level, biographical level, what was the biggest surprise to you in the course of writing this book? >> guest: i think the life of ronald reagan. you know, the story of frances, the attempted assassination in 1981, you know, it's almost impossible to believe a man 70 years old, somebody should support, do extraordinary things, the bullet, and it pierces within a couple of millimeters of his heart, and he is getting within minutes here, not far away to george washington university. and what he jokes with his nurses.

i think hollywood could not have written such a script. between the assassination attempt and the air traffic controllers strike too much later, it's as if that's the birth of the reagan legend, with obvious geopolitical consequences. it's hard to believe we are just fascinating. afternoon. called "american caesars" from franklin d. roosevelt to bush. highly recommend it. thank you so much. >> guest: it's been a pleasur pleasure. >> coming up next book tv presents afterwards, an hour-long program where we invite guest hosts to interview authors. ..

>> host: and welcome to "after words." my name is amity schlaes. i'm a senior fellow at the council on foreign relations in a bloomberg news columnist. i'm your host today for the show but others in their books. today our guests or to they're too preventable, two outstanding

political authors, scott rasmussen and doug schoen. scott rasmussen collects and distributes polling data. mr. schoen is a poster comic who had conch to make bloomberg. mr. schoen foc contributor to fox news. their book is "mad as hell," how do t. party is bundle and silly remaking the two-party system. we have a double out there, so we're going to be a little bit shorter. could you each get a two sentence description of what the tea party movement is? >> guest: tea party movement is a grassroots movement that has been disrespected by people in a political class because fundamentally the rejection of the political class. >> guest: i would say the group of voters, about eight quarter of the electorate that is basically saying we're fed up

with washington, we are fed up with spending, we are fed up with taxing policies that don't reflect our values that we want to return to core principles. >> host: house speaker nancy pelosi says the tea party is a grassroots about an astroturf movement founded by a few rich people. what do you think of that? >> guest: the whole notion of the tea party movement defending washington wish i said it was racist, it was astroturf. frustrations have been building for decades pushed out by the bailout legislation. people in washington never saw it coming because they still believe that we'll update the nation. most people are tea party in america believe is bad for the economy. >> host: mr. schoen, it isn't anything new at all? >> guest: thursday by wired intake somatic populations. others on the left, others on the right, but this committee is a continuation of what we sow in

the mid-1990s, early 1990s, so it is greater fervor, greater force. after the election were going to concede it's had greater impact. >> host: i think you miss americans for prosperity by david koepp of koepp industries as a major organizational backer of this movement. is not evidence of astroturf? >> guest: i think the opposite actually. if there was not a grassroots movement to find, they would not be voters to mobilize. you can put a lot of money into campaigns do not get much response. the tea parties, i think, as scott said, authentic grassroots movements that are self-created and mostly so finding. >> guest: pays a lot of money, politicians try to jump in front of the tea party movement, but that's because when you have a movement like this, it has two things going for it.

when it has passion and to what it does resonate with the majority of americans. a lot of a lot of people like to take credit for that and help it along. quite frankly to cope brother disappears from the tea party movement would go on just fine. >> host: it's a race to take credit. thank you. you talk about the mainstream media and how is underappreciated. why did the media -- the old media overlooked this trend? >> guest: they didn't want to see it. earlier this year scott brown had a stunning electorate victory in massachusetts for ted kennedy sophie. polling has showed be a competitive race and they never covered it as a competitive race until the final couple of days because it is incomprehensible to them the democrats could lose the lead. so much of the tea party movement is in that same category. they can't believe people are unhappy with the policies of the federal government. >> guest: they know, i am

startled us a look at the data. i see the level of activism rightly points to scott brown. you could point to share an angle or paul marco rubio. the list goes on. and for some reason the media has not wanted to give the tea party movement credit now. for goodness sake come you don't have to be a supporter of christine o'donnell or share an angle to recognize the vibrancy of of the tea party movement. >> host: utile and in the code in your book about rush limbaugh, the radio show hosts. and mr. steele of the rnc. can you tell us an anecdote a tendency which you think it means? >> guest: do know, my sense of it is that the image don't really means is the political class, the political leadership doesn't have a clue about what this movement is really about. one of the thing that scott

points to wait for tonight and we should talk about is that the republican leadership is his and alienated from the tea party movement as is the democratic. >> host: could you repeat for the pure what happened with mr. steele and mr. linda? >> guest: they have entirely different business republican voters, tea party at the base. he would like to think of himself as the leader. mr. steele thinks there is something to go up and not going to work. republican voters believe that michael steele and republicans in washington are out of touch with the party base by wade range. >> guest: steel criticized limbaugh. limbaugh pushed back and he sued for peace. and a certain way, when this happened i said boy, that's the power of rush limbaugh, and actual fact while he is undeniably posted and powerful and influential. it was ultimately a reflection of tea party power reflecting

itself in that dispute. >> host: maybe it's a force in history that tea parties, such as the repeal of the fairness doctrine, that radio doctrine that made very strongly opinionated shows such as rush limbaugh's dating back to the present ratings, that would be decades and decades ago now. >> guest: certainly what happens is going way back before the tea party movement. everything in the political mainstream today is built upon frustration that's been growing for days. this is a grassroots movements happen in america. in the 1960s the proceed on the bus and it ain't the civil rights movement. frustration had been hoping for decades before that. even the founding of america, the frustration had built and that's what is happening today is frustration at the number used, but it didn't just start in april 2009. >> host: it reminds me of

another grass-roots story about wendell wilkie who was a surprise republican candidate in 1941 and against franklin roosevelt and they said he was a grassroots candidate has wilkie clubs sprang up all over the country. and washington they commented the grassroots of a thousand country club, but it was funded by the corollaries of the country. >> guest: here's the thing. wilkie was a utility executive. what we are seeing here is a rejection, exclusively, unabashedly of country club, a lease, business leaders. when people say, sharon angle, rand paul, marco rubio and try to deny them is to the tea party movement of candidates that are hardly ideal are getting nominated as they are not traditional republicans. they are not mainstream candidates. they shoot the mainstream and

are supported because of their alienation from the system. >> host: the central theme of your book is the elite versus the regular man. how do you find elite and how do you to find the ratio of americans who are elite and americans who are not delete or who are mainstream in real? >> guest: we call it mainstream voters in the political class. mr. voters are people who support the concept we should be let ideally. we asked people whose judgment you trust more? american leader or political leaders? we asked about the federal government and they typically work together against the rest of us. seven out of 10 people polled that latter view about the lines between big government and big business. some are on the left, some on the right, but overall 60% of americans are consistently on the mainstream site is all of those questions. only about 14% are even with the political class.

you talk about a sense to scale back in the 1770s. he said about one out of three columnists to support support the crown. so we have a very small level of support for the status quo in washington. >> host: how big is the political class or the elite group? >> guest: 7% are in a 7% lean in that direction. >> host: is it possible -- dr. schoen went to that. does that define you forever on one side or the other? >> guest: we may disagree on this, but i think if you go to an ivy league college, you're part of the political class, just by getting to the membership. i told your research associate before we began that i took a seminar with a late departed and much lamented senator daniel patrick moynihan was, with a terrific look you might also

enjoy reading. but i remember that seminar some 30 years ago and a guy got up and said he was an authentic representative of the working class. moynihan said that when you live in the 02138 zip code, i can assure you you are in the political class. i think that's really the case and you lose touch very substantially with mainstream values. >> host: soever one who ever attended, senator moynihan put aside to ever attended of those schools, which i detailed is always out of it forever. i think that's a little harsh. he went to depaul. you didn't go to iu. >> guest: it took me 12 years to get my undergraduate degree. i trapped at a couple years along the way. >> host: what you're saying the creek. certainly if you're part of the elite institution, you have at

the images you don't even recognize. it is possible for someone with that background to recognize that the american people should be given more respect and be given -- the government should arrive in the authority. there is an attitude among some. i was at harvard recently. we don't understand what the people don't want us to leave. that's the attitude people are upset about. >> host: maybe the problem is arrogant enough pedigree. is it possible? >> guest: do you remember what eric young said about harvard name? he said the most arrogant in life is a harvard man with a c. average. >> host: maybe our universities aren't as different. >> guest: notwithstanding what i'd like to believe i've accomplished and what you've certainly accomplished, scott and his father found at espn who

has built one of the most respected polling companies in america. given that level of success at a relatively young age, he may not want to be part of the elite, but he's done more than the vast majority of the leads, whether they graduated from harvard or not. >> host: maybe you're the least of innovation. >> guest: if you go back even to the founding days of the country, there were elite, but what they were doing as they were pursuing this idea that government should not be run by the elites. the government should be run with consent of the government that there had to be popular and we seem to be moving away at this point in time. >> host: thank you for leading a push on this question of being tolerant of that. we should get a bit more to the tea party. the tea party itself has issued memoranda or documents.

whether they declare and it supersedes those issues to be? >> guest: i i not only save the tea party is issued -- >> host: the fight point onward -- >> guest: it's even hard to define do with any because it is not the club. one out of four or one out of five say the tea party movement. the things that unite them: fiscal policy issues. >> host: number one you mentioned first fiscal policy. >> guest: in the sense nobody is listening to them. >> guest: and i would go back to fiscal policy and say they believe there is perfect to lead a corrupt alliance between the two parties in washington to spend and tax more than they believe it's prudent. and when people say the tea parties are moving, what they really are our anti-keynesian. they are traditional balanced

budget, when the government the way i run my household. i don't want to. i don't want to got to say. i don't want excessive spending. i do want social programs if we can't afford it, but if we can i. don't want to pursue it and i'd like to protect the programs we have because i need them. they are just small limited government people who forgot me just say i'm new to all of this. i just am so angry. and you know, that i think pretty authentic. >> host: plus backup and say what keynesian is. >> guest: basically spend to prime the pump. you have written about this eloquently. >> host: i was just reading the economic consequences of the peace. that is a very fun book. this is a great u.k. at economist who developed the modern stimulus as we know it, but also what a lot of other

things. one of the things he praises in that book is inequality of income distribution because it's optimal when wealth, elites, have a lot of money. they don't spend it on watches like paris hilton. a large share of it they spent on investment which leads to productivity gains, which in turn is the best kind of growth for the economy. it is anti-keynesian. i agree. and it's sort of a visceral anti-keynesian -- people don't just wake up and say i hate the u.k. economist. what they say is it doesn't make sense to me to spend more than i can afford whether in the government or a household. >> guest: you're exactly right. most people don't know who chances. there is sort of a culture keynesianism outdated. most americans today believe if you cut government spending and that will create more jobs and spending more. they believe there will create

more jobs. the reason is not because of economic theory, but they just think that the right way to run things. >> host: the average american, whether he or she is in the tea party or separate basically believes if you increase the senate to reducing taxes, you're going to get more economic growth. so if you say to the average american, which is better? the government spending money to encourage growth and consumption are the government coming back to making more money in the pocket, they're going to tell you more money in my pocket and let me do with that money what i want and the more likely not to spend it in a way that was social is. but don't tell me what to do. while they are not trained economist and they may not know, you know, canes or any other economic philosopher, they have a clear idea and you'll see on november 2nd how they take those ideas to the polling booth

and express them with what i think i would agree with me will be a repudiation of the obama administration. >> guest: just a repudiation of the obama policies. for the third straight election cycle their voting the continuation that has been in the clinton era when people came in less controlled congress, president obama. there is a voting against parties. >> host: it happens faster. they get tired faster. we're going to get to the other issues of the tea party, but just on the fiscal side, if they are not keynesian voters and they don't like spending, how did they feel about past taxes? art laffer says that incentives matter and overrate can generate more economic aid to the d. and

more revenue and then the government expected. just go the other thing about this but i think is important to understand is the tea party members and supporters generally are compassionate people. these are not selfish, mean-spirited people, but they lead a commonsense life. and commonsense means you don't spend what you don't have, you don't overburdened people and you give people incentives. they see these as core values, that if they were more, perhaps later, they would express more eloquently. but they are no less fervent and passionate than a trained economist. and the other thing that happened, scott has pointed to this a bunch of times. they look at people in new york and say where do these people come from? what kind of values today have? how do they think about things?

they are just befuddled. angry, too, but befuddled. >> host: betide the fallback to a policy point of view. the thing that ignited all the frustration to the tea party movement was the bailout. >> host: we have fiscal and nowhere addressing bailout. >> guest: i think it's part of the same thought process. because her dad was saying about commonsense approach was $700,000,000,000.1 reaction as he did know this ahead of time to prep anybody clicks another reaction that's really deep is the moral outrage about it. americans believe in this idea if you do will in business you should keep your profits. if you do poorly she keep the price. all the sudden they say wait a minute. people change the rules to help their friends, to build difference with our taxpayer money. it was seen as an insider job.

they were seen as political class alliance with that big business crowd on wall street and people say, wait a minute, and the same time this is happening, how come values are calling? half of homeowners believe this is worth more than the mortgage. they change the rules to hurt us. >> guest: you know, another part of this, which scott has alluded to and again the burden enormous eloquently about is the suspicion of believe, the aircraft and the washington arrangement. i mean, i remember you writing about the jewish kosher butchero government bureaucrats why they did what they did and why it was rational, reasonable and supported the community in the market. it was seen, as i relied, as a violation of trade laws and loved them too i think one was even incarcerated to my

recollection that you told him the story is correct. i told the story because what you see in the tea party movement is an absolute sense that washington is out of touch. but scott alluded to his corrupt. if you're a big tanker you get yourself in trouble and your buildout. if you're not a company, buildout. if you're working guy guy who gets behind on a mortgage they should've never taken out because they shyster a banker, tough luck. >> host: maybe we can see this in addition to the elite regular man at the battle of economic theory. and a battle between macroeconomics and microeconomics. microeconomics being the experience of the firm. what does the firm say about what's happening to the economy? what does the little business they about whether it wants to decide to hire again. this is again the great problem

with patented central recovery, jobless recovery that's very interesting. we talked about the first pillow, just so the viewer to bailout. we talked about fiscal and tax or maybe the economic philosophy , the intuitive economic philosophy that my time these impulses. there are a few other components you've identified in "mad as hell." >> guest: when you talk about all this, it's not quite as you describe it. when you talk about it and economic theory terms, people were mad as thinking in economic theory. what they are thinking if there got sent to what is right what is wrong and translates into an economic theory. but that's not the way they are viewing it. they are viewing what is wrong as more of a moral sense. >> host: but there can be morose to economics, just not modern economics. i mean, there were only people

with ibs patients who are about economics in one was william graham sumner who said don't forget the forgot man who really identified as what we call today a tea party person. a tea party purse and left been receiving special gifts of the special-interest crowd. just a mask by mark russian molesky some questions about yourselves because we're all interested in how you got here and all these books you've written. who do you work with. is the tea party movement more powerful than other such movements? i think is specifically for example every a quote from the 1970s. many had to suffer at the hands of a political economical way to live shape decisions and never count or states or does cover from justice. when unemployment prevails they never go for a job. and that quote is from jimmy

carter. this is an acceptance speech when he ran for president more than a quarter century ago. so sounds awfully similar. is the devotion of greater than other repulsion so we've experienced in our lifetime or in american history? >> guest: the depth and passion certainly. and what i would say is there are about 100 potential tea party who can be good. six u.s. senators. two years ago a this time, if we said we were going to talk about the tea party and its influence on the midterm election, he would've gone what is that? if i said to you is pretty simple. i mean, there will be the spontaneous movement that will grow up and take over the republican party, will fundamentally influence our politics than i thought we'd be talking about in the run-up to the the midterm elections.

so, i think it is extremely, extremely potent and powerful. when the next question gets asked and i'm sure is scott's reaction, which is of a tea party go away? if their fiscal agenda is addressed and sure will go away, but i don't see any evidence that's going to happen anytime soon. >> guest: when you talk about the change are the quotes in the 1970s, jimmy carter was typing into a similar frustration. you have watergate and the tom had just come on. fiscal policies today have their roots in the presidencies of lyndon johnson and richard nixon. fiscal policy spending on name on spending level. people have been voting for decades -- at least candidates who promised fiscally conservative policies. i don't know if this is bigger or more powerful. it think it's an expansion of the same frustration that's been going on for a lot longer now. >> host: can you get to really briefly or left-leaning strand

to tea party or not. or you have a more right-wing -- what are those two strands and are the left-wingers in the tea party? >> guest: they are and what they now call their carthy party, which they had to rally against two weeks ago in washington. there are people who would agree with the critique of the tea party movement. they say washington is corrupt and the serving big business. what we need is more regulation, more government, probably more free distribution away from the wealthy and powerful to ordinary people. they would argue that was morally, economically and socially just unfair and that bonuses in the bailout are egregious violation of the norms of american society we should take those bonuses and benefits that came from the bailout away from the corrupt elite. the same analysis, different conclusion from the tea party movement. much smaller however.

