to investigate organizations that thousands of reporters are spending every moment of their lives investigating. nobody is going to investigate the areas we go after. that is where my conscience leads me. at veritas, choose to a investigate organizations that no one else will. as time goes on, we will do things that will surprise you. you will be surprised at what we investigate. host: eric on the republican line. go ahead. caller: you are doing a great service. i do not care if it is a liberal cause or a conservative cause. i have a suggestion. the obama administration is talking about going around the laws of the states where they have to provide a picture id to vote. when you come to this country, i think it is imperative that you be legal and are eligible to vote. if you can go to a college town and get a fake id and see how many college towns you could vote in for the president of the united states under the disguise of a college student. i guarantee that you would find that you could cast many votes that way. guest: there is a lot of voter fraud. that might be something we choose to investigate as time goes on. host: off of twitter. if you believe of what you do, you would be bold and not to resort to deception. guest: deception. i do not know what that means. 60 minutes when win donilon some rewards -- journalism awards. on the to catch a predator series, they would use child the course -- child decoys. if it is ethical and award winning for mainstream to analysts -- journalists to do this, why not -- this is about the establishment media's concern that citizens are getting these scoops. we are rising to a standard that goes above and beyond media when we release the ball, uncut cakes. -- the full, uncut tapes. caller: i just want to say bravo. everything you are doing should be exposed. congratulations. thank you. host: how do you determine your topics. would they be conceived as topics for conservatives like yourself? guest: you will be surprised as time goes on. i got my start in college. everyone thought the same thing. it is more of a power struggle. people think it is ideological. it is political. the consequences of the work are political. it is really about exposing something that is the nature of an organization. the essence of npr. the essence of acorn. when i saw them breaking down the doors of homes that were four close, i thought these people -- forclosed on, but these people operate illegally. as time goes on, you will see us investigate a wide ranging spectrum of non-conservative, non-liberal organizations. host: on what topics? guest: i am concerned about the relationship between big business and big government in this country. the occupy wall street crowd is concerned about that. the tea party -- that is something they share in common. that is something you are going to see us look into further. host: in florida on the democrats' line. go ahead. caller: i want to congratulate you on your good work. you are filling a void the the news community. good luck in the future. keep on keeping on because you are doing something that needs to be done. the mainstream media is covering up as much as they can. host: akron, ohio. mike. caller: i was pleasantly surprised to hear you admit that the tea party and occupy wall street have something in common. i have thought that for quite some time. neither one would like to admit it. you should go after people on the right as much as you do on the left. historically speaking, people in the media business tend to lean toward the left. people go into banking tend to lean toward the right. you are going against the flow. you are a conservative who wants to be part of the media. my only advice to you would be to try to be a bit more balance. the last people on the left if they are crooked. also go after people on the right as well. guest: going after government, and generally speaking, is considered left wing. i do not know why it is considered left of center. i do not know why occupy wall street is now walking into public buildings and asking difficult questions. it is conservatives that hold government accountable. that is a ridiculous premise. we are going to continue to hold government accountable. might be difficult to continue to do so. the amount of heat i got for walking into a senator's office was unbelievable. we will go after people. i may not do investigative exposes on these ideologically right people, but i will go after people in the financial- services or fraud in corporations regardless of what they are ideological ben it. i do not view -- bend is. i do not view this as an ideological struggle. host: two reporters -- real reporters deal with both sides of the issues. that is where mr. okeefe does a hit job. guest: there is a similar attack that i go into these investigations with a preconceived notion. all journalists go in with a tip or an instinct about what they are investigating. we are compensating for where these reporters do not go. if you want to attack me for only investigating acorn, you have to attack people at rolling stone magazine others who would never in their lives investigate the organizations we go after. host: canton, ohio. nancy, you are up next. caller: a producer from cnn called you a sexual predator. she accused you of sexual harassment. host: is that its? t? guest: that is a bogus claim. she did not make that specific claim. one of my e-mails got linked with a brainstorming document in it. cnn was the network that tried to cover-up for the acorn employees. cnn brought the guy from the washington post to say it was an isolated incident. they did not have any facts. they just said it was isolated. the next day, they released the tape in d.c. cnn has a history of covering up what i do. there was an hour-long documentary one year ago on me and others. they tried to say i was trying to do a sting that they got an e-mail about. it was not true. the e-mail was a brainstorming document. i was not going to do what was in that document. another example of cnn. >> we are leaving this now to take you live to a debate between herman cain and newt gingrich. this event is in texas outside houston. live coverage here on c-span. >> our topic is of great concern to tea parties and other grass- roots groups. what can we do about the growth of entitlements? tonight, we are making history. with this debate format and topics, the tea party movement has moved beyond rallies and is changing the way american voters choose a president. [applause] by participating in this forum, these candidates demonstrate e enormous courage and a great deal of respect for american voters. we are grateful for both. i will introduce one of our moderator's for tonight. he is the texas chairman for americans for prosperity. welcome and thank you for participating. let's get started. [applause] >> thank you ladies and gentlemen. we are happy to welcome you here tonight. i would like to give the texas patriots pac a hand and a round of applause. they have done a phenomenal job putting this together. they managed to talk ability presidential candidates into sitting down for an hour and at and talking to each other, which is an amazing achievement in itself. i want to make sure our candidates are here first. we are good to go. ok. joining us this evening, two candidates from the state of georgia. herman cain and newt gingrich. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much. let's throw our hands up one more time like this. >> gentlemen, thanks for joining us this evening. we will get the microphones situated. there we go. before we proceed and begin tonight's debate, i want to introduce my co-moderator, who will describe the scope and nature of the problem we will be discussing this evening, which is entitlements reform. this is the second events for the texas patriots pac. earlier this year, the voted in favor of the house budget plan. it is the first serious attempt since george w. bush's failed to try as social security reform to tackle our looming enterprise programs crisis and entitlement problem. tonight, steve will briefly outlined the scope of the problem and demonstrate the affects of congressman paul ryan's budget on the future of medicare and medicaid. the candidates will have three separate discussions. each discussion will focus on one of the big three entitlement issues. medicare, social security, and medicaid. prior to each segment, steve will provide background information on the next entitlement problem to be discussed. we will kick off our discussion with the candidates by presenting some of the proposals in the congressman and paul ryan's plan. the candidates are in the driver's seed and will interact with each other. i will try to make myself like a referee at a football game, as scarce as possible. we will not try to steer the debate. neither of us will endorse a candidate. it is my great pleasure to turn the stage over to the hawkeye state congressman, whom i am supporting. i believe he is a great conservative. i admire and respect him. please give a warm texas welcome to congressman steve king. [applause] >> thank you. thank you all very, very much. it is great to be back in texas. last time, it was hard to go home again. i see all abuzz with solid, conservative energy. i want to thank the texas patriots pac for pulling this together and making this happen. this act goes around the country. i want to thank congressman brady for making this happen. [applause] since i was in high school, i look forward to a lincoln douglas style debate. i am so glad we have two georg an my charge is to seek to set the stage for this discussion on entitlements. the budget grows so fast that when you watch congress every day, it is hard to get a handle on what it all means. i want to address the issue of each american's share of the debt. the slide show going on here, i describe it this way. my most recent granddaughter is just learn to walk. her name is reagan ann king. when she came into the world the national debt was $44,000. now her share of the national debt is not quite $48,000. to put it in perspective, the average student loan debt upon leaving college is $24,000. can you imagine coming into the world owing uncle sam twice as much as you would if you are a college graduate paying off your tuition. by the time she starts fifth grade she will owe $88,000. that line does not show it as fast as it is coming up, but it is growing very, very fast. the share of the national debt sinks us all eventually to where it is hundreds of thousands for each individual. we often hear cut the spending and get it to balance. this is within the context of the republican budget or the ryan budget as we know it. the next is a pie chart. and on it is the breakdown. if it is not brown or green it is entitlement spending. the green service is foreign help, the other part that is brown is defense. i don't want to shrink it down much. i think we need to defend the country. but all of the rest, 62.3% of the budget is on auto pilot. it is very, very difficult to be able to shrink this. i tried to do so by cutting off all of the funding to obama care. that is one of the things. next is spending and revenues to see how this thing is growing annually. there is an arrow that shows the average revenue for the federal government, if you go back to world war ii is about 18% of gdp. if you project that out the horizontal red line, that is off thed for inflation, you can see what happens with the projected spending. i should also make a bit of a definition. blue line on top. baseline spending. i remember being antagonized by what the democrats did in the early 1990's. when they said they are cutting the anticipated growth, that is the anticipated growth. we do have to cut it otherwise it will break us all. in order to get the spending down to the 18% of gdp which is the historical amount the federal government collected, you can see the entitlements swallow up that. you can see how interest grows out by 2050. it is another entitlement you can't get out. we must service our interest. the national debt, baseline spending projections goes on up to a national debt of $130 trillion. under the ryan plan the red line does not mean red ink. that means republican now that. is one the democrats put over on us. red is what happens if the republican budget plan gets kicked in. it does flatten out the national debt and eventually it balances 26 years down the road. we are up against a very big problem. i know we will do a great job of solving it. annual deficits, the next screen. here under the ryan plan is the red line and the baseline projected spending is the blue line. blue you carry it out to 2050 and you are looking at $10 trillion a year in deficit spending. that is $100 trillion for 10 years. the ryan budget plan bends that curve and takes us back to the balanced budget. that is not until 2037. so we have a very difficult task. i want to balance the center of that. so does everybody else. we have the automatic spending medicare for example shows what happens with medicare, goes out of sight again. it does not require much embellishment. the blue line is out of sight. under the ryan plan with premium support and the other measures that are in place that are proposed in the plan it bend its down and we get to the point where we have a manageable situation. the first entitlement discussion we have. a refresher screen on total spending so you get the idea. after we go through it, you will see if it is not brown or green, it is on auto pilot. 37.6% is all you can address under discretionary spending. it is going to take grit, determination and support from all of you to launch the next president to the white house with a mandate from the tea party and the people across this country and the constitutional conservatives and all of the people that believe in constitutional government and responsibility. the next entitlement is a social security slide. i will speak to -- when i went into congress they told me that the social security trust fund would start to draw more out of it than it had in it. by 2042 it will have drained the trust fund. in reality we reached zero on it now in income and payout and we have a long way to go to get it back on track. the darkest of blue shows you the deficit in social security as far as the eye can see. the lower part is the proposal. a roadmap to prosperity that he has drawn that shows that with an investment of individuals and a portion of their sornle security contribution we get back into the track with the social security trust fund. but it will be a long ways before we get that. a generation has to turn over before we get that done. i laid out all but the medicaid component of this. medicaid is in trouble. the ryan budget plan flattens out the medicaid expenditures. what happened is obama care will push millions into medicare and they lowered the standards for eligibility. proof of citizenship is a test to a nine-digit social security number. there is a proposal to block grant medicare to the states. that is something we will hear from the candidates on tonight. the annual deficits component of this, the blue line on that is the baseline spending projected. huge deficits going down to -- i think that number is $10 trillion per year. under the ryan proposal the deficits are reduced out until a balanced budget happens, 26 years, i know. if you see where the arrow points on the line, that is balanced. from there on to the right, below the red line and down to the hash mark, that is deficit reduction. i pray they live to see the day we have deficit reduction in this federal government. i am hopeful that we will take a big step tonight on how to get there. i know the individuals that we will have will do this. we will keep you entertained for the balance of this. i am glad to have a ring side seat to all of this. thank you very much and i look forward to this discussion. >> thank you congressman king for that great presentation. so gentleman, tonight's first topic is medicare and the growth of medicare. what our audience would like to know is explain what happens to medicare and to our budget if we do nothing and explain what happens if we implement the ryan plan and do we agree with the ryan plan. if not, what is your alternative. newt gingrich. >> look. can you hear me? the mic is not on. that is a disadvantage. is this on? this is on. ok. can i go back to three minutes? if we are stupid enough to do nothing, we will eventually resemble greece. it is not complicated. paul ryan came up with very good ideas. one of them is that he would fundamentally change medicare by going ultimately for younger americans into a premium support model. now, i favor as a choice a premium support model. but i don't favor a mandatory premium support model. my reason is simple. i want us to get back into the habit of giving the people of the united states a range of choices so that you are empowered, not the bureaucrats and not the politicians. if you believe in the free market, we should be able to design a series of choices where the marketplace rapidly beats out the bureaucratic system and people go to it because it is better for them and not because they are compelled by politicians to go there. and i also think as a practical matter if you are dealing with something the size of medicare, you can't coerce people because they will defeat you. the fact is the american people won't let politicians impose on them. look at the reaction from all of us on obama care saying you are not going to impose on us. my argument is that we have to come up with solutions that are actually better, the people say yes. wal-mart does not say pass a law so people have to come here on wednesdays. wal-mart has to offer better values for people to come here so they think they are getting a better deal. we have to approach how we reshape the country. the scale of change that we need is so large it will take so many entrenched elements that we have to have a strategy that starts with the american people deciding that we representative -- represent a better future. second, both in medicare and medicaid. i will come back to this three or four times tonight. you have to get to a better health system in order to get to an affordable health system. example, we published a book several years ago called stop paying the crooks. you would think that is a title that even in washington people would have figured out is interesting. medicare and medicaid, because the federal government is such a bad administrator pays between 70-120 billion per year to crooks. the dentist who files 982 procedures per day. the committee is not looking at this. by itself this would get them over half the savings that they are trying to get but requires thinking about government and not just cutting it or increasing it and getting people in washington to think is a very big challenge. >> at this particular juncture i am supposed to have a minute to disagree with something he said, but i don't. i would like to instead -- i don't. give me three minutes to add a historical perspective. i remember talking about medicare when i first went to godfather's pizza as president because that is when i really realized that the things that we can control inside the company were a lot easier to control than the things outside the company in order to stay profitable and to stay in business. medicare started in 1965. our government told us that it would cost $6 billion to roll it out. we also told that by 1990 it is going to cost $12 billion because of population growth, inflation. but in 1990 they missed the target of $12 billion. it wasn't 12. it was not 24. it wasn't 50. it was $109 billion. a 900% miss. how many businesses can survive missing a target like that? so that highlight another problem that we have which is long-term government projection busy what a program is go to cost has never been right. name one. they have never been right. now, that being said i believe as speaker gingrich believes that you can't reshuffle medicare, medicaid or social security. we must restructure. i haven't found anything in it yet that i don't disagree with. but there is a fundamental principle. if you want to solve a problem go to the source closest to the problem. it is not washington, d.c. go to the states, go to the doctors, go to the patients. that is what the ryan plan attempts to do by allowing those medicare accounts for younger workers as an option. so, that is an overriding guiding principle that i look for in any of these. there is another thing that we learned for decades. finally we are talking about it seriously. people spend other people's money more wrecklessly than they spend their own money. let's have it be their money and we will spend it better. that is what you have to do. get it out of washington d.c. according to the clock i have nine seconds left and i am not making this up. politicians have overpromised for decades. we have to get real. we are headed off of a cliff. >> my first executive decision tonight is suspending the clock. from now on take as much time as you want to answer questions. feel free to pose questions to each other. let me start you off. what do we do about rising health care cost? the cost of doctors, health care, services, x-rays, everything. they appear to be going up 15% irrespective of economic conditions. they seem to have a market of their own. clearly it is a market. our audience wants to hear from you. can we really solve the medicare problem until we solve the health care cost problem? >> we have the best health care in the world. we have a health care cost problem. you are absolutely right. in order to solve the health care cost problem we must use market driven, patient-centered approaches. i talked to doctors. here again you cannot manage health care costs out of washington d.c. it is impossible. every program we have that's been administered out of washington d.c., a bureaucrat tries to make a decision that will impact a patient or hospital or doctor fails. what we have to do is to unravel the system with market-driven ideas such as those located in hr 3400. years ago hr 3400 opened up health savings accounts rather than restrict them. allow association health plans. when i ran the national rec center association today it had 14 million employees. we wanted a plan that we could customize to our workforce. we are not like a bank, the restaurant industries. we are not like a manufacturing company. our workforce is different. you can't do that now. the other thing that doctors would like to see, and i spoke to a group of doctors a couple of days ago, loser pays loss. losers pay. because that is what is driving up the cost of malpractice insurance, that is what is causing doctors to practice defensive medicine. it would be a big step towards overall torte reform. >> insurance problem or medical service provider cost increase problem? >> i think that the mess of the health system is an everything problem, a federal government problem, state government problem, insurance company problem, a hospital problem, doctor problem and a patient problem. all of us have a hand in making this thing a total mess. go back to the 1943 decision that was awarding workers to get around wage price wroles by allowing them employer insurance plans. it is done as a gim nick the middle of world war ii. nobody thought through the consequences. as herman said what happens is the person who is paying is not getting anything. they assume that person is cheating. the person who is receiving is not paying for it so they don't value it and the person providing the service knows the person they are providing the service to does not value it and the person they are writing a check to does not value it. think of going to mcdonalds, no national hearings on fraud at mcdonalds. you show up and say i want a quarter pounder with cheese. they give you a quarter pounder with cheese. you give them money. you are happy. they are happy. if you open up your bag and there is no quarter pounder with cheese you are unhappy and go back and say where is my quarter pound wear cheese. one of the reasons i was so excited, and i really do want to thank the patriots' act tea party and the whole effort going on here. there is a chance for us to talk in a non-0 second way to -- you know i did say if anybody predicted a year ago that the two of the top three candidates in the polling would both be from georgia it would have seemed unplausible. we both represent a willingness to talk about common sense to whatever the national establishment thinks is acceptable. and that is radical. we are the two most radical candidates in this because we both are willing to say common sense. in the city of washington common sense is such a radical idea that it does not count. i will give you a quick example and yield back to my good friend here. i helped balance the budget for four straight years. the only speaker in the modern history to do that. we reformed an entitlement, wellfare, we reformed medicare which people tend to forget because we did it so carefully nobody fought over it. we had a.r.p. neutral in a president election year. if you are serious about real health reform, abolish the congressional budget office. it is a dishonest institution which routinely schedules things the wrong way. let me tell you why. we have a new book coming out on end of life planning and families being involved. every hospital that i know will tell you if you get the family and the patient involved it is better emotionally and better medicine and in the long run it is actually less expensive. the congressional budget office only scores it as a cost because they refuse to accept any evidence of savings. their answer is bigger government, higher taxes, more bureaucracy and it makes it impossible to get the reforms we would bring in from the private sector. >> congressman king has