tv Book TV CSPAN November 13, 2011 4:00pm-5:00pm EST
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i think this 30 year battle we have an end whether the government has been the source of our problems and there's no such thing as a bad tax cut auric attacks are a regulation or good regulation has to discourage what is really going on out there in the world. we still have enormous advantages in america to come up with lost ground relative to other countries. at our performance and standardized tests and the competitiveness of all health care system, what we get for what we pay in our ability to generate manufacturing employment and export and her research and development capabilities in areas we know growing in the years have had.
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i think it is because we've been asking the wrong questions. we need to talk about how to build an economy of what the shared prosperity, what is the government to do, the private sector, how can they work together? >> what happened in 1990? i'm sorry, 1980, was the fundamental change that was made? >> guest: president carter had a very successful first years in office. if you go back and look at the midterm elections his party did quite well. we had about 10 million jobs. would like to have the 10 million back now. but at the end of his term, we have the stagflation, high inflation, stacked it grows, problems of managing the foreign angel untreated oil crisis, trusting government was level then-president reagan is a problem and he said, let me cut the taxes and the likes of the
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florida government and we will shrink government. agenda of either the white house or fourth parties in congress wanted to shrink government very much so we began to work to unsystematic structural deficits for the first time in history. it was the beginning along with developments in the air base erosion of our competitive decision. we were going to have tough times anyway because other countries with people just as smart as we are, working as hard as we do but start rising. so we have to be acting to maintain america's position anyway. but by taking our eye off the ball, which is doing what works in a modern highly interdependent world in having the same argument we had in 2010 all over again, the government is the source of all the problems has cost us a lot of trouble. so i try to talk about why this strategy didn't work, what we did in the 90s work better and why it will work again and why i
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essentially have supported the positions that president obama has taken on energy and a number of other areas because they think it is taking us in the direction we ought to be going. >> host: when you talk about solutions coming your solutions to how we can get the economy back, you talk quite a bit about the sense in both commission and some of their recommendations. if you had been president of the commission had come out, what would you have done with their? >> well, what i would've done is to say this is a great piece of work and i think that in general it is going in the right direction. i think we should use it as a blueprint and work off of it. i don't agree with everything in a report. for example a say in the book that while i agree with them that we are taxing a 35% and we are the only major country still taxing overseas income which
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keeps many from going back here, but are taxed a is only 23%. so i would like to see the broadening tax base and how to get as close to 23% rate, which is what we tax anyway as possible, but i would leave the r&d tax credit in. in other words, if we use it as a framework, we can always change it. they had a proposal on social security that was quite progressive, actually gave more money to lower income seniors, which is important because as you saw from the reports came on poverty statistics, poverty is going up among lower income seniors because notwithstanding medicare they still have significant out-of-pocket health care costs. so i like the social security, the drift of the social security proposal. on the other hand, if the economy were to promote more growth, we should balance the
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budget sooner by 2035. on that score, they are pretty conservative, but they do know that we have to soil the retirement of the baby boomers and may have to assume in their abstinence that we cannot bring health care costs back in line with inflation. i think we can, but it's hard to send a few you a a commission like that. >> host: one of your 46 recommendations, repatriating tax or profits from overseas. when we talked to policymakers, after teamsters support appeared why has that not become policy? >> guest: because for two reasons. reason number one is in 2004 president bush tried to do it. let me back. the law in america is if you're an american corporation you bring many overseas. if you bring it to america to reinvest, whether it is a new
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plant and equipment, new employees or pay raises, which you bring it back for, you owe the american tax minus whatever he paid overseas. now every other major country has gone to a territorial system, which means they let people bring their money back. without that tax. so as a result, a lot of the money gets put overseas. eventually it will be invested overseas. but in fairness when president bush tried this with the congress, and tax. modified 4.4%, the three companies that reap retreat of the largest amount of money not only didn't create jobs in america and put all the money in executive compensation, they eliminated 30,000 jobs. my answer to that is this, i think the president should ask
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republicans to work with tax reform and the democrats. i think the goal should be to get good rate is close to the tax break as possible, which is 23%, which would mean you got fewer people paying less than 20, which is not acceptable. that's about what the average american pays. while doing that, i would like to repatriate it in the following way to avoid 2004. can make the same view on that that the president has made on the payroll tax. i would say if you can document that you have added to that employment, then the portion you spend doing that is not subject to any tax. forget that for you right now. if you want to do whatever you with the money has to be the long-term capital gains, 15%, not 5.4. who will take the money and fund america's share of the infrastructure bank and then