>> guest: there is a couple of other things. one, because there is his populist movement on the bus tonight there is a sense of lack of lack of the judas needs of government. 21% believe there is the content of the governed. second thing is the populist wing of the website side of the equation tends to have more confidence in democratic lawmakers than the people -- populist on the right have been republican lawmakers. ..

ing was defeated insurance companies are still able to raise rates indiscrimminantly. there was a corrupt deal with the pharmaceutical companies in their view and all of this adds up to a health care bill that the extreme left would regard as essentially corrupt and dishonest. now the right has their own props, which are very, very different but, again, similar analysis, diametrically opposite conclusions. >> host: so they would, in your book you describe a single-payer group with a chicago basis? with a chicago basis that was not entirely happy with the health care law. it was too right-wing, to compromised? >> guest: they wanted action in the street to fight the health care bill. >> host: there is very compelling story of a woman

who died in pregnancy, right? all this is happening but i want to stop about and talk about. these are special guests they have done quite a lot of work in their lives not just this wonderful book even though it is wonderful and interesting and germane as we're coming up to the midterms, highly exciting. i'm a little anxious to ask this question since we already talked about school, but where did you go to high school? >> guest: i went to horace mann. >> host: right here. where did you go to high school. >> guest: in will perham, massachusetts. >> host: where did you go to college? >> guest: i went to harvard college. >> host: that's okay. i took a year off first. then i went to the university of connecticut. took more time off. went to university of north carolina in charlotte and finished off at dppaw university. took me a while to get there. >> host: in "the wall street journal" there was a competing cultures, one was the culture. depaw. the depaw culture was a

pragmatic culture i think it is fair to say. we had a number of whosers is. some who went to depaw. depaw seemed to be the college of many of the hoosiers. many of the viewers will maybe remember george malone, the great columnist of many decades and malone had that pragmatism. i wish you were here to talk about the tea party now. what were your parents political views? >> guest: moderate. my mother is, is a live and is a left-wing democrat. my father was a more moderate democrat. and i was brought up to believe that my religion was jewish and my political party was democrat and i was supposed to be orthodox about both. >> guest: my views were a little different. my family made sure i was brought up to be a new york yankees fan and new york giants fan. political views never really got too far into the equation. i guess at some level they

were probably republican-leaning but politics something never discussed. >> host: i should mention that since i write for "bloomberg news" and you have worked with mayor bloomberg, maybe your mother is ambivalent about mayor bloomberg or maybe? >> guest: interesting question. she waxes and wanes. i think she feels he has been on balance a very good mayor for the city but somebody who thinks in fairly straightforward terms about politics. frequently has trouble with somebody who is, like mayor bloomberg, more pragmatic, calling it as sees it. i think one of the problems we find in politics today is the left and the right have become sufficiently, distinct that it is hard for politicians in the center to build the kind of abiding and enduring coalitions that would demonstrate to people that the corrupt arrangement that the left and the right talk about is not real but

it is illusory. >> guest: what is the relationship --. >> host: what is the relationship between sports and politics? are the same thing? are they similar. equal sign with a wave very line or are they almost the same? are they different. >> guest: political campaigns are a lot like the way i watch a giants game. you get passionate and upset with the referee's calls if they don't go your way. in america we've become a sports bar nation in terms of our politics. when we polled on the scott brown race nationally before that race, people around the country the enthusiasm gap was everywhere in the country as it was in massachusetts. if you were a republican in california you were watching the race with the same excitement with a republican in massachusetts was. >> guest: i tell you one story on sports and politics. i'm proud one of the things i'm most proud of having worked for seven or eight years off and on with ther is byian opposition to topple milosevic. one of the people i had

opportunity to work with great pleasure was ambassador richard holbrooke. in the course of discussing a poll about political divisions in serbia, he looked at me and said 367. just stopped. i said, 367? he said, don't you know ty cobb's lifetime batting average. i guess i knew that not in this context. like you, i was a frustrate streeted sports editor who turned to politics because you substitute one kind of statistic for another. i did. >> host: you also did some work in the u.k. and your first book. can you tell us a little bit powell and you also wrote a book about moynihan. >> guest: i wrote. >> host: and how you went on this political journey and what you found with these early leaders. >> guest: sure. i decided when i was young that i was obviously interested in ideas.

so my doctoral diser istation was the social basis of support was on powell and the british electorate. if anyone has interest in what i've done, coming to the tea party movement in america was a lot of ways intellecutally same kind of questions i faced in the u.k. that was social, lesser than economic issues. this is purely, if not exclusively economic. and so i wrote about free market economics in britain. and the impact of immigration. and then, turned to senator moynihan who had been a teacher of mine and obviously a friend of mine. i wrote his biography when he just came to the senate. like i said, published in 1997 or 78. it was trilling for me as a young person under 30 to have a chance to write about such seminal figures. one in the case of britain and the other in the case of american politics so it was

a great thrill for me. >> host: what was the best thing about moynihan? >> guest: his intellect. a brilliant man. i don't know if you've seen steve wiseman's book yet. it was extraordinary the range and depth of subjects he wrote and spoke about. the problem we have in our politics there are so few people who are able to do more than just mouth talking points. just one more comment and scott certainly should talk about his extraordinary back ground as well, but i went to a breakfast this morning with former governor kerry of new york and in his early 90s he is well aware what is going on. a bit infirmed but in great shape and somebody mentioned northern ireland. we had the four horseman alluding to himself, senator kennedy, tip o'neill, one other. he said there aren't politicians like that anymore. i think he's right. you can agree with people or

disagree with them. i think what we're look lacking in political life to a very substantial degree are transcend dant figures able to bridge cultural, political and economic divides. >> host: he is a figure who seems larger every year senator moynihan to all of us? >> i think that's true but i think we're lacking large-scale figures in our politics of any world view and it is i think to our detriment. >> host: tell us a little bit more about espn. >> guest: you know, i grew up in the broadcast business. my father was in it. i did my first radio commercial when i was seven. >> host: what was that about? >> guest: that was some christmas promotion for something in amherst, massachusetts. >> host: can you say it for us? >> guest: i can't remember it. i remember being so nervous walking into the studio with my dad. >> host: did it you read? >> guest: no, i memorized my lines. i also remember i did my first television i can tell you with nick buonacatti who

played with the boston patriots in the american football league. went on to be captain for the miami dolphins undefeated team. that was a long, long time ago. my dad and i did a lot of broadcast things. we bought the rights to western massachusetts hockey playoffs when i was in high school because my team wasn't good enough to make playoffs. we paid 20 bucks for the rights. my dad was working with them and i became announcer. from a pure performance point of view the greatest thrill of my life. gordy howe was my childhood idol. he came and played on the team. came with his two sons. at his 50th birthday i was the emcee. stood at center ice in the spotlight with my childhood idol on his 50th birthday. to make his better his birthday is the day after mine. it was our joint birthday celebration. it was a great thing. in those taste you couldn't get sports, couldn't get things on television.

there was only one college game played a week on television. hockey games couldn't get on very much. my father and i were trying to find ways to do it. we heard about this new thing called cable. the real key was the satellite. we learned we could send the signal around america via satellite for less money than it cost to send the same signal around the state of connecticut via traditional land lines. >> guest: you seem to also identify again this it book which is the new medium, allows messages to get through that somehow for some reason shut out before. >> guest: that is, you were talking about wendell wilkie before the difference between his clubs and what is happening today. the internet, social networking. the way you get messages out changes everything. >> host: your publisher of this book is harper collins that is my publisher too i should mention. who is your editor. >> guest: adam bellow. >> host: can you say a word or two about adam since editors don't get talked about enough on radio or tv? >> i would tell you this. i think that the great

genius of a good editor like adam is the ability to take an idea and to help craft it to suit both current, the current environment as, well as, closely as possible to the underlying intellectual trend that are driving it. and adam helped us do that immeasurably. i think we have a much better book as a result. >> guest: adam, two things happened in this book. doug and i met at wendy's to start talking about it. >> guest: that's true. >> host: did you work together before? >> guest: been on tv before. never worked together. we started with this idea. when adam came in, he, he was very nice about the way he did it but he reorganized our thoughts and really put it together in much more compelling way. >> guest: i would say this. i don't know if you've collaborated with anybody on a book. >> host: it is a hard thing.

>> guest: it's a tough process. we, i think, cooperated and collaborated seamlessly. the only thing i have to say is that you know, i assumed that people would see that my genius would run through every page and, it's pained me to realize that scott has gotten as much, if not more well-deserved credit an argument i must confess that day in wendy's's he framed. he said doug, unless we get into the distinctions between the political class and political elite and what it means for public opinion, we will not be doing justice to my idea and what i want to do. i think we did it, scott. and i think the book is immeasureably better as a result. >> host: did i each write chapters or write them all together? >> guest: we wrote different sections. we put this themth to the and it fit. >> host: did you use skype or regular telephone or use the library? >> guest: we used pen and paper. >> guest: we sat down

face-to-face couple times. we scribbled things out. not so much pen and paper and e-mails and word documents. and there were, there were times when i would get a document, i'd say there is no way this can work because doug just missed this completely. then i go back and talk to him about it, i realize he had credit tykes in mind and we worked it out to a much better product. >> host: more e-mails or more chats on the phone? >> guest: mostly e-mails, a few chats. but i think the great benefit of the collaboration having done another book where the collaboration was not as seamless, put it politely, when we talked things out, it took only a few minutes to try to resolve things, but the important issue is, in addition to the convivality and communalty, i think the work product benefited from it which is why you wanted to cola elaborate. >> guest: we started out in

different places. when i would say things i was hearing doug was hearing something different than i intended to say. i'm sure he had the same persons experience as we tried to a lick late it was -- articulate it that is what we both meant. >> host: as we come to the final part of the show and ask you about substance stand politics. we're close to an important election. >> guest: absolutely. >> host: there is this chapter in your book where you talk about populism. and you say, you use the word rigged. pages 104-105. the system is rigged. one of the quotes you're writing about the law that changed our banking and investment banking structure, gramm-leach-bliley from 1999, you say it repealed the glass-steagall act and allowed commercial and investment banks to merge. this policy was meant to strictly benefit the elite. it benefited some of the elite. we can clearly see that. was there an intention there? was it, when you say meant

to benefit the elite, that sound not to benefit other people. do you see a motive in there? or do you just see out comes? >> guest: you know, first of all i think most people see motive. >> host: do you see motive? >> guest: some of the time, yes. >> guest: he sees motive. i see out come. >> host: there is one of these famous --. >> guest: yes. >> host: divides? >> guest: yes. we quickly reached an accord how we would analyze it but it was perfectly clear to me that repeal of glass-steagall did very little for ordinary people and a lot for some very, very wealthy bankers. scott, when he critiqued my views, said, doug, look at the process that got here and look how people think about that. you have to do that if you're going to really understand what's going on. >> guest: when i say in motive, part of it is there is a corrupt process. i believe most of the tea party activists if they went to washington, stayed there

long enough they would end up being just as corrupt or just as wrapped up in the system as people are today. i think it is a deeper --. >> host: power corrupts. absolute power corrupts absolutely. >> guest: i want to say something on the word rigged, normally when you do polling you don't throw in supercharged words like that. we wanted to find out how deep that word was. how often people get reelected people with unheap with them. system was rigged. that is why majority get reelected they rig the system to benefit themselves. there is deep level of mistruss. >> host: mistruss, everyone agrees on. to assign intention is brave and strong thing to do. of the banking crisis we have in the united states a good part of it had to do with people borrowing too much with adjustable mortgages that were not the right decision for them to

make. >> guest: what about financial institutions borrowing too much at 35 to one to invest in the underlying assets of those mortgages that are wrapped into different tranches of debt so that somehow a house of cards that is shaky is presumed to be more stable because a rating agency that if not, you know, corrupt is certainly incompetent? how about that? >> host: that's right. it is all in there but i wouldn't say, i'm just questioning the monocausality to it. the mainstream man or women internalized keynesian economics probably knows shouldn't borrow, interest rates may one day go up or he or she so that's all. politics, this question from john fund, of "the wall street journal" because he

is one of my political friend who i like to hear what he has to say. he says politics is a marketplace that conveys info just like the stock market, i'm paraphrasing him but somehow the marketplace didn't seem to give the political parties the right info about the popularity of their policies because the party seemed surprised that the voters don't like them. is that your elitism again or? >> guest: any market needs to have some rules to operate by and in a market can be can be well-designed or can be poorly designed. my argument would be our political system is poorly designed to transfer information from voters to the political parties. >> host: now we get to the most important part of your book, what to do. we know people are mad as hell. the phrase is there we can see it. not only in your fine work but also in other work and you have some very interesting recommendations and i would, before i state your three-step plan i want

to say it was especially interesting to put ideas before people which is to say you ask in step 3 for a plan to be put to the voter instead after politician offered up to the voter. could you describe that three-step process you recommend at the end in the conclusion of your book. >> guest: i know we're short on time so i want to make sure we go really quickly on this one part of it is the politicians need to level with the voters. they need to get the information to them but our idea was to put, on major issue because there is no trust in congress, because there is no consented of governed if politicians propose changing social security or medicare or raising taxes, that they should do their best effort and submit it to a vote of the people. and try to win approval for it. >> host: submit the idea --. >> guest: submit the legislation. >> host: the legislation in, and in sense that legislation could be shorter. that might be good. >> guest: might be less special surprises for people in nebraska and other places. >> host: we're also getting close to our conclusion. can you tell us what you think is going to happen in

the election? >> guest: 55 seats in the house. eight or nine in the senate. republican route. >> guest: i agree with those numbers. i also say there is a string of governorships in the midwest that are going to shift from democrats to republicans because white working class voters voted for hillary clinton over barack obama are now getting ready to vote with republicans. >> with those republican gains will there be a change in the tax law or health care law? >> guest: the house republicans will repeal the health care law. not because they want to but because they're too afraid not to. and then it will go to the senate and there will be all kind of political maneuvering to try and avoid looking like you're supporting the status quo. but it will billion a campaign issue in 2012. >> guest: on the tax law, goodness gracious, who knows what will happen. obama seems absolutely intent on raising rates on the incomes of 200,000 for an individual, 250 for

families. the republicans will be intransigent against that and goodness gracious, i fear for our fiscal health if we have the kind of cataclysmic conflict that i feel will result from that battle. >> host: the battle will be a negative? >> guest: i think it will be a huge negative for the country because i don't think there will be agreement. >> host: very exciting days ahead. >> guest: absolutely. >> host: i'm going to try, "mad as hell", new book, very kindly right before our important election. our guests are scott rasmussen, douglas shown. >> guest: thank you. very good interview. that people are now starting >> what do you think about

hip-hop now?ik >> it is off to new lows. the inspiration for this book, i started thinking about the ideas -- >> sunk to new lows you[l said. >> i do. i started writing this book,rt i wrote the op-ed in 2007 and i believe that the dominant artists at time, not the soul artists butop artists that were really driving the media coverage of the genre and were really setting dominant culture were soulja boy. if you compare that to the so-called gangsta rappers ofl early '90s. jay-z and biggie, that is such a decline in artistico- quality even alone the festage. >> you're cool with biggie? >> i had a problems with biggie but i think he had a lot more complexity than youl see now. i'm kind of interested ine watching a guy like drak.

but i don't one artist guides an entire culture. >> so you say it sunk to new lows. explain to me why you feel that way. these are street poets, okay. why do you feel that they have sunk to new lows if they are expressing their reality? >> well, it is debatable if they're expressing their reality. d a lot of them are simply propagating some of the worst stereotypes about black people that everng existed. [applause]op >> but if that's theirve reality, should they be silenced? >> it is not many of their realities. some of them do have pretty gritty realities. >> there has been a moviehe about biggie and we canma clearly see that he rapped about his reality in the streets. >> no. biggie was actually a guy who observed some other people's realities more than b he rapped about his own. i have lived in the fort green area of brooklyn for a

few years.e the part of clinton hillth biggie comes from is quite nice compared to the partsth of rural south where, much nicer than what james baldwin grew up in. nicer than what ralph ellison grew up and far moreot affluent. >> the guy was a druguc dealer. are we going to dispute that. >> he made choices. i grew up in the suburbsew around guys who chose to deal drugs because it was very cool. >> so -- >> his mother was a school teacher. he didn't to deal drugs to feed himself.ri >> that was his choice. >> it was exactly. >> let me ask you what is good hip-hop to you? >> well, i want to make, i want to be very clear about this my book is not about music. it is not a critique of the artistic merit of hip hop which i don't dispute. a >> let me repeat your title. losing my cool. how a father's love and 15,000 books beat hip-hop culture. >> it is about a system of values that the music doesn't create but it

provides a soundtrack to and echo chamber, it magnifies off 10:00 and glorifies and romanticizes these things. c but i'm not, a lot of oldernd black critics of hip-hop have at problem with hip-hop on musical level and find it inferior to jazz and other forms of black music. b that is not my argumenta whatsoever.le i'm trying to attack ideasmu and cultural values and critique them and talk about what i really see as the secular religion of hip-hop, which it is a way of living. even a way of reaching for a cup of water.qu a way of greeting some oneee on the street. t a way of dismissing certainay ideas as not real. i'm not talking aboutf whether an artist like and you draw 3,000 has ability because clearly he does. i wouldn't, music i wouldn'tar need to critique the culture00 if it the music was trash because one of the reasons the culture is powerful and seductive because the music, the culture is aestheticly pleasing in a lot of ways.