a question. >> i appreciate hearing the discussions about what can be done to cut down health care cost. if we can't get there fast enough before we go off the cliff the hardest questions that i face is what about giving people options to opt out. we have tens of thousands of people a day becoming eligible for medicare. how do you get people off the entitlements and how do you say to someone you are not going to make it. at 65, you might have to be 66. if you have the wealth purchase a replacement policy. roll it into a life management account. do you have the solutions on that end? >> yes. if you go back to the ryan plan, which is one of the features we like about it if you are 65 years of age or older or already on medicare you won't be affected. don't allow the liberals to make you think they are throwing grandma off the bridge in a wheelchair. the way for the younger workers, if they take that option of the medicare account, they treat it like it is their money. their name is on that account. it is not a pool. what i like about it is if in the ryan plan it said initially it would be about $11,000 and you would have to buy a medicare certified plan. if you buy one that costs $10,000, that $1,000 left over goes into your medical savings account and it continues to build so when you treat it like it is your money, that is how you wean people off of accepting that someone else will pay for it indefinitely and that it is go to be somebody else's money. that feature is already built in the ryan plan. >> i outlined what we can do. the answer consistently in washington is since we can't do any of the things that are smart which of the three painful stupid things should we do? and i am really serious about this. all of you understand how deeply i feel about this as a former speaker of the house and how frustrated i have been. i just put on the table between $700 billion and $1 trillion just by not paying crooks. why is it so hard for congress to decide before you impose any penalties on honest people you quit paying crookings. the c.e.o. of i.b.m. stode barack obama you can pay for virtually all of obama care by taking existing i.b.m. technology and applying it to stop paying crooks. american express pays .03 of 1% to -- you are 330 times as likely to pay a crook through the federal government than you are through your american express card. you can turn it around in 60 days. you would in 60 days save $1 trillion. i am happy to test the ryan plan but i would test it next year. i would say that anybody who is current leon medicare who voluntarily prefers on their own to go to a premium support system can do it next year. it is a great bill that says if you are successful and have money and would like to contract out, let's give you more freedom. the current medicare rule is more restrictive than the british national health care service. why should bill gates father be blocked from paying more if we wants to pay more. >> before we leave the medicare discussion, define the benefit plan or premium support. >> you go first, newt. >> that's only fair. here is the core problem. this is frankly why ultimately the mandate does not work. when you get the government in the business of defining for you what you are allowed to have the government has to start defining in detail. i went on a rant at the dartmouth debate because they just had a government group say you didn't need to test p.s.a. for prostate for males. the head of the national cancer institute, the commissioner of food and drug administration. he is a world class expert on prostate and said this is such a stupidly ignorant and dangerous decision. for about 10% to 12% of the males who get prostate it is a very aggressive, dangerous cancer and will kill them. if they came back and said it is not a very good test and we should have research to get to a better test that allows more discrimination, that should be rational. they are just a bunch of people sitting there reading papers, averaging information and said in our judgment that is what happens with a defined benefit plan. you want to move to a place where we will help people be able to buy insurance. but they should be able to deal with their doctor and hospital and they should make the primary decisions. as you go through dramatic changes in health care you don't want bureaucracy stopping innovation. you know that 1967 computer is just fine and really cheap and we don't need to go to this new model. that is what happens when you let bureaucrats stop innovation by saving costs. >> they have been making the transition from defined benefit plan to defined contribution plan, the difference being the way companies used to do it by saying here is our retirement plan and health care plan and all of the benefits. they made the conversion to this account has your name on it. you are go to put your own money in there. it is your own money. it is back to this issue of money thing. what the ryan plan does with that feature the medicare account where it will actually have an individual name on it, it is moving towards a defined plan and over time everybody will have their accounts. it gets down to ownership of those dollars. it will cause people to spend it more responsibley. that is the direction that i believe we have to move. >> do you have any questions of each other on this subject before we move on? >> i want to ask you one question because it is something you dealt with. as you look at the steady cost of government, what is the advice that you give other ceo's as they try to plan survival in the mod inner economy when washington and sometimes their state capital are so out of control? what is your advice to other ceo's and how they think about this. >> my advice to them is something they realized when i first became president and ceo of godfathers in 1986. if i did not get involved in these issues, they were going to collapse our entire free market system. so my advice is simply to ceo's, don't play it safe. get involved. be part of the solution. you have some of us out there that are fighting. need help and reenforcement. and the good news is, and it gets back to something you said earlier. i want to congratulate the tea party group for putting it together and you had the courage to move it to the next level, not just rallies. let's educate people. better inform people is what is going to change this country. the tea party movement, it is real and it is growing. you have liberals trying to put a bad name on it. they called you names. they called me a racist like they call you a racist. the point is that my advice to ceo's and business people, get involved. not to sit on the sidelines and think you will be able to stop it with an expensive lobbyist down the road. my question to speaker gingrich is that you spent a lot of years successfully in congress. you had a very distinguished career. you left congress, and that gave you an opportunity to think. so you have been studying and thinking about things rather than being inside that washington bubble. what are the three biggest things you have come to realize by being outside the bubble during this period of time? >> first of all, it is an interesting reversal of the two careers. you are in the private sector and were drawn back into the public life. i left the public sector and opened up a number of small businesses. i learned that the opposite of how washington and most state governments think is if you don't get up every morning trying to find a customer, please a customer and renew a relationship, so you keep the customer, you don't get to stay in business. this is part of why i am so intrigued with strong america now and the idea of applying it to the federal government. if you have not earned your pay today, why do you think we will pay you? the second is something i have known. now i have been out for a while it is even truer. i was really struck with it the other day. it started with one person in 1948 and now has about 2,000. you look at what they built in 1948 and the stuff that they do now. the great reason for the american people to be optimistic is that in almost every part of the private sector somebody is doing something brilliant that could be transferred to government. and it would lead to dramatic decline in cost and a remarkable increase in effectiveness and the challenge is this wall that the politicians, consultants and the news media create that block you from having that conversation. i am very optimistic because i spent the last years believing if you went around the country and found best practices, you would be astonished how much you could change private sector health care and how much better the health would be and how much cheaper it would be. the third thing is something i learned when we balanced the federal budget. every wednesday night we would have 12-15 and i would say we are going to balance the federal budget. i said what is your advice. back then it was only about a $ 300 billion deficit. when i entered office the congressional budget office projected a $ trillion deficit. when i left four years later they projected a surplus for the next two years, a swing of $5 trillion. set very big goals with tight deadlines, delegate like crazy and don't let any experts in the room. >> we will try to tackle the problem of social security entitlement. it seems the problem is relatively basic. we have less younger workers contributing into the system, trying to support older americans and more americans are getting older. so, it would seem to me that we have three basic options. we can raise the retirement age, reduce benefits or we have to raise taxes. so let's see, herman cain will tackle that one, by all means. >> well, you went first on the first issue. i can go first on this issue? social security. the three things you mentioned, none of the above. that is not solving the problem. i am a firm believer in let's solve the problem. with all due respect, those ideas prolong the problem. this is why i am a strong proponent of an idea that president george bush introduced but it couldn't get any momentum. the idea of personal retirement accounts, optional personal retirement accounts. 30 countries have optional personal retirement accounts. i asked why can't we do that. the answer is, we can. we have to fight the demagogary and we have to fight all of the people that don't want the system to change. i believe strongly in that approach and that is an approach that i know that i will try to promote. the other thing that we have to do is to educate the public on it so that they understand it. when the country of chile did it they had a system close to what we had a system. workers got up to 27% on the dollar of every dollar they earned and the system was broken. finally somebody said we have to change this. it is insane. when they gave workers the option to help pioneer that model, when they gave workers the option, within three years 90% of all workers said we want the option even if we are close to retirement. why? it became their money on an account with their name on it. today they don't have the problems that we have trying to deal with social security. >> herman cain, i would like to ask you about all of the older americans that already paid into the system. would they get their money back if they elected the private option? the ones already paid into the system, they have the choice. but if they opt for the new system, if they take the option, no. i don't believe that is how it would be structured. stay with the current system. if you are close to retirement or you are already getting retirement, those benefits will be paid. the option is for younger workers who will help pay those benefits so they will get a greater return on the amount that does want go through the system. let me add when all of the traveling and all of the people i talked to, i asked all of the young people if you had an option to take a portion of your payroll taxes and half of it would continue to help pay for the benefits that have been promised and the other half would go into an account with your name on it. then you take the 50% that you keep and invest it in some very conservative investments, would you be willing to do that. yes. i have not found one young person who would not that i can option because they understand that they are ending up with a greater retirement fund investing half of what they are contributing than what they are promised today if we continue with the older system. >> roughly 6% of wages are being paid by the employee and the other being paid by the employer. >> 7.65% by employee. >> how did the employer portion end up in a private account? >> you have to convert the tax code first to a 9-9-9 plan. i am about fixing the problem. one of the biggest problems we have is that the payroll tax is the biggest tax that a lot of workers pay. it is the biggest tax that they pay. we are not going to talk about tax tonight, newt. maybe they will invite us back to talk about the economy on another time. i would be happy to do that. but seriously, we have to change the tax code. the tax code is one of the reasons to get back to the other issue that health care costs keep going up because there is a disconnect. ers can deduct what they contribute to an employee's health plan. that makes no sense. it promotes the idea that it is somebody else's money. that employer is taking it out of the wages indirectly. the payroll tax is eliminated such that the money that is collected with this bold revolutionary idea called 9-9-9 and then accounts would be set up for optional personal retirement accounts with that money because we raised the amount of revenue. >> i am go to side-step the great temtigse discuss 9-9-9. although i was just sharing with herman our mutual friend asked us to spend an hour with him on this dialogue one evening. i suspect in that setting we might get around to comparing tax notes. first of all, i am delighted that peter is here. he is part of an emerging intellectual revolution. public employees in galveston. what they discovered is that you can put in about half as much money and get back twice as big of an amount if you did it in the private sector rather than turn it over to the government. i'm to give you some principals for rethinking the system. any candidate who is not prepared to talk about giving younger more thans the right to choose has no serious solution on social security. you can say to everybody that is current leon it, you are fine. don't let aarp or anybody else lie to you. you are fine. having said that there are three principles. growth, honesty and not messing up social security by trying to balance the budget on the back of a retirement plan. first of all, growth. you go back to where we are when i left the speakership. you had a lot more people go to work. don't look at the current static model and decide anything. if you looked at 1979-1980 under jimmy carter, social security was going to collapse. under reagan it got dramatically healthier. it is amazing what 20 million extra americans does to make the country healthier. second, honesty. and this is a challenge to the super committee on the current congress. lyndon johnson in order to score a cheap political point presented the budget and brought social security into the general budget in order to hide the deficit. that is why social security got sucked into the budget. prior to that it was a free standing retirement account over here to be solved on its own. ever since people have been figuring out some way to frankly steal the money. the president said it this summer. there is a little youtube video of barack obama twice in july going i may not be able to send you your social security check. there is $2 trillion in the trust fund. what kind of a totally dishonest president does it take to scare senior citizens? take it off budget. get it back to be a free, independent retirement act. -- account. third, if you want to solve social security in the long run, you go to a system -- we are not far apart on this. go to a system where younger americans, right wing americans are willing to give up the money because they want to prove a point. the fact is that you let younger americans choose. i am not going to abolish the current system for younger americans. if you want to stay in, get a smaller return, allow politicians to scare you about what they are go to do with your money, not have it as an estate so if you die early it does not go to your family. and have politicians say we will tell you to work many more years. i regard it as -- you know my two grandchildren, you may have to work three extra years 60 years from now. the idea that will significantly change the present is lunacey. if you have your own personal social security savings account and want to retire earlier on a smaller amount of money, why would the congress tell you not to? and on the other hand if you are like andy rooney who just passed away having worked until he was 91 and decide that you love what you are doing and want to stay active, why should the congress tell you you can't? let's get politicians out of that decision process and return it to americans and let americans control their own lives. >> let me add the other challenge that we have. we, as a nation, are not short on good ideas about how to fix social security or how to fix medicare. this gets back to the question that you asked me about ceo's. they can educate and help to inform their workers about what is truth and what is garbage. unfortunately they are not always go to get the truth depending upon what station they watch or which newspaper they read. i believe the businesses in america can provide a tremendous service to help to change the pair dime in washington d.c. by also becoming vehicles to inform your employees about what is fact and what is not. secondly, one of the big advantages that we have in this election cycle that we did not have 20 years ago is the power of this movement, the tea party movement and the power of the internet. more and more people are a lot smarter and more and more people are a lot more informed and we must use that to our advantage. i believe the president of the united states in addition to be commander in chief must also take on the role from that particular place communicator in chief as well. >> we were talking before one of the debates about herman's role in turning around godfather pizza. the degree to which enthusiastic, positive solutions oriented leader suddenly changes the team. i want to thank everybody who gave up what every sec fan believes is the national championship game tonight to be a part of this. the worst team in the history of the green bay packer franchise is in 1858. terrible record. vince lombardi arrives in february 159 from the worst team in the history of the franchise, 15 players become all-pro, seven hall of fame. that is what leadership is. we both agree. i became speaker because i told the truth to the house republican party for a decade and they finally decided it was ok to become a majority. he became a leader at godfather pizza because he knew what would make the company successful. ronald reagan, told the truth. compare his ability to talk directly to the american people and have the american people move the congress with the current president. this president is about as candid and accurate as bernie madoff in what he tells the american people. >> as a matter of clean occupy the proposals, i am hearing a personal retirement account advocacy from each of you presuming it is patterned off of the savings plan as a model that one might see. but my question is, as i heard from the speaker to take the social security trust fund off of the budget, i will pose this first to mr. cain and then back to the speaker. where do you put the money? i have one of those in my briefcase, i carry it around. it is a copy of one of the bonds that are there. it is copy machine paper. all of those $ .4 trillion are in a filing cabinet in west virginia, it is an i.o.u. from the government to the government. where do you put that if you are not going to loan it to the government? >> i want to do this. this is a topic i was involved in as speaker back when we were trying to balance the budget in the 1990's. this whole way is a fraud and a lie. it is because of the unified budget. there is $2 trillion that you have put into a trust fund. now it is sitting there. it is not hidden. it is a piece of paper, just as the money you put into a bank account is a set of digits held electronically. every politician in washington wants to find a gimmick to enable them to balance the federal budget on the backs of the american people who put all of their money into social security. my point is that money does exist. it is a debt the united states government owes every american. if you take it off budget and you say fine, you figure out how to get a balanced budget on the rest of the money. now talk about how we will solve social security. $2 trillion, you take that, add in the types of things herman and i are talking about, you all of a sudden find with a few modest cuts in spending that you can in fact get to a stable retirement system. now it does make it harder to balance the rest of the budget because since lyndon johnson in 1968 we have been hiding the size of the real budget deficit behind social security. it is time to be genuinely honest and deal with the two as separate issues. here is social security. let's figure out a stable retirement system. here is the government. now let's get the budget balanced. >> let's first realize, and this is wa we have to be honest with the american people about, it is going to take a long time to work ourselves out of this mess that has been created for decades. now, we are not going to be able to deal with the unfunded liabilities and the money that has already been stolen. let's go to a situation where there was a bill introduced in the senate a couple of years ago, a bill that said starting from now all social security contributions would go towards social security benefits. it was defeated in the united states senate. that is all people were saying. what the money was collected for, let's spend it for that. we have to start at that point going forward as we work our way out of this mess. >> the federal government will collect social security and invest it somewhere. park it in the private market. park it in a trust account of another kind. it has to be parked somewhere until it is >> that money which is raised in taxes was into u.s. treasury notes on which the government pays interest. that is fine as long as he recognizes it is a real debt to the american people. it is not a phony politicians transfer and smoke and mirrors. the private sector money would have in your personal account would go into the private sectors. he thinks to get a 1% economic growth over the next 50 years by the amount of capital your saving. i talked to a chilean who is an expert and is. in chile, they now have savings in their social security account equal to 76% of the annual economy. that is how much they have amassed over 30 years. i give you access to capital for economic growth that is breathtaking and long term and stable in a way that is healthy. i draw a distinction. the money we raise through taxes can stay in treasury notes as long as it is separate and only for social security. the money that individuals put into their accounts would go into the private sector in a way that would dramatically enriching the entire country. >> let me try to answer congressman king's question again. i don't think i did a good job the first time. in the private sector, most companies have moved to a defined retirement approach for their employees. the employee's's name is on the account. the employee makes contributions based upon how much of that earnings they want to put an end. and the company will make a contribution. the employee then selects, 1, 2, 3, or four options as to how they want that money invested. you consider yourself a low-risk investors. there are mutual funds you can select. you can select a medium or high. based upon what you want to do and how much risk -- you can split between those -- you can do exactly the same thing for individual retirement accounts using that model so you are not parking it in one account. are giving people the option. using a similar model, parking the money will not be the problem. inking the money out of the federal budget will be the hardest part. >> thank you very much. we are going to move on to the next topic. we will give you another round of applause. [applause] our final discussion tonight is going to involve -- we are calling to discuss medicaid reform. in honor of new king bridge, i think since obamacare is such a big part of medicaid and problems we have, we can discuss the obamacare during the this 30 minute segment. i would like to ask -- the rain plan proposes blocked plans for medicaid and allows the states to decide what to spend it on. i guess my first question is, do we need to retain the entire medicaid scenario where we have the program at all? should we continue with the program medicaid is health care for the poor? should we maintain it? the second is, should we agree to the block grant proposal by congressman ryan? the you have another alternative? >> i absolutely agree with block granting to the state as a way to begin to get these costs under control. it gets back to my overriding principle. in order to solve a problem, go to the source closest to the problem. the states know better how to use resources in order to be able to provide the greatest amount of help to the greatest number of their citizens. the other reason i agree in the block grant approach, since medicare and medicaid were started in 1965, what it has done trying to control out of washington, d.c. is it has gotten states put on at like people