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open it to americans to invest in by buying bonds to build america and open it up to investors and welfare from other countries and let america join ranks of other wealthy countries that are using private and public funds to modernize infrastructure. and so that is one problem. the other problem is that the joint tax committee is inclined to say what the senate 2004. you can do it now but you're losing $80 billion over the long run. they shouldn't say that anywhere. now every country says were not giving the 80 billion. revised look at the money back now and put america back to work. >> you also in your, "back to work," president clinton talk about executive compensation levels. nobody needs to see regulated. >> i don't because i tried to take a whack at it by passing a law in 93 with the economic
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plans to limit the tax detectability like the executive compensation. i believe we eliminated to a million dollars a year so you pay people whatever you want, but you can only deduct a million dollars a year. inadvertent and that it contributed to another child, which has been destabilizing a tank, which is paying executives in stock but they can do for caching and until it rises in value. the problem with that as it reinforces the trend of say the stockholders are more port than the employees of the customers and the communities. and from the 1930s, when a lot of our corporate law was made up through the mid-70s, in mid to late 70s, corporations were thought to be creatures of the state they got certain purposes
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like limited liability in return for which they had obligations to shareholders, employees, customers and community. then starting in the late 70s and going through the last 30 years, we have created this environment which the shareholders cannot weigh more than the employees are the customers of the communities. and the irony of that is that the people with the biggest stake in the long-term profitability of the company have the least influence. the people of the biggest stake in the short-term profitability are companies that have the most influence. so i think government policy should try to be silence that. if that happens, i think you would have more corporations trying like nucor. they would be sure to take care of employees, too. >> president clinton, you look in your book as well when you are talking about this since in both -- simpson/bowles commission can you talk about how we should he move in that
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direction. >> yeah, over the long run, the virtues are as follows. you can structure it to be progressive so it doesn't follow from the necessities of life. number two, it's really good for exports because the last level is a fat tax, which is basically a layered tax on various steps in the production chain. the last level is sold in another country. and products sold from other countries uttered here. it's one thing to help your ask for it. that does not violate any international trade law. secondly, does that prefers investment over consumption so it's more oriented towards the future and not so we do america. that is something that i think we'll have to move towards.
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it's virtually impossible to do now with middle american incomes declining against inflation in the cost of living and with his dead specter hanging over to the future. and with an urgent need to create jobs now. but i do believe that if we could succeed in corporate tax reform, then we should take a look at individual tax reform as a simpson/bowles recommends. and then we should take a look at whether some or all of those taxes could be supplemented or replaced by a fat. >> host: do you think the congressional deficit reduction or super committee should look at fundamental reform of the tax system? what do you think of the deficit reduction committee structure of general clark's >> guest: well, the structure is the only prep the one with any chance of coming out with a program that will provide cover for democrats to vote for the
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things they don't like and republicans for the things they don't like. they seem determined so far to do with the president recommended and what was reflected in the first budget deal we made last december, which is not to have a lot of budget cuts or tax increases while the economy is so weak. given the president surcharge on people in my income group to pay for some of the things that we need to do would not trigger until 2013. so i haven't given up on that. it is tough because if you want to get a million and half dollars of deficit reduction, a trillion and a half, excuse me, it is hard to get there without any new revenues at all unless you can bring health cost more closely in line with inflation. the best things to do that as a point not in this book are changing the delivery system of health care and those things are
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hard to quote score. president reagan signed a bill that he worked at the democratic congress on. i signed a bill that i worked with the republican congress to save money on medicare and medicaid. the bill president reagan signs a 15% more than estimated first-year and eventually 50% more than the bill on our site save 50% more the first year. and i know claim full credit for that. we'll work together, democrats are republicans trying to figure out what woodward. but the point is i am convinced there were tons of things that can be done but would not dilute the quality health care and leave people feeling the health care and cut them bring this inflation rate down. but it's hard to get the committees to squirt because you cannot know when it hands exactly how much money is involved. postcode this is president clinton's fourth book. this is "back to work: why we need smart government for a s strong economy."