>> but that is the history of african-american music in a sense.du >> well, not really. if you listen to love supreme, john colter there is no similarity between that and something like t blueprint two, you know? >> right. [applause] and i'm a john coltrane fan. >> me too.r >> i am. i am. so i want to go back to my question, which i want you to answer directly. what would be good hip-hop? >> well, i can list, we could spend the rest of the panel with me listing. >> we'll not spend the rest of the panel. what would be good hip-hop since -- >> good hip-hop music isf reasonable doubt by jay-z. ready to die by biggie malls. is the content and message involved in some of that i great music, poison? yes. it is. if you try to live your life the way jay-z instructs you

too it will end disasterously for i. you will not, you will notiv fly in a private jet most likely. [laughter] >> to watch this program in its entirety go to booktv.org. simply type the title or the author's name at the top left of the screen and click search. "booktv" is on twitter. follow us for a regular updates on our programing and news on nonfiction books and authors. twitter.com/"booktv". >> we're here at the "national press club" with diane reams, npr host and honorary chairwoman of the press club book and author nights. she is promoting her new book, "life with maxcy". can you tell us what the book is about?

>> maxie is a little long hair chihuahua who came into our home seven and a half years ago when we had a big home with a a big garden and then he had to move to a condo. it is all about life with maxie and that move and the impact he has had on our lives. he is such a special dog. >> what are some of the changes that maxie had to become accustomed to? >> for one thing, he wouldn't walk, he wouldn't walk on a leash. so i had to push him in a stroller before we left the house. he was king pasha, you know? and i was the one getting all the exercise, but since we've moved into the condo, he finally learned to walk. he has become friendly. he used to nip at people.

and now, he is the friendliest dog in the world. i could have brought him here tonight and he would have gone up to everybody and allowed them to pet him. >> what inspired you to write about maxie? >> you know, i was speaking out in salt lake city, utah, and the publisher heard me speak about maxie and two weeks later he sent me a letter asking me to write a book. what can i say? so i wrote the book and they assigned a photographer and we took thousands of photographs and there we are. >> colleen mayer, american history professor of mit presents a history of the ratification of the u.s. constitution. she recalls the year long

debates that took place around the country following the constitutional convention as the newly produced document was poured over by the citizenry. she discusses the book at national archives in washington d.c. the program is just over one hour. . . and i cheer you on. i am delighted to be here to

speak about ratification the book. i have gone around quite a bit in previous years talking about ratification, a work in progress. and to have it finally in book form is a tremendous relief. you understand that after i tell you that the contract they signed with shaman and sister back in the late 1990s committed me to produce a manuscript in 2004. you may have noticed it is not 2004. in fact, over the years were a gift talk coming out of the worker with dewey mike in 2006, 2008, people would say this sounds very interesting. do you have a deadline on this project? i would say yes, 2004, which got a little attention. it may be useful to start here by asking what took so long. and there is an obvious answer to this, that the project is a

huge one, that involves all 13 states. which i do cover, not in equal depth, but is the story of ratification and in all the states that participated in those debates. and that it is written from a document base for the most part. this could not be described as a synthesis of previous work, since there really wasn't an awful lot of previous work on the conventions. i could probably close this part of my talk with that, but i have too confessed that really isn't the whole truth. i should also confess that when i signed that contract, i had no idea how long this book was going to take because i hadn't thought about it very much. the idea for the book i say with

some regrets mind. they came from simon & schuster who is very interested in american history. he noticed the books were selling for a while and looked around for a topic no one had written on and came up with the ratification of the constitution. he said there is no good narrative history program for general readers for a night of added for scholars or journalist either. a couple attempts that didn't quite work. so when i was asked if i would do it, i said yes and 20 seconds wrathfully give or take one or two. and that wasn't exactly time for deep reflection. so the next question is why did i say yes so quickly? again i have a bit of a confession. the first reason is probably a little silly. in 1997, i published american scripture, making the declaration of independence. a notice something very peculiar

that happened afterwards. starting at the don't want to those collecting books people were finished with in the way the library, they would say to me things like, you're the later they wrote the book on the constitution. and they would say your book on the constitution. and at first i would correct them if they actually from the declaration of independence. i assume the i wasn't a great idea. they would basically roll their eyes at another academic peasant. making distinctions where none need to be made. so i would say quick to say hey that's a good idea? i think i have in the back of my mind an idea that it could become the lady who wrote the book on the constitution for the lady who wrote the book on the declaration of independence and i wouldn't have to watch them roll their eyes anymore when i corrected them. second, the idea of writing a

narrative is very appealing. historians are really trained to write narratives. we make arguments. i became -- and i was anxious to try the genre. i think your eye was informed by two masters of that chandra, david mccullough and barbara taught men. they had read american scripture anything she liked it. but when i met him he said yes of course i don't do anything like that. i tell stories. i said i thought i told stories in american scripture. and here was an opportunity to dedicate my skills entirely to telling the story, a rather complicated one, but hey, a story. and then i remember i heard harbert tuchman talked decades ago when i was still a graduate student. i had one line of hers really stuck in my mind.

she said it was possible to build tension in telling a story, even if you're readers new hope it came out a few of them looked carefully never to mention bl, or even to allude to it until you came to it at the proper place in your narrative. i thought i wanted to test that. nobody said anybody cannot know the constitution was ratified. can i build up tension in telling the story of the narrative if i follow barbara taught in schools. when i describe to somebody what they wanted to try to do, i recall maybe 10 years ago, you plan to write a thriller on the constitution? it seemed so improbable. when people now say to me and asked me if you've written a

book, what is about? i say from the constitution. and they say maybe i'll read the next tunneling on both. i have a better answer now. this is only after some of the reviews came out. you know, michael mcconnell and "the wall street journal" said it was a gripping story. brooke keizer in "the new york times" said now i have my answer. they fit with your book about? i said i wrote a thriller on the constitution. you can make your own judgment on that, but at least they don't roll their eyes. of course the subject was important. andersen is in a hole in the story of american history is identified, that the standing invitation for the likes of people like me to jump right in and get to work. i had also heard james madison's statement to congress in 1796, that if you wanted to know the

meaning of the constitution beyond this word, the place to go was not the federal convention, which only proposed it, but the state ratifying conventions, where the voices but treat people breathe life into what was on the debt proposal previously. i later came -- i don't say much about the significance of that in the book. i came to understand i am an historian, not a lawyer. i leave it to others to tease out whatever legal implications. i know it was important and of audiences beyond a handful of historians and that was certainly an enticement. finally i knew how much you think robert bender did not, but there is this massive project coming out of the meeting and the state historical society of, the documentary history of the

ratification of the constitution. there are today 21 volumes in print. most of them focus on pulling together the documents of ratification in different states, in individual states i should say. for some states, there aren't very many records, but for some they are very rich. and i would say the project still has five states to go, that it has published anything on. but they have covered the major states. there is one volume on pennsylvania, three on virginia, for a massachusetts and five on new york, the last of which came out only less here. i literally could not have told the story of ratification in new york without a work of the documentary history of the ratification of the convention.

so you know, i couldn't have written in 2004. i had no idea, but this literally the earliest time i think i could have completed the book in the form that it would live. now, if you want to understand the importance of the documentary history of the ratification of the constitution, i think it's useful to ask another question. that is why arthur shoves the book on the federal convention. and i wrote nothing. most historians wanting to try their hand at telling the story of the ratification of the constitution. and you start with, they are very different event. the federal convention was one event at one place, of course philadelphia was one set of delicate and it happened over a four-month period between may and september 1787. the ratified process is

tremendously different. it occurs in 13 states in some states have more than one convention. there were maybe 1000 different delicate and it happens the core that i talk about with most intensity was roughly a year as wholesale about the reader. but if you wait till the last of the original 13 join the union, that is rhode island, two and half years. one other consideration here, which i think is anything but insignificant, that the records of the federal convention were published in a professional form in 1911, edited by max aranda. the first two delegates and volumes. there are four altogether, five published in 1987 for the first two volumes are on the debates in the federal convention.

and they pull together the official journal. william jackson kept it so carelessly and i've come to think of them as robert scoundrel, of madison's notes which are magnificent. and then collated them, with notes taken much more partial to by other members of the convention, often for their own preference. they didn't i think of the same mission of preserving these days for prosperity, but they put them together, collated them so for any one day you can prepare the accounts that went on. now, editing is not just copying manuscripts and printing them. take what fran have to do with's notes. madison apparently changed his

manuscript notes circa 1921 after the official journal have been published. he assumes a journalist authoritative. it was not. so in some ways he thought he was thrown, he'd fix it. and often where the wind was from accuracy to error. what do you do with this? he had to look at the manuscript and figure out where madison made changes in 1921 broccoli. fortunately as he tells us, it wasn't so hard to do because the inca medicine used in 1921 faded in a different way than that and she accused in the 1780s. so he could pull this up for it and then if you look at this version, they have little devices by which a scholar or a very interested educated reader could look and see which version of the document was written. look, this is a treasure trove

for historians and torturous. it's an easy, regular authoritative reference on the documents of the federal convention. what about the state ratifying convention? welcome in 1987, james hudson, who is the chief of the manuscript division at the library of congress published an economical and pointed out that many states did not even have published versions of the debate and that those that existed were flawed, hopelessly flawed as he would've told us because they're a very biased towards the federalists. the federalists often paid for the publication and found a reason, as he put it, give to the opposition. to a considerable amount, i think pennsylvania was by far the worst. thomas voip published only the

speeches have to federalists, james wilson and thomas became. you'd think they were debating with goes, except for one place, the guy from western pennsylvania, john manley actually interrupted wilson to fill them in on some point that wilson has alluded to so you know at least otherwise you know they purged are the speeches of those who were not in federalists. in fact, they were further. there was an editor and pennsylvania, alexander dallas went on in another way, who published the pennsylvania herald. he took it in his head that he would publish running debates, were basically almost transcripts of what was said in the convention. these newspapers were very small. they weren't like "the new york times," sometimes four pages to

tell the convention, so it took a lot of time and he skipped around the little bit. he was still publishing these after the convention had adjourned. and unfortunately, some of the speeches by what the federalists called anti-federalist seem to be a little too persuasive, so the federalists canceled their prescriptions. dallas was fired and that was that. what this means is i had to piece together what critics of the constitution said in the late part of the pennsylvania convention from the nose of those who took notes so they could refute them. it's not ideal, not ideal at all. the federalists were trying to, you know, rewrite history. i think i was the last of the consideration they were trying to win a very hard fight. and we have to remember that.

what they did was not -- done in the course of combat. other states weren't that bad, but i do recall the notes on the massachusetts convention with no takers said the following. just like every other day, the anti-federalist made their points and they said i just can't take all this down. when you've been a notetaker like that, you have to wonder how much you can rely on it. but some people were very good. i mean, david robertson took notes on the virginia convention. he produced a 600 each book on the debates in the virginia convention in the summer of 1788. and i think robertson did pretty well. later, john marshall, the future chief justice was a delegate at that convention looked back and said robert van did a pretty good job with those delicate

bouquet while organized presentations and spoke very articulately. he had a big problem. the convention wouldn't give him any preferred seating. and the federal convention, madison just went and took notes in the front row so he was between the delegates in washington and he could hear everything i suppose. and some people gave him copies of their speeches. poor robertson was up in a gallery with people shuffling in and out. it was very hot in the summer of 1788 in richmond, virginia and he couldn't hear everything. marshall said he allowed the trouble with people like alanis james madison who had a very weak speaking voice. he added -- marshall added that nobody could have captured the torrid words from patrick henry, although i have to say he did

rather well. if you read his accounts, i think you can sense both the power of henry's oratory and it's in cohesion. not a good track, a wonderful trip. if it wasn't for his heroic effort, the marvelous story, the moving story of the heroic meeting of nine in the summer of 1780 would be totally lost to us. we know also how well we did that one day she did go there. ecc is your precious newspaper published that day. only by what robertson recorded later could you somehow be back because people alluded to what was said on that report when he was absent. but his records are good enough

i can reconstruct some things about what was said on the day he wasn't there. god bless the man. okay, but now factor in the documentary history of the ratification of the constitution. hudson said that these books -- his point was quite simple. but if you want to recover the original meaning of the constitution and the debate of the state ratifying conventions, forget it was hopeless. the documents would not sustain it. now you've got the editors of the history of the ratification, the constitution, which sent teams of editors and tuesday. they went to one archive after another. they vacuumed all kinds of basically pulled out copies of anything that referred to the ratification of the cons to tuition. and they published with regard to the conventions, not just the journals, which are often interesting. they're probably better kept

than jackson on the federal convention in many cases. the only tell you motions when they need you came. it sort of the bare-bones business at a convention. and guide you can get them online now. and i did that. but sometimes they wanted to see the whole thing. all right, the journals -- the published debate, not that this kind of like for him, but then they collated those with newspaper accounts of the debate and letters that were sent out by delegates. now come you don't have those by and large, certainly not in the same volume for the federal convention because they would see. the ratifying conventions were not secret. they were reporters there covering them and individual delegates were so glad they were sending them back home, telling them what was going on in the convention.

and better yet off the floor. now let it be said the politics of the federal convention is very different than that of the ratifying convention, but glory hallelujah. was it wonderful to give some account of what these caucuses were doing, why they were doing what they were doing on the floor of the convention. it allowed a much fuller account of what was going on and indeed it's impossible to understand what happened at the end of the new york convention. moreover, the editors focus was not just a convention. they wanted to document and didn't fax.demint a broad based public debate. they give this document to tell us about arguments in whole. like one, i guess my all-time favorite comic better for it, names of all places, a rather energetic debate over the cons

duchenne in which women were full participant. indeed, one of them provoked the whole argument. women were supposed to be interested in politics. yeah, we know better. how could they not? this was the issue of the year. americans regardless of gender understood their future was going to depend on whatever decision was drawn. wilco went to the towns. they collected the records for example in towns in massachusetts and connecticut. and what they did about the constitution. these were not pro forma. there was one town in western massachusetts that had, if you can believe this, for informational meetings before they came to see with a thought and what did they think? they also went into the street and told us about the wonderful

part fracas. i like fracas. in albany, new york. it started when a group called themselves that in upstate new york, celebrated the fourth of july in 1788 by burning a copy of the constitution ceremoniously. i mean, after all it was appropriate for every could could measure a day through an genius ratification that provoked some rudderless, some anti-federalist counterattacks and the fabulous trash their favorite drinking place. now this is a rough place. what these documents do in other words, they tell us much more about conventions. they tell us about the broad public debates. they give us a picture of america in 1787 and 1788.

look, my job -- what was my job? my job was to pull a story of these documents, to find a way of organizing it. and that was something of a challenge. i mean, how can you tell a clear narrative about an event that happens in 13 different places, sometimes simultaneously. my solution was to emphasize for a major state full of the others in their appropriate place in the chronology. but this was challenging and there certainly were times where i had the sense that all of the skills i had accumulated over, you know, several decades as a historian will be mobilized in telling this story. but i will also tell you i had more fun writing this but in any other book i've ever written.

look, the ground treiber of collecting the information, that is going into the archives, pulling out the documents, seeing how you could bring at a time, can you hold it for tomorrow, typing them up, i didn't have to do that for most states. it had been done for me. all i have to do is to read these to figure out, you know, try to figure out what was going on in the editors give me some help now and then i meant to write it up. and you know, i think this is where my strong card came in. by the providence of god i have one word skill. it is rooted in historical documents. i've always been able to see more documents and other people can do. you know, it's weird. i think ulysses scratchpad a memory of topography that was very useful in the civil war. how useful is that now?