getting hooked on crack. we have to break the crack habit. if you block the money with some general guidelines and that the statements of fact, over time they also are going to have more flexibility. over time depending on the resources that are coming in, that michael dell. i don't believe we should cut states of cold turkey. in may and the dependency on washington d.c. bureaucrats making that decision. >> you are talking about the federal mandates? >> yes. ending the federal mandates to the state. cut those mandates. but the states decide. -- let the states decide at. >> i want to go back to where you began. if you go to my web site newt.org and you look at the contract with america, the first item in the contract is to follow steve king's leadership and repeal obamacare. [applause] i strongly support paul ryan's approach to looking medicaid. i would point out that peter has also put develop a proposal in block printing of the remaining welfare programs which has a similar affect including an integrated opportunity corestates to deal with people who are poor using innovation and new approaches in ways that save money. i want to talk very briefly about medicaid and a couple of levels. picking up on something that harmon has said that is exactly right, this is where we will have a real national debate. i don't believe you solve problems dealing with poverty under the liberal model we have had over the last 40 or 50 years of people being helpless. it was a remarkable book that really helped it does not -- define our welfare reform proposals in the 1990's. i just want to suggest to you, we need to rethink medicaid much the way we rethought the process of more welfare reform. for example, gov. judd the bush when he was governor of florida had a program where if you have diabetes or asthma and you took care of yourself. you did not need to go to the emergency room, you got a christmas bonus. he saved the state some much money by taking care of yourself that it was profitable to reward you for being a mature responsible person. that notion of linking behavior to award that turned out to be sure -- and extremely successful for poor people, i will give you an example of how to shave -- save money in medicare. the number of people who walk into the emergency bridge to get aspirin is an absurdity. if what they needed was an aspirin, they went to the equal flat of a minute clinic and that costs 30 or $40. you want -- the hospital was not charging any emergency room visit for aspirin, you save money. you start tracking the person's visits. there are clearly abusing the system. there should be a point where there is a consequence for abusing the system. we have -- >> [applause] -- we have to start distinguishing between the taxpayer as being concerned for terrible -- charitable care and the taxpayer being a sucker that is being exploited. that is it big difference in the current system. [applause] >> one of the general principles that i firmly believe that is an underlying theme in all of the ideas we are putting forth is that we must go from an entitlement society to an empowerment society. and help people who help themselves. and not another entitlement. anecdotally, not long ago we were in florida. we were in this restaurant. a young man he was a waiter in the restaurant recognized me and said, mr. herman cain, you know that old saying, give a man a fish and he eats for a day. teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. i said, yes. this young man who happened to be black said, i don't want to fish. i want an economy will teach me how to are how to fish. this is a message we have to share with the americans. >> would you favor a system where you give people some kind of a voucher to acquire health care as opposed to a benefit system? >> yes, i could be supportive of a voucher system, but not of the voucher was going to pay all of the costs. people need some skin in the game. if they don't have scandium, it is real easy to say, how much more will the government give me? >> let me answer on two levels. first of all, i think we ought to have general block grants. if one state was to try a voucher, it can try it. some states might decide to simply give doctors a tax credit for providing care for free as long as the doctors documented the care. that might turn out to be cheaper than the current model. i think the purpose of giving back to the 50 states is to provide 50 laboratories of experimentation. we have proved washington cannot fix this. i think that is a reasonable step in the right direction. you have to think of people as a complete person. the talk about medicaid over here. the talk about education over here. these things all become integrated and one human being. we need to be looking for an example in public housing where if we are right to give you an opportunity to 11 public housing, maybe should have a role in cleaning it up and painting it and fixing it. there is a whole range here where we should start -- this will be a huge debate with the left. they have a model where everyone is weak, helpless, and stupid but government will take care of them. these me to ask, who do they think government hires? >> medicaid fraud is all over the newspaper headlines. my question is, the states don't seem to be able to prevent fraud from occurring. they don't know what they are being built for. they have to go back and try to find it after they have paid and overpaid millions of dollars. do we change the system? how do we change the system and prevent it from occurring? >> egested don't to block grant the money he block press the responsibility out of washington, d.c. that is part of the problem. the states are trying to adhere to these rules without building up a big administrative and function. also, it puts the responsibility and decision that the state level. if it is that money, they will find the money. right now they are caught up in the democracy that they don't have the resources to be able to do it. >> this is one area where i sometimes call -- it causes some ways. i believe in health information technology. it is important to provide the same information pattern follows that everyone of you deal with. how many of you get money out of an atm machine? how many have done it outside of the united states? he walked up to any unanimous machine in a foreign country. seven languages,. you pick the one you are good at. you put in a plastic card & a former code, it crosses borders and pfizer bank. verify to you say you are. it gives you money in the local currency and you have no idea what the transaction math is because you don't know -- and happens in 10 seconds. when they started to go into medicare part b, they met with the pharmacist. all the bureaucrats say, how will we deal with the paperbacks for the last 15 years, everything we do is electronic. this said, gosh, how will we get you to go back to paper. the reason you have so much fraud is to have a crack sitting out here who stays until 8:00 or 9:00 at night with an ipad competing with a bureaucrat at home using paper. [applause] >> i just want to bring up an issue that was brought up by the current of georgia. the eligibility standards were significantly eroded by actions that were initiated by then speaker policy. i mentioned in my remarks about how the requirement for citizenship included a birth certificate, social security number, and other documents, it has now been reduced to a testing of eighth nine a digit number. my question is, would you restore the standard that nathan fought to keep? >> absolutely. we should not make it easier for people to cheat. [applause] we can't get on an airplane without showing the right kind of identification. it is not just restoring the retirement -- a requirement for medicaid, i absolutely agree with what he was trying to do. i also happen to believe that we should require ids for people back to vote so be can't get a lot of this out of that. why not? [applause] the people that are fighting using the voter id in order to be able to do one of the most important things we are to do, they are fighting a because they want it cheating to continue. there is more cheating than anyone -- then a lot of people want to admit. [applause] >> this is one of the areas where you have an extraordinary gap between the private sector and the government. why you can be an optimist in the long run with to get people in government who have the courage to be rational and to do what is obvious. how many of you have ever tracked a package on either ups or faxed to see where it was going? we have technology that allows us at the cost of shipping a package to go on line and find out where it is with remarkable accuracy. this is not a theory. [laughter] one of my proposals was that in order to find everybody who is here illegally, we send it down a package. [laughter] now -- faults, it is funny, but it is making a profound point about where we are. i think we should be able to identify everybody who gets emergency aid of any kind. candidly, i think every state should sue the federal government every year for every penny they have to spend for people who should not be the united states because it is the federal government to talk responsibility. [applause] -- federal government's responsibility. [applause] >> i want to shift this over a little bit. you know how hard this is for me to stay out of this. i really want to be objective and ask a question. the heritage foundation did a study. he counted and identified and it drafted and started the means tested federal welfare program that we have. he came up with this number that is astonishing to me. 72 different welfare programs. that is wrapped up in this entitlement component. is wrapped up in the medicaid component. i would ask how you address those and 72 different programs that have constituencies. are we going to approach that? i have a follow-up on that. >> biscuits back to my statement about changing entitlement programs. change them to empowerment programs. i am thinking about the model government -- gov. thompson was there. you could not get benefits and the sea pretty went to look for a job or you proved you were taking a class to improve yourself. a lot of people ended up getting off from the welfare rolls. i don't have a problem with means testing, but we have to do more than that. what we have to do is make people take ownership and make them want to get off programs. that is what i believe we have to do. i would package them up and send them back to the state and give the states the flexibility to modify some of those. they would know better how to stretch those dollars. in terms of making those dollars complementary to the dollars that today would be able to spend. >> let me say first of all, i think if you start with a question of whether or not means testing actually encourages people to stay below -- you think about it, i am one to give you food stamps. we have today the most effective food stamp president in the american history. that is not a positive thing. think about it. you get some foods damps, unemployment, you get public housing. all of a sudden you say to yourself, do i want to rise above the point where i will be means tested? you create and -- you create a discouragement -- this was the work done by charlie marie in a book called "losing ground." he said we are teaching people to fail and give up the american dream. i am very much for rethinking -- nobody should get nothing -- something for nothing unless they have a severe disability for some kind. if somebody has a temporary problem after a car wreck, that is one thing. if somebody has a problem as a severe disability that is another thing. if you are in able bodied person and you are getting something for nothing, we are pretty stupid for giving it to you. go back and read abraham lincoln's letter to his brother about why he would not send him more money. i favor fundamentally changing unemployment compensation so that it has attached to it a training component. you cannot get money for doing nothing. if you have 99 weeks of a training component, you could get an associate degree in the thai people have been sitting around waiting for all obama to create jobs. lastly, there is a proposal that is very powerful for taking virtually all of these mandatory welfare programs, block granting them, going back to the state and city in each state ought to decide what it wants to do. it should decide how he wants to deal with these issues. i think that is the right general direction to end up giving the state's primary responsibility for most of these domestic issues. >> we have talked about what some people have described as the biggest elephant in the room -- entitlement programs. as you, speaker gingrich and i are not a free to talk about this. it starts with being honest with the american people because the united states government has been intellectually dishonest with the american people for nearly 50 years. let's not forget to getting back to another point you have made, yes, we can talk about these programs individually. on ultimately, they all work together. they all come back to -- what is the best form of help you want to give to people. you want to get them off medicaid and get them a job. do not forget we have to grow the economy which is job one so there will be jobs available. if we go to the training program, that is looking at the whole problem and need to address and not just hellebore efficiently give money. we have to look at the whole specter. he will have some people that will be lazy. people that choose to be lazy and not help themselves -- that is bad little as my grandmother used to say progress on the unemployment benefits out there, i have watched them in my lifetime go from 26 weeks paid for by the employer to 99 weeks paid for by borrowed money. i wonder if either of you have a position on what the cap the matter ought to be and what to do with the expansion of unemployment benefits. >> knew it is thinking about what he wants to say. that is not a date. i would recommend fundamentally changing how it works. the federal government starts out at 26 weeks -- 26 weeks and it states have some part of this. i would restructure -- restructure it so that if you got 26 weeks of unemployment, the next time you go back and apply you only get 13 weeks. after you get 13 weeks, it will be 7.5 weeks. you make it a diminishing benefit because that will make it harder for you to go out there and try to find a job. >> this is one place where i think we do approach it differently. i would say from day one, if you don't sign up for a training program offered by a business to hire people, you don't get any money. i would connect to the unemployed into the jobs. we have millions of jobs we cannot fill because we have an older work force that is not trained for the new kinds of jobs. we pay the older work force to do nothing for 99 weeks while we try to find people for the new jobs we cannot fill. i would say from day one, your goal should it be to get trained as fast as possible to get a full-time job to be able to move back into the track. they would have to do something every single day in order to do a penny. >> we are running out of time. i want to give each of you a chance to ask each other a question. who would like to go first? >> i will ask you a softball and what i think folks will find interesting. we have not played gotcha one time tonight. [applause] i want to ask you something and give you a chance -- you have had a terrific life. we have known each other for many years when we fought hillary ^ together. you have written books. you decide as a citizen to dive into this thing. what has been the biggest surprise to you out of this whole experience? >> running for president? "yes. >> the net picking of the media. -- the nit-pickingness of the media. i expected to have to study hard. i did not recognize the nature of the media when you are running for president, especially when you start moving up in the polls. that has been the biggest surprises because, if there is a journalistic standard, a lot of them don't follow it. as a result, too many people did miss information and disinformation. it is the action of the behavior of the media has been my biggest surprise. this is probably going to get taken the wrong way, i did not take political correctness .chool praye there are too many people in the media that are downright dishonest. they do at this service to the eight american people. [applause] >> herman cain, the you have a question for newt gingrich? >> yes, i do. mr. speaker, if you were a vice president of the united states -- [applause] [laughter] -- what would you want to the president to assign you to do first? [applause] [laughter] >> having studied my good friend of dick cheney, i would not to go hunting. >> i hope you enjoyed it tonight to talk debate. let's give our candidates a round of -- i hope you enjoyed the debate tonight. let's give our candidates in a rut of applause. thank you for showing up tonight. let's hope we do this again wilson. >> we would like to thank our moderators. stephen king from iowa. [applause] as long with our two presidential candidates newt gingrich and herman cain. thank you for attending the texas patriots political action committee. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> you can watch this debate again with republican presidential candidates herman cain and nicking rich at 10:30 p.m. eastern and on c-span not work. -- cpsan.org. -- c-span.org. >> this has been completed. all it needs is a signature on there. this is the filing fee and. this is a slogan -- we do this every four years. >> you have a great secretary of state. you have done a great job. we appreciate your leadership you are going to make sure new hampshire remains a first in the nation. it is the responsibility and an honor that new hampshire richly deserves. i am happy to be part of the process and put my name of the paper hoping this time it will take. i will be able to become the nominee of our party. >> the new hampshire primary is set for january 10. you can follow campaign 2012 online with the c-span video library. click on the campaign 2012 tab to access cat -- candidates and event. the c-span a video library -- it is washington your way. >> former nbc news anchor tom brokaw talk about american politics, journalism, and challenges at a speech during the national press club. >> there are a few individuals depicted more than what's on those walls. our guest speaker today, like fdr, is one of those. he has spoken at our luncheons and is one of the winners of the lifetime achievement for the state of war. if you will indulge me for just a brief personal story, i have him to thank for this career in journalism. for decades now, americans of had breakfast with our guests, dinner and a nightcap. he hosted "the today show." he frequently served as the post of prime time feature specials. he is here today to talk about his new book --"the time of our lives: examining the past present and promise of america." he will tell us what he thinks about the great tip -- divide of our political climate. many are familiar with his remarkable story. he married ms. south dakota. dibble san celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. -- they will first celebrated their 50th anniversary. he would anchor at kmbc. we are told he covered 11 presidential elections. he was nbc's white house correspondent during watergate. in 1983 he became the anchor of the nightly news where he remained until 2005. having been named one of the most trusted people in america according to polls, he was asked by nbc to step back into the spotlight to host "meet the press" after the sudden death during the 2008 election. he has won every major award and broadcast of journalism. members of our club now well he was the winner of an award that was given here at the national press club. with his trademark midwestern style, our guest is a natural storyteller whether on the air or between the covers of a book. in 1998 he had a break through achievement with his popular pocket. it has been ranked above -- it has been ranked as one of the best, the century. other successful books have followed while remaining present on the air for nbc news. while he has been less than complimentary about baby boomers, he has remained neutral on politics. several years ago rush limbaugh referred to our guest as a self heating liberal. in his new book, and this is a classic response, he says "rush of all people should know that those of us making a good living listen to the sounds of our own voices are incapable of sulfate. we think we are grand." is not often we have the opportunity to have such a prestigious member address our audience today. we are pleased he will return boats again. please give a warm welcome to mr. tom brokaw. [applause] >> thank you very much. the other piece of that was -- the response was that when i said we think we are grant, i include russia and that fraternity which is true. it is granted to have you here. your grandfather was not only a great friend but he was the godfather of a small club to which i belonged where people who were once the anchor of the nightly news. this audience knows your grandfather very well, i will share with them a story about your grandmother who was one of the most favored people that any of us could ever have the privilege of knowing. i am sure he will agree with i always said walter had a steady course because he had his first mate betsy cronkite. we count on our wives to let the air out of us at the right time. meredith played that role in my life. her idol was betsy cronkite for a couple of reasons one was but they booed into a high rise in new york after about three months, pepsi said to a friend of hers, you know i kind of miss the old place. the friend said, of course, betsy.l you have so many good news. >> she said it has nothing to do with that. we have a backyard. i could bury all the plaques that walter kept getting. we were at the content -- the kentucky derby one year. it was a death march would have the visibility we do what we were therefore are affiliated stations. at saturday we were at a black- tie dinner and walter said, how do we get out of here? i said i have a two prince who have always wanted to take the two of less than a hot air balloon and week -- he said we can only do this at dawn. he said go make the arrangements. i did. at dawn the next morning we were out getting ready to get into the baskets and half the town showed up still in tuxedos and champagne glasses. walter got in his basket and i got in mind. we lifted up. the first voice i heard was betsy cronkite saying, we are here on the ground in dividing up your things. do you still wanted that burial at sea? my final favorite story of them came after walter had retired for a couple of years and was at yellowstone national park narrating a documentary. he was standing in line like an ordinary citizen at the gift shop. it was a woman standing behind him and behind that woman was betsy. \ the woman kept looking at him. finally she could not contain herself. she tapped him on the shoulder. she said, has anybody told you you look just like walter cronkite did before he died? [laughter] walter turned it around and began to clear his throat. now the woman is in a mild panic. he turns -- she turns behind her and says, walter cronkite is dead, isn't he? betsy looked off for a moment. his grandmother had a wonderful crooked smile and her eyes would crinkle. she smiled and said, you know, if he is not by now the old as soviet probably ought to be. --the old s.o.b. probably ought to be. fewgoing to take just a minutes of your time and talk about how i wrote this book and also about to the craft that you that so many of us at the national press club. i have been asked this for a half century this next year. my marriage coincided as my career with a journalist in a modestly in omaha, nebraska. over the course of the half century i have won the lottery professionally and personally. i have had a wonderful family. i have daughters of accomplishment and now for granddaughters. we only make the girls in my family. i have had the privilege of a journalist to cover stories that the police precincts in omaha and atlanta all the way to summit meetings and in china. in the course of that time, i have never lost my sense of wonder. that change was for me in some ways distilled in june of 19 -- of 2009 when i was interviewing president obama in germany. he was preparing to go to normandy for the anniversary. i had just been there the day before. i had spent a great deal of time they're considering i read about the greatest generation. i was there ready to interview the president of the united states, thinking about all the change i had witnessed. i was born in 1940. i spent the next 40 years behind communist lines. now the city was rising out of the rubble of that time under the oppression of communist rule. i had just come from berlin or i had been denied to the wall came down. berlin was the most exciting city in central europe. it was very cosmopolitan. a vibrant once again. it had been the capital of the most regime anyone could possibly imagine. the headquarters of hitler's nazi germany. then along came an african- american president whose father was born in africa and his mother came from here. began our exchange. when i mentioned to him i was in berlin the next the wall came from -- the market now, he said i know tom. i watched the. i was in law school at the time. i said, oh my god. he was in moscow. i walked away from -- he was in law school. it began to resonate with me as i look at my grandchildren. i wondered in 250 -- in 50 years from now what it would be saying about their time and what we left them. what we created for that. as many of you know when you begin to write a book you think you have