Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Our Hands 20161001 : vimarsana.com

You know, you mentioned this just a few minutes ago that i have been wondering how much of this conflict between therella and eleanor may have been in part between women and men. Because World War Two and the response to the defense of the united states, there was so reliant upon incorporating women into the work place that nose and a number of the social concepts that are described as being left wing are really essential to getting women in the work force. You have to have child care. If your men are off in europe, theyre in the pacific and then somebody needs to care for the children who are going to be left without any parent. Bauds their mothers are are going to be replacing the the men who have been ripped out of this civilian work force. Yeah. So there smt was a strong gender component to not just their debate but to the ideas behind their proposals. Eleanor roosevelt you know, that American Social Defense Administration initially was designed to mobilize women. That politically did not sell for various reasons. But i think that she and many not all but many of her closest aids believed that in a sense that they wanted to give women the tools, empower they will the opportunities not just to contribute to the war effort. But to i guess make you know all citizens in a sense more full fledged citizen. And with the same you know rights and opportunities in the work force and elsewhere. And one of the ideas was that by focusing on post world war what does the peace look like . That the country would come out of the war and the democracy would be stronger. You know, people would have more rights, there would be more opportunities. Women would become more full pledge members of society. Laguardia who actually i think had a very impressive record of hiring women in his Mayoral Administration i think someone is writing a book on this. But he did not at least in their debate around this was in part i guess why i call it national security. It was really he became almost for a period of time single mindedly focused. I would argue on very much focused on militarization and i think at spoangt he didnt want women to be warred. So there was it was partly a very much a vender debate and i think when he brought her on, he thought that she would primarily tend to what he probably saw as you know women volunteers. You know, what he called the basket weaving and use bags ket weaving and kind of dismissed it as frivolous stuff which was a reference to some of the stuff that he saw that women did during world war i which were not particularly manly or useful. Another gentleman on the other side of the table. This is really jones, this is more of a comment than a question. But the conversation has reminded me that even the academy was not immune from this and American Historical Society was paid by the government to do a series of pamphlets on social issues during world war ii and my favorite one has been always been do you want your wife to work after the war . No and the answer was it was ambiguous but those are up on the website if you havent seen those. Very interesting. Thank you, and on that note im afraid i have to draw this to a close. [laughter] please join us right now for a reception but please note that copies of the book are are available outside defenseless under the night. And on september 26th, next week come back to hear nile ferguson of Stamford University talk about his biography thank you to our audience and participants thank you to matthew dalic. [applause] upcoming book fairs around the country in october. The southern festive book held in nashville, tennessee beginning october 14th. At st. Wake inn boston book festival held in city square. Then its the wisconsin book peflt that takes place at the Downtown Madison Public Library in october 22nd, october 29th its the louisiana book festival held in baton rouge by State Capitol and other downtown locations. More information about book fair and festivals booktv will be covering to watch previous festival coverage click on book fairs tab on our website go to booktv. Org. Next on booktv Charles Murray proposes plan to reare place current welfare system by setting a universal basic income using conversation with jared byrne seen Economic Advisor to Vice President joe biden. Moderator is indication that generally enjoy talking to each other about issues on which we disagree, and i dont even to the extent of what we disagree on the topic. [inaudible] its good that you do because otherwise this would be boring topic tonight is universal basic income ubi, i had published a book on this in 2006. Ive actually been interested in concept since the 1980s. And i republished a revised version of it this year for a couple of reasons. One is that in 2006, i was saying well we couldnt afford it right now with the same budget we have. But we could afford it by about 2011. I was actually off by a couple of years and we passed the break even point in 2009. But now were well above break even point we could implement the plan that have in my hands for less money that we have in transfers, and that situation is going to get dramatically worse if you want to think of it that way over the next several years because we do have rising entitlement costs. We can look confidently into the future and see budget deficits that are extremely serious. And i would say that one way or another there has to be nature reform. Congress is not doing major reform unless it absolutely has to and i think it will absolutely have to. That was one reason. A second reason is that much more than in 2006 i am aware of a huge ship that is taking place in the job market and will is not 