vesco goes, imagine how i manage to make my living doing this. and i love it and i could to what i loved. that's why i think i such fun writing this book, which i thought was such a wonderful story to tell. now, i had five other states to do of course that hadn't been covered. i actually found that not to be such a problem. a lot of the documents were in harvard's library, where i work. and what i really got into trouble at battelle, another creep in if it is been in this business for many decades is you get to know who to ask questions. i'll give you my favorite example. i realize that hampshire was awfully important and i didn't have dhr see volumes on it. so i started reading and i came

across a reference to a folder at the state archives of her in concord. and i wonder -- i didn't know what it was. was it just bare-bones delegate credentials? you know, the pontiff whatever points so-and-so or did it include the instruction of talents? did you tell something about their proceedings as they debated the constitution? i called the archivist was a i called the archivist was a very nice man who pulled a full drought, but he seemed rather puzzled by it. i said thank you very much. and i remembered him and made jere daniel, who was just ahead of me at the harvard graduate school historian who meant it tartness. jerry would've for that folder. maybe jerry does e-mail. so i e-mailed him and said jerry, this folder. is it worth the drive to

conquer? remember me, jerry, from way back? and he answered quickly, i'm going to oregon, but i'll be back in a few days. hold tight, i'm going to send you the material to answer your questions. what he said they were copies of articles he had written. look, jerry not only read the folder in concord, he'd gone to all these towns. he knew who lived next to him and how that affected the way the town voted. he had the most intimate knowledge of the politics of new hampshire on ratification that was imaginable. and some of these articles i had to look for. they were new hampshire history. i suppose i'd gotten around to it. bush is so grateful to them. and then he answered my questions. he corrected what i wrote. why would he do this? he was anxious to have his very specialized work that into the general narratives. i mean, the extent to which

people came forward to helping still just caused me. richard loeffler, a retired editor of the documentary history of the constitution agreed to read the whole manuscript. well, i have friends who read price of it. i didn't take take i could give them this whole big boat. somebody i know wrote on massachusetts, which agreed the massachusetts chapters? you know, the way historians read other people's work is the different than the late way editors three people spoke. who's the flip here, could document. type on page 10. it got the name of the town were on 15 and you might rethink what you say and 23, and of consultation. loeffler went through this line for line. it took me a while to realize he'd even gone through the nose. and he knew the documentary records so well. at one point he said he put it

john jay yes, you're right. the book you got a quotation from does say what you say, supernode isn't wrong, but that's not what jay said. go to the j. papers online, on the columbia library site. i mean, who gave this information? ytd do it? who said this to be a landmark book that he wanted to be as accurate as possible. you get my point. i put the better part of a decade into this book. of course i was teaching a bit at that time, only about two years was i able to work out the full time. but that's a fraction of what this book took. how much time to those editors put in? i think a century would be modest. many are my age and they spent their whole lives doing it. they are retiring now. a century seems modest enough. then, factor in all the time

jere daniel put in. look, my name is on the title page. ten years is however a fraction of what this book to. it is properly understood a cooperative enterprise. it is built firmly on the labor of others. okay, so well. what did i learn? what is now? a couple of things. first of all i redefined the terms in which the story is told. it's always been told it's a conflict of federalist and anti-federalist. and i started writing that. while sometimes and the good of a slow learner, but a time i got to the tape, massachusetts and that the documents i said hey, the only people using the term anti-federalist are fabulous. what's going on here? and eventually i decided that i

would not use the term anti-federalist unless it appeared in quotations. and they were almost always written by federalist, that is people who supported ratification of the constitution as written. or if the so designated willingly accepted the term. and that pretty much defines me to a group in the upper hudson valley is new york, so-called coach anti-federalist or as i call them critics of the constitution and they prefer to call themselves republicans and i honor that. once i got away from the federalist and anti-federalist, and love followed from that. i mean first of all, to use those terms suggest there are parties involved. that brings a lot of baggage. we know how parties work. well, if there were parties, maybe you don't know how it

worked. also, it spurs other -- it inspires other dichotomy. once i'd missed before the constitution, one must be against it. that also turned out to be wrong. in fact, once i got away from the terms, i was able to make a feint, and hope and pray far more than two positions on the constitution that in fact probably a majority of americans accepted the constitution as better than the confederation and worthy of being a basis for the new government, but a substantial party said look, as written, it just isn't going to work. like my guys in massachusetts. they were ambiguous phrases and it's missing some things that really have to have been. it needs to be amended before it goes into effect. the other side said let's see if the problems really happened and

then we can amend it using the procedure in article v. the fight was over amendment. then i think we can start to understand why eventually it was, despite substantial criticism, ratifying. however, the heart of my story is in the convention and sells. it isn't political analysis. just wonderful stories. i take such delight in them. i hope i can share with you. you have to understand that these were the exciting events of the time. what did she do for amusement? you went to church. you know, all the excitement here was that orators with the rock stars of the day. and the conventions brought together all the great political and some clerical workers of their day. people crowded in. they wanted to hear these

debates, one of the big challenges. how could they find a hole big enough not only for the convention, but for all the people that wanted to listen to the debates. now, the federal convention just closed the door and made secret. could she do that for conventions that were making a decision -- an important decision in the name of we the people. of course not. so you can say sorry buddy, we're locking the door. people should be able to listen to this and they wanted to accommodate them. so there was all the exciting and intensity of it. i hope this comes through in the book. it requires our imagination sometimes. although the documents give us a tremendous amount of information about them. and as i looked at the conventions as a whole, i thought there was something of a bind of development. that is to say, one thing of looking at this is the

federalist, whatever else you think about learn from their mistakes and they really did make mistakes. pennsylvania, they went in with a two thirds majority -- two to one majority. they understand this because the divisions in pennsylvania roughly collated with divisions in state politics. not perfectly, but pretty closely. they knew that the majority of them they just rode roughshod over the opposition. and in fact, they treated them so poorly that in the end the minority refuse to accept the decision of the convention. they said it did not speak for the majority of people in pennsylvania and they did not accept. there was chaos, even semiarid in the town of carlisle. okay, this was not good. a lot of people got very suspicious. as the story was published beside hey, what are they trying

to put over on this? you wouldn't like this if this really was a constitution you could really consider openly. they don't seem to trust open debate. pennsylvania really made ratifications much less likely to happen. the federalist shot themselves in the feet, but they learned. you can see it in washington, benjamin lincoln and massachusetts. basically they learned was that it wasn't enough to win. you had to have a victory that was worth having. that is a victory in which the minority didn't go away mad. and you can see them doing that massachusetts. massachusetts had no idea how the convention was going to divide. but they treated the opposition with constant courtesy, even witness who can tell from the

private letters, they despised the supporters of shays rebellion. on the floor of the convention, they listen to them. they answer them seriously. as a result, you'll get one of the best and most probing and in some ways most innovative debates on the constitution in massachusetts. i also -- and when that didn't work they came up with another strategy. i mean, they still won't share. the federalist that massachusetts would have a conversation, not a debate. what's the difference? the federalist that massachusetts would have a conversation, not a debate. what's the difference? if you have a conversation you don't take those. they didn't want to take a vote until they knew they would win. interesting. all these debates didn't seem to be converting many people so they came up with another strategy. they would suggest that the convention adopts a constitution without any condition, but recommend the series of recommendations once it was put

into effect. it wasn't going to work unless they could get the right people in mind. the person they needed was john hancock, the very popular governor of massachusetts. hancock was a boston delegates and indeed the convention has selected him as president, but he was home in his magnificent house with an attack of gout. rufus king, the federalist said he would get better soon enough when he understand how it's going to decide. in other words, he found was a political disease. in any case, what we can see from the document of these wonderful collections that have brought together, the deal they put together, the adversary they sent to hancock, the way they played to his pride and his political smart. and how he responded on the wonderful seat of what hancock arrived. the guy apparently couldn't

react. you can imagine the excitement. people would leave their seats when hancock came. during the noon hour, they had a long new node or for what we call lynch. they probably had a big meal that if they were free to lose their seats. i think i like massachusetts, to because there's an account of the delegated name, dahmer school. there is nothing that gives you a better sense of change over time and to give step an account of what it took to come in 1787. there were, bridges, snowstorms. you know, we can do this in a couple hours now.

it took him six days. i love doing that, but then there was the bow. the vote was in the federal church. there were people that had church. there were people that had galleries that can accommodate people appeared over 364 delegates who appeared on the floor of the church. and then there seemed to be people stuffed into every note and cranny. the so-called seller was filled. i think it was an upper floor. even a loft was stuffed with people. when the vote came, the place was silent, except for -- let the redo my account. the question was put at 4:00 when the convention approved for the ratification of the constitution and nine recommended amendment. the names of the delegates were called out one by one, according to the counties and towns they

represented. and they answered with a or a nay. it must've gone at a fast clip. they submitted it was finished by five s. commercial reported. we can only imagine christopher gore and other practice gorky first checking the vote against their list of those they expected to vote for or against. meanwhile, sulla noted the crowded hall fell into a deep quiet, except for the litany of names and hope. you might've heard a copper phone on the gallery floor, william richard member. there was such a profound silence. to do so with complete, 187 delegates had voted for ratification and 168 against. nine delegates were absent. manst. nine delegates were absent.

massachusetts had ratified the constitution with the majority of only nine team under 350 votes. soon palazzolo for boston's began to rain and the people poured into the streets, shouting what was for them a glorious tree. virginia. virginia is different. and massachusetts, on the people who practice eloquence, educated famous orators prefer the constitution. the other side were farmers and mill owners. it was a little lopsided. it was a little lopsided. virginia was also very close. they didn't know what was going to go. it all seem to turn on 14 votes from kentucky, which was still part of virginia. and kentucky didn't seem very happy about the constitution. i really think james madison's heart was in his mouth through the whole episode.

and indeed, roughly divided, if you take oratorical strang, probably the opposition had the edge because they had patrick henry. patrick henry was a mac as an orator. jefferson, who really hated him, the greatest orator of all time. not to get a compliment by someone hated him as much as jefferson did, gives it special credence. once the 1780s, jefferson and madison were in a fight with henry on the other side. jefferson said to madison, we have to give out. the only thing we can do is earnestly pray for his early death. [laughter] henry hijacked the virginia convention. that is it was supposed to be going to the constitution line by line with no such luck. he said -- he raised big issues that made them debate them.

and then there was his thunderstorm speech. the honorable gentleman, james madison, tells you of important lessons, which he imagined were resold to offer mankind of the adoption of the system henry told the delegates and beginning what might have been the high point of his rhetorical performance at the convention. he saw instead the awful event i.d. of the dangers with which it is part. i see it. i feel it. he could even see beams of a higher order, anxious concerning our decision. when he looked beyond the rise and vines humanized, at the final consummation of all things human. and those intelligent beings, which inhabit the imperial mountain, reviewing -- this is what they do and have them. reviewing the political decisions of revolutions, which in the progress of time will happen in america and the

consequent happiness or misery of mankind he understood how much wood would depend on what we now decide. at that point, a violent storm shook the hall and forced henry to stop. it was at the beans of a higher order in their mansions screamed out to support henry. look, i couldn't make this stuff up. i could not imagine it's enough. it's a wonderful story. and that's why the conventions are the heart of my boat. the boat goes roughly from -- the heart of the book goes from september 17, 1787, when the federal convention adjourned to 1788, when the confederation congress declared the constitution ratified and made arrangements for the first federal elections. they were still two states out of the union that for all

practical purposes i thought that is the ratification controversy. there is a prologue, which looks at the background of the convention, tries to describe what all this have to happen through washington's eyes. there is an epilogue, which talks about what happened to the amendments in the first federal congress and manages to get north carolina and rhode island back to the union. but you know i couldn't stop. that's what i signed up to do. i had sat in the hall with these guys. and i came to like some of them. you know, we know what happened to washington and the boom boom in 1804 to hamilton. those weren't really what i was curious about. i was curious about some of the unknowns, the local politicians who performed so brilliantly. what happened to them? some of them overly heroic.

for many this was the high point of the political career. a poster called in memoriam, that tells you what happened to some of these. and to close, and i will close here is that close the book, but the story of one delegate from western pennsylvania, who is really badgered by the federalists and the pennsylvania ratifying convention, but two was quite impressive. actually, he bested, he eats so to speak, prove drunk the chief of the supreme court and james wilson, the leading lawyer on an issue with the history of jury trial. so william finley turns out he had it long and distinguished career in congress after ratification of the cost of tuition and was known there as the venerable family. but finley in 1796 looked back over the ratifying convention

and talk a little bit about how his thinking had changed. he referred to the pennsylvania ratifying convention with considerable understatement as one where some circumstances of irritation were unfriendly to crow discussion. the later he decided, you know, maybe the massachusetts solution of ratifying and recommending amendments made a lot of sense, that we needed to improve the federal government quickly. and to call another federal convention, better to avoid it. he even after his positions and decided nonoffice objections to the constitution square, as he put it, well-founded. after the congress recommended in states ratified some of the amendments he wanted, he became confident that additional amendments could be enacted when they became necessary. and they had, like so many

onetime critics of the constitution, william finley embraced the government as my own and my children's inheritance. he knew the constitution had to be fixed and there he had plenty of friends. perfection was not to be as the work of mortal men. and his mature judgment, the comp petition was however not just good or maybe good enough. we came to believe he was capable of being well at ministered and on the whole, the best government in the world. and so, i want to close and say this was a cooperative enterprise. not only with living people, but i'm so grat enterprise. not only with living people, but i'm so grateful to william finley for giving me a way to end my book so well. thank you.

[applause] i feel i've talked too long, but we do have questions. [inaudible] >> hello. >> hello. >> so just to clarify the ratification is purely aye or -- yes or no. how long was it before the bill of rights was basically kind of accepted by gaby thickset date, but we all want certain changes? >> what happened was started with the united states, would ratifying recommend amendments. astor massachusetts, every state that nearly did that. now, don't assume that what they recommended was the states have ratified and participated in the

first congress. only virginia asset to be added to the constitution. but most people wanted was an improvement on representation and some restriction on federal taxing powers because they thought, well, this was the major right -- issue of the american revolution. no taxation without representation. and they say the representation in congress wasn't adequate for certain taxes. that was the big issue. i'm not frightened of the federalists madison. what we got, that is the amendments to madison's proposed were an effort to perry. and i think he believed in what he was doing, but he was also played a very interesting political gain. the amendments that were -- madison wanted to change the body of the comp to duchenne.

we all know that i trust. his proposals in the first federal con this. they got changed into a list to be pasted that again because roger sherman of connecticut said you couldn't change the body of the constitution. the people have ratified it. moreover, you had all the signatures, you know. and if he changed it, you would look like what they agreed to was to change documents which would be great using. we got the list at the end, like the afterthoughts they were and nobody called them a bill of rights that i can find between september 1789 and february 1792, when jefferson announced that they had been ratified. the time of the 12 proposed have been ratified. this is a whole another subject. it seems to be hard to stop here. i am what you call a born-again

historian. >> use the phrase original meanings during your lecture. are you suggesting that there was a consensus finally among the state conventions as to the various terms? >> i think you will find points where there is an agreement or at least a public agreement. i do not endorse the idea. i don't say anything about what the meeting of this for a contemporary interpretation of the constitution is. they say i'm not a lawyer. i'll leave to let lawyers fight it over, but at least they have great guide to the debates, which reminds me. you must be good reading public sphere, who are here. i have footnotes or endnotes rather. little numbers in the text. this is a bit controversial thing, right? a lot of readers don't like them. i could never understand why. but if you don't like them, just think of some poor lawyer trying to put together a brief who

wants to know where some quotation comes from and we can say for several hours of work by having a little number there. i mean, if you don't like numbers in the text, i urge you to overlook it, like other nonthreatening things like music and elevators. >> first of all i'd like to congratulate the taxation without representation has been a major fact your are so many of the state ratification. and i hope someday the district of columbia get some justice and not batter. but that wasn't my question. my question was, did any of the federalists -- excuse me, the feds themselves -- >> recalled themselves. >> i'm talking about congressional people. at this outside agitators.

in other words, did not offend go to new york or pennsylvania or did everybody realize that we passed only have local people speaking? >> no outsiders spoken these conventions. only elected delegates. there was one controversy in massachusetts. average kerry, would've been a delegate to the convention refused to sign a 10 day period and some people of like mind wanted them to speak. just to get some information, a big fight over this. finally he went homght over thi. finally he went home. no, no, only locals. it is the people of the state were making this decision. the people in the galleries were watching what was going on. governor morris of pennsylvania went to the virginia convention. not all the founding fathers had a sense of humor as governor

morris day. and he wrote this just delightful poetic jingo about what it happened in the virginia convention. of course they quoted, to love it. i loved it. [inaudible] >> my apologies. [applause] >> pauline maier will be put to these ghassan and death life from new into 3:00 p.m. eastern. ..