an idea where you will go but you find the journey really becomes an adventure because with every page as you finish it, you have any thoughts about the direction you want to go. this book for me really came down to two questions. one was -- what happened to the america that i thought i knew. the second question came from people i encountered as i went across the country. they would say to me, do you think my children will have a better life than i have had? i worry they will not. that question is at the heart of the american dream for so many families. they come here hoping that succeeding generations will have better lives than they have had. that was the case of my family. my mother and father came out of the depths of the great depression. my father dropped out of school when he was 10 years old to go to work because he was this large strong that boy and became a master operator of heavy construction equipment. it was find work but it was not easy. my mother to talk family farm dried up and blew it away from them and seized from the bank in 1962. she was 16 when she graduated from high school. she was one of the brightest woman i ever knew. college costs would hundred dollars a year and there was no way she could go. she wanted to be a journalist, so she lives her life out to me in many ways and had been a guide. i thought about the change in their lives and the change in my life. my parents always safe for me to go to college in hopes that their sons would have a better life than they will. they will make more money, they will have better homes and more cars and more poise. obviously, there is a finite capacity for that. what i attempt to do in this book in many ways is to get us collectively wherever we are from and what ever we believe politically or religiously or culturally to kind of have a national dialogue about what it is we want to leave behind. i think if you begin with that question of what kind of values do we want to leave behind. what kind of economic opportunity in the workplace do we want to leave behind it? how do we expand the tolerance that took such a quantum leap forward as a result of dr. king in the civil rights movement? how do we fit into a smaller planet with so many more people? how do we use this transformative technology that is available to us all at our finger prints to make this planet a better place? it was in that passion i lost this book. i began really with the need to do something about american education. what is most encouraging to me is that that is a subject that is now on the table. for too long, we had a two class system -- those who could afford to move to the suburbs and send their kids to private schools. the rest of the city and lower parts of socio-economic losses were stuck with a one-size-fits- all warehousing education. education is the currency of the 21st century. at least we are talking about it here in the nation's capital attempting to do something about it as they are across the country. we have a long way to go. in china, every eighth grader is required to take math, physics, and biology. in a america only 18% of high- school students take those courses. as long ago in 1996, i was reporting from south korea during the olympics. because we did it in the middle of the 90 meter time change requirements, i was there before dawn overlooking a courtyard of a junior high. before the sun came up, that courtyard was filled with the likes of the flashlights. i could not figure out what was going on. i went down a little closer. there were students in the courtyard doing their homework by flashlight and a waiting for the doors to open so that they could improve themselves. this is a country that in the 1950's was ravaged by war and had a kind of stone age agriculture economy. now it is one of the industrial powerhouses in the world. the president of korea had a meeting with obama one year ago. he said in a conversation, tell me about your challenges in education. the president of korea said, my greatest challenge is that the parents want more from me, not less. i began to address that in this book and the world can all play in it in a variety of ways. those of us in my generation ought to be thinking more about becoming tutors and becoming involved. the schools of not only our grandchildren but our communities. i think the place of charter schools is important. i think the combination of what i call public/private partnerships in many communities where people are getting of all because that is going to be their customers. they are trying to bring new resources to teaching. we are finally having a national debate about what is an effective teacher and how you build an effective school system? but the transit -- make the transition and from what i call proportion and our lives. i just had a fairly active discussion on npr this morning at which a caller called in to challenge me. he said the housing crisis was entirely the fault of wall street. wall street played an enormous role in the housing crisis. it was not all wall street. people have to accept personal responsibility when they sign on the bottom line for a mortgage they cannot afford. here in washington, fannie and freddie drove a lot of the stampede to people thinking they could afford homes. at home ownership was a boy to be part of the american dream. unfortunately, it ignored a lot of the financial reality that comes with that. it continues to be a heavy burden in economic recovery in this country. a subject that will have been of interest to many of you is this extraordinary change that is going on in the profession i have spent most of my life -- journalism. i liken it to the second big bang. the impact of this new technology we have created an entirely new universe out there. we are at the moment trying to determine which of these plans will survive and which will drift too close to the sun, which will merge with others to support life as we have known it as journalists. how will it finally worked itself out so there is a kind of orderly universe and we can know where we are going. at the same time, i find it exceptionally exciting. but audiences say to me, what happened to the journalism i thought i used to know what walter and you and dan and peter were there. i am going to surprise you. there is a richer menu of information out there now than there ever has been. it is available at a keystroke. you can no longer be a couch potato. you have to get up in the morning and not just retrieve the newspaper and watch one of the evening news broadcasts. to be a fully informed citizen, you have to develop a kind of personal filter system for the information that is coming at you all day long. what is reliable? what has integrity? what is the political motivation of this particular website? all the newspapers now have the upside to of one kind or another. those are still works in transition. the same thing is true in my business over the air and on cable. we are working our way through it. the test ultimately always is, however, how reliable is the information? what is the integrity of what we are seeing and absorbing? that is going to require more vigilance on the part of those of us who are on the receiving end of it. we should have no less of an expectation of that. the fact is that the region so much greater. even while traveling i can get up in the morning, read the financial times, london, read the latest release from the saudi ministry, go on the web site of the foreign relations and see overnight development and read a couple of papers to say nothing of the broader range of papers that are available to us in this country. i even read just to see how the old high-school football team is doing and how my friends were getting a lot out there. they have a terrific website. finally what is most important about this exceptional change we are witness to and we are a part of as catalysts and practitioners, the place of journalism will not and should not go it is critical to free people everywhere. that cannot be lost in the debate about journalism. free people require a forum where they can retrieve information that is useful to them to make decisions that will affect their lives and their nation and their communities. we must redouble our efforts to make sure that the culture of journalism remains in tact. it is placed in the public dialogue and it is defensible. just this past week obviously we have been witness once again to what i think is one of the fault lines of american journalism at the moment. it has become an echo chamber. something like the herman cain accusations get into the system and a squeeze out almost everything else. it is a pattern that develops in which everyone chases the same story. the fact of the matter is, herman cain decided to run for president some time ago. one or read in going back to find out what his history was? he had a fairly prominent role as president of the restaurant association. he was on the board of reader's digest association. there was a time not so long ago when anyone who declares for president cannot fully expect to be the object of a series of reports in the washington post, the wall street journal, the new york times, were on television. no longer. now everybody choosing candidates around the landscape or at the dates. when something happens, playing a giant game of gotcha. i think that is a place to begin. you always will have the horse race in american politics. you will always have the scandal. the american public deserves more from us from these people stepping forward to run for president, possibly president of the united states. they require a long in-depth examination of who they are and an examination of what their policies are. republicans, democrats, and independents -- that is the least that we owe the voting audience and the people who give us all the freedoms that we have and the first amendment to the constitution -- freedom of the press. having said all of that, we can always expected there will be a robust debate in this country. some of the language that we are seeing now is reasonably mild even by contemporary standards. there was a new book out on the campaign of 1948. i was reading passages -- pass -- passages from last night. at one point he made a speech in which he compared tom dewey in the fact to hitler and mussolini. it was recorded and printed in that fashion. he said thomas dooley is just like what happened in germany and they said they have to have somebody represent them and it was adolf hitler. the same thing happened in italy. the dewey people went ballistic but harry truman and stuck by his guns and continued the campaign in that fashion. we have a rich tradition of that. here is something that may surprise a lot of people. abraham lincoln was in a way one of the first bloggers. when he was a lawyer in active illinois politics, he wrote a scathing criticisms under a pseudonym -- scathing criticisms of them that had very little basis in fact. very opinionated. of course, because he was so well know, one of his opponents called him out and challenged him to a duel. because he was challenged and a large being the man, abraham lincoln decided he would shoes broadswords. they met just across the line they met in missouri at dawn and, thank god, wiser heads prevailed and got the tool -- duel called off. it was provoked a. licoln, blogger using someone else's name. [laughter] i will tell you two stories, one which involves a our grandchildren. we are big outdoors people. we could not wait for the grandchildren to be old enough so we could take into the back country of montana. when they were just seven and five, we decided they should go on their first camping trip and we took them up a trailerless area near our ranch to a rudimentary cavan on our property. there were warning about the and big cookout. they were whining but when we got there we had a big cookout. we gave them lamps and tuck them into their sleeping bags and you can see they have a lot of questions but they were not talking. we got our sleeping bags just outside the tent and we could hear an urgent conversation in whispers inside. the youngest of the two said we need an adult in here and now. [laughter] that may be a metaphor for the country. finally, the anecdotes that follows that is that i always learn something from the wild, from nature, when i am in montana. every year, there is an enduring lesson i learned from the animal life or from the storms that blow through or the floods we have or the severe winters. the most memorable one for making about four years ago when our river was very high, almost flood stage, because of snow run off. i went to a high point overlooking the river that was bordered by a growth and on the other side, to get to the grassy pastures and range of our ranch, there were thick rows of hawthorne bushes. a conover grove came a group of alex. -- calves. they decided i was no threat. the mother cows let these newborn calves into this very high and strong ratings. river they swam across and the calves were having a hard time getting through the hawthorne bushes. they all made it except one and he was swept downstream. i was wondering what to do. on his son, he found an eddy and got up onto a sand bar and walked up further and was on the far bank. the rest of the herd was across the river and they were waiting patiently and he tried again until the second time. then he got back on the sand bar and tried a third time and failed again. now i can barely breathe watching all. this as god as my witness, after the third time, he stood on that send back trembling. across the way, his mother separated from the herd and walked to the edge of the river, looked at him and nodded her majestic had come waded into the river and nuzzled him and let him upstream to a safer place where they both got across while the rest of the herd waited for them and then they moved on to greener pastures. our country is at flood stage. we need to find a way we can navigate these rivers together and find our way to higher ground. thank you all very much. [applause] >> thank you very much, tom, and it is a pleasure to have you here today. using 'a term the greatest generation' how would you categorize the present generation? >> the young people coming of age? >> or maybe us. >> i'm not a baby boomer. i was born in 1940 and there was not a lot of birth going on during the war. i have been fascinated by the baby boomers because i was close enough to them that we shared a lot of interests and i covered them as a reporter. i call them the unresolved generation. i don't know how they want to be remembered. the current generation now are called m theilennials and they -- the millennials and they are beginning to get a subset because they have been chastened by what has happened economically. many of them have moved back, but they cannot find a job or for housing. we're beginning to be called neo-frugalists by spending their money it wiser than their parents did and they're spending their time on line talking to everybody else and they are skeptical about a lot of the institutions we have all taken for granted including corporations and what kind of job security they have. that is how i would characterize them. >> we have dealt with similar themes in recent luncheons' including when ken burns was here to talk about his new three-part series," prohibition." he is that as a fulcrum to talk about the divisiveness in u.s. history. how would you place of this period in history we are experiencing right now relative to our other history? >> i don't think we know yet. indeed more perspective and more distance from what we are going to. it seems that the moment that this is a very difficult time in part because the old rules don't seem to apply. i was with a group of very sophisticated economists c andeo's in late 2009. in late 2009. they said the recovery would be well under way by the fourth quarter of 2010 because of the amount of stimulus the government would on lease. everybody underestimated the depth of the housing crisis and the systemic quality of unemployment in this country. it was about companies learned to do their job and make money with fewer workers. everybody also underestimated the kind of rootlessness and what turned out to be the inefficiency of wall street with its instruments in which they were just trading money. 40% of our economy, i think, is made up of financial services. it doesn't make anything. it just trades instruments. everyone underestimated the connectivity in the global economy. whoever thought that when greece got a cold, we could get the flow. -- flu. that is really what has happened everything is so tied together that races around the world. >> on the political climate, we started to see some interesting things happen with the tea party movement and it seems it has garnered a response from the occupied wall street people. in terms of the political environment we are in -- you came of age in terms of your career during watergate which was a rough time as well -- how does this feel to you now and going back to the time of abraham lincoln? >> 1968 was very difficult this country was deeply divided by the war primarily and the counterculture and what was going on in the streets of chicago and other places and the war was a cancer on american life. we lost 16,000 people in vietnam in one year. lyndon johnson was forced to step down and dr. king and bobby kennedy were both assassinated. and yet we had an economic underpinning in which things were pretty good economics. even the people in the streets had a home to go back to or could go get a job of they chose to because there is a demand in the workplace. what has changed is that there is so much economic on certain to. -- uncertainty. that causes exceptional anxiety. if you take the people who have a home in foreclosure or in danger of it or the value of that has gone way down compared to their mortgage, that represents the most instances and the great bulk of their net worth. they cannot see how they will ever get out from under that. then you have an older workers who have lost their jobs or have been furloughed and they don't have a retirement program anymore and what will happen to them. we had a lively debate on npr because i had been critical a of theaarp and a new advertisement. i think it would've been more useful or that the for them to save many of our members need these benefits. we, however, would like to have a dialogue. we know about entitlement programs and we want to be a part of this discussion. if everyone just retreat to their corners and issues threats, i don't know how we get down stream. medicare needs to be reformed structurally and otherwise. social security cannot be sustained at its current levels unless we make some significant changes in it. we made changes during the reagan years and this time for other changes. i think organizations in t includinghe aarp should be saying this. >> are many americans guilty of the same issue of failing to be willing to make a significant sacrifice like the greatest generation? >> i think more and more they are. the national debt is a critical issue. it will be left behind for our children and grandchildren to pay off the debt and it will make life that much more expensive at every level in this country. for most americans, they cannot touch it or feel it or smell it so it is kind of just out there and if things are going ok, they will not worry about it. if the national debt can with a hot, dry wind that blew in your face when i got up in the morning to remind you that it exists or when you stepped out the door there was an enormous amount reminding you of how much of that national debt you have to pay off at some point, i think we would have a greater sense of urgency among the masses. >> what is your sense of optimism or pessimism as to whether these much needed solutions can come down the pike? >> i am a product of america in so the glass is always half full. everyone comes to this nation to fulfill the american dream. we had enormous outpouring of tributes to steve jobs. steve jobs and all the others invented this technology in america. they changed the world. if you go to silicon valley, you find these bright, young americansthat a long time ago we would dismiss as computer geeks. if you give them running room, they can get the job done i think there are some fundamental structural problems with the country at the moment that we have to address. we are competing against countries that now have an open playing field in which they are preparing for their future by inventing their own institutions and changing their laws to adapt to the reality. we are living in an analog way in a digital world. >> this is a question from the audience -- you sound down on public education. you cannot mean that every public school is failing its students. >> i am not down public education. in the book i pay tribute to a variety of public education has to look at how it can renew itself. i pay tribute to a woman in fayetteville, north carolina, a superintendent who got concerned about the gap between hispanic and african-american students and white students. it was mostly because of absenteeism. so many of the lower class is had no parent at home when they left for school in the moment when they got home so they skipped. she put on a campaign to get kids back into the classroom and persuaded her teachers and a local money to have a six the day of class on saturday and gave out her telephone number and they turned the school around. i worked with a school in the south bronx in new york, an elementary school, with a principle that called me up to invite me to see the school. it was built in 1955. i saw an anteroom that should be library. i helped her raise the money and she was resourceful. that rule now is filled with computers and electronic books and other kinds of books. she keeps it open until 7:00 at night as a community center for single parents who come home from work and go there with their children and learn together. a lot of teachers are volunteering to stay afterwards. it is the kind of enterprise that will be the saving grace of public education in the country. i have many other examples in the book. i encourage you to buy it and read them. [laughter] >> we have a question from the head table -- what you think about the impact of the citizens united decision? >> i have been a big critic of a long time of big money in politics and that took it to a whole different level. having said that, i'm not enough of a legal expert to say that the supreme court was wrong because i think that institutions and corporations have a right to play their part in the american political system. before we had citizens united, there was other money pouring into the system. i have been covering this particular part of american politics since i've. began in california, went to the secretary of state's office after an expensive senate race to look at the records about who was giving money and they could file by submitting all the names but withbetween the names and one line bond up against another so it was almost impossible to read pages and pages of documents. money is mother's milk of politics. so many people in this country who are not directly involved in the culture have come to accept a. that is hard to get the public aroused about the impact of money. they are inclined to say it has always been that way and always will probably be that way. now we're talking about numbers that are unimaginable. we will send a couple of billion dollars -- we will spend a couple of billion dollars on the presidential election and that money could be used in some many different ways to move the country forward. >> is the impact of that pushing people away from their government? >> i went across the country in 2009 on highway 50 and half the country was ticked off in the half cocked position than they did not believe anything they were hearing anymore and i believe that was the root of the tea party movement. the other half of the country was really just worrying about holding their families and communities and businesses together and they had given up on washington. many of them had voted for the president as independents or moderate republicans and they felt a kind of sense of the trial that he was not as aware of what they're going through in the heartland most of all, people just don't feel connected to their congressmen or senators in the way they once did because they lead such different lives than they did. you have an entire industry on k street. look at the amount of money being used to attack the new regulations on wall street. every bank and financial institution has a high-powered lawyer and we have not finished the debate on health care. that will be driven so much not from the patient population as it will be by the special interests. >> you are recognizing current times more as an author than as a broadcast journalist. talk about the craft of writing for a book as opposed to preparing for broadcast. >> broadcast journalism is short form and books are long form. that was a transition for me. i have a number of friends who are literary novelists. we talked about the craft of writing. carl hiassen. i said my problem is always writing long and keeping track of everything because i am used to short narratives. a book is a really long journey. they said there are no pills you can take. [laughter] you just have to find your way through it. i find it very gratifying. what i like is the permanence of awa it. -- of it. walter lter isaacson and i had a conversation about it he said i am trying to hang onto first edition copies of books in print that i like because i think 20 years from now, i know where they will be. i'm not sure what will happen to my electronic books. i think that is a fairly astute observation. i find that my grandchildren love the tactile