50 years down the road but 10, 20 years down the road. Obviously example is like Truck Drivers and the advent of driverless truck and cars which will be upon us probably within a decade. But actually the much scarier aspect in terms of just to share numbers and nature of the changes are in white job and after decades of being overhype at official intelligence is going to carve out very large numbers of jobs that up until now having held by people often with College Degrees above average intention intelligence to make complex decision and allow those to go away. Think travel agent. In terms of things that are already been appearing. That was the second reason. Third reason is ill just finish that off by saying, i think were looking forward to a future in of which living a satisfying life will still involve both location. But it wont necessarily be vocation as defined in a terms of a 40hour a week job. And third reason is that same reason that i was interested in guaranteed income back in 2006 and that is i think it offers a chance to revitalize americas Civil Society. Im going to make a very brief statement on what the plan consistents of what i would hope it achieves. Try to hold that with 10 or 11 minutes and then jared will have a chance to respond at length and then well go back and forth on things that we do disagree on and open it u up for questions later. First basics of the plan as i present it. I will start out by saying that a universal basic income could be a disaster. I think if it were an add on to Current System it would be a disaster. For all of the reasons that a lot of people say it would be. However, if it replaces Everything Else that both financially becomes more feasible and a variety of good things i think happened that wouldnt happen otherwise. So we replace all transfer with the universal basic income, and by all transfers i included in that Social Security, medicare, medicaid all welfare programs. All agriculture and anything that constitutes a transfer from some american taxpayerses to other american citizens as opposed to i think this is like Police Protection and National Defense and so forth so the amount in the plan of 13,000 per year per every person in the united states, citizen who 21 years or older. You need to have a electronic electronic deposit into a known bank account to get the plan and theres some reasons for that stipulation in monthly installments. Now, here is stipulation only stipulation i have in my plan is 3,000 of that must be used for health insurance. That is a very complicated subject and jared wants to get into that, im happy to do if but ill leave it out of this initial presentation and say one way or other carve 3,000 of that out and lets say were talking in terms of money. Disposable income 10,000 a year. You cant live on 10,000 a year youre saying to me. Well, youre right if you want to live all by yourself without reference to anybody else thats true and if you dont want to work at all the, thats true. You can very easily make a decent living for yourself if everybody else has 10,000 a year and youre willing to cooperate. If you can getting together with a boyfriend or girlfriend or relative or friend or anybody else still not working thats 20,000 a year. If you hold down a minimum wage lets say 7 7. 5 an hour job, and you work for 2,000 hours year thats 15,000. Thats 25,000. If you were living with someone else thats 35,000. Now you can go through a lot of permutation and say that the universal basic income make it is really easy for people doing very ordinary things to live well above poverty line and forget poverty line that makes easy to get into the middle class if you have a couple where you have a 20,000 increment. And some fairly low paying jobs youre getting into middleclass income. And with that comes progress against poverty that has alluded us or the last 40 years. It has all sorts of ways in making retirement a comfortable retirement easier than it is Social Security especially for low income earners all of these things are issues that i have to excute but ill assert that and move on. Couple of issues are really important, and let me pause for a moment. I know that this plan could never be enacted especially as i specify it when i say theyre really important whatever i mean is whatever version of this might actually be considered the things im about to say i think need to be taken into account. One is you need a really high payback point. In my plan i start to clawback some part of the grant at 30,000 of earned income. And at that point you pay a tax on every graduated tax schedule between 20 and 60,000 dollars. Plan is this current programs marginal tax rate so that if you have medicaid, and some form food stamps and other form of assistance it can be very dicey to get a job because you lose those. If you are on disability and i think that the people in this room are aware of the massive increase of this Disability Program which includes lots of people who may have a real disability for certain kinds of jobs but could easily hold other kinds of jobs they cannot go to work without jeopardizing what they have is a guaranteed life income and a lot of people dont want to do that. So if you have high payback point you sidestep all of those traps and you really lure people into working until they cant afford to quit. So that somebody has been working at a job and gotten raises and now gets up to 30,000 they have eat 40 at this that point i dont think many of them will quit working because they have to start paying a small amount of the grant back, and go from 40,000 to a 10,000 year lifestyle. Let me move on from that to a brief jot line why i say that i think ubi offers a chance to revitalize american Civil