>> the event hosted by the american enterprise institute in washington, d.c., is 90 minutes. >> good morning, everybody. i'm president of the american enterprise institute. i'm delighted to welcome all of you to this point session entitled how to reclaim american prosperity featuring glenn hubbard and a distinguished panel. the free enterprise movement, our culture of free enterprise in the united states has been under relatively sustained attack. most people would agree and the proponents of free enterprise have taken on the challenge of

this over the past couple of years with great vigor. the free enterprise movement has made remarkable gains making a personal case for free enterprise and point out the manifest inadequacies of our foreign public policies. when the future free enterprise advocates need of a full set of policies, however. they need to say what we need to do as opposed to what we need to stop doing. we need to address the threats, the realistic threats and a fair and honest way facing our nation and set america free as a nation of entrepreneurs. we have to find a practical way to do this. glenn hubbard who is our featured speaker today at his co-author have what they believe are precisely this set of policies for america. they detailed them in a brand-new book, that some of you have seen and titled "seeds of destruction: why the path to economic ruin runs through washington, and how to reclaim american properity." which was published last month.

glenn hubbard is not a stranger to aei audiences. ease the dean of the columbia business school, a former chairman of the council of economic advisers to the present. is a prolific author and speaker, public intellectual, and he's a member of aei's council of academic advisers. he's here quite a lot and we are delighted. we are joined today after presentation of his new work by a panel that you see before you here today that features ramesh ponnuru from the "national review," carment reinhart from the university of maryland, and the panel will be moderated by our very own head of economic policy studies, kevin hassett. so please join me in what coming glenn hubbard. [applause] >> thanks very much for that kind introduction. and thanks to a hale and hearty audience.

the book "seeds of destruction" i wrote with peter was a classic of mine in graduate school. is a wonderful christmas present. so let me just promote it right here. a great stocking stuffer. when peter and i sat down to write this book, it was about a search for both ideas and common ground. peter is democrat. i am not. and what we did was try to search for ideas that were both intellectually important to the two of us, but also had a chance of happening. the first interview i gave when i worked at the treasury department in the early 1990s was to david wessel, who then was with "the wall street journal." he asked me about the timeframe for completion of the corporate tax integration study, the treasury was been doing. and i had been handed the economic stewardship of. and i said i think this

interview is 1991. i said i think it will be ready when my son goes to college. "the wall street journal" reported that interview and noted that my son was then nine months old. i will note that my son is now in college and we are not always debate whether or not to extend dividend tax cuts. the policy moved a little faster than i thought. we clearly in this book are about policy that is more than just waiting for a generation. in setting the stage of the book, just make a couple of observations and then maybe a moment on what the book is about. the first observation is that amity shlaes is right. amity is right about many things. she was very kind to write the forward to the book, and she began with an the observation that the 1950s are very interesting. republicans want to live there, democrats want to work there. and i think what amity meant by

that observation in the sense that she was right come is that the 1950s in popular imagination are a kind of housing in time for many conservatives who have memory of better growth for much of that decade. for all of us i think there is a memory of the shared prosperity of that growth. and the important sense in which amity is right in the policy mix we will talk about today trying to advocate, is what set of policies both give us good economic growth and broadly shared economic growth. so amity shlaes was right. manatee khrushchev was wrong. like amity be right about many things, nikita khrushchev was wrong about many things that you have in mind something particular. one of the famous kitchen cabinet debates between vice president nixon and khrushchev

was over what indicator was the son of prosperity in an economy and how do you fight that out. and to premier khrushchev, the answer was obvious, and it was rocket thrust with a symbol of soviet power and his version of soviet growth. vice president nixon, after some hemming and hawing, defined color television as is indicated. when they speak to young people i remind them that in those days, this debate happened the year i was born, it was in a long, long period ago, and thursday's color television will be like talking about the ipad today. i was at that nixon was in a box somewhere. he was talking about something quite important. the real answer to my khrushchev was wrong, and, frankly, white nixon got wrote in his debate a year later with senator kennedy was that economies that have been innovation and growth wind up with both color television

and rocket thrust. so growth is the answer. the book is not a doomsday book. i know it is very fashionable, and every time i have lunch with pete peterson i am reminded of this fashion to have a root and branch discussion, and there's a little bit of calvinism in my talk with you this morning. but this is not a doomsday book. rather, to take the metaphor of the season, it is like the ghost of christmas future. from a christmas carol, point to things that might be, but don't have to be. peter and i are very much interested in long-term problems, but we will not be offering a kind of liquidation list eat your spinach kind of medicine. now, to find ideas i want to start with something that we have all lived through, and sadly, are still living through, and use it as a microcosm of why we've gone astray with accepted

focus on the short term and inadequate attention to the long-term. so what i want to do is use the financial crisis that had its largest impact, the 2007-2009 period, one which we are clearly still living today as a microcosm. and i want to talk at the risk of oversimplifying about two versions of the financial crisis so as not to editorialize, let me call than simply a and b. now the a story i would describe as mildly victorian because it reminds me of my mother. and my mother always believes that where there was pleasure, pain could not be far behind. and the victorian stories, what we went through was a period of excess and private markets and their irrational exuberance causes excess and bubbles. the damage then happened in the

economy was deepened by the rot in the financial system, poor incentives, lax lending standards, and resulting of loss of wealth of financial institutions of investors, of taxpayers. the cure in the story is, let's get back to normal in the way we get back to normal is a couple of ways. one would be countercyclical policy to prime the pump to stimulate ourselves back to a reasonable trend growth quickly. and the cycle would be to rush for financial safety. we've seen this most recently in, say, the dodd-frank legislation that prizes a move to safety. now, the b explanation is somewhat different. the b explanation says the financial crisis really didn't start in 2007. it actually was the product of

quite a long period of time, of long-term structural imbalances. presently, although not exclusively, in the orientation of the american economy so much toward consumption, so little toward investment. that mirrored, was mirrored by a policy orientation in key emerging parts of the world that played in the mirror role also to their own detriment. at the same time in which this imbalance is occurring in large part causing this imbalance, at least in the united states, where a set of public policies exacerbating the tilt to consumption. we specific about these as i go, but since what talking about the financial crisis as a microcosm, much of this had to do with excessive focus on the housing market to the detriment of talking about other forms of consumption, or more

importantly, investment. story transfixed, like story a, realizes that shocks, whether they were just a bubble in story a with a long-term imbalances in story transfixed. deep and their effects the real economy through financial propagation, in particular the banking crisis, the shadow banking crisis in the united states. but they too are in story b is very different than in story a. it emphasizes structural reforms that would tilt the ship much more toward investment in away from an excessive emphasis on consumption, and they would tackle financial reform to balance to things, a natural concern over safety in the aftermath of what we have been through, but also a healthy concern for vigorous intermediation and growth. now, this idea of the financial

crisis is a microcosm for a metaphor for this tension in what's been going on in u.s. policy between the short-term and the long-term. these are really two themes that i want to talk about. they are the centerpiece, center in the book this morning. the first thing is that we have been through a series of policies sometimes deliberately, more often unwittingly, and paving over long-term problems that exacerbate, in fact, short-term problems. a clear example of this is the housing bubble where, rather than addressing long-term problems in capital accumulation and in sluggish, at least in the past decade, the growth of money wages, we instead resort to cheap credit and financial interventions designed to target growth in the housing market. i'll get back to that.

this example of paper and over the long term to focus on the short-term comes in the tax area where our repeated failure to be serious in talking about tax reform isn't just something that causes academic economists paying. it leads to crazier and crazier short-term policy. i'll come back to this in a couple of minutes. and we are living through that trauma today. another area of financial regulation where our inability or unwillingness, whichever, to tackle really long-term problems of too big to fail, of the housing finance system in the united states have led us to paper over problems in the financial system, each time leading to a different bubble. and then finally, entitlements, where our repeated failure to consider what's wrong with social security and medicare, to programs that play and actually

very viable function in the heart of the american economy, have led us to focus on rounds and rounds of discretionary policy with very little success. and very little success with either political party that has proposed. so the number one that i will argue is we are peeping over the short-term. the number two i will come to several times is about principle over principle, by which i meant when we talk about reform in washington we typically talk about principle spelled p. a l. we are talking about it now. is everything from secretary geithner talking about we need to target a size of a current account deficit to the notion of a particular measures of the budget deficit, primary deficit, the social security program, whatever we're talking about, have to be of a certain size. that discussion often happens with unfortunate inattention to

principle spelled ple, which is what exactly do we want fiscal policy to do, how do we think about saving in the united states? what role do we really want entitlements to play and what role should our tax system play? the consequences, peter and i argue, have been a couple of problems. one in here and now and wanted to scare in the future. in the here and now, if you look at the decade of the 2000s, the first decade of the 21st century, we argued that he growth deficit relative to the growth that we had enjoyed in the prior part of the postwar period probably lead to as many as 10 million foregone jobs. the thrust of the book is not that we need a new stimulus package to bring those jobs back, but that our repeated air to focus on the long-term cost us those jobs.

the bigger issue we argue is not even so much the mistakes we made, but the mistakes we might be making. that is, our now failure to address entitlements, our now failure to address tax policy, financial reform and so on, could actually retard the country's fiscal position and growth position to the point that we can no longer provide the services americans take for granted, by which i mean defense of the country and the free world. other public goods relating to research and education, all of these are paid out by fiscal policy and they growth policy that are off-track. now, i said this is not a doomsday book. nor is it a cookbook. if i had a set of -- a silver bullet i was sort of tell you. there are important levers for growth. i'll mention these and no focus on three or four in the interest of time. on the one hand, look at a list like this and say it's familiar.

but it does have and be refusing to it, all of the things that i will mention and that you see on the slide represents structural factors in growth. if you talk to economists they are the kind of factors you might get some economic historians if they were trying to tell you about the industrial revolution, or if you're trying to tell you about periods of wealth creation and growth, more than sadly, and if you were to talk to current policy practitioners who often think about what it takes to move gdp this year. there are only 10, but inconsistently worthy of mention, of free markets which peter and i have a discussion in the book. free trade, which is much in vogue in discussion, but not really in practice. that benefits of free trade that

we talk about in the book are not so much the ones you hear so often which are provided in consumption, but one gear less often, the importance of free trade in bringing competition and productivity growth to the nation, and as being an important part of a policy pivot for a nation that for too long has run large current account deficit. the third is vibrant entrepreneurship. here we tackle in the book the notion that all entrepreneurship is about creative destruction. indeed, much of the policy fear of entrepreneurs is precisely because the metaphor of creative destruction, destruction scares politicians. we argue in the book that most of what is featured in entrepreneurship in the past half-century or so looks more like what you think of non-destruction creation. through markets, instruments, new ways of doing things with a

different kind of policy emphasis. fourth, we need some city in this country. the notion that we can finance investment centered by turning to the international capital market works at a moment in time, and it we have found out in many moments in time for a long period. algebra, don't even need economics. it tells us it can't work forever. and the u.s. does need to raise saving. but fifth, just as important as raising savings, we need a financial system that works well in translating saving to investment. this has been one area in which the u.s. has excelled in much of the postwar period, despite the problems that we know about from the financial crisis. this is a good news story but it is a story that is imperiled given public policies recent emphasis purely on the consumption aspects of finance and not aspects are into mediations for investment.

innovation is critical. it is not just about labor and capital, but about the speed of innovation. and again, policies and fixation on ever higher marginal tax rates and higher shares of government of gdp put that into. the rest of the factors are intuitive. need to invest in human capital. we have an energy policy that has not blunted the effects of oil price shocks from growth on either the supply side or the demand-side. health care is not just an issue for the obvious link that we would all like to be healthy and healthy people produce more, but for the link that efficient health care financing is important for the budget and for economic growth. and then finally we have a small pea in the book are manufacturing, and much of washington discussion, manufacturing matters, too. in no small part for our nt but also for something less celebrated by economists, they

shopfloor innovation where you have to have the facility here. now, while the subject are talked about a lot, they are seldom practiced in washington. what we have done in the past couple of decades in both political parties is champing consumption over investment, build a financial system around consumption, and they inefficient or insufficient attention to trade. what do we do about this? i'll mention these and do a handful of little case studies. peter and i outlined what we call ceta prosperity blueprint. this is not a cry in your beer book. if you were to look at all of these and say what one or two things tie them all together, really a couple. one is you got to put the long-term first. as i will argue in a moment that is not tantamount to saying each with spinach in the short term. there can be important short-term benefits from putting the long-term first.

and a second lesson is don't try to use a single instrument to hit to the objectives. and the two objectives sometimes championed by the two political parties, but certainly to reasonable objectives to talk about, our growth in fairness. the points we make in the blueprint in the book are about several things. i would only talk about a few of them the story. happy to answer questions on any. one is about recasting monetary policy. we arguing about that monetary policy has gone astray in recent years, excessive focus on the short-term, with too little regard for long-term objectives of monetary policy and excessive politicization of the federal reserve. rethinking fiscal stimulus, we argued that the argument for staying this has been used too many times and that we are trying to attack a structural problem with cyclical measures.

the ones in italics i will come back to. i'm burdening our tax policy is known to tax reform. freeing trade productivity, freeing trade policy is how do we championed the benefits of free trade for productivity and jobs come and how could we try to focus on trade agreements in fact rather than just sending the leader of the free world. energy we arguing about, and i'll mention the specific example in a few minutes, that there is a smart path to greater energy independents that fall squarely in the middle of arguments you hear on the two sides. social security has got to be the centerpiece of any near-term fiscal consolidation effort. we will give you a plan. health care, we took a very wrong turn in recent policy by focusing on a short-term concern access rather than the long-term concern which is cost.

most economists if you speak to them about health care irrespective of their political persuasion would tell you if you could get costs under control you could improve access. he would tell you to store the other way around but that, of course, is what we just did. medicare and medicaid need to be repaired follows from that kind of health care debate. we will talk a little bit about preventing another financial crisis. now, including the long run first i'm going to choose three examples and it is not i will talk a little bit about energy as well. i'm going to pick as three main examples tax policy, social security, and financial regulation. these are three of the areas in the ceta prosperity blueprint. i picked of these three because they all fall into a trap. and in each case policy has been mired in a trap that is not because people are not intelligent. it's because they have

constrained the problem simply to think about the short-term and not the long-term. and here, let me start with tax policy where a key and under both republican and democratic administrations in recent years, we have slipped into a peter and i called i can't seem consumption trap. the keynesian consumption trap, or you could call it the more money in people's pockets trap, to quote my former boss, president bush, in talking about tax policy changes, that trap centers on the marginal propensity to consume out of tax changes in the near term as the touchstone of evaluating a tax policy. now, that has a couple of issues with it. one as economists would tell you it's very short-term focus would become critical from a theoretical perspective to know whether you're talking about a marginal propensity to consume out of a temporary tax change,

which would be very modest and most economic models, versus a marginal propensity to consume long-term tax change which would be in much larger and most economic models. is also problematic because it leads you to miss an argument about the centrality of marginal tax rates themselves in judging tax policy at and intuition that is familiar from a first lesson in public economics that the distortions of marginal tax rates are higher. the higher is marginal tax rates. now, why this trap has been important by both sides allowing them to fall into the more money in people's pockets trap, we are mired in a debate over whether it is the case that high income people will or won't save more of the given tax cut, rather than focusing on the effects of marginal tax rates on saving investment and entrepreneurship. or failing to realize that about

half of people called high income, or the top 1% of u.s. taxpayers, our business owners and it's not like the consumption problem they're solving, but rather an investment problem. one could get out of that trap if you wanted to, focusing the and in amity shlaes teed up with growth and broad-based prosperity by saying why do we have a system that has low marginal tax rates, but doesn't a big average tax rate cuts, average tax rate cuts for high income people. i will give you an example of the. social security, we have fallen into this principle versus principal trap by saying no, what we really care is something about the size. so we worry about social security deficits, and we'll change benefits and taxes to meet some deficit target as opposed to stepping back and asking what the heck do we want this thing to do. how do you an example falling

again a growth and broad-based prosperity of what we could do to achieve visible, p-a-l, but he was a p-l-e way of going about it and financial financial regulation, that trap we fell into was housing, both parties came together to say housing was a wave of paper and over the way people were feeling, and so by broadening access to housing finance further and further down the income scale, we could have a big effect. to do this we would need of course to lose some lending standards. we would need to use government sponsored enterprises to carry out a mandate that few in the private sector would do on their own. and that, of course, is what we did. that trap lead you to trying to close the door with an excessive focus on safety, rather than on health. and again there is a way out. let's talk about tax policy for a moment. the objective our tax policy is

really about saving investment and growth. we don't have to use the tax code alone two-hit distribution of objectives. we have something else in the federal budget called spending that is very capable doing that, and tax policy can be used in part for fairness, but parents should meet the centerpiece of setting tax policy. the problem with the trap of falling into the marginal propensity to consume her argument is that what we've done is set the center of the debate not only the objective that peter and i mentioned, that i think in economists would mention, but rather on the fate of the bush tax cut, as if the entire infidel revenue code could be described by the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. this has led to three rattles of policy discussion. rathole number one is repealed in 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. this is irrational because in and of itself repealing the tax cuts would be close to the

largest tax increase, at least in recent history, without any discussion of offsetting policies for growth. it would certainly not be the way economists would tie you to go about a reduction in of itself which generally centers more on spending cuts. at second rathole is why do we extend all but the high-end tax cuts. secretary geithner piously said that this was the way that the u.s. could convince the rest of the world it's serious. unfortunately, that kids at exactly wrong. it would show the rest of the world we are unserious. the attacks -- tax cuts while very small compared to the size of the deficit in the tax figures, the administration uses something like 70 billion a year against $1.4 trillion budget deficit, they are the ones that the most significant effects on

growth. indeed, a sense in which secretary geithner gets it exactly wrong is if the u.s. were really serious, it would be talking about how we want to tackle middle income taxes and entitlements, not just upper income tax entitlements. the third rattle is largely a republican one, and its extended 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanently. that's a rathole because this set of taxes enshrined in the current internal revenue code would not be, where most e-commerce would start if you're trying to think about big reform of taxes. some elements of the gastric many, many elements of it, no. a better answer would be extended for a while until we can have a real discussion. what can work here, peter and i argue, is low marginal tax rates, again, because distortions are higher. the higher the marginal tax rates. and emphasis on investment incentives, and narrowly tax

preferences. that is, it doesn't have to be the case that low marginal rates are associated with low average rates for a given taxpayer. one could achieve that kind of revenue without distorting marginal tax rates. while a good long-term objective is something like a broad-based progressive consumption tax, there are many, many good ways to start. but they all share this focus on lower marginal tax rates. now, social security begins with the problem, again, a principle versus principal, and this problem comes about because we tend to use the word deficit a lot. economists don't like words like deficit because they come from accountants. i teach in a business coal and accounts get paid more than a coveted they may know more than we do but i can together as a term that lacks economic concept. there are two components of a deficit that do have economic can't do.