experience. they read with books in their hands. they love the idea of books and go straight through. them they are not reading electronically as much as they are a book with a binding on it with a printed page >> talk about the timeworn you were the"nbc nightly news anchor." we have some young people in the audience who might not be as aware that as people like i am. >> it was only six years ago. [laughter] >> some thought the stature of the network anchor cannot be recaptured again. >> i would like to remind people that bill o'reilly gets a lot of attention because he is the most popular commentator on cable's. news he likes to talk about that and the. as fine [laughter] as the number 1 cable news programs, he has half the audience of network newscasts. these evening news broadcasts on a combined basis deliver about 20 million viewers. who in this room would not like to have that kind of circulation? it is more competitive. there is a decline from year to year but we were about the demographics. the audiences tend to be older. we don't get as many young people because they can get news from many other places. we have nightly news that comes on after the news signs off on line. it is that makes that will probably prevail for a good long time. dan and peter and i thought we were grand but we were not perfect. what changed for us was that we all grew up as correspondence, as reporters, and when we got to those chairs, satellite technology and arrive simultaneously so we could be anchors and reporters. we get on a plan to go to the philippines or to russia or czechoslovakia when everything was changing. we could be in south africa or the night the berlin wall came down and report live from those sites and it added a homer the -- a whole other dimension. >> do you think the nightly newscast will survive 20 years from now? >> my guess is that it will. it constantly has to adapt to what is going on. it will probably take on some new forms by then. i think it will probably have many parts to it. there will be on the airport, and on my part and they will be complementary going on at the same time. you will probably be able to see it on your ipad. you'll be able to dial it up even on an airplane. we have gotten used to the idea of getting on jetblue and watching satellite television. why couldn't we have the nightly news available to this on apda for ipad? there is complementary information off to the side. >> you talked about how the media should have done its due diligence with herman cain six months ago. is the media missing a lot of stories because of the downsizing of those operations? >> i don't think it has anything to do with downsizing. it only took bob woodward and carl bernstein to bring down richard nixon. they were two reporters who went out there and winter card files and knocked on doors and that is how you do real reporting. pro publica has won two pulitzer prizes in six years with a staff of 34. our bloomberg representative was telling me they have 200 people and the bloomberg bureau. bloomberg did not exist when i was a reporter in washington. there is a lot of firepower out there. it is just how we. use it we should not become just an echo chamber. i was on jon stewart last night promoting my book and before i got on, the first half of the show, jon's staff did the best job all week i have seen on the herman cain story of putting it in perspective and getting archival information and tracking the different things he has set along the way and putting in context some of the defense of them. there is a debate going on that our blacks are better than their black and there is such a dispute. jon stewart went right after that. at one point, someone was suggesting that this was just an allegation against herman cain and it was recent and jon said it was not an allegation because it happened in the 1990's. that is the kind of reporting we should be doing on all the traditional news outlets. there wasn't anything loaded about that. he was doing a factual recitation about what had happened. >> we're almost out of time and i have a couple of last-minute housekeeping items to take care of. we will have some of coming luncheon speakers -- on december 40 jim cantore will be here to talk about extreme weather. between then and now, the u.s. postmaster general will address our audience about the crisis affecting the u.s. postal service. >> ask them if he can keep the post office open in big timber, montana. [laughter] >> here is a card. because you do some traveling, you have been at the podium before, we have a new thank-you gift, as small and it is, and the as the newnpc travel mug. one more question -- you will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary next. what is the secret to such a long, happy marriage? >> when my daughter first got married, the oldest, my wife said to make sure you always have your own space. jennifer said that was greatest advice because my mother has 5,000 acres in montana which is more than i will ever have [laughter] . i think space is important. we are devoted to each other. we complement each other in some men. a wave -- so many ways. as i am in the vanity business. i'm a cowboy in terms of my impulsiveness. my wife is a master. she is a great horsewoman. she is an expert bridge player. she knits of this stuff for our grandchildren. i am at the other end of that spectrum. i'm out there raising house a -- hell as a journalist and doing the kind of things a. i like we fit together in a way. she still lives at my jokes which is important. i still count on her to have the long view and most of all, what has been so important to our marriage, is that i amn awe how she has been a role model for our daughters by just being there for them and allowing them to develop as individual women without imposing her own self on them. it has worked out very well the . we met when we were 15 that is the equivalent of a moonshot that you can make a marriage last for 50 years when you met in your 15 years old in south dakota. i have met a lot of other people in the world and there is no one else that occurred to me i would be married to. i would like to think she feels the same way. [applause] 9 >> the name of the book is "the time of the."lives thank you very much [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] the >> it debate between herman cain and newt gingrich. after that, another chance to see tom brokaw. later, remarks from the head of transportation security on aviation security. tomorrow, house minority whip on the deficit efforts to reduce the deficit. and the 2012 campaign. at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> i think that is helpful. reading of the phone book can be an education. it is good to see what can be done wrong. >> author stacy has said -- device. she has won a pulitzer prize and spent time at the senior editor shyness schuster -- simon and schuster. >> there should be hope for what is yet to be done. >> more sunday night on q&a. >> filling out the declaration of candidacy. it is completed. all it needs is a signature. this is the filing fee of $1,000. this is a slogan or something. you might want to leave. >> you have a great secretary of state. we appreciate your leadership. we will make sure new hampshire remains first in the nation. it is a responsibility and an honor. i am happy to be part of that process and put my name on this paper hoping this time it will take. [laughter] i will be able to become the nominee of our party in the next president. >> the new hampshire primary is set for january 10. you can follow on line with the video library. click on the campaign attached to access to candidates and the events. the c-span video library. it is washington, your weight. >> now debate between herman cain and new to gingrich on current issues facing the u.s. it is hosting the event in texas outside houston. this is an hour and 20 minutes. >> what our audience would like -- explain what happens to medicare and our budget if we do nothing and explains what happens if we implement the ryan plan? you agreed? if not, what is your alternative? >> is this on? can you hear me? the microphone is not on. that is a disadvantage. can i go back to three minutes? let me start with part of the promise. if we're stupid enough to do nothing, we will resemble greece. we will go bankrupt. it is not complicated. paul ryan has some good ideas. one of them is he would change medicare by going only for younger americans into a premium supports model. i favor as a choice the model. i do not favor a a mandatory model. my reason is simple. i want us to get back into a habit of giving the people a range of choices so that you are empowered, not the bureaucrats or politicians. if you believe in the free market, we should be able to design a series of choices or the marketplace and beats out the bureaucratic system and people go to it because it is better for them. not because they have been compelled. i also think that give you are dealing with something the size of medicare, you cannot course people. they will defeat you. the american people are not going to let people impose on them. we have said you're not going to oppose us. my argument is, we have to come up with solutions that are better. walmart does not want people to come here by force. it is their job to offer better value so people decide because they're getting a better deal. we have to approach how we reshape the country. the scale of change is so large. it will not take defeating so many entrenched elements of the laughter. we have to have a strategy that starts with the american people deciding that we represent a better future. in medicare and medicaid, you have to get to a better health system in order to get to an affordable system. we published a book of several years ago called stop paying the crux. you would think that is a title that people would have figured out was interesting. medicare and medicaid pays between 7100 $20 billion a year. think about that. i mean the dentist to files 982 procedures a day. the super committee is not looking at this. by itself, this would get them over half the savings they're trying to get. it requires thinking about a government. getting people in washington to think is a big challenge. [applause] >> at this particular juncture, i am supposed to have a minute to disagree with something he said but i doubt. -- don't. [applause] i don't. give me three minutes to add a historical perspective. we can change the rules as we go. [laughter] i remember talking about medicare when i woke first went to godfather's pizza. that was when i realized that the things we can control inside the company were a lot easier to control than the things outside the company in order to stay profitable. medicare started in 1965. our government told us it was going to cost $6 billion. we were also told that by 1990, it was going to cost $12 billion. because of population growth and inflation. in 1990, they missed the target of $12 billion. it was $109 billion. how many businesses can survive missing a target like that to? that highlights another problem we have which is long term projections about what a program is going to cost has never been right. [applause] that being said, i believe and this gingrich believes, we cannot reshuffle medicare or social security. we must restructure. the guiding principle all embedded in the plan that i love -- i like the ryan plan. i never found anything in it and i disagree with but here is a fundamental principle. if you want to solve a problem, and go to the source closest to the problem. it is not washington, d.c. " to the states, the doctors, the patients. that is what the plan attempts to do by allowing those accounts for younger workers as an option to read that is the guiding principle that i look for in any of these ideas. another thing we have learned, we're talking about it seriously. people spend other people's money more reckless than they spend their own. they will spend it better. that is what they have to do. according to the clock, i have nine seconds. politicians have over promised for decades. as has been pointed out, we are headed off of a cliff. >> my first executive decision is -- from now on take as much time as you want to answer questions. phil free to pose questions. a jobs. what to do about rising health- care costs? the cost of hospitals and services, x-rays, everything. they appeared to be going up in respect of of economic conditions. they seem to have a market of their own. i have some suspicions as to why this happens but our audience wants to hear from you. can we solve the medicare problem until we solve the health-care cost problem? >> we have the best health care in the world. we have a health-care cost problem. you are right. in order to solve the health- care cost problem, we must use market-driven approaches. i have talked to to doctors. market-centered approach is. here again, you cannot micromanage health care costs out of washington. it is impossible. every program we have ended bureaucratized to make a decision that will impact a doctor has failed. what we have to do is unravel the system with market-german ideas such as those located in h.r. 3000. with the new congress introduced by representative price from georgia. a couple of years ago it opened a health savings accounts. it allowed a health plan. when i ran the national restaurant association, we had 14 million employees. we wanted a plan that would be able to customize. we are not like a bank. we're not like a manufacturing company. our workforce is different. the other things doctors would like to see, loser pay laws. the state level or federal level, losers pay. that is what is driving up the cost of malpractice insurance. doctors to practice defensive medicine. that would be a big step toward reform. >> insurance problem or a medical service provider cost increased problem? >> i think the mass of the health system is and everything probe -- problem. it is an insurance company problem. it is a hospital problem. all of us have a hand in making this a mess. you cannot go back to the 1943 decision that was rewarding workers to get around the wage price controls by allowing companies to offer insurance plans. it was done as a gimmick. nobody thought of the consequences of a third-party payment system. what happens is the person is not getting anything so they assume the other person is cheating. the person who is receiving does not value it. the person who is providing the service knows the person they're providing it to does not evaluate. any time you build a triangular system. we have no national hearings on fraud at mcdonald's. you show up and say i would like a quarter pounder with cheese. that is what they give you. you give them money. they are happy. you are happy. if there is no quarter pounder, you are unhappy. you say, where is my quarter pounder? there is a direct relationship. i want to thank the tea party and the whole thing. i appreciate steve coming down to be part of this. it is a chance for us to talk at a non-trivial way, and to reset -- [applause] -- are was an atlanta and i said if anybody predicted that the top candidates and would both be from georgia, it would have seen impossible. -- seemed implausible. we represent a willingness to talk about common sense without regard to whether the the establishment thinks is acceptable. that is radical. [applause] we are by any reasonable standard the most radical candidates because we are willing to say common sense. in washington, that is such a radical idea. i'm going to give you an example. i helped balance the budget. i am the only speaker to do that in modern history. we did it at a time when people thought it was impossible. we did it by insisting on profound change. we reform medicare which people tend to forget because we did it so carefully. we had aarp neutral. probably our most complicated experience. here is what i learned. if you're serious, abolished the budget office. it is a dishonest institution which does things the wrong way. let me give you an example. we have a new book coming out on end of life planning and families being involved. the campus -- opposite of debt panels. every hospital will tell you that if you get the family and patient involved, it is better emotionally, medicine, and in the long run it is less expensive. the congressional budget office scores it as a cost because they refuse to accept any evidence of savings. their answer is, bigger government, higher taxes, more bureaucracy. it makes it impossible to get the reforms we would bring in. [applause] >> i appreciate the discussion. if we cannot get there fast enough, the hardest questions i face is, what about giving people options to opt out? we have tens of thousands of people eligible. andd you get people off turn this into an equation where when you say to someone you're not going to make it, we want you if you have the wealth, we would like to put it in their life management accounts, those are the hardest decisions. >> if you go back to the ryan plan, if you are 55 years of age or older, you're not going to be affected. don't allow the liberals to use that scare tactic of throwing grandma off of the bridge. that is just to scare tactics. the way for the younger workers if they take that option of a medicare, they treat it like it is their money. their name is on that account. what i like about it is, if you -- it would be $11,000. you would have to beat them -- by a medicare-certified plan. if you spend $10,000, that money can go into your medical savings account. it can continue to build. when you treat it like it is your money, that is how you wait -- wean people off of it. that feature is already built in. >> let me a slightly disagree. because of the way you framed the question. i wrote a book called saving lives and saving money. i outlined what we could do. the answer was, since we can do any of the things that are smart, which of the stupid things should we do? i am serious about this. i will give you three examples. i put on the table money just by not paying crooks. before you impose penalties on honest people, stop paying crooks. ibm, the ceo went to the white house and said you can pay for all of obamacare by taking existing technology and applying it. american express pays 0.03 of its revenue. a 330 timesizen are to pay crook. why is this hard to say now how fast you could turn it around? 60 days. 60 days we will contract out to american express and ibm to create a consortium where they are going to eliminate the center for medicaid services which is a bureaucratic monstrosity. you would save a trillion dollars. two, i am happy to test the ryan plan. anybody who is in medicare who prefers on their round to go to a support system could do it next year. voluntarily. and i agree entirely with herman, tom price has a great bill. if you are successful in view of money, let's give you more freedom. the current medicare rule is so restrictive. why should bill gates's father be blocked from paying more if he wants to pay more. i would rather have him pay more than lecture us on raising taxes. >> i am going to turn us back. >> before we leave the discussion, a defined benefit plan or premium support? you go first. >> that is only fair. here is the core problem. here is why the mandate doesn't work. when you get the government to defining what you're allowed to have, the government has to define in detail. they just had a bureaucratic group say that you do not need to test prostate for malice. -- males. he had been the head of the national cancer institute and the commissioner of food and drug administration. he is an expert and he said this is an ignorant and dangerous decision. for 10% of the people who get prostate, it is a dangerous cancer and will kill them. if they had said it is not a good test and we ought to have research to get a better test, that allows us more discrimination, that would have been rational. the panel of the obama administration had nobody who was a urologist or cancer specialist. a bunch of people were reading papers averaging information and saying, in our judgment, that is what happens. what you want to do is move to a place where we say we will help people be able to buy insurance. they should be able to deal with their doctor and hospital and the family? should make the primary decisions. as you go through changes in health care, you don't want to bureaucracy stopping innovation. imagine if you have do have approval for the iphone or the computers. that 1970 -- 67 computer is fine. we don't need this new model. that is what happens when you allow bureaucrats to stop innovation. you have a much worse system. [applause] >> take as much time as you need. >> i will make this brief because if the private sector, they have making the transition from defined benefit plans to the contribution. the difference is the way companies used to do it. here is our retirement plan. here are the benefits. they made the conversion to this account has your name on it. we will put some of your own money on it. what the ryan plan does the, where it will actually have a name on it, it is moving toward a defined contribution plan. everybody will have their account. it is down to ownership of those dollars. people will spend it more responsibly. that is the direction we have to move. >> any questions on this subject? >> one question because it is something you dealt with at godfather's. as you look at the steady encroachment of government, what is the advice you give other ceos as they try to plan survive all when they're faced with the fact that washington is so odd of control? what is your advice to other ceos and? >> my advice to them is something i realized when i first became president of godfather's. if i did not get involved in these issues, there were going to collapse our entire free market system. my advice to ceos, don't play it safe. the part of the solution. some of us are fighting. the good news is, and i want to congratulate the tea party group for putting this together, not to just rallies, let's educate people. better informed people are going to change this country. [applause] become better informed. this movement that i call the citizens movement for the tea party movement is real and it is growing. you have liberals that they're trying to put a bad name on it. they call me names. they call me a racist like hugh -- you. my advice to business people, and get involved. so you can be a part of this movement and not sit on the sidelines and think you're going to stop it with lobbyists down the road. >> any questions of newt gingrich? >> my question is that you spent a lot of years in congress. you have a distinguished career. then you left congress. that gave you an opportunity to start of their ventures and to think. you have been studying and thinking about things rather than being in sign that washington bauble. quarter the three biggest things that you have come to realize being outside the bubble? >> first iraq, it is it -- first of all, it is an interesting reversal. you got drawn into public life by the pressure. i left the public sector and opened a number of small businesses. the first thing i learned which is the opposite of how government works, if you do not get up every morning trying to find a customer, please a customer, renew a relationship, you don't get to stay in business. this is part of why and so intrigued with strong american now, and applying it to the american government. if you have not burned your pay today, "you think we will pay you? -- why do you think we will pay you? [applause] the second thing shaped my career in congress. now that i have been out for a while, it is even truer. i was struck with this the other day at premier, which builds heavy equipment for construction. it started with one person in 1948 and now has about 2000. i was looking at their model. look at what they built in 1948. the great reason for the american people to be optimistic is that in every part of the private sector, somebody was doing something brilliant that could be transferred to government, and that would lead to dramatic declines in cost and a remarkable increase in effectiveness, and the challenge is this wall which consultants and the news media create, which blocked from having that conversation. i am very optimistic, because i helped found the center for transformation. i really believe that if you went around the country and found best practices, you would be astonished how much you could change medicaid and medicare, how much you could change private-sector health care, and how much better and cheaper our health would be. something i learned when i balance the federal budget -- i brought in a bunch of ceo's. i would say, "we are going to balance the federal budget. it is an act of will. what is your advice?" my record was when i entered office, but the cbo projected for 10 years a two trillion $700 billion deficit total. when i left, the projected a surplus for the next 10 years, a swing of five trillion dollars. and here is what they said. set very big goals. with tight deadlines. delegate like crazy. do not let any experts in the room. [applause] [laughter] >> we are going to move on to our next subject. please give our candidates a round of applause. >> thank you. >> gentlemen, we are going to try to tackle the problem of social security entitlement reform. it seems like the problems are relatively basic. we have less young workers contributing into the system, trying to support older americans, and more americans are getting older. it would seem to me we have three basic options. we can raise the retirement age, we can reduce benefits, or we have to raise taxes. herman cain is going to tackle that one. by all means. >> will you what first on the first issue. -- well, you went first on the first issue. social security. the three things you