Society. Its a complicated argument in many ways. Let me put it in materials of one of the things thats most commonly brought up to me is a reason you dont want tods is youre going to have people who drink up their money before the end of the month. And if taken away all of the Government Programs whats going to happen to these people . And whats going to happen is that their going to have so seek help but it cant go down to democracy downtown they have to talk to boyfriend, relative, friend the salvation army, and say im tapped out gee, i dont have anywhere to go. You have to help me. You have changeed the dynamic, the person who is doing that no longer is a vaccinate who victim who has no sources. Americans have a history of not letting people die in the streets so heres the response i envision not naive but practical. But youre going to have lets say its the girlfriend say okay, not going to let you starve. But dont tell me that theres nothing you can do because i know that first of the month you have 800 some becomes coming into your bank account sign you got your act together. Multiply that kind of interaction by millions of times every day around the country, in terms of people who have human needs. And what im saying is that dealing with those human needs is beginning to to be pushed don to the level where you have the best chance of getting an effect. Because theres one thing that anybody who is ever worked with people with Serious Problems knows it is that some people need a pat on the back and a helping hand and sympathy and other people. And the people who know best how to do that are the people who are closest to them. The people who are most ineffectual at doing that our government bureaucracy so run by rules and rules are not very easily adapted to the complexity. But in ways in which it revitalizes Civil Society is not limited to the people who have lots of problems. And need to have those problems addressed. It goes to one of the things that made america exceptional. Not exceptional in our eyes bragging about the united states. But exceptional in terms of the europeans eyes who came over here in 19th century and say never seen anything like this and that is the extent to which American Communities especially in the north and west dealt with their problems. Forming associations as the pride. But also in all sorts of informal ways there is ways around the world we did it as we did. I have sometimes made the case and tried to document with numbers, that if you took the philanthropic effort at the end of the 19th century im willing to go to the wall that amount of money and efforts would be more than tax base of new york city could have ever matched in terms of Governments Services if they decide to do government program. A lot of that is gone away. I want to see that come back because that is the stuff of life of communities thats what makes living in community rewarding in the way that makes vocation rewarding of what makes a family rewarding and title of the book in our hands comes from that concept of putting life back in our hand. Our hands is individuals. Our hands as families. And our hands as communities. So ill stop there. Turn it over to jared. Well, thank you charles. Its a pleasure to hear you talk about civil discourse because i consider you a master at that on oneonone some of the reasons i enjoy interacting with you. Couple of bocks ago charles wrote a book called coming apart. Which i read at the time and i like a lot of what i read in there. And i didnt realize at the time im not sure if you did but prestages a lot of dynamic in current election in view and if you havent you should go back and look at it. This current book, i have many more disagreements with, and what i would like to do is talk about why i think charless idea for a universal basic income is misguide in the sense that it would compound some of the problems we have in our economy. It would get rid of a number of important programs that have evolved in ways that in which they have their intend effect and extremely efficiently doing what theyve done in a 18 trillion pluses economy. A lot of my reaction reading in our hands, this edition was what we have not broken dont fix it, and the fix is a lot worse than the Current System. And then i want to talk about this notion of jobs and the kind of the future of work. Because here charles is part of a Larger Movement where in many social and economic commentators are very much concerned about the future of work from perspective you heard from charles. Charles and thinking that ubi is a solution then. Im going to disagree with that. But im going to try to end this will take ten minutes tops on a note of agreement areas in which i think charles plum as he always does something worth elevating. And perhaps agreeing upon if we can. I have a pretty significant wrinkle that im going to dangle in front of you and see if you nibble. So this may be somewhat here, here,e. I. But i will assert based on extensive evidence that Social Security, medicare, medicaid the Affordable Care act and the safety net are all working very well. Having their intended effects efficiently and effectively or there certainly aspects of those programs that need work. About as charles suggested solvency issue must be resolved for large Insurance Programs. But in the very first paifnl his book he said suspends political disbelief which is actually a very reasonable thing because if youre going to read about a really very large game changer like a ubi, you kind of have to suspend political lead unfortunately if youre talking about any policy change in this town, these days you have to suspend political disbelief. But i would argue that, in fact, achieving Insurance Program