one is called taxes and the other is spending. when we look any proposal, the question is not what it does to the deficit in social security or the overall, but what it does to spending and taxes. if we ask ourselves what do we want social security to do, we can avoid unfortunate rattles. the rattles here are payroll tax increases, which we know suffer from the high marginal tax rate problem, and other spending cuts. i mentioned at the beginning of the talk if we don't get this right and we don't count with taxes will simply not be able to defend the country or pay for education. in the end in present value terms the budget must balance. will be can do is try to reduce benefit growth for middle and upper income houses. there are many, many ways to do this, no single proposal, but all these proposals would get it right by saying yes, we need to bring the system in line but we need to do in a way that doesn't damage broad-based prosperity.

what about financial regulation? back to the objective here want to talk about enhanced, enable balanced growth. icy plumbing because of financial system isn't supposed to be the sexiest thing in the economy. and sometimes the stress of the number of my students who are focused solely on finances and other nodes of the economy, finance should be plumbing but very good quality plumbing like you would want in your own house. what can't work is the over emphasis on housing that we have pursued in public policy, not just because we get too much housing. it's because we wind up distorting the entire financial system as is always the entire securities that was built on top of what used to be simple home mortgages. we also can't do this by focusing simply on safety. safety is a kind of cheese whiz

strategy in which all we do is wind up holding cash or treasury bills, but with little ability to generate appropriate levels of risk and lending. what can work is really three things of radical mortgage reform their guy would just mention it, talk about in the book. reform of housing finance and the removal of much of the major government rule we've had in the gses. and a rethinking of mortgage contracts that provide better incentives. on capital reform rather than just saying hold more, more, more, the desire is to think about what do you want capital to do and a discussion of a familiar proposal to economists, how to develop and design practically capital requirements that move over the business cycle. and then finally on systemic risk really focus on the elephant in the room which is a credible too big to fail. wild that is featured in a lot

of discussion in dodd-frank it is largely silent in the actual law. let me just mention quickly and we can come back to it into an a if you would like, when harry we also talk about in the book is energy policy. this is an area where i think wonderful compromise from an economic perspective between what republicans have argued in energy policy and democrats, and here the goal is to reduce the damage from oil price shocks and also recognize externalities in oil consumption. many people focus on externalities. in the book we also talk about national security externalities. what can't work your, to ratholes that we been going down, one is what i will call the independents myth. we simply will never import energy. that's not realistic. and the second kind of sciences

man idea that if we just wait long enough technology will happen. most business people respond to the senate. one thing we talk about in the book is oil price floor as opposed to the cap-and-trade or simple tax that make sure that oil prices don't fall in the u.s. below a reference level which removes uncertainty in innovation. so obvious the attacks is required to do that. to tie all this together to wrap up, all of these examples have something in common. there's a single key that unlocks change and that is pivoting to thinking about the long-term. i admit economic arguments with you this morning, but i'm not a politician. i will be bold enough to argue with you that there is some political salience here, too. start with social security recommendation for a safety net entitlements system. from a republican point of view, that addresses the need to reduce future outlays and try to

get rid of require tax increases. from a democratic point of view, it focuses on guarding against poverty in old age. tax reform from the republican point of view, a plan that i outlined, would address the need to give it away from consumption toward investment and trade. from a democratic point of view it would address the need to raise wage growth in the long-term. the financial regulation policy from a republican point of view would strengthen financial intermediation and innovation. from a democratic point of you it would minimize casino incentives and poor consumer products. and then finally, the oil price would have market-based innovation incentives perhaps from the republican side and address growing concerns more from a democratic side. to wrap up there are two ways to think about policy. we've been using the toppling of these that comes from lord

keynes. in the long run we're all day. but thoreau was also right. in the long run, men, or women, he would be the only way. thanks. [applause] >> thank you very much, clean. i guess i would summarize your comments to say we have been using a cheese whiz strategy to get out of a rattle. but i guess that she's probably doing the rat in the first place or something. so we've got to discuss and. the first is tragic am a senior editor for "national review" cover national politics. he has been for "the wall street journal," the "new york times," the financial times, newsday, the "washington times" and many other publications. and is the author of the aei history of japanese growth, which i think will segue nicely into the conversation that i expect to have with both discussants, which is that there have been some experiences of

being in rat holes in the pass around the world, and some folks have tried different things to solve the problems. what we would like to do is get into discussion that takes your discreet and takes things that was tried in the past, and so with that, and also i guess the political feasibility. why is that we keep going the wrong thing and so on. with that i will turn it over to ramesh ponnuru and then i'll introduce carmen. >> that is, can. let me just start by a green with professor hubbard, nothing says christmas like "seeds of destruction." i agreed with a lot more in this book that i disagreed with. icon in particular, would say i am much more keen on amity shlaes and/or ideas than nikita khrushchev. if that's the choice before us. but as a journalist i suppose to

produce complex i'm going to spend more of my time today talking about the things that i disagreed with. let me start with the areas of agreement. i think one of the really interesting things about this book is the way that it starts with perception, and many as it starts with exceptions and insights but are more frequently associated with folks making the anti-free market more interventionist arguments about economic policy, but then those from them to pretty conservative conclusions. i think that's true of the discussion about china. that's two of the discussion and that manufacturing. and one place where i think that this book makes a real, at least rhetorical break from a lot of center-right commentary on economics is that there's i

think a really sound understanding that our goal should not be to simply restore the economic status quo before the financial crisis. there's an understanding that the economy was not in good health during what most center-right economic commentators, at least judging from the public rhetoric, still regard as the boom. in some cases conservatives will talk about the bush boom and act as though that's a we want to get back to. i think for a lot of reasons, including wage detonation, that is mistaken it's a mistake that this book i think very wisely avoids. on policy i think the book makes a strong case for progressive consumption tax. i guess i am predisposed to thinking that. indexing of social security benefits so that initial benefit

levels rise with prices and not with wages, i think is another great policy. clearinghouse for derivatives, a capital reserve requirements policy that is anti-cyclical and a rules-based monetary policy, all of this i think is great stuff. and if adopted would be very large steps forward for this country. so, then where do i get my disagreements? let me start with health care. on health care of a lot of my, fundamental policy conclusions are very much in keeping with those of the book come with some cases i would get there any sort of giveaway. the book repeatedly describes rising health care costs as our principal problem in health care sector. i'm not sure i regard it that way. i think there are reforms,

including many of the reforms they talk about which we get us better value for the dollar, more individual control, more satisfaction, but, you know, if 30 years from now health care spending as a percentage of gdp is higher than it is now, or significantly higher, that is not something that i think is problematic. i think the country as they grow wealthier are likely to spend more on health care. and i don't think that economic policymakers should think even in the back of the my that there is some sort of correct figure for health care spending for health care spending over gdp that we ought to be aiming for. some of the right policies at lease in the short run cost health care spending to go down but they should be a principal goal of those policies. i also don't think that things such as the infant mortality rates and a life expectancy of

this country are strong evidence about the efficiency of health care spending in this country. i think there's a lot of reasons for thinking based on, for example, our lifestyles that those numbers would be likely to be worse than those for other countries for reasons that don't reflect on the efficiency of our health care spending. on medicaid the policy recommendation in the book is to have a cap block grant to the states where the state payout from the federal government would be based on population plus inflation. i think it's a perfectly good policy. again, a very big step forward. hear my disagreement would be more rhetorical. the emphasis on the book is the key, which he get from this policy is increased state flexibility. the problem with medicaid issue to all of these rigid sort of federal guidelines and

micromanagement. and certainly that is an element to the problem. i think the bigger problem is the lack of accountability on the states, the fact they are essentially give it a blank check to spend more money, knowing that someone else is going to pick up half of the tab. the problem isn't bashing i'm borrowing it from the terminology of aei scholar, michael, the problem is it's an unfunded mandate. .com is it's an it's an unfunded mandate. and then last on medical malpractice it is simply disagree with the idea that we should have a federal reform, medical malpractice laws. they should just that there should be a reasonable cap on noneconomic damages, seems to me it's not clear that's the best approach, even if it is the best approach. it is not clear what that reasonable cap should be. medical malpractice strikes me

as a perfect area in tort law where the flaws of the state's policies are almost exclusively borne by the residents of that state. so why don't we have laboratories in democracy? why do we allow states to bear the cost or reap the benefits of their different medical malpractice policies? i think we should want to punish states for having lousy political cultures that drive doctors away and we should want to reward states for improving their political cultures, and getting better policies. i think that essentially the system we have. i don't see any reason to change it. turning to other areas, of the book. on fannie and freddie my principal disagreement is that, like a fog of reform proposals, i don't think this one goes far enough. it may talk, in a lot of places

they talk about their ideal policies and was so deeply compromised step forward should be. i think it will go compromised step forward should be to really disentangle fannie and freddie from the taxpayer, and from federal support, a step that might very well mean ending these institutions. my ideal policy, however, is to either burn or raising these buildings to the ground. i'm not dogmatic about which method, salt the earth and then put aside their same these are the wages of sin. spit and you thought i was victorian. >> right, right. you're never going to get to my right. i think the hostility in the book towards a just will rate mortgages and interest rate, interest only loans is unjustified, or at least not justified by the argument presented in the book.

i think that in some circumstances for some people who know what they're getting into, these sorts of mortgages can make sense and work out fine. i'm biased because i'm speaking in both cases from personal experience. on oil, energy policy, although the rhetoric addiction is popular and bipartisan, i'm not sure its opposite of which we don't typically think of something that is cheap and useful, and, therefore, used in great quantity of something that we are addicted to. and i think there's a real political naïveté to the suggestions on energy policy. it's all well and good to suggest a policy that reduces volatility of oil prices. by don't think that actually price shocks per se are unpopular.

people rather like positive price shocks and i think it's going to be a hard sell to get people to say we are going to reduce the likelihood that we have a downward shock and oil price. let me put it this way. if i were, if professor hubbard were money for political office on this platform against a candidate who, say, had a particularly fluid a sex scandal, i would bet on the sex scandal guy. [laughter] and finally on china question. i'm not really sure what the upshot is of what we should really do, these are the china. there is some sort of gestures in the direction of let's really get tough with them on currency manipulation piracy and so forth. what form does that take. what are the possible negative consequences of it. and i guess one last thought.

reading that china sections, it strikes come it struck as reminiscent of not so much as the books about japan that i was reading two decades ago, about how the japanese were eating our lunch and we really have to be terrified into changing our economic model. that i think turned out pretty clearly to be mistaken, which doesn't of course mean it's mistaken this time around. but it's a similarity that i found quite striking. and with that i will yield the floor and, except to say, i think professor hubbard and his co-author a gift for writing a very stimulating, interesting book. >> thanks very much, ramesh. chat is going to be loading carbons slot. carmen reinhart is the co-author of this time is different, eight centuries of financial folly. i think it's safe to say that

that book -- turn on the screen. i think that it's safe to say that the book is really the most influential serious academic book that i can remember in my lifetime. in the economic sphere. it's been a huge success because it has so much wisdom of history in it, and i thought some wisdom might be an interesting thing to bring to bear to this discussion of looking at past history and the scene weather, you know, the crisis of capitalism motivated in part the start of this book is the kind of common experience in past crises. carmen was recently appointed to the dennis whether some senior fellows at the peterson institute. so she is joined us here in the think tank community after being a professor at the university of maryland for many years. carmen. >> thank you for that wonderful

introduction. well, let me begin by saying that i share much of the diagnosis, much of the proposed cures that are laid out in this book. and i will delineate where my thoughts coincide, and also where my thoughts and depart. i think we have great his departure on monetary policy, and more broadly defined financial sector on the whole. let me also state at the beginning that the elephant in the living room that i will be addressing, that is importantly address in the book through a lot of it talks about needs to do with entitlement, need to deal with the savings incentives, if the elephant in the living room that i'm going to be addressing throughout his

debt. government debt, which keeps rising as far as the eye can see, and contingent liabilities of the government. as i said there's a great deal said in a book and i will refer to that, about this, but also private debt. since the federal reserve began to publish its statistics on government debt and the flow of funds in 1945, but the historical statistics of the united states go back to 1916. i can say that since 1916, the level of public and private debt in the united states at present is unsurpassed when you combine public and private. when you look at public alone,

only one year, 1946 right after world war ii, was public debt. bigger than it is now. that's a running theme that i will come back to. so the elephant in the living room is, well, what do you do in a decade, in the aftermath, when you inherit this large stock of debt? any policy decision has to be informed by the fact that we have this debt overhang. that's going to cover not just, i'm not talking of cyclical policy. i'm talking about structural policy changes, which i will go through. and this element by the way it is not a baby elephant, not an adolescent elephant. this isn't elephant with large hips. [laughter] so what the starting point, the

authors pretty much convincingly tell the story, look, we have an incoherent tax system where there is a lot of nepotism even towards borrowing, toward consumerism. this is nowhere clearer than housing. we had already three years after the crisis plenty of evidence of inefficient fiscal stimulus. please tell me if i mischaracterize. we have multiple layers of regulation that often have during the run up to the crisis contributed to it, and we really haven't dealt with a satisfactory sends. and if our longer-term objective, that sort of desire 1950s outcome is an era of greater growth and witty misalignment of incentives.

away from capital information and moral hazard is everything. i mean, moral hazard -- i'm right on the board when the authors are talking about, you know, that too big to fail from the if we felt like we dealt with the to the ghetto problem, think again. too big to fail is alive and well. here it just sort of drawing on a little bit, the aftermath of the financial crises. let me just state this is not about the immediate aftermath, but the decade after a major financial crises. these are the economic environment in which any changes in policy are likely to take place, if history is any guide. a decade, this is based with

vincent reiner here at the aei and my or your work with ken rogoff. this is paper we presented after the fall that jacksonville federal reserve symposium. and we basically said look, if you compare the decade before the crisis to the decade after the crisis, a decade after the crisis is, if you think the title of seeds of destruction sounds gloomy, it's not, it's not an understatement to say that the decade after financial crisis is a pretty gloomy day. it is characterized by low growth, high unemployment, and lower housing prices. this is important also when it comes to that sacred cow of dealing with the removal of tax

interest and interest deducted build in such. because that's the environment in which policy choices are going to be made. one criticism that i have of the book is that i was left wanting to hear more about the issue of timing and sequencing of some of these policies, that i would like, you know, loved look, it would have been an ideal time to remove the interest deductibility of mortgages during the height of the boom in the real estate market. but that's not the situation that we are facing, we have to ask ourselves with a tiny be right, even though it is certainly the right idea in terms of reducing long-term, long-term, potential misallocation of resources, but

is the timing right given the long shadow that financial crises can. and the next slide basically shows the elephant. this is part of the element. it is a small part of the elephant. this is only the leg of the elephant. it basically shows public debt in the three years after a severe financial crisis. ..