mentioned, none of the above, because that is not solving the problem. i am a firm believer in let's solve the problem. with all due respect, those ideas prolong the problem. this is why i am a strong proponent of an idea that president george bush introduced but could not give momentum. that is the idea of personal retirement accounts, optional personal retirement accounts. [applause] 30 countries have optional personal retirement accounts. the chilean model -- i started studying eight years ago, and asked, "why can't we do that?" the answer is we can. but there is demagoguery whenever you try to fix the problem. and we have to fight all the people who do not want the system to change. i believe strongly in that approach, and that is an approach i know i am going to try to promote. the other thing we have to try to do is to educate the public on it, such that they understand it. when the country -- but the country of chile did nearly 30 years ago -- they have a social security system very similar to ours. the workers had gotten up to 27% on the dollar of every dollar they earned, and the system was broken. somebody said, "we have to change this. it is in st.." when they gave the workers the option of that model in chile and -- they gave workers the option. within three years, 90% of all workers said they wanted the option even if there were close to retirement. why? because it became their money on an account with their name on it. today, they do not have the problems we have, trying to do with social security. >> herman cain, what about the older americans that have already paid into the system? would they get their money back if they elected the private option? >> to the ones that have already paid into the system have a choice to continue to get the benefits that have been promised. but if they opt for the new system, if they take the option, i do not believe that is how it would be structured. you have a choice. stay with the current system if you are close to retirement or already getting retirement. those benefits are going to be paid. the option is for the younger workers, who would get a greater return on the amount that does not go into the system as they opt out of the system. all of the groups i have talked to, i have asked young people on a routine basis, "if you have the option to take a portion of your payroll tax and half of it, hypothetically, would help pay for the benefits that have been promised, and the other half would go to an account with your name on it, would you be willing to forgo 50% of payroll taxes to take 50% in an account with very conservative investments?" i have not found one young person who would not take that option. they understand that they will end up with a greater retirement fund, investing half of what that are contributing, then what they are promised today if we continue with the old system. >> , and despite roughly 6% of wages paid by the employer -- >> 7.65% by the employer, 7.65% by the employee. >> how does the employer portion end up in a private account? >> to first have to convert the tax code to a nine-nine-nine plan. i am about fixing the problem. one of the biggest problems we have is that the payroll tax is the biggest tax that a lot of workers paid. it is the biggest tax that they pay. we're not going to talk about taxes tonight. maybe we can talk about the economy another time. i would be happy to do that. but seriously, we have to change the tax code. the tax code is one of the reasons that, to get back to the other issue, that health care costs keep going up. they contribute toward employee health insurance, but an employee cannot. there is the idea there is somebody else's money. in fact, that employer is taking out of your wages indirectly. the payroll tax is eliminated, such that the money that is connected with this bold idea of 9-9-9, optional personal retirement accounts would be with that money, because we raised the same amount of revenue. [applause] >> for this evening's purpose, i will sidestep the great temptation to discuss 9-9-9, although i was just sharing the that our mutual friend, shawn hammett, has asked us to spend an hour with him in this kind of dialogue one evening. i suspect in that setting we might get around to comparing tax codes -- tax notes. frankly, i am delighted peter ferrara is here. he is part of an emerging intellectual revolution that in many ways began in chile, but also began in texas, with the galveston system. public employees in galveston, what they discovered was that you could put in about half as much money and get back twice as big an amount if you did it in the private sector, rather than turn it over to the government. i want to give you three large principals for fundamentally rethinking the system. this is one of the reasons we are happy to be here. any candidate who is not prepared to talk about giving younger americans the right to choose has no serious solution on social security. [applause] and you can say to everybody who is currently on that that you are fine, and it is not quite to be touched. do not let the aarp or anybody else lie to you. having said that, there are three principles -- growth, honesty, and not miss an of social security by trying to bounce the budget on the back of a retirement plan. if you go back to 4.2% unemployment, social security is more solvent, because more people are paying taxes. do not look at a static model and decide anything. under jimmy carter, social security was going to collapse. if you look at the reagan recovery, social security got healthier. it is amazing what 20 million americans going to work does to make the country healthy, ok? second, honesty. this is a challenge for the super committee and the current congress. lyndon johnson, in order to score a cheap political point, presented the budget and brought social security into the general budget in order to hide the deficit. that is why social security got sucked into the budget. prior to that, it was not part of the budget. it was a freestanding retirement account to be solved on its own. ever since, people have been trying to figure out some way to steal the money. the president said it this summer. we are putting together a youtube video of president obama twice in july going, "i mean not be able to send you your social security check." there are two trillion dollars in the trust fund. what kind of dishonest president scare's senior citizens? they do not need to be involved with the debt ceiling. take it off budget. get it back to being a free, independent retirement account. third, if you want to solve social security in the long run, you go to a system -- we are not far apart on this. go to a system where younger americans, or a deal logically right-wing americans in their 60's -- or is geologically -- or ideologically right-wing americans in their 60's, you have a choice. you can let politicians scare you for 60 years. and do not have it as an estate, so if you die early, it does not go to your family. have a politician says, "we have to tell you to work more years." it is not courageous to say that my grandchildren may have to work three extra years 60 years from now. the idea that is going to significantly change the present is lunacy. if you have your own personal savings account and want to retire early on a smaller amount of money, because you are willing to have more free time, why would the congress to you not to? on the other hand, if you are like andy rooney, who passed away having worked until he was 91, and you love what you are doing, why should the congress tell you if you cannot? let us get politicians out of the decision process. return it to americans. let americans control their own lives. [applause] >> let me add the other challenge that we have. we are not short on ideas about how to fix social security or medicare. what we are short on is the ability to educate people on the solutions. this gets back to the questions about ceo's. ceo's can educate and help inform their workers about what is truth and what is garbage. unfortunately, they are not going to always hit the truth, depending on what station they watch or newspaper their watch. i believe the businesses in america provide a tremendous service, helping to change the paradigm in washington, d.c., but also becoming vehicles to inform your employees about what is fact and what is not. secondly, one of the big advantages we have in this election cycle that we did not have 20 years ago is power of this movement, the tea party movement, and the power of the internet. people are more informed. we must use that to our advantages. i believe the president of the united states, in addition to being commander in chief, must also take on the role from that particular bully pulpit. the communicator in chief as well. [applause] >> i want to build on this for a minute. we were talking before one of the debates about herman's role in turning around godfather pizza, which he was sent into when it was a very troubled country -- company. the enthusiastic, positive, solutions-oriented leader suddenly changes the team. i want to thank everybody who has given up what every s.e.c. member believes is the national championship game tonight in order to be a part of this. here is a true story about leadership. the history of the franchise in 1958 -- have not had a winning season since 1947. vince lombardi and arrives in february of 1959. from the worst team in the history of the franchise, 15 players become all-pro. that is leadership. i tell the truth to the house republican party for a decade. they finally decided it was ok to become the majority. he became a leader because he saw what it would take to have the country be -- to make the company be successful. ronald reagan told the truth. compare his ability to talk directly to the american people, makes sense, and have the american people move the congress with the current president. this president is about as candidate -- is about as accurate as bernie madoff in what he tells the american people. >> as a matter of cleanup on these proposals, i am hearing a personal retirement account advocacy from each of you. i am presuming it is patterned of the federal government employees savings plan. as i heard from the speaker, to take the social security trust fund off budget -- i will oppose this first to mr. kane, and then back to the speaker. where do you put the money? i have one of those sheets in my briefcase. i carry it around. all it is is copy machine paper. all of those are in a filing cabinet. it is and i owe you from the government to the government. where are you going to put that, if you are not going to loan it to the government? >> this is a topic i was involved in back when we were trying to balance the budget in the 90's. this whole way that congress and washington deals with social security is a fraud and a lie. it is because of the congressional budget office and the unified budget. there is two trillion 400 billion -- there is $2.40 trillion that you have put in the federal budget. any amount of money in a bank account is a set of numbers called electronically. but everybody wants to find a way to balance the budget on the backs of the american people. my point is that money does exist. it is a debt the united states owes every working american. if you take it off the budget, this is all psychological. you figure out how to get a balanced budget on the rest of the money. social security -- it turns out to trillion $400 billion, which is not big money, but it is a start -- these are modeled more on chile than the federal retirement plan. you find that with a few modest cuts in spending you can get to a very stable retirement system. it does make it harder to balance the rest of the budget. we have been hiding the size of the real budget deficit behind social security. i think it is time for us to be genuinely honest and deal with them as separate issues. here is the government. let's get the budget balanced. >> let us first realize, and this is why we have to be honest with the american people -- it is going to take a long time to work ourselves out of this mess that has been created for decades. we're not going to be able to deal with the unfunded liabilities and the money that has already been stolen. let us go to a situation where -- there was a bill introduced in the senate a couple of years ago. the bill said starting from now all social security contributions would go towards social security benefits. it was defeated in the united states senate. that is what people are saying. the money was corrected for it it. we have to start at that point, going forward, as we work our way out of this mess. >> the federal government is going to collect social security and invest it somewhere. park it in the private market, but where? >> the money which is raised in taxes goes into treasury notes on which the u.s. government pays interest. that is fine, as long as you recognize that is a real debt, not smoke and mirrors. the private sector money you would have in your personal savings account would go into the private sector. reagan's chief of the council of economic advisers think you get a one percentage point increase in economic growth over the next 15 years, but i was out of the principal group in the morning and let it sleep. -- in des moines lately. they have savings equal to 67% of the annual economy. that gives you access to a scale of capital for economic growth that is breathtaking and long- term and stable. the money we are raising through taxes can stay in treasury notes, as long as it is separate, and the money individuals put into personal accounts would go into the private sector in a way that would dramatically in which the whole country. >> i do not think i did a good job the first time. in the private sector, let us use this as a model. most companies have moved to a defined contribution retirement approached for their employees. the employee name is on the account. the employee makes contributions based upon how much they want to put in. the company will make a contribution. the employees of blacks from three or four -- the employee selects from options for how they want to be invested. you can declare yourself low- risk. there are mutual funds you can select. you can select a medium. you can select high. based upon what you want to do, you can do exactly the same thing for individual retirement accounts, a personal retirement accounts, using that model. you select the level of risk you want. in that model, he the money will not be the problem. yankee in the money out of the national budget is going to be the hard part, dealing with other unintended consequences. >> re-are going to move on to the next topic and you another round of applause. >> we are going to discuss medicare respond -- reform. we can discuss obamacare as well during this 30-minute segment. i would like to ask. the ryan plan proposes block grants to the state for medicaid. my first question is, do we need to retain the medicaid scenario, where we have to program at all? do we continue with the program medicaid as health care for the poor? should we maintain it? should we agree to the block grant proposal by congressman ryan, or do you have another alternative? >> i absolutely agree with the block grant to the states as a way to begin to get these costs under control. it gets back to my overriding principle. in order to solve the problem, go to the source closest to the problem. the states know better how to use those resources in order to be able to provide the greatest amount of help to the greatest amount of their citizens. the other reason i believe in the block grant approach is because since medicare and medicaid were created, what it has done, trying to control it out of washington, d.c. -- it has states hooked on it like people getting hooked on crack. we have to break the crack problem. if you block grant the money with the general guideline and let the states do it, depending on the resources for coming in, that is going to go down. i do not believe we should cut the state's off cold turkey. that would leave too many people without the help. but it is a way to end the dependency on washington, d.c. bureaucrats making those decisions. >> you are talking about the federal mandates. >> ending the federal mandates to the states. cut those mandates, and let the states decide. >> let me go back to where you began, which is obamacare. if you go to my web site and go to my proposed 21st century contract with america, the first item is to follow steve king's leadership and repeal obamacare. i strongly support paul ryan's general approach to block granting and medicaid. we could block grant all the remaining welfare programs, an opportunity for states using innovation and new approaches in a way that saves a lot of money. i want to talk very briefly about medicaid at a couple of levels. picking up on something harmon has said that is exactly right, this is where we are going to have a real national debate. i do not believe you solve problems dealing with poverty under the liberal model that we have had for the last 40 or 50 years of people being helpless, ok? there is a remarkable book called "the tragedy of compassion,"which helped define welfare reform in the 1990's. we need to rethink medicaid, much the way we rethought the process of welfare reform. for example, governor jeb bush, when he was governor of florida -- if you had diabetes or asthma and you took care of yourself, so you did not need to go to the emergency room, you got a christmas bonus, because you had saved the state so much money by taking care of yourself that it was profitable to reward you for being a mature and responsible person. the notion of linking behavior to award, which turned out to be very effective with poor people, because it turned out they were aware of money. i will give you a classic example of how you save money in medicaid. the number of people who walk into emergency rooms in order to get aspirin is absurd. if you simply had an ability to triage as you walked in -- if what they needed was an aspirin, the could go to a minute clinic. that lasts 30 to $40. if the hospital was not charged in an emergency room visit, you save an immense amount of money. second, you start tracking that person's visits. if they are clearly abusing the system, the should be a point where there is a consequence. this is going to be very controversial. we have to start distinguishing between the taxpayer as being concerned for charitable care and the taxpayer as being a sucker to be exploited. that is a big difference in the current system. >> one of the general principles that i firmly believe is an underlying theme in all of the ideas that we are putting forth is that we must go from an entitlement society to of empowerment society, which teaches people to help themselves, not another entitlement. anecdotally, not long ago, we were in florida. we were in a restaurant. a young man who is a waiter recognized me. he came up to me and said, "you know that old saying, give a man a fish, he eats all day, teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime?" this young man, who happened to be black, said, "i want to fish. i want an economy that teaches me to achieve my american dream puzzle that is what we have to tell people. >> would you favor a voucher system, he where you gave people that gave -- that needed health care some type of a voucher to acquire the health care, as opposed to a benefit system? >> i could be supportive of a voucher system, but not if the voucher was going to pay all the costs. people need some skin in the game. if they are playing with skin in the game, it is easy for them to say, "how much more is the government going to give me." >> first of all, i think we ought to have genuine block grants. that means if one state wants to try a voucher, it can try it. some state might decide to give doctors a tax credit for providing care for free, as long as the doctors document to the care. i think the whole purpose of getting back to the 50 states is to create 50 laboratories of experimentation. we have proven decisively washington cannot fix this. that is a reasonable step in the right direction. let me also build on this idea of responsibility. you have to think of the complete person. we talk about medicaid. we talk about education. these things all become integrated in one human being. we need to be looking at public housing, the notion that if we are going to provide you an opportunity to live in public housing, maybe you should have a role in cleaning it up and pointing it and fix it. there is a whole range where we should start -- this will be a huge debate with the left. the left has this model in which everyone is weak, hopeless, and stupid, but government will take care of them, which leads me to wonder -- who do they think government hires? >> medicaid fraud is all over the newspaper headlines. the states do not seem to be able to prevent the frost from occurring. they do not know what they are being billed for. the have to go back and try to find it after they have paid millions of dollars. how do we change the system and how do we prevent that from occurring? >> you do not just a block grant the money. you also block grant the responsibility out of washington, d.c.. they are trying to pull the strings in washington, d.c. states are trying to adhere to these rules without building up a big investor function. it also puts the responsibility and decisions of the state level. if it is their money, they will find that money and stop the fraud. right now, they are caught up in bureaucracy. they do not have the resources. >> this is one of the areas where i sometimes cause some weights. i believe in health information technology. i believe it is important we apply the same patterns of information flow that everyone of you deals with with an automatic teller machine. how many of you get money out of an atm? how many have done that outside the united states? you walk to an anonymous machine in a foreign country. seven languages come up and you pick one you're good at. he put in a plastic card and punch in a form number code. it crosses six borders, find your bank, verifies you are who you say you are, gives you money in the local playing card, and you have no idea what the transaction meant. you are happy. you took 11 seconds. the center for medicare and medicaid services does paper. when they started going to macarthur park dietz, they met with the pharmacist. -- to medicare part d, they met with the pharmacist. everything in the pharmacy is electronic. they said, "how are we going to get you guys to go back to paper?" you have a crook who stays until 8:00 or 9:00 at night with an ipad, competing with a bureaucrat who is using five -- who is going home at 5:00 and using paper. the major inhibitor to change is the center for medicaid services, which is an inherently obstructive paper-based bureaucracy that stops us from getting into a better future. [applause] >> i would like to bring up an issue by the current governor of georgia. the eligibility standards for medicaid -- those eligibility standards were significantly eroded by actions that were initiated by then-speaker pelosi. i mentioned in my remarks how they set up a requirement for citizenship which included a birth certificate and other identifying documents. it has now been reduced to attesting to a nine digit number. which you restore that standard? >> absolutely, i would restore that. we should not make it easy for people to cheat. we cannot get on an airplane without showing the right kind of identification. it is not just restoring the requirement in order to keep medicaid. i agree with what the government was trying to do. i also happen to believe that we should require photo ids for people that vote, so we can get fraud out of that. why not? the people that are fighting, here -- that are fighting using voter i.d. in order to do one of the most important things we do -- they want cheating to continue. they are for cheating in this country. [applause] >> this is one of the areas where you have this extraordinary gap between the private sector and the government. why you can be an optimist in the long run, once you have people in the government who have the courage to be rational and to what is obvious. let me give you an example. who has tracked a package to see where it is going? we have technology that allows us, at the cost of shipping a package, to go on line and find out where it is with remarkable accuracy. this is not a theory. one of my proposals was that in order to find everybody who is here illegally, we send them a package. [laughter] it is funny, but it is making a profound point about where we are. i think we should be able to identify every person who gets emergency aid of any kind. candidly, i think every state should sue the federal government every year for every penny they have to spend on people who should not be in the united states, because it is the federal government pay for responsibility. >> i want to shift is over just a little bit. you know how hard it is for me to stay out of this. but i really want to be objective and as a question. the heritage foundation did a very expansive study. the identified, graft, and charted the means-tested federal welfare program. this number is astonishing. 