is a less heavy lift than getting to kind of change that charles is introducing. Soty hope in our commentary i can say more about this. But let me start out with Social Security and work my way through that list quickly. Social security, in the absence of Social Security elderly poverty would be about 44 . So Social Security takes it down to it 9 . Administrative cost of Social Security used to be 2 of benefits paid which was already far above any kind private sectr program with what charles is advocating for is now down to. 5 . Administration of Social Security is. 5 of benefits paid. Social Security Risk adjusted provides the same returns as the kind of stock market investment that charles had, and by risk adjusted yoim what you have to factor in and i didnt see this anywhere in our hands is the inherent risk in put a retirement account in the stock market. We have this debate during the private account days of gw bush and one was reasons it went away i was happy to see was about in part because the market kind of tanked around when we were having this debate that reminded people of the importance of accounting for risk when were talking about a pension program, Social Security, a guaranteed pension program. Charles also says nothing about transition cost which are huge when youre moving away from a from Social Security to something more variable. Medicare, medicare not only is like Social Security. Deeply beloved program. So i think you would have some real headache trying to deal with that aspect with getting rid of that but it also is again, a highly efficient program. And medicaid if you look at the cost of the cost increase and, of course, if you want to ask are our fiscal pressures coming from they are from cross pressures from health care in particular. You will find that consistently year in year out medicare and medicaid grow slowly than the cost of private Health Coverage even controlling for age and peoples medical conditions. So again, highly had efficient program. Now what about the aca . Well, two things. First of all do yourself a favor its not hard to find look at a plot of the uninsurance rate so the share of the population that lacks . Rns. Insurance and draw a line where aca comes into belay if you do this for nonchildren you do this for adults and youll see especially working agent youll see a particularly what i mean by the way, charles would get rid of child insurance as well, chill. Draw a line where it cools into play. After year and year end it dropped off a cliff. It was 16 you want people uninsured 16 in 2010, about 9 today. The aca and this also has to do with change in medicare rei and health care spend and kind of delivery measures that are in aca and other things at the same time not all of the aca by a long shot have reduced our projection of Health Care Expenditures by 4 Percentage Points of gd px thats 800 billion if you take this out a couple of decades as cdo does. So these programs are proving to be efficient and bending cost curve in ways that are extremely important and that i fear going to the private sector solution that charles advocates wont get us there. Now the safety net. I very much disagree with charles assertion about the extent of work in the safety net. I think there may have been a time when there was more of a problem and more of a problem but over the last 20 years, the safety net has become increasingly conditioned on work. , in fact, if youre disablinged elderly or a working person, the safety net is now much more tilted towards you than it is against you. Now, this causes another problem which is we have a larger share of household and depoverty disconnected from job market. By the way, here, a cash grant would probably be helpful on top of what were doing as opposed to replacing it. But it again, were not doing power points here which subpoena fine. Probably as it should be. But let me describe it. In fact, if youre disabled if more effective than its ever been before. Two more points and then will turn it back over to charles. It is simple math that if you are going to take a system, the system of transfers, which is disproportionately tilted to toward those at the lower end of the pay scale and targeted at poor and low income people and targeted toward everyone, you are going to dilute the distributional impact of the system. You are going to push back on the equity or the equality inducing aspects of the safety net. The safety not as ive mentioned takes that away and pushes back the other way. By taking a set of programs that are disproportionately targeted at the lowend and diluting their low income effectiveness by distributing them broadly. Finally, on jobs, heres the thing, charles said the kind of jobs robots that are coming for our jobs, he may be right, he doesnt always say things lightly so i want to defer to the possibility that the future will be different than the past. However, it is true that what i said in the idea that the best technology for the future will be has never been correct. Here is why i am so specifically doubtful about this claim in at least the nearterm. If in Fact Technology or labor substituting capital, if capital that substitutes for workers and labor was entering the workforce at an accelerating rate, we would see productivity growth accelerate. That says nothing but output. Hour. Labor hour output. Hour of work. If we were creating more output with less work which is the technologist tell us is the symptom, we would be seeing productivity accelerate. Instead we see productivity decelerate. I would argue its what we should be arguing about up here. That is evidence that there is something wrong with this hypothesis. Folks talking about robotics in the future, were looking around