assuming things like fannie and freddie, which in the first quarter of this year alone was explicitly included in the government's account and it amounted to about 27 percentage points of gdp. so if you take the follow me for a moment here -- net central government debt plus state and local debt, plus dead of government enterprises which as of the first quarter this year includes fannie and freddie were at 170% of gdp, only surpassed in one year, 1946. and so the whole issue of indebtedness going forward means that, and by the way, it is very much central to a point that is at the heart of the book, that

what can you do? what can policy due to foster growth? in recent work or her more recent work with ken rogoff, the sure paper called broken a time of debt, we highlight that countries with a high stock of debt, debt levels, public debt levels above 90% of gdp growth rates are lower. so the point i am a king, all these commentaries about debt and the aftermath of crises is we are starting out from a hole. and so, and we are starting out from a hole that involves high indebtedness which also brings me to the issue of monetary policy. now, the 50s looked great in retrospect in many dimensions, but let me say that in the aftermath of world war ii, the united states and most of the

advanced economies that had inherited very large stock of debt had far from independent monetary policies, and there was an era of financial repression, which what does financial repression mean? i am saying because what may be the rolls from a long-term desirable stability of the price level and what you would want a central bank is not what the central bank in the united states, the uk's -- i know they are danced economy faced high levels of debt. it wasn't because it was desirable. it was because it was expedient. and what is financial repression? financial repression actually combined caps on interest rates or keeping interest rates low, having a high share of marketable debt in effect in 1951 in the united states. we had a conversion of debt that

took marketable debt and made it nonmarketable and aim, pretty much the aim that we are seeing all over the world today which is to have a higher chunk of debt in which you don't worry about rollover and which interest costs are low, and a little bit of inflation. and that little bit of inflation combined with low interest rates in these large captive audiences was a major factor in liquidating our debt after world war ii here in the u.s. and u.k. and australia and in most of the advanced economies, which at the time and inherited a lot of debt so, the taylor rule is nice, but the taylor rule really came around at a time and which we were facing very different -- a

very different economic environment, that which we have inherited today. so, so i practically agree with everything bad that is said about needing to change tax incentives, about the fiscal thrust, about regulation, but a monetary policy i really have my doubts about what realistically we can expect in the decades to come. if we look at this last episode of both high world indebtedness, because this is not just the u.s. but it is also the u.k.. it is most of the advanced economy. now, i do share -- i didn't know this but like len's mom i am very victorian, and so my last

commentary is going to be on monetary policy and more importantly, the feast side, the victorian feast. that victorian feast, and this is important looking forward, because one thing where we are not the 50s is actually not a very good guy. it is how integrated we are into the rest of the world for better or worse. part of it is what monetary does in the u.s. and part is what are confounded external imbalances continue to do which is continue to provide abroad that whether we like to admit it or not has really undermined our monetary policy autonomy in a big way. and the reason i say this is not not -- you know because i think the view, which is i think espoused, not embraced by the

spouse in the book is that we deviated from a taylor rule. i have heard this from taylor himself many times, believe me pick grow wheat deviated from a taylor rule and this was an important contributor to the crisis. i just don't buy that. we have massive capital inflows purchases of u.s. treasuries from central banks that dwarf the magnitudes of qe2 and qed one. england -- sorry the u.k. had massive m. flows. ireland had massive m. flows. greece had massive m. flows. capital imposes a polite way of saying you borrow a a lot from abroad and in effect you know when you look at monetary policy and what we can or cannot achieve domestically, the correlation between the federal funds rate and long-term mortgage rates is a very weak one in this area of global

capital. so, what i am asking the authors to think a little more about is how the u-shaped monetary policy? in an environment which is a global and which we have a lot of debt? it is not going to be a taylor rule. and a taylor rule of law and, you think glenn also raise the issue that we can't have too few instruments when we have to many goals and if the instrument is also avoiding another credit boom like the one we had and a lot of credit was fueled by being able to borrow from abroad, think we also have to look at more 50s style measures in which you'd know old-fashioned tools like margin requirements and other things that discourage embeddedness. thereby not be pretty, but they may very well be expedient.

so, to wrap up, let me say i very much enjoyed reading this book. a lot of the issues, you know, the articulation of things that, pertaining to just really how best of our tax system is and believe me when i say, when i go and talk about current account deficits and borrowing from abroad, i traced then import me back to our tax system because that is, that is key determined in our saving and investment decisions. it made me very, you know, think very hard about these issues in terms of the proposed solutions. it is impossible for me to read you in my own work without, and agree on everything.

i think, you know, we have to number one, think about more the timing of these things in light of the fact that the aftermath of financial crisis isn't particularly vulnerable period and how you would, how you would bring, how you would sequence and bring the zen and secondly, i think that the debt overhang that we have we cannot make disappear. the way that you make debt disappear is through default, through partial restructuring, through partial defaults which is called restructuring, through growth which seldom happens and through some combination of inflation. it could be -- it doesn't have to be the big low out variety that we have had in many emerging markets or in germany after world war i, but the way we did it in the 50s, the way we did it in the 50s and the

40s, in a recent paper on financial repression i calculate the liquidation effect, how much debt with liquidated through a combination of very low interest rate, low interest-rate policy segmented markets and a little bit of inflation. and it was the equivalent of raising two to 4% revenues as a percent of gdp in the u.s. through the late 40s and through the 50s. for the u.k. it was actually even higher. and for australia it was even higher in the early 50s, so i want to send them back to a working board on monetary policy. >> tank. >> thanks very much carmen. i think glenn, before we open it up for questions for a minute or two, you respond and i have one question for you too if you could kick off your response which is the seeds of destruction, you say that they

were planted by both parties, which in some sense means that you yourself are kind of a farmer, right? you are there as chairman of the council of economic advisers for president bush. do you think that this book reflects a change of heart before you, or is it more that you think that you have sort of seen this coming but you were completely unable to get the politicians to listen back then and are hoping to be more successful now? >> i can answer that question at the end. no. i think that it is both parties that contributed. i think there are good elements, if you take the bush tax cuts, something i thought a lot about, there are some wonderful elements of the bush tax cuts and some particular ones i am very fond of but suffice it to say that the set of policies that we followed not just in the tax area but the whole area, all

the policy did exacerbate the problems that carmen mentioned of excessive leverage in the economy. i don't think that any one person gets blamed for that but it is certainly something that both parties acquiesced to. both parties acquiesce to the housing subsidies over time. both parties looked attacks policy through less than pro-growth lands so i don't think that is a change of heart for me. i can recall making those points many times. the only person that opposed medicare expansion in the bush administration but there it is. >> you did that right before you departed. >> that is true. that is true. and i would like to thank ramesh and carmen for it wonderful comments. just a few things. on health care i agree with ramesh's observations and the book that i wrote with john kogan and dan kessler called healthy, wealthy and wise.

it is about value. talk about costs in the book, but really is it about values. every reason to believe though we are not getting value right in u.s. health care and costs are too high from a value perspective. ramesh is also right on medicaid. the key issue in medicaid is less the formula you choose in the block grant and ending co-participation, ending states getting to spend other peoples money. in fact john and dan and i have argued the formula you said you want the governors to stop the co-participation in your way ahead. on adjustable mortgages and interest only mortgages what we have argued is that we ought to go back. peter and i argue that we ought to go back to a kind of regulation that limits contracts by wealth levels. i have absolutely no problem with affluent people having any kind of contract they want but it was ironic that a wealthy

person buying an apartment on park avenue in my hometown had a simpler contract then many low income families with sub-prime mortgages. that is not the way we do anything else in regulation from hedge funds to private equities. probably not the way we want to do it here. on energy the addiction really is harmful because of the national security externality. it it is not addiction to things that are coming out of the oil in texas. is coming from places that are trying to harm us. on china, there is a think a difference from japan. i am one of the ones he wrote quite critically of the japan is going to eat our lunch in the late '80s and early '90s, but this time the global imbalances are such that it is not i'm afraid china has a better economic model. that is not the point but that the global imbalances are truly problematic. carmen i absolutely agree that debt is as they often end of brown but there is more we can do about it. the big elephant in the room is

actually entitlement debt. the scary numbers the carmen showed us, while scary aren't the scariest ones. the real scary numbers are the entitlement that's. that is much larger and that we can change and we can change it with a stroke of a pen and we can change it by limiting benefit growth in a very large effect in the long term fiscal policy of the country. in terms of timing and sequence, we argue in the book is you basically want to tackle spending first particularly social security, corporate tax changes and limits on deductions. i think tax reform follows are some of the reasons the carmen mentioned. monetary policy, we may disagree a bit. the 50s were also a time of william mcchesney martin who comes out to praise in the book in addition to the things you mentioned. it was also in accord, a way to the treasury something we could wish for perhaps today. the problem with a little bit of inflation is, it is like f. these and some optimal tax

levels -- models. if only you have a onetime wealth levy wouldn't be distorting and you could finance a lot of things with a. the problem is rich people suspect they will do it again in the problem with a little bit of inflation is really the same thing. on the taylor rule and the crisis i am like john taylor. we don't argue that the taylor, violation of the taylor rule was the sole cause of the crisis but it probably is important in contrast that through their breath between gaps of short-term and long-term rates. >> and now i ask her questions. please raise your hand and wait for the microphone, identify yourself at the start of your question and make your statement in the form of a question if you can. >> dana marshall and i thank gland and peter for this excellent book. but i thought it was very interesting, and this is a question may be to ask glenn to elaborate a little bit on it, one triangle of issues in those

age was innovation manufacturing. one of the many good things about this book is its bipartisan, it is holistic and it is real and the sense that there is a focus. it is very interesting to see the to discuss and didn't get much into this and this is very characteristic of these kinds of discussions and fortunately the book breaks out on this little bit. it gets into questions like the real economy and like many fracturing and like innovation and like trade. the book speaks about the problems that china has imposed on the system in many ways. you give some suggestions about ways out but i wonder if you might just able to be elaborate a little bit, and i know time is short, on what we can do to rebuild our innovation system so we not only innovate better but that we manufacture what what we innovate and not simply offshore that to increase a trade deficit

which is clearly unsustainable. >> a great question. dana, on china the way out of macroand micro-- macroin the sense that the u.s. and even more in china needs to save rather less in than those are both in each country's self-interest so this whole minute -- issue of policy coordination, this really should happen. on a micro level i think we have to push the chinese hard, not so much on the exchange rate but more on a financial system that actually encourages that rebalancing. i think that is a push that is likely to succeed. on innovation i think there were two things we can do. one is obvious and that other less obvious. the wanted that is obvious is really to continue our support for basic research. a lot of innovation in the real world has come from basic research in the sciences and

engineering that involves federal support in universities. i think that is a great thing. but i think manufacturing is also very important and here in the book, we don't advocate and industrial policy. we say stop handcuffing policy from corporate tax, but a geisha and reform, things that keep industry here. the recent to do that is not mercantilism. in the sense you learn something about practical or or clinical innovation on the shop floor and that the shop form's -- force and not hear all the basic research will not give you you that innovation so we are little bit more manufacturing friendly i think then many conservatives seem to be. >> isaiah question. i guess we will start over here and work our way around and we will go one, two and three. >> appreciate it. first of all on the tax code, just to give you a reference the

$300 billion annual in compliance is only one external cost of the code. gao did a report on that in august 2005 and if you plug the numbers and it is more like a 700 billion annual external cost it could be up to a trillion. in fact i asked david walker about that in and his response was just we stand by all of our reports that we did at gao. the other thing is, going even further, robert caro formerly of the treasury's tax analysis division, said in committee testimony i think it was the finance committee in 2008, that the code could be decreasing the size of the economy by up to $1.3 trillion. i wanted to ask you mr. hubbard what you thought about a 15% tax credit, just in manufacturing? i understand there's about a 20% cost difference between the

chinese products here and what we can make it for. that is according to outsourcing cross-indexed and a corporate tax reduction, although i favor it, will not affect as you know the -- for souls -- sole proprietorship, partnership and finally, i asked you this at a chamber event one day, you might recall. atr's estimate on all of the indirect cost, tax code, legal system, regulatory is about 2.5 trillion annually added to the 5 trillion in spending several state and local, 7.5 trillion total, 52 or 53% of gdp so if people want to know why the economy is slow and atr as you know uses the 12 trillion in personal income as the

denominator so they get about 60% so a typical business of let's say a million dollars of sales per year, $600,000 a fair portion of government created costs on average. >> your question raises a lot of interesting issues because the higher that we try to make marginal tax rates in the corporate sector or the non-corporate sector, we get all kinds of tax avoidance and regulatory schemes that become necessary. the lower marginal tax rate, not just the lower earth day distortions that the economist talk about but the lower regulatory apparatus. i don't think the idea should need to give a tax preference to manufacturing. but really you try to lower a tax burden for all activities so lowering marginal tax rates on individuals and lowering corporate tax rates. that doesn't have to a hole in the budget for reasons that i

mentioned. so there are ways to do that i think are quite efficient and in the case of the corporate sector you could probably lower the corporate rate into the high 20s with no offset just because of the large income shifting potential and the unincorporated sector would probably require offsetting reduction changes. >> we have got another question right over here. >> my name is alex jürgen and i very much enjoyed the panel. at a question specifically on the oil price tax that you are advocating. how would you implement this tax and if its sole goal is to keep the price of oil high, which presumably i guess would mean the tax would be the differential between the market price of oil and the target price of oil. how do you prevent government and politicians from using this as a revenue source that is always going to be there because presumably wouldn't be there if

i price of oil is high enough so how do you manage expectations on that? speedwell first and that back part of your question first, we are given the book that the attack shouldn't be used to raise revenue. it out to be used to read re-bid so we are talking about in econ speak the substitution effects of the tax not the income effects of attacks. the difference between an oil price and a straight tax like a carbon tax or oil tax is we are trying to focus on the lower tail and not the whole distribution and it came about talking to executives and companies who are looking at oil saving innovation. their biggest fear was what ramesh was celebrating, which is oil prices come down to being low for a period of time. the suv's are back. nobody wants to think about alternatives. a tax does not take away that state of the world. it affects various but it doesn't eliminated at the bottom so we should know rather than having a simple tax, have one that operates only in the low price state so we weren't trying

to raise revenue. it is up to politicians what they do. the argument we gave was this was simply for the price effect and we would rebate the money. >> can i just verify in response to that negative attacks? i am not celebrating it. i think i am two-thirds of the way convinced by the argument here. i was just making a political point about the feasibility of it. >> this is a follow-up on the last question. >> could you identify yourself? >> my name is james diamond. you indicated earlier in your discussions that waiting for technology is a rathole. you indicated now an earlier that oil price floor removes some of the uncertainties renovation. where does innovation and in a rathole begins when it comes to new technology and energy? >> my point was just that businesspeople don't innovate for the heck of it.

they innovate because there is a return to that innovation, and when you are talking about long life capital, you have to be very worried about states of the world in which the price of oil stays low for a prolonged period of time so this wishing that people would innovate against that uncertainty isn't going to make it happen. i think if energy taxes would be one way to encourage innovation but i don't think they are the best way because they don't really get at the state of the world people really are worried about which is that you could go through five, even 10 years of the period of very low oil prices. so i'm a huge fan of innovation. it is not not innovation that is a rat hole. it is the idea that dreaming -- hope is not a strategy of hoping businesspeople will innovate for their own good is probably not good policy. >> we have run into hour time limit so i would like to thank everyone for coming and thank our panelists for a very stimulating conversation. [applause]

>> this event was hosted by the american enterprise institute in washington d.c.. for more information visit aei.org. >> "capitol hill cooks" is the name of the book. the author is linda bauer. booktv usually doesn't talk about cookbooks, but why would we want to talk to you? >> this is cooking for a cause. 50% of all the proceeds and royalties in advance go to homes for our troops so it will tom's for the veterans who lose their limbs in the war. to give them a wheelchair accessible home and who wouldn't want to know the favorite recipes of george washington, to president obama with notes about why they like the recipes and this congress. >> what is president obama's recipe in your book? >> he has a running and cheese curry and shrimp lately and he. >> how did you get access to the recipe is? >> the beauty of it was my husband with the longest-serving

white house social aid in history and i was midterm during watergate so i knew a lot of the folks and i have done free recipe books and given them to charity. this is to books and one for the same price so it is a great bargain and it is the best charity you could ask for. >> here's one recipe you have for clove cake. theodore roosevelt. >> that's right and it is a healthy cake, let me tell you. it is heavy and it is great. great. it is to wish his. >> what are the recipes do you have in here that people might be interested in? >> i think the best recipe is probably mamie eisenhower's fudge. when she married ike she told my husband she didn't know how to boil water and after she married him he was the chef. she ran across this million dollar fudge recipe and it is so good. even kids can make it. and my second favorite is probably ronald reagan's pumpkin pecan pie. it is just like pumpkin pie but it has the pecans in the nuts are on top.

>> you also have a recipe in here from harry reid. >> yes i do. it is chicken and pepper get cream sauce. it is very good. i have ron paul's and michelle bachmann so every political persuasion you could want. >> "capitol hill cooks" is the name of the book. linda bauer is the author. recipes from the white house, congress and all of the past presidents. ..