72 different means-tested federal welfare problems. that is wrapped up in this program. i would ask how you would address those 72 different programs that all have constituencies, how you would approach that. i have maybe a follow-up. >> this goes back to my statement about changing these entitlement programs, changing them to entitlement -- to empowerment programs. i am thinking about the model that was used in wisconsin, but fundamentally we defined the entitlement program. you could not get benefits indefinitely unless you prove you went to look for a job or take a class to improve yourself. a lot of people ended up getting off the welfare rolls. i do not have a problem with means testing, but we have to do more than that. means testing will help, but we need to make people take ownership and want to get off of those programs. that is what i believe we have to do. that is fundamentally restructure them. >> would you block grant them back to the states? >> i would send them back to the states and give the states the flexibility to modify some of those, because they know better how they can stretch those dollars. they can make those dollars complementary to the dollars they would be able to spend. >> first of all, you have to start with the question of whether or not means testing encourages people to remain below. think about it. you say, "i want to give you some food stamps, and we have today the most effective food- stamp president in american history puzzle that is not a positive thing. but think about it. but you get a little or no income tax credit and public housing. do i want to rise above the point where i am going to be means tested? you actually create a discouragement. this is the work that was done by charlie marie -- charlie murray, in a book called "losing ground." we are teaching people to be dependent. we are teaching people to fail, teaching people to give up the american dream. second, i am very much for rethinking -- nobody should get something for nothing unless they have a very severe disability. if somebody has a temporary problem after a car wreck, that is one thing. if somebody has a lifetime severe disability, that is another thing. if you are an able-bodied person getting something for nothing, we're pretty stupid for giving it to you. you can read abraham lincoln's letter to his brother in law on why he would not send him any more money. there is a certain tough love we need to be adopt as a country. i favor fundamental change to unemployment compensation so it has attached a training component and you cannot get money for doing nothing. you could get an associate degree in the length of time people have been sitting around waiting for obama to create jobs. peter ferrara, who is here, has a proposal that is very powerful for taking all of these programs, block granting them, going back to the states and saying each state ought to consider what it wants to do and how it wants to deal with these issues. i think that is the right general direction to move back toward implementing the 10th amendment and giving the state's primary responsibility on these issues. [applause] >> we have talked about the biggest elephant in the room, entitlement, social security and medicaid. we are not afraid to talk about this. the united states government has been intellectually dishonest with the american people for nearly 50 years. let us not forget, getting back to another point that newt made, that if we talk about these programs individually, ultimately, they all worked together, and it all comes back to what is the best form of help to people, that you want to get them out of medicaid -- education and a job. we have to grow this economy, which is job one. that is looking at the whole problem we need to address, and not just how we more efficiently give away money. you are going to have a few people that are going to be lazy. people choose to be lazy and do not want to help themselves. that is there little boogie- woogie, as my grandmother used to say. >> i have watched unemployment benefits go from 26 weeks paid for by the employer to 99 week'' paid for by borrowed money. i wonder if either of you have information about unemployment benefits. >> i am thinking about what newt wants to say. that is not a big. -- a dig. i would recommend changing how it works. the states have some part in this. if you had 26 weeks of unemployment, the next time you go back and apply, you get 13 weeks. you make diminishing benefits, because that is good to make you work a little bit harder to get out and try to find a job. >> this is probably a place where we approach it differently. i would say if you do not sign up for a training program offered by a business, you do not help people. we have millions of jobs we cannot fill because we have an older work force that is not trained for the new kinds of jobs. we pay the older work force to do nothing for 99 weeks while we are trying to find money to train people for the new jobs which cannot fill. i would say from day one you ought to get trained. your goal should be to get trained as fast as possible to get a full-time job to get back on track. they would have to do something every single day in order to get a penny. >> i want to give you a chance to ask each other the question. who would like to go first? [laughter] >> i am going to ask you a softball i think these folks would find interesting. i hope you will notice we have not played gotcha one time tonight. [applause] i want to give you a chance. you have had a terrific life. we've known each other for many years. you had a great radio show. you decide as a citizen to dive into this. what has been the greatest surprise to you out of this whole experience? >> maine nitpicking of the media. i expect to have to work hard. i expected to have to study hard. i did not realize this media when you start moving up in the polls. that has been the biggest surprise, because if there is a journalistic standard, a lot of them don't follow it. too many people get misinformation and disinformation this is probably going to get taken the wrong way, but i did not take political correctness school. there are too many people in the media that are downright dishonest. not all, but to many of them doing a disservice to the american people. >> do you have a question for newt gingrich? >> yes, i do. if you were vice president of the united states and -- [laughter] what would you what the president to assign you to do first? >> having studied dick cheney, i would not go hunting. >> i hope you enjoyed tonight's debate. let's give our candidates the round of applause. i want to thank congressman king for doing such a great job. thank you for showing up tonight. let us hope they do this again released soon. -- really soon. >> we would like to thank our moderator's. -- moderators, along with our presidential candidates. thank you for a to avoid big texas patriots political action committee newt gingrich-herman cain debate. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> this is the formal part, filling out the declarations, which has been completed. >> all it needs is a signature. i can do that. >> this is a filing fee. >> we have that. >> is there a slogan? >> we do this every four years. >> you have a great secretary of state. you have done by great job. we appreciate your leadership. you're going to make sure new hampshire remains first in the nation. it is a responsibility and an honor which new hampshire richly deserves. i'm happy to be part of that process and put my name on this paper, hoping this time it takes and i will be able to become the nominee for my party. >> the new hampshire primary is now set for january 10. you can follow campaign 2012 on line with the c-span video library. click on the tub to access the candidates and the events -- all searchable, cheryl, and free. it is washington, your way. >> tomorrow on "washington journal," a look at the u.s. economy. after that, discussion of the 2012 presidential race. also, a look at how super pc = politicalfluence the process. that is 7:00 a.m. eastern, here on c-span. tomorrow on "newspapers -- newsmakers," steny hoyer on efforts to reduce the deficit, and the 2012 presidential campaign. that is 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 a.m. eastern, here on c-span. tom brokaw talk about politics, journalism, and challenges facing the u.s., at the national press club. >> you will see prices photos depicting the history of this club and our profession. there are few individuals to but did more than once on those walls. our guest speaker today, like fdr, is one of those. he is a winner of our lifetime achievement for the state award. if you will indulge me for a personal story, i have him to thank or blame for a career in journalism. i saw a news conference where i became fascinated with broadcast news. when i saw them camped outside, i decided to get in the business anyway. well i have you to think for that, i am not sure my wife would say the same thing. our guests of had breakfast with our guest. he hosted "the today show," the nightly news, and endless specials. he is here to talk about his new book, and will give us his unique perspective on this current point in history, and tell us what he thinks about the divided our political climate. many of you are familiar with his story. a native of south dakota, he married miss. they will soon celebrate their 50th anniversary. his first news kids work at iowa, nebraska, and atlanta. he joined as a reporter and would enter at kmbc. he has covered 11 presidential elections. he was white house correspondent during watergate. he pivoted to host "the today show." in 1983, he became editor of nightly news. having men and one of the most trusted people in america, he was asked by nbc to step back in the spotlight to host "meet the ress"after tim russert's tragic sudden death. members of our club know he is winner of the fourth estate award, given during a memorable evening in 2003. the same award was given to jim lehrer a few days ago at this podium. with a trademark midwestern style not unlike walter cronkitein 1998 he had a break h achievement with his popular pocket. -- book, "the greatest generation." it has been ranked above -- it has been ranked as one of the best, the century. other successful books have followed while remaining present on the air for nbc news. while he has been less than complimentary about baby boomers, he has remained neutral on politics. several years ago rush limbaugh referred to our guest as a self- hating liberal. in his new book, and this is a classic response, he says "rush of all people should know that those of us making a good living listen to the sounds of our own voices are incapable of sulfate. -- of self hate. we think we are grand." is not often we have the opportunity to have such a prestigious member address our audience today. we are pleased he will return boats again. please give a warm welcome to mr. tom brokaw. [applause] it is granted to have you here. your grandfather was not only a great friend but he was the godfather of a small club to which i belonged where people who were once the anchor of the nightly news. this audience knows your grandfather very well, i will share with them a story about your grandmother who was one of the most favored people that any of us could ever have the privilege of knowing. i am sure he will agree with i always said walter had a steady course because he had his first mate betsy cronkite. if there is an oxymoron in american life, it is humble anchorman. we count on our wives to let the air out of us at the right time. meredith played that role in my life. her idol was betsy cronkite for a couple of reasons one was but they booed into a high rise in -- when they moved to a high rise in new york after about three months, pepsi said to a friend of hers, you know i kind of miss the old place. the friend said, of course, betsy.l you have so many good news. >> she said it has nothing to do with that. we have a backyard. i could bury all the plaques that walter kept getting. we were at the content -- the kentucky derby one year. it was a death march would have the visibility we do what we were therefore are affiliated stations. at saturday we were at a black- tie dinner and walter said, how do we get out of here? i said i have a two prince who have always wanted to take the two of less than a hot air balloon and week -- he said we can only do this at dawn. he said go make the arrangements. i did. at dawn the next morning we were out getting ready to get into the baskets and half the town showed up still in tuxedos and champagne glasses. walter got in his basket and i got in mind. we lifted up. the first voice i heard was betsy cronkite saying, we are here on the ground in dividing up your things. do you still wanted that burial at sea? my final favorite story of them came after walter had retired for a couple of years and was at yellowstone national park narrating a documentary. he was standing in line like an ordinary citizen at the gift shop. it was a woman standing behind him and behind that woman was betsy. the woman kept looking at him. finally she could not contain herself. she tapped him on the shoulder. she said, has anybody told you you look just like walter cronkite did before he died? [laughter] walter turned it around and began to clear his throat. now the woman is in a mild panic. he turns -- she turns behind her and says, walter cronkite is dead, isn't he? betsy looked off for a moment. his grandmother had a wonderful crooked smile and her eyes would crinkle. she smiled and said, you know, if he is not by now the old as --the old s.o.b. probably ought to be. fewgoing to take just a minutes of your time and talk about how i wrote this book and also about to the craft that you that so many of us at the national press club. i have been asked this for a half century this next year. my marriage coincided as my career with a journalist in a modestly in omaha, nebraska. over the course of the half century i have won the lottery professionally and personally. i have had a wonderful family. i have daughters of accomplishment and now for granddaughters. we only make the girls in my family. i have had the privilege of a journalist to cover stories that the police precincts in omaha and atlanta all the way to summit meetings and in china. in the course of that time, i have never lost my sense of wonder. that change was for me in some ways distilled in june of 19 -- of 2009 when i was interviewing president obama in germany. he was preparing to go to normandy for the anniversary. i had just been there the day before. i had spent a great deal of time they're considering i read about the greatest generation. i was there ready to interview the president of the united states, thinking about all the change i had witnessed. i was born in 1940. i spent the next 40 years behind communist lines. now the city was rising out of the rubble of that time under the oppression of communist rule. i had just come from berlin or i had been denied to the wall came down. berlin was the most exciting city in central europe. it was very cosmopolitan. a vibrant once again. it had been the capital of the most regime anyone could possibly imagine. the headquarters of hitler's nazi germany. then along came an african- american president whose father was born in africa and his mother came from here. began our exchange. when i mentioned to him i was in berlin the next the wall came from -- the market now, he said i know tom. i watched the. i was in law school at the time. i said, oh my god. he was in moscow. i walked away from -- he was in law school. it began to resonate with me as i look at my grandchildren. i wondered in 250 -- in 50 years from now what it would be saying about their time and what we left them. what we created for that. as many of you know when you begin to write a book you think you have an idea where you will go but you find the journey really becomes an adventure because with every page as you finish it, you have any thoughts about the direction you want to go. this book for me really came down to two questions. one was -- what happened to the america that i thought i knew. the second question came from people i encountered as i went across the country. they would say to me, do you think my children will have a better life than i have had? i worry they will not. that question is at the heart of the american dream for so many families. they come here hoping that succeeding generations will have better lives than they have had. that was the case of my family. my mother and father came out of the depths of the great depression. my father dropped out of school when he was 10 years old to go to work because he was this large strong that boy and became a master operator of heavy construction equipment. it was find work but it was not easy. my mother to talk family farm dried up and blew it away from them and seized from the bank in 1962. she was 16 when she graduated from high school. she was one of the brightest woman i ever knew. college costs would hundred dollars a year and there was no way she could go. she wanted to be a journalist, so she lives her life out to me in many ways and had been a guide. i thought about the change in their lives and the change in my life. my parents always safe for me to go to college in hopes that their sons would have a better life than they will. they will make more money, they will have better homes and more cars and more poise. obviously, there is a finite capacity for that. what i attempt to do in this book in many ways is to get us collectively wherever we are from and what ever we believe politically or religiously or culturally to kind of have a national dialogue about what it is we want to leave behind. i think if you begin with that question of what kind of values do we want to leave behind. what kind of economic opportunity in the workplace do we want to leave behind it? how do we expand the tolerance that took such a quantum leap forward as a result of dr. king in the civil rights movement? how do we fit into a smaller planet with so many more people? how do we use this transformative technology that is available to us all at our finger prints to make this planet a better place? it was in that passion i lost this book. i began really with the need to do something about american education. what is most encouraging to me is that that is a subject that is now on the table. for too long, we had a two class system -- those who could afford to move to the suburbs and send their kids to private schools. the rest of the city and lower parts of socio-economic losses were stuck with a one-size-fits- all warehousing education. education is the currency of the 21st century. at least we are talking about it here in the nation's capital attempting to do something about it as they are across the country. we have a long way to go. in china, every eighth grader is required to take math, physics, and biology. in a america only 18% of high- school students take those courses. as long ago in 1996, i was reporting from south korea during the olympics. because we did it in the middle of the 90 meter time change requirements, i was there before dawn overlooking a courtyard of a junior high. before the sun came up, that courtyard was filled with the likes of the flashlights. i could not figure out what was going on. i went down a little closer. there were students in the courtyard doing their homework by flashlight and a waiting for the doors to open so that they could improve themselves. this is a country that in the 1950's was ravaged by war and had a kind of stone age agriculture economy. now it is one of the industrial powerhouses in the world. the president of korea had a meeting with obama one year ago. he said in a conversation, tell me about your challenges in education. the president of korea said, my greatest challenge is that the parents want more from me, not less. i began to address that in this book and the world can all play in it in a variety of ways. those of us in my generation ought to be thinking more about becoming tutors and becoming involved. the schools of not only our grandchildren but our communities. i think the place of charter schools is important. i think the combination of what i call public/private partnerships in many communities where people are getting of all because that is going to be their customers. they are trying to bring new resources to teaching. we are finally having a national debate about what is an effective teacher and how you build an effective school system? but the transit -- make the transition and from what i call proportion and our lives. i just had a fairly active discussion on npr this morning at which a caller called in to challenge me. he said the housing crisis was entirely the fault of wall street. wall street played an enormous role in the housing crisis. it was not all wall street. people have to accept personal responsibility when they sign on the bottom line for a mortgage they cannot afford. here in washington, fannie and freddie drove a lot of the stampede to people thinking they could afford homes. at home ownership was a boy to be part of the american dream. unfortunately, it ignored a lot of the financial reality that comes with that. it continues to be a heavy burden in economic recovery in this country. a subject that will have been of interest to many of you is this extraordinary change that is going on in the profession i have spent most of my life -- journalism. i liken it to the second big bang. the impact of this new technology we have created an entirely new universe out there. we are at the moment trying to determine which of these plans will survive and which will drift too close to the sun, which will merge with others to support life as we have known it as journalists. how will it finally worked itself out so there is a kind of orderly universe and we can know where we are going. at the same time, i find it exceptionally exciting. but audiences say to me, what happened to the journalism i thought i used to know what walter and you and dan and peter were there. i am going to surprise you. there is a richer menu of information out there now than there ever has been. it is available at a keystroke. you can no longer be a couch potato. you have to get up in the morning and not just retrieve the newspaper and watch one of the evening news broadcasts. to be a fully informed citizen, you have to develop a kind of personal filter system for the information that is coming at you all day long. what is reliable? what has integrity? what is the political motivation of this particular website? all the newspapers now have the upside to of one kind or another. those are still works in transition. the same thing is true in my business over the air and on cable. we are working our way through it. the test ultimately always is, however, how reliable is the information? what is the integrity of what we are seeing and absorbing? that is going to require more vigilance on the part of those of us who are on the receiving end of it. we should have no less of an expectation of that. the fact is that the region so much greater. even while traveling i can get up in the morning, read the financial times, london, read the latest release from the saudi ministry, go on the web site of the foreign relations and see overnight development and read a couple of papers to say nothing of the broader range of papers that are available to us in this country. i even read just to see how the old high-school football team is doing and how my friends were getting a lot out there. they have a terrific website. finally what is most important about this exceptional change we are witness to and we are a part of as catalysts and practitioners, the place of journalism will not and should not go it is critical to free people everywhere. that cannot be lost in the debate about journalism. free people require a forum where they can retrieve information that is useful to them to make decisions that will affect their lives and their nation and their communities. we must redouble our efforts to make sure that the culture of journalism remains in tact. it is placed in the public dialogue and it is defensible. just this past week obviously we have been witness once again to what i think is one of the fault lines of american journalism at the moment. it has become an echo chamber. something like the herman cain accusations get into the system and a squeeze out almost everything else. it is a pattern that develops in which everyone chases the same story. the fact of the matter is, herman cain decided to run for president some time ago. one or read in going back to find out what his history was? he had a fairly prominent role as president of the restaurant association. he was on the board of reader's digest association. there was a time not so long ago when anyone who declares for president cannot fully expect to be the object of a series of reports in the washington post, the wall street journal, the new york times, were on television. you always will have the horse race in american politics. you will always have the scandal. the american public deserves more from us from these people stepping forward to run for president, possibly president of the united states. they require a long in-depth examination of who they are and an examination of what their policies are. republicans, democrats, and independents -- that is the least that we owe the voting audience and the people who give us all the freedoms that we have and the first amendment to the constitution -- freedom of the press. having said all of that, we can always expected there will be a robust debate in this country. some of the language that we are seeing now is reasonably mild even by contemporary standards. there was a new book out on the campaign of 1948. i was reading passages -- pass -- passages from last night. at one point he made a speech in which he compared tom dewey in the fact to hitler and mussolini. it was recorded and printed in that fashion. he said thomas dooley is just like what happened in germany and they said they have to have somebody represent them and it was adolf hitler. the same thing happened in italy. the dewey people went ballistic but harry truman and stuck by his guns and continued the campaign in that fashion. we have a rich tradition