distant corners, we never been right about those distant corners and im afraid were not right now. Certainly you can find any evidence that would lead you to believe that you would want to take apart a system that i think is working well and replace it with one that is effective. I will save my areas of agreement because i have one that i will get out later. Ill not try to react to everything you said because that will be speaking in 15 minute chunks. Okay we have these programs, we are spending state and local and national altogether about 2 trillion a year. We still have millions of people in deep poverty, we still have billions of people without health insurance, we still have an intransigent set of people who are able to live decent existences despite all of these programs. I guess that what were saying is i will skip over the fact that i will have transition costs, thats okay. I would never make a big deal out of the cost of the bureaucracy. Lets think about a guy who will never be anything except low skill you already had some. If he gets into the labor market and stays there he wont stay at minimum wage. Lets say its 10 an hour. Away. That doesnt quite double, but boy does it augment his income. That same guy under the Current System, what can he get. You know these numbers better than i do. He can get food stamps and other minor help. Its not nothing close to ten g every year in terms of what he can do. And enter into not just escaping from poverty, but entry into the more comfortable life is pretty much shut off again. The labor market will not pay more for really low skill work. Now, think about marriage which has been declining rapidly. Marriage which is one of the best ways for all sorts of good things to occur. All at once, if you get married and your low income and even. [inaudible] thats a big difference from anything that we have now. I guess what im saying is the Current System is really bad at taking people on the short end of the stick and giving them an avenue into which they can reasonably look forward to a good existence. Its a huge venture of money toward the lowest income groups because i leave part of the grants for the people who are above 60000 in income, thats the price of losing medicare and Social Security. I say that advantage of my plan is really important. Is there anything else. Let me just stop and we can go back and forth on that. Theres a guy you just mentioned, he doesnt have a family, right . I started out with him not having a family and then i ended up with him having a family. So that guy is understood served by the system i was touting. I agree with that point. Interestingly, one of of the way to help him, believe it or not theres some bipartisan interest in doing this is to ask band the earned income tax credit to reach that guy. That is a single worker, take the guy charles described where a single parent with kids get five or six grand max. I wanted to talk about that for a moment. Two things. The safety not should not be viewed simply in terms of lining up dollars and seeing who gets more. By the way, if you did that, i still think i would come out on top because i was looking at some numbers and some of this is pretty complicated because it involves a lot of calculations about benefits and intersection of different programs but a colleague of mine was showing me some work suggesting that the bottom fifth gets on average about 15k a year in the kinds of transfer that we are talking about. Thats before Social Security and thats important as i will suggest in a minute. It is not clear, i think my mathematical point about if youre just going to diffuse a bunch of transfers on the income scale, given your marginal tax rate on higher income people, you would still be distribution only disc equalizing. We have a nice paper that recently came out from the center that i think makes this point in a way that i want to be very explicit. If theyre working halftime at the minimum wage, she ends up with an income based on the benefits of her foods damns, you take that person and you even take out her payroll taxes and this mom with a couple of kids is making 17000. Instead of working halftime at the minimum wage, if she doubles it, double her work at the minimum wage and this gets to charles point, that she end up with less or doing worse . In fact, she loses about 1. 5000 in food stamps. She more than makes up for that with another 2500 in the itc and another 1300 in in the child tax credit. Her income grows from 18000 up to about 26000. That is the work incentive currently built into our system. Recognize that as thats going on, she is contributing to Social Security and paying payroll taxes. Getting rid of Social Security is the part of his plan that i dislike the most. It says everybody should invest in the stock market, put 2000 a year in the stock market. There is no rule that they have to do that. That is charles admonishing them and he saying thats what you should do. Guess what, a lot lot of people wont do it because they cant afford to do it or they have a discount rate meaning theyre not giving a crab about the future and its a variable pension. Its not a guaranteed pension, its a variable pension. If they retire in a bad year, they will feel it. Let me stop there. Here i have an issue because i have to move the topic along. A lot of people dont get Social Security. You could be 65 years old and under a variety of condition you get very little Social Security or none at all. Even if they havent saved a penny they got there ten grand. If there were two of them they got their 20 grand. Let me just make a blanket statement, i think if you talk about putting money in the pockets of low income people, i think i can go to the bat with