[applause] >> best historian shares many attributes. most must possess a keen sense for key details in a complex situation, an instinct for organizing facts and pulling a story together leading no precious functions of screw the truth in a class by himself is our guest tonight, a man who has applied lessons from a career in journalism to his work as a narrative historian. do the writing of several extraordinary volumes he has sifted through countless military records, diaries, manifesting operations orders and then put on paper this site, sounds and smells of the experience. and that's a good friend was recording a track or sharing the passing of someone close. tonight we'll take a journey through the life and career of one of our most accomplished military historians, rick

atkinson. this program is coming to you from the pritzker military library in downtown chicago. for those of you joining us on the internet. rick atkinson joined worked as an editor at the "washington post" for a quarter-century covered not only germany and nato, but also somalia and bosnia. he's the author several books, including the world war ii classics in army at dawn in the day of the battle as well as in the company of soldiers, which followed the 101st airborne division and general david petraeus in iraq. crusade, a narrative history of the persian gulf war and the long gray line, the narrative account of west point's class of 1966. he is currently at work on volume three of his trilogy in the liberation of europe in world war ii. it atkinson's awards include the 92 pulitzer prize for national reporting in 1999 pulitzer prize

for public service. the 2003 pulitzer prize for history in 1999 for national reporting and the 2007 gerald r. ford award. for distinguished reporting on national defense. please join me in welcoming the 2010 recipient of the pritzker military library literature award for lifetime achievement in military writing, rick atkinson. [applause] it may be very easy to just keep giving you a word for your work. >> i'll take you. >> you would take them. this has been a fascinating, fascinating career. have you ever wondered if you wake up in something also have been? >> i'm afraid i might wake up in something else might have been. i've been very lucky. as with many people are blundered into what may turn out to be a real passion and that was the newspaper business and not provided me with the tools and experience and wind at my back to become a full-time

narrative historian. and so the art has been unpredictable at times, but i couldn't be luckier. >> i wanted to think of a creative way to talk about all the things that you've done tonight. i asked a lot of very mutual friends to submit questions to me over the last month and a half. and so we're going to journey down through some ideas. i asked them all, what would you ask rick atkinson if you were sitting with him? one of the people that responded with carol rivkin who gave me the concept of true journalism and true writing. and she wanted to know how these thought processes are similar in how they are different. >> guest: carol reardon is a history professor at penn state. she was at one time had to be a society for military has terry. you know, i think it's a question of lenses.

when you're a journalist, you can look at things through a certain lens of a certain length with a certain aperture on it. when you're writing a instant history as a journalist -- and i would say this about my time with dave petraeus in the 101st airborne, a kind of instant history. but the different plans, different aperture. when you're writing what professor alan millette, was the previous winner of this award would call true history, then that again is a different lens in a different aperture. and i think that what i have found at least is that distance on the fence allows you to see things obviously that you can't see when you're in the middle of an obviously. but when you have that distance, say 65 years from world war ii, it's sometimes hard to recapture the immediacy, the ambiguity of

immediate experience as you called it, that she's got when you're getting shot at, for example. what is mouselike because the vivid nature of the sensory swirl of any intense event, war more than any others is something that is hard to capture when you're at a far distance from it. so i think my ambition has been to capture what it mountlake, but without forfeiting all of the requisites of true history, real history, including the rigors of scholarship, the recursive documentation. but to allow a reader to access the experience, the historical experience in a way to and in some respects approximate that of accessing the experience of a journalist. >> host: is real-time versus

the historical view of this -- when you are looking at a situation, is there any time in your process the ones arguing with the other? which one wins? >> guest: well, sure, there is always a tension or friction of some sort i suppose. the truth is that when you're writing narrative history like the trilogy that i'm writing now, youre aloing for a kind of olympian on things. you want to have a stateliness in the voice that's very difficult to achieve as a newspaper reporter they handed out on deadline. and so, voice dictates to some extent which of those different% goods will win now. viavoice i mean -- everybody here who is a reader knows what voices. you recognize that, you hear it.

and there's an authenticity to voice that is very important for a good historian, good writer at any sort to capture. and i'm always listening to be sure that the voice is authentic and accurate. >> host: do you enjoy one more than the other? obviously today you enjoy being an historian. but for all those years and you were in combat with general petraeus, a different kind of a situation, recording, notetaking, research. >> guest: gap, i think newspaper reporting, journalism in general is a young man's profession and they can't even pretend to myself that i qualify anymore. so having done it since 1976 still have any a loose affiliation of the "washington post," i cherish that world. i cherish the people in track. at the world under siege right now for fiscal reasons.

but it taught me a great deal. and it taught me a great deal about writing. it taught me a great deal about -- i was an english graduate student here at the university of chicago. in becoming pretty precious as a graduate student, especially if english literature graduate duden. one of the things that journalism did for me psychopathic and the preciousness of it. i mean, if i didn't sit there and bring it out, i didn't get paid. and that strips away your illusions that every little word absolutely must be perfect. so i think that was actually a useful part of my maturation as a writer. postcode you grew up in germany and you were an army brat. and the time that you spent early on in germany, in europe, did that help develop your interest in world war ii?

and was anyone influential in getting you involved in writing? >> guest: well, you know, we lived in salisbury actually. i lived in munich and my father was a lieutenant. we were in salisbury for the first verse of my life, so you can see there is a great influence at that time. i don't remember any of it. but i have been back. i was the "washington post" correspondent in berlin for several years. frankly, there was always the question of what were we doing in central europe in the mid-50s? and we were there because my father would come into the army as the lieutenant in 1943 and gotten out after the war ended, gone back to college and then came back to the army made a career out of it and with an army by occupation. and growing up on army posts around the country in the 50s and 60s, world war ii certainly was very much part of the landscape. it was part of the culture. there were a lot of world war ii

veterans around, needless to say. so, you know, i think i was imprinted with a native interest and it did not take. as far as influences in writing, i was encouraged by my parents. i have found skill added as a teenager, certainly an interest in it. and the usual procession of teachers at various levels who ertainly preach this to others who are interested in the best way to determine first first about whether or not any good at it and if you have a passion is to get out and do it. you can sit down here and talk about it, dear isaac and so on, but it is very much a physical act. and you know, one of the things that people discover, that i certainly discover if it is a very solitary thing. even in the newsroom, when you are sitting there composing, you are doing at buyers though.

as a writer, as a book writer, as a writer of big factbook, i have the -- you know, it's really a fortress of solitude and your can find so you get the task done. and if you don't like that, if you're enough of a social gregarious creature that you cannot handle that solitude, then it's probably not the right thing for you. and sometimes that takes a while to determine whether or not you are constitutionally suited for it. >> host: your editor and also also -- your editor obviously knows how you like your books. it's interesting and legendary that you have this deep, long research process that you're very targeted in your outline and then you write. could you expand on how you process? >> guest: short, targeted is a nice word. compulsive would be another word

and it deteriorates from there. well, as gearhart weinberg notes and certainly having let the path for many of us with the research days are long and tedious, depending on which are writing about. if it's as big as world war ii and the incredibly long and incredibly tedious. i began working on this trilogy full time in january 1999. on the third volume should be published in the spring of 2013. that is 14 years of my life. so the process consists obviously of deep research. and for me that involves a lot of our tribal research. the secondary material is full of books about world war ii and i doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of all the books about world war ii that have been written. amazon lists 52,000 titles. the secondary research is very daunting. were you make your money i think advertisements on its primary research, where you're working through various archives lurches

mall around the country and allow the world. i live in washington d.c., so i'm fortunate to be closed to the national archives, the military history institute in carlisle, pennsylvania, where the army teaches many of its records, the library of congress and so on. and then there are much more obscure archives. and i'm trawling. i'm looking for, you know, shelby foote in the civil war was a novelist and member of a trilogy of the civil war and set a fact is many truth until you love it. and i'm looking for facts to love. and not trawling process you can obviously wander into those woods and never wander out. so i set deadlines for myself and a deadline for ending research on volume three, which is that very small subject of normandy at the end of the war in europe was the end of april of this year. and then i'm stopping. i did stop because you just got

to stop. you can never grasp all of it. and then i spend -- i'm coming to the end of the process now, months. i've been spending since the end of april constructing a very large cumbersome outline and index. and i'm deciding where this goes, where that goes, where this goes, where that goes. i've got a narrative structure in either exists or it doesn't. a lot of it involves throwing things out. that's the hardest part in some ways. and so the outline, which i'm just about finished a 600,000 words. that's more than twice the length of this book. but now i've got a math. and i've got an index of where everything is located. msn now coming out the outline,

cleaning that. and in the next days as writing, which will start writing after thanksgiving. i'll use that outline as a guide to myself of where i'm going and telling this immense scale, this profound tale, the greatest tragedy in human history. and if we don't have a map, you can get lost really easily. i will use that as my roadmap as they negotiate my way through volume three. bo thestarted it wouldriting one be three. >> guest: actually was three from the beginning. >> host: because nothing could be 24 pages long. even carry one card with say that. >> host: i always thought of it as one book. i'm just making people buy it three times. >> host: i want to talk about traveling around and make it

there a sense that there are 20 or more knowledgeable people in the world in a world of stuff is hidden. they also know it's two battlefields. you walk and talk to people. tell us a little bit about that part of your research. >> guest: i think it's important to spend time there because the crown speaks to you. anyone who's ever been in gettysburg or normandy knows the crown speaks to you and the cemetery speak to you and it's very important for me as an amateur's tactician also to have a better understanding of topography and to understand some of the operational issues involved. so i do. i spend a lot of time. having lived in berlin for three years in the 90s. i was there for that and a succession of anniversary commemoration, 50th anniversary of d-day, 50th anniversary since the bolton so on. so that was an opportunity for the first time really to look at background. and then i've been back

subsequently. and i just think it's a critical part of among other things, the emotional resonance of worker trying to write. i believe deeply it is a profoundly emotional subject were. and to somehow unplug yourself from that emotion is a mistake. and one of the ways to remain plugged in and so on. i also believe that it is important not to glorify. you know, the notion that all the brothers were valiant and all the sisters were virtuous is just nonsense. it's historically false. and the truth is much more interesting. they all had enormous feet of clay as we all do.

and to understand that and to accommodate that somehow as you're writing about it's historically make sense, i believe, more profound care to. in many cases, they are required to overcome their shortcomings, there vicissitude. and i believe that's one of the reasons that these tourists can still resonate with us now decades after they're gone. just so you also talked a little bit about your idea of trying galatian between our view, debut and the citizens do. can you talk a little bit about that. not process of your work? >> guest: have i talked about that? >> host: well, it was the opposing courses and a citizen. so by visiting, you get that third picture come with your area. >> guest: clearly in any conflict ticket bought across a

landscape as noncombatants. that's an important thing to understand. that's part of the emotional resonance of it. and so i think in the same way that those of us who are easiest for civil war history in the 30 gettysburg the little town with airy bunch of shoemakers living and all the sudden you've got it lien made in this enormous historical thing bawled on the town and understand the impacts that it had on individual lives, everyday lives is important. and obviously for what i'm writing about now, world war ii fell on an out-of-town and a lot of cities. i'm trying to understand this so that you understand the opposing forces, allies, but also those who are caught in between somehow. that's an important part i think of history. >> host: a friend of ours, aj

mcmaster has asked -- he said to say rick is one of my favorite people, so please give him my best. he said prior to tear trilogy, most of them written about world war ii. what you uncover and research than the surprise you? >> guest: well, everyday i'm surprised. and i'm surprised that i am surprised every day at this point. each i'm at master, brigadier general, one of our great soldiers, phd from north carolina and a very, very interesting kerry. well, many things to surprise me. one of the things that surprised me early on as i came to this as a novice really not having studied for a lifetime. i was surprised at the death of enmity between the british and americans, particularly the degree of anger phobia between

american generals. bradley patton, orlando war, plus goes on and on and on. their angle of hopes almost to a man come in the great exception to that is to wait eisenhower somehow comes from born in texas comes from a small town in kansas and escapes that kind of anger phobia that accepts the culture in which he isn't driving. that continues to surprise me because it really intensifies the workers on and there are all kinds of reasons for it. one of the reasons that they're fundamentally 19th century men. torch marshall etd, that 1885, eisenhower 1890. and it's not that far removed from their boyhood to the british as our hereditary enemy, with the british tried to keep us in getting their independence paper in the capital on the war of 1812 and so on. they're pretty and deeply

imprinted on that. there were other reasons, too. world war i experiences and so on. but this surprises me. and clearly coalition warfare is the gain. the best team is going to win world war ii. eisenhower understands that in his bones really and that's really his job. he's a middle infielder marshall at best. but that's not his job. his job is to hold together this fractious, disparate coalition, which has many centrifugal forces pulling on it. and one of the centrifugal forces is this deep-seated animus that many of our generals in particular feel towards the british. and so the price me. you know, there are many surprises about kerry or a lack of character that you come across. i continue to find things -- one of the great things about researching a subject that is

the ottawa since world war ii. and it is bottomless. people will be writing about it and hopefully reading about a 500 years from now is that no one, not even the great gearhart weinberg dissected everything. the u.s. army records alone from world war ii. as one service, one way 700 tons. no one has looked at more than a fraction of that. and so, it's obviously daunting, but there's opportunity fair because you can do your trawling. if you're an archive rat as i am, you can try really wonderful things that have not been found. i'll give you one example. the english channel, as we know kim is a body of water separating the united kingdom from france. if you want to invade france, you've got to go to the english channel. that's a difficult proposition . you know they're going to to be enemy for is waiting for you.

and you know that you fly over it from paratroopers or even tried to land with gliders or airplanes is difficult, to sail across difficult. so what is your alternative? digging underneath the tunnel. the tunnel as we now call it is an idea that came up in the thinking notes out of a room full of smart young majors and they did a study. the city to see whether or not it was feasible, physically feasible to tunnel under the english channel and to invade that way. in the study came up. i thought in the national archives here it is a really wonderful thing. the study came back and said yes, this is feasible. it would require moving 50,000 cubic meters of spoil him to retake either remember, 100,006 months i think to take this thing, but there was one

problem i could never get passed, that last 10 feet. [laughter] because you have the entire brigade of the german army next to them. and so they could out how you got past that are your in that study said there are lots of things like that out there. some of them not quite the whimsical. and you know, it's one of the fun things -- one of the motivating things that i find about this enterprise that they've undertaken is you can still find very interesting things, other larger archives that may be out there somewhere that someone knows might help craft? >> guest: well, certainly personal i ties still crop up a lot. over the trends and anyone who

writes serious about world war ii is stunning. it's almost overwhelming. it's hard to deal with. and some of the is derived, but a lot of it is very interesting. and a lot of it is really primary source material. some guy who was a corporal in the 85th division, who happened to have a literary friar and kept a detailed diary, diaries were prohibited at the front and that was an incentive for every jihad to keep a diary. and some of them are really fantastic and of them are just now still coming to life. this guy dies and his children find it. instead of doing the awful thing of throwing it away, they try to dispose of it in a responsible way. all of the material i collected put the military institute in carlisle, pennsylvania. so that's sort of stuff keeps you. >> host: i just want you to know that we also do that very

thing here and we do well. >> guest: well, the notion that you're going to find a true comparable to that in the library of commerce for the national archives, that's not going to have been coming up with world war ii material. but it's not inconceivable that there will be important caches of letters, historians since 1943 have been looking for the letters between eisenhower and kate summers v. his secretary and some believe is leather. i don't believe that. his driver actually. maybe somebody will see the eisenhower summers the letters at some point. so you know, i think there still is material out there and there still are memories to be coaxed, ever fewer number unfortunately. i think the big cash as we know

what they are. >> host: how are we doing? institutions to any cataloging all that? making it available to you. he said it's very hard to manage when people are sending you this. however doing? >> guest: i think it's a mixed bag frankly. you know, some institutions have taken it very seriously to heart, sometimes belatedly. military institute in carlisle, for example. the army is for serious money in the new building and they professionalized their archival treatment. and now it's a first-rate institution. the navy? crummy. the navy cares about heritage. i don't think they care so much about history. ..

>> you are keeping in trust our collective heritage. and maybe we should get out of the way and let someone come in here who does know what they're doing. and whoever's holding the pursestrings for that institution to insure that that material is preserved as long as possible.

paper will last for centuries. digits, we don't know how long digits will last, and it's a big question, what happens to all of dave petraeus' e-mails of which there are probably hundreds of thousands at this point? will they go away? will they be accessible to historians 50 years from now? i don't think that is clear. and so it's very important that, in this case, the federal government take that very seriously and be thinking about historians in the 22nd century who want to write the definitive history, and they'll have enough distance on it and be able to write the definitive history of that ugly, messy period from, say, saddam's invasion of kuwait in august 1990 through, well, who knows, through what year. but if you don't have access to now-dimtized records,

correspondence and so on, it's going to be very hard to do that with any kind of authenticity. >> how long is the world war ii archive going to last, that paper? >> well, it depends on, first of all, the archival methods. but if you go to the national archives and it's a great building in college park, maryland. the federal government made an effort to at least make the building suitable. the archives are something of a mess. it's not thear