of that. here is something that may surprise a lot of people. abraham lincoln was in a way one of the first bloggers. when he was a lawyer in active illinois politics, he wrote a scathing criticisms under a pseudonym -- scathing criticisms of them that had very little basis in fact. very opinionated. of course, because he was so well know, one of his opponents called him out and challenged him to a duel. because he was challenged and a large being the man, abraham lincoln decided he would shoes broadswords. they met just across the line because do will for not permissible in illinois. it is worth keeping all of that in historical context. finally i will share with two two stores at the conclusion of my book. one involved my grandchildren. we are big outdoors people. we are back packers. i climb a lot. we could not wait for the grandchildren to be just old enough so we could take him in the back. we rushed it little bit when he was just two and five pre we decided they should go on their first camping trip. it took them off atrial area near our branch to the very root of merit -- with america -- rudimentary part. we got there and had a big kick out. at the end of the cut out, meredith said it to them, okay. you are going to sleep in the cabin. it is a tiny cabin. tom and i will be outside of our sleeping bags. you could see they had a lot of questions but they weren't raising them. we could hear her whisper and urgent conversation from inside. the youngest of the two stood on the porch and look at the tee of -- two of us and said, we need an adult and here now. i think that may be a metaphor for the country. finally, the anecdotes that followed that is i always learn something from the wild -- from nature one i m -- when i am in nature. the most memorable one for me came a few years ago when our river was a very high because of snow runoff. i went to a high point overlooking the river that was thick rows of hawthorne bushes. out came about 12 alcatel's and their newborn calves. they stood and looked at me. i was 200 yards away. i decided i was no threat. the mother cows led to the new calves into a very strong a raging river. they swam across and the calves are having a hard time going through the bushes. it all made it except for one. he was swept downstream. now i am thinking, what do i do now? on his own he found a back current and walked back up a little farther and was on the far bank. the rest of the herd was across the river and waiting patiently. he tried again. he got back in the sand bar and it tried again. now i can barely breathe watching all of this. as god as my witness, after the third time he stood on the bank trembling across the way his mother separate herself from the herd, he waded into the river, and let him up stream to a safer place while they moved on to greener pastures. our country is and flood stage we need to find a way to navigate rivers together at a higher ground. thank you very much. [applause] >> are you talking about young people? i am not a boomer. i am a member of the silent generation. the current generation coming of age now are the millennial spread there are a subset because they have been so chastened by what happened economically. a lot of them have moved back home because they cannot find a job and find housing. marketers are beginning to call them kneel for herbalists. there spending money much more carefully than their parents did. there are making decisions a week or a day at a time, spending a lot of time talking to everyone else. they are skeptical about things -- that is how i would characterize it. >> we dealt with some things in recent launches including his three part series prohibition. he uses that as a fulcrum to talk about divisiveness in u.s. history. how would you please this. we are witnessing to other periods compared to our entire american history? "i think we do not know yet. i was with a group of a very sophisticated economists and see owes in late 2009 almost the said the recovery would be well under way by the fourth quarter of 2010 because of the stimulus would unleash. everybody underestimated the depth of the housing crisis and the systemic quality of unemployment in this country. companies learning how to do their job and make money with fewer workers. moreover, everybody also under estimated the kind of worthlessness that turned out to be the inefficiency of wall street with instruments in which they were trading money. we have 40% of our e economy made up of financial services. it does not make anything. they just tried a lot of instruments. finally, everybody underestimated the connectivity of the global economy. who ever thought that when greece got a call, we could get the flu. that is what has happened. everything is so tied together that it races around the world in an extraordinary hurry. >> we started to see some interesting things happened with the tea party movement. it seems to garner a response from the occupy wall street people. in terms of a political environment we are in, you came of age during watergate. that was a rough time as well. how does this feel to you now with the reference to abraham lincoln? "1968 was a difficult time. this country was deeply divided by the war and the counterculture and other places. the war was a real cancer in american life. we lost 16,000 people in vietnam. and that one year alone lyndon johnson was forced to step down. bobby kennedy and martin luther king or bob assassinated. we had an economic underpinning in which people -- things were good economically. people could go get a job if they chose to because there was a demand in the workplace. what has changed it now is there is so much economic uncertainty. that causes an exceptional anxiety. if you to people who have a home that is in foreclosure or in danger of it or the value has gone way down compared to their mortgage, that represents in most instances the bulk of their net worth. they cannot see looking out how they are ever going to get out from under that. you have elder workers who have lost their jobs or have been furloughed. they don't have a retirement program anymore. what is going to happen to them? we had a pretty lively debate on npr because i have been critical of the aarp and their new ad. i think it would have been more useful for them to set, a lot of our members need all of these benefits. we, however, would like to have a dialogue. reach out to us. we know about entitlement programs and we want to be a part of the discussion. if everybody retreats to their corner and issues threats, i don't know how we get downstream. he fact is medicare needs to be reformed. social security cannot be sustained at its current levels unless we make some significant changes in it. it is time for some changes now. that is what i think organizations including the aarp ought to be saying. count us in progress to the table pretty have thoughts on this. are all americans are many americans guilty of the same issue? failing to be willing to make a significant sacrifice like the greatest generation? "i think more and more that they are. here is what i do think. the national debt is a critical issue. it is going to be left behind for our children and grandchildren to pay off the debts. it will make it that much more expensive at every level in this country. for most americans, they cannot touch or feel it or smell it. it is just out there. if things are going ok for them, they will not move it. when you step out the door, there is an enormous amount reminding you of how much of that national debt to record to have to pay off at some point. it had a quality about it i think we would have a greater sense of urgency about it. >> what is your sense of pessimism as far as whether these much needed solutions to come down the pike? >> iowa product of a america. the glass is always helpful to me. we have the grit institutions in the world, even those that are stressed at the moment. the genius is that everybody is coming here were to to work harder and fulfill the american dream. we have been witness to the past couple of weeks to the enormous outpouring of tributes to steve jobs. steve jobs and bill gates and all of the others -- they invested this technology in america. they changed the world heard if you go to silicon valley, you find a bright young americans that we once dismissed as computer geeks out there in silicon valley -- by the way, they don't have a recession. it is that kind of american inventiveness that if you give them running room, they can get the job done. i do think there are some fundamental structural problems that we have to address. we are competing, as i said earlier, with countries that now have a open playing field. are preparing for their future by inventing their own new institutions and a changing their luster adapt to reality. >> see some very down on public education. surely you cannot mean that every public school is failing its students? "i am not down on public education. i think public education like every other institution has to look at how it can renew itself. she got very concerned about to the gap between hispanic and african-american -- which he looked into it was because of absenteeism. some of the lower sociopath economic losses -- they skipped school. she put on a real campaign to get kids back into the classroom, she had a 60 up losses on saturday, give out her telephone number as other teachers did and it turned the school iran. i work with a school in the south bronx. a principal in a public school called me up and said, i want you to see our school. it was a wonderful school broken in 1965. large room. completely empty. i said, what is this? she said it should be a library. we don't of anything to fill it up with. that room is now filled with computers and electronic books and other kinds of books. she keeps it open until 7:00 at night for the single parents who can come home from work, go home with her children, and learn together. it is that kind of enterprise that will be the saving grace of urban education in the country. i encourage you to buy them had read them that way. >> from the head table we have a question. what do you think about the united citizens' decision on elections. what do you think that will do about the level politics the experts i have been a real critic for some time about big money and politics. that took it to a whole different level. having said that, i am not enough of a legal expert to say the supreme court is wrong because i do think institutions and corporations have a right to play their part in the political system. before we had citizens united, which have lots of other money pouring into the system. what i have discovered -- i remember in california i went to the secretary of state's office after a very expensive senate race and they could file by submitting all of the names withbetween the names and one on one bond up against the other. it was almost impossible to read pages of documents. so many people in this country have come to accept that it is very hard to get the public aroused about the impact of money. they are generally inclined to say it has always been that way and it will always be that way. now we are talking about numbers that are unimaginable. we are going to spend a couple of building up -- billion of dollars on a presidential election in a time when that money could be used many other ways to move the country for corporate >> is the impact of that to push people away from government? >> i think it is. i would across the country in 2009 on highway 50. i came back with two conclusions. one was about half of the country was kicked off. they just cannot believe anything they were hearing any more. i really believe that was the return of the tea party movement. the other half of the country was really just worrying about holding their families and communities and businesses together. the kind of have given up on washington. they were independents or moderate republicans and felt a sense of betrayal that they were not aware of what they were going through in the heartland. most of all people do not feel connected to their congressman or senator in the way they once did because they lead to such different lives now than they did. you have an entire industry on k street. how much money is spread it around. look at the amount of money that is being used to attack fort new regulations on wall street. every bank and financial institution has a high-powered lawyer in there. we have not finished the debate on health care promoting it or taking it apart. that will be driven so much of from the patient population as it will be by the special interest. >> you are almost recognized and current time more as an author per that is what you are here today and as a broadcast journalist. talk about the craft of writing for a book rather than preparing for on here. how do they differ? >> broadcast journalism -- it is short term. books are long form. that was a transition for me. i have a number of fronts that are literary novelists. we talked about the craft of writing. i talked about it and said my problem was always writing -- and keeping track of everything. i am used to short narratives. a book is a really long and journey. they said, there are no pulls you can take. you just have to find your way through it. it is kind of a gratifying. what i like about it is the permanence of it. walter isaacson and i had a conversation the other day about to print versus electronic books. he said something very perspective. he said i am try to hang on to first edition copies of books in print that i like because 20 years from now i know where they are going to be. i am not sure what is going to happen to my electronic books. i think that is a fairly astute observation. i find my grandchildren still of the experience grid date read books with books and their hands spirit of love the idea of books. the district for their predicament and read them. they are not reading electronically as much as they are a book with a binding of a tour with a printed page. >> let's talk about the point in which you were nbc nightly news anchor. you had rivals out cbs. >> is that right? >> we do have some young people in the audience who might not be aware of that let people like i am. >> it was only six years ago. >> some have thought to the stature of the network anchor can never be recaptured again. do you think that is true? >> bill are rarely gets a lot of attention because he is the most popular commentator in cable news. he likes to talk about that. that is fine. he has the no. 1 cable news program. he has half of the audience of scott kelly hit his third break in the news broadcast. on a combined nightly basis deliver about treaty million eight years. who in this room would not like to have a circulation of 20 million viewers? gratefully, brian has done a great job and he is number one. diane is no. 2. it is more competitive. what we worry most about is there is a decline from year to year. most of all we worry about the demographics of it. the audiences tend to be older. we don't get as many young people because they can get it from many other places. we have a nightly news on line on the web sites you can get additional information. i think it will be that makes that will probably prevail for a really long time. you don't want to overstate what can and peter and i all thought we were crammed it just like i did with russia but we were not perfect either. what changed for us which is so exciting as we all grew up as correspondents. as reporters. when we got to those chairs, satellite technology arrived instantaneously. we could get on the plane and go to the philippines or to russia or czechoslovakia when everything was changing. we could be in south africa or the night the berlin wall came down at report live from those sites. >> do you think the nightly newscasts will survive 20 years from now? >> my guess is that it will. it constantly has to adapt to what is going on. it probably will take on new forms by them. what i think is it will probably have many parts to it. there will be an on my part and it will be complementary going on at the same time. you will probably be able to see it in your ipad on whatever form that is pretty will be able to dial it up on an airplane occurred we have all gotten used to the idea of getting on to a blue and watching television across the country. why could we not just of the nightly news available to us either on apt a gordon ipad that's sitting there is a good possibility of that. complementary information off to the side -- statistical analysis of what we have reported on. >> he talked about how the media should have done due diligence with herman cain six months ago. is the media as a whole missing a lot of stores because of the downsizing and all of the operations of the attention to trying to keep up with real-time news? "i don't think it has anything to do with them sizing. it only took bob woodward and carl two guys to bring down richard nixon. they knocked on doors. that is how you do real reporting. his new outfit has 1 two pulitzers with a staff of 34. our bloomberg representative had told us he had how many representatives and the artist? >> over 200 reports of liberty but reads as when i was a reporter in washington. here is a lot of firepower. it is how we use it. we ought not to become an echo chamber. i was on john stewart lost at promoting my book. before i got on, the first part of my show. he did the best job i have seen all week of putting it to on a perspective and getting archival information. tracking different things he said along the way. he put it in context some of the defensive of his. there is a debate going on. and culture is setting are blacks are better than their black spirit that is why there is a dispute about this. jon steart much forgot that. somebody said this was an allegation against herman cain. john said it happen in 1990. it was not an allegation. there was a settlement may. that is the kind of reporting we should be seeking on all of the cable news outlets. there was not anything loaded about that. he was doing a factual recitation of what had happened. >> we are almost out of time. i have a couple of last minute housekeeping items to take care of. i'd like to provide the audits of upcoming luncheon speakers. jim kantor will be here to talk about extreme weather and it's up to cover that. between then and now the u.s. postmaster general will be able to address our audience about the crisis that is really affecting the u.s. postal service. >> ask him if he can keep the post office open and montana. >> here is a card. [laughter] >> i know you have been at this podium before. we have a do think a gift. it is the new nbc travel mug as a token of our appreciation. he will be celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary next year. what is the secret to such a long and happy marriage? >> when my daughter first got married, my wife went to her and said, always make sure you have your own space. jennifer got up and said, i thought that was real good advice. my mother has 5,000 acres and montana. that is more space i will ever have in a marriage. i do think space is important. we are devoted to each other. we complement each other in so many ways. i say in the book, i am in the vanity business. my wife is a master of -- she is a expert bridge player. she admits all of this stuff for our grandchildren. i am all of this -- i am on the other side of the spectrum. we fit together in a way. she still lives at my jokes which is an important part of it. i still count on her to have the long view. most of all what has been so important to our marriage is i am in all of how she has been a role model for our daughters by just being there for them and allowing them to develop as individual women without imposing her own self on them. it has worked out very well. we meant when we were 15. that is the equivalent of a moon shocked that you can make a marriage last for 50 years when he met in -- when you were 15 years old. there was nobody else i ever occurred to me i could be married to. i would like to think she feels the same way. [applause] >> the name of the book is "the tim of our lives." thank you very much. >> tomorrow, a look at the economy with gregory lp. a look get house supertax influence the political process with seila krumholz. that is live at 7:00 on c-span. >> i think reading the reports is usually helpful. reading a wrong but can be an educational experience. it is good to see what is wrong to you can avoid it yourself. >> stacy schiff has advice for would-be writers. >> i think every young writers should remember that publishers are desperate for a good new book and author to publish. there should be enormous hope for what is yet to be done. >> more with stacy schiff sunday night on "q &a." >> speaking from the university of pittsburgh, freda's unemployment report and the refusal to pass the president to talk jobs plan. -- president's job plan. >> this is joe biden. this was speaking from the university of pittsburgh where are just spoke to students about what we have done to ease the burden on them when it comes to the rising cost of tuition and the accumulation of student death. when we will do to create jobs when they graduate. it is the 20th month and a row where we increase private sector jobs. as all of you know, that is not nearly enough. we have to increase the pace. we have to act now to do everything in our power to grow jobs. president obama is on his way back from france were he just met with leaders of the 20 largest economies in the world. he urged european friends to step up and stabilize their own economies. if they fail, it will affect the entire world. to many americans are still struggling. too many are worrying about the rising cost of that tuition and accumulation of debt. to many parents are in stagnant jobs were worrying if they can send their kids back to college next semester. my dad used to have a saying. he said a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. it is about dignity. has been a belt respect. we cannot wait to help them. the president and i believe we have to act now. that is why we will introduce the jobs bill to create 2 million new jobs. 51 senators voted for that, the republicans in the house -- the republicans used a procedure that required it to have 60 votes so it failed. they demand we have a separate vote. our republican in the senate voted unanimously to vote on each part so far to restore 400,000 jobs for teachers, firefighters, put them back in classrooms on the streets and the firehouse is. they voted down the second part of the program to rebuild roads and bridges that would have created more than 400,000 jobs. these are all programs that republicans in the past have supported. once again every republican voted no to put these folks back to work. i think the assumption is they are voting no for the way we pay for these jobs. they are paid for. we think everybody should pay their fair share. that is why we added a small surtax on the first dollar after a person makes his first million dollars. it seems fair to us. it is a small price to pay to put hundreds of people back to work. we can't wait for congress to start acting irresponsibly. that is what the president began to use his executive power in making announcements for one that will make hundreds of thousands of people refinanced their homes from the six interest they are paying -- 6% interest they are paying to 4% interest. that is why the president announced beginning next year no student will have to pay back more than 10% of a discretionary income toward their student death. he also announced new regulations for prescription drugs to prevent price gouging. there is more to come. if a republican congress will not join us, we will continue to act on our own to bring relief to middle-class families and that those aspiring to get in the middle class. we refuse to take note to -- we refuse to take no for an answer. we know the steps a lot will not answer our problems. it will make a difference in the lives of millions of families struggling to hold on. you know that i know that if the republicans would let congress do their job to me to responsibilities, we could do so much more. we could do it immediately. that is why the president and i need your help. tell your republican congressman and senators to step up and stop worrying about their jobs and start worrying about yours. together is the way we will bring america back even stronger than it was before. thank you. >> hello. i am united states senator scott brown. they expected me to work with anyone in any party for the good of our country. that is what i do each and every day. with millions of americans looking for jobs, it is no mystery what our priority should be here in washington. we should be doing all that we can to help this economy start creating jobs again. we should be doing it right now. working to create jobs is one of those challenges that tests us in congress. it shows us who we releaser. the party leadership on capitol hill or the people who elected us and the first place. i answer to my conscience. i answer to my constituents, period. focus is exactly what congress is to revive our nation to talk economy. with the holidays approaching, the should be a happy time spent with families. to many americans of spent months looking for a job and still cannot find one. the reality is we should make a difference here and now with legislation that can be passed immediately. i know this can happen because both parties have already found common ground in economic policy. it just a few weeks ago we passed free-trade agreements with south korea and panama. these agreements show what bipartisanship can accomplish. they were negotiated by they were negotiated by presiden

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