you on numbers and come out looking good. But put that aside and let me bring up another topic that i want to get to. That is the future of work and also where we stand right now. Laborforce participation has been dropping, especially among whites and more notoriously among white males. We are now down in a historically unprecedented rate of ablebodied male of prime working age who are out of the labor force. In addition to that we have the question of jobs. I absolutely grant you that they have been wrong. This time its different is a very dicey proposition to make it i would argue with you that you could have a rational person who could have foreseen that things were not going to be so bad, when buggies were no longer needed that a person could of said youll need these other kinds of things that are going to generate jobs. What you need to replace the jobs of the drivers, one of the largest employer sectors in the country who are going be without jobs, what are you going to do with millions of whitecollar, i have to raise this quickly. There is a guy that has written about iq but the fact is, ill put it in terms of iq. We had a society with a hundred and 5410 which is above average and they could get above average jobs because they could do things to make these kinds of judgments. It is really scary to which the massive numbers of those jobs are going to disappear. There are examples i could give to. Let me put it this way, can i prove to you that this time is different . Certainly i cant in the confines of this our. I would have a hard time doing so if we spent two hours on it. I think its something we should be thinking carefully about. Just one final comment on this, the decline in social capital that was made famous has continued and a lot of the reasons it has continued have to do with the fact that some other good things occurred, such as women going into the labor force and having the opportunity to go into the labor force, i think that that was a good thing. Good things can have collateral effects that arent so good in one of those collateral effects was that a lot of what women contributed before they were in the labor market were huge amounts of social capital in terms of making communities work. I am not in any way, in any form, let let it be perfectly clear, i am not recommending that we encourage women to get out of the labor force. I am saying that the ubi would make it possible for women who want to be out of the former labor force to be at home and raising children and being deeply engaged in the community, it makes it easier for that to happen and thats a good thing. It also opens up ways in which guys who do not have a place in the labor force will be able to find ways in which they can legitimately say to themselves, im doing stuff where i live that is valued and if i werent doing it i would be missed. But i make a closing statement and then well go to questions. You landed at a place where there may be some agreement. One of the things i like about a universal income of some sort is that it does allow people not to take lousy jobs they dont want and in that sense increases their Bargaining Power. The lack of Bargaining Power is a critical deficit for low income people. Let me close with a final critique and suggest an idea that maybe there is common ground. It was interesting to me to hear charles say i left them out because these are expenditures that dont count as transfers and i agree with that. These are agreements that decide he has some public good they want to fund. I cast a broader umbrella of public good that i think charles does and most libertarians, but its one that i think i share with most americans and thats the idea of investment. Investment in Retirement Security such that we as a nation have agreed since the 1930s that were going to have a guaranteed pension for the elderly. It could be improved, no question, but the idea of a variable, youre on your own and heres a few thousand dollars and i hope you invest it fruitfully, no we are going to have a guaranteed pension reality. We will have Healthcare Security which is medicare which charles also gets rid of. We are going to have a safety net that isnt just a set of consumption programs, medicaid, headstart and they have been found to work like investments. They lead to less obesity, better educational outcomes, better Employment Outcomes, better educational outcomes and Employment Outcomes and earnings outcomes. Kids who grew up getting these benefits actually did better than kids who didnt get them. These are investment programs. We invest and our investments are in areas where we agree that market failures will not lead to excessive elderly poverty, child poverty, health care deprivation among the elderly. That is my signature objection to the plan. Now about the job thing, i think nick was here and has a new book on this, i have another dissenting, i have a chapter where i disagree with nicks diagnosis but his diagnosis is extremely well put together. The problem we have not just the macroeconomists, the problem we have in our economy is one of lack of demand. We have output gaps, meaning the potential for gdp is consistently been above the actual gdp if we were fully employed we would be generating more output. We have been at full employment in our job market only 30 of of the time since 1980. This is a massive market failure we have been at full employment only 30 of the time since 1980. That is a pointandclick calculation you can do yourself. Theres nothing devilish about it. Until we establish that we have tapped all the demand we can and used the cyclical benefits of a Strong Economy to pull people back into the market, one of the points i made about this work is that the employment ratio which fell so much during the Great Recession has climbed 2 3 of the way back. It is a very cyclical variable. Its not that people are running away from work, its there is not enough jobs. Im very hesitant as long as we have output gaps to sign off on a technological unemployment piece that has always been wrong and i dont want to replace it with a program that i feel will increase inequality. Heres the thing i agree on. Ive been waiting for the. Instead of a ubi, what if we had a guarantee jobs jobs program. I think theres a lot of work to do out there and we may disagree on that but at least based on the numbers that i just cited, what if instead of guaranteeing them income we guarantee them jobs and i think politically that is a less heavy left because there are people in this institute who will not want to write checks but having people have jobs is more acceptable. Look, my problem with it is this. The government is a lousy employer. Privatesector jobs. What if we guarantee privatesector jobs. Subsidized, privatesector. Heres what you hear when you go to employers. They are just trying to run their businesses and they say, all i want is somebody who will show up on time, every day, doesnt take half hour bathroom breaks every three hours and can deal with his coworkers and im having a terrible time getting those. There are stories about jobs going unfilled because employers cant find people with these really basic skills. So if you have, i think it would be a replay of sita, for you youngsters in the room, this is a 1970s, very, very big, very, very big, comprehensive and training act for young people and i think it would be a repeat of that. Im just going to go to questions now. Wait for the microphone please. Do make it a question please. [inaudible] [inaudible] i think we are right to ignore it. I think that we are worried about how to make america work better. The notion is that i am sensitized this year in this Political Campaign is somebody who has been a big fan of globalization, as i have been saying you know what, in the course of this, i have not been paying sufficient attention in ways that my fellow americans have been screwed over in ways that dont affect me. Im in fact worried about how to make america work and i will worry about the rest of the world later. Toward the back, your hand up west mark. I thought about calling on my colleagues but im not sure that would be a good idea. Thank you very much. The idea is that people make good monetary decisions however there is strong evidence in psychology that people who are in poverty actually think about money differently and think more in immediate terms so in your plan, to have any Scientific Evidence to the contrary . Have you taken that into account at all . Even if everybody squanders everything and makes no provision for the retirement whatsoever, the getting the 10000 a year until they die. If you are two of them, thats 20000 a year. That is the completely stupid and unthinking, but i will tell you, its a kind of guarantee and that is certain things about money, if everybody has ten grand and investments that are Common Knowledge among the people in this room, it will be the topic of conversations and barbershops in cafes and bars in ways that they are now. Somebody will walk into the bar and theyve got this great get which scheme that theyre going to buy tulips and yeah, there will be people who do that and theres also when to be lots of people around the bars rolling your eye and say what you need is to diversify your portfolio. Things that are not said in bars now and in barbershops now are going to be a lot more widely spread. Its part of something that we did not get to at all. The way in which, when everybody has ten grand, dynamic dynamics change within communities and how people talk to each other and the assumptions they make about each other but i wont go off on all that. Thats an objection that i have as well as i tried to suggest in my comment, i worry that people will underinvest or inadequately invest in i dont know why we would break a system that works now. It doesnt work for everybody. I think Social Security is an extremely pervasive program in any citizen who has been in the country is going to get Social Security through themselves or their spouse. Let me say this. Where i have a similar objects objection is in charles healthcare plan. Its a catastrophic plan where you have to take 3000 off the top of the democrat and by this Catastrophic Health care in the private market. This is basically just a very high deductible plan and here the psychology comes into play as well because what we have found, especially for low and middleincome people who have a high deductible plan, it doesnt make them price conscious or shop more, what it does is they dont go to the doctor when their sick. It cost more because they dont get preventive care. Ill go here and then ill go back there. [inaudible] [inaudible] you talk about making progress against poverty, we know perfectly well its the reason we have deep poverty is because the ei gc art income and if you count those things as income then you cut the poverty rate in half. Its a lot easier to count rather than abolishing Social Security and medicare. Just count what we already spend and counted accurately. Here are my questions. My calculation would be that if you take Social Security and medicare and if we were to do this tomorrow and transfer it to your system, the cost of that in terms of Social Security benefits is 378 billion. The cost of lost medicare benefits is close to 400 billion the airport i know you have transitions and stuff. Its a huge transfer from the elderly to others. Second question youve made a lot of great points