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mr. president, refer quite often to hinder holsteins new book, the next american economy. >> guest: is a good book. americans who are pessimistic should read it because it will get you out of your pessimism. first it shows there are places in america that are burrowing into the future with confidence. secondly it describes what they do so you can imagine wherever you live the top in some version of that and putting it in where you live. i'm not everybody can be silicon valley. not everybody can be the tech cluster around m.i.t. not everyone can have 100 simulation companies the way orlando days. not everybody can either center for genomic research the way san diego is, but everybody can do something. when we have the global initiative for the united states last summer, a company called
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onshore and said they would create a thousand jobs in joplin missouri by providing services that used to be outsourced to other countries in a smaller community and more rural setting. those are the kinds of things that we need to look at so i think if people read the book, it will help to break their pessimism. >> host: if he were president and had the opportunity to be the encourager in chief, how would you make it that typepad's are manufactured in the united states? what policies would use that? >> guest: first of all, i don't know that we can because they've invested a lot of money in their infrastructure. in general but i think we ought to do is to look at the overall wave structure which is raising
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and then you have to add to the chinese parties will be made there in america. you look at trees cause, look at the product to the d., not just wages on whether the materials come from and i would be analyzing all the high-end manufacturing being done in the world today, not just in the ipads and figure out which of those things could be made in america if we had a good generous research and development tax credit, if they could have their last on-site manufacturing and then i would organize a set of tax incentives to do that. for example, the chinese want the solar and wind job so bad that they just put another $34 billion. free training, free land, a 20 year tax holiday.
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they are determined to hold onto this as a key to 21st century manufacturing. we don't have to do that much because we've got great venture capital because we have a lot of laboratories doing this work because our capacity for solar and wind generation is staggering. we rank first or second in the world and the ability to do that. north dakota could generate enough electricity for 25% of our used in america from the wind if we had a national grid and you could feed the power to her that people are and where the wind over the sunshine. that is what i would do. i would design a program around the kinds of good jobs the way of the best chance to get. >> host: stephen moore and "the wall street journal" lamented what he said was you going from being a new democrat to it that big government person and that this book is all about big government coming back with
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the war. what is your response to that? >> guest: it's just not true. you know when i was president as i pointed out, we spent less than 20% of gdp -- we spent less than 18% of gdp to be taxed less than 20% of gdp, both at or under a post-world war ii average. when i was governor with the second lowest tax burden in the country. i raise taxes to fund education and economic development incentives and lower taxes to provide tax incentives to create jobs and to reduce the income tax burden. i got rid of the income tax on 25% of our people. so that's not true, but i do what i want to do where we disagree if you would like to keep on cutting government and think everything would be wonderful. if you look at this book, i call for a public or the partnership,
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something america has never done. i have no objection to privatizing certain things, but on the other hand, if you look at the facts, it is not public versus private. it is what works best. for example, with a privatized health care finance system than 2009 in the depths of the recession risk premiums so much under the guise whose costs are going up that health insurance profits went up 50% and 59 people lost health insurance. 3.5 million went on medicaid because they had no place else to go. set the policies that he would support our increasing government as maintenance. and so, i believe that -- i just don't think it's a public private gain. we have to have a cooperative attitude. there's a lot of things the private sector does way better than government will ever do. i for example -- i prefer tax
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credits to government subsidies, with the particular companies to lose, but i like the section 1603 program which i talk about a lot in there because it gives the equivalent of a tax credit to start us so we encourage startups as well as existing businesses. so i know what mr. moore would like us to continue to strengthen the federal government more or less indiscriminately. i have no objection. when i was president we had the smallest federal government since dwight eisenhower's last year, smallest percentage of the federal workforce since franklin roosevelt was president. i wouldn't mind doing that again. but i think there are some things that government has to do. government is good at aggregating capital for modern infrastructure, but i think we need more private investment.
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so i would like to see a debate in this committee could do this. they could say okay, look, here's what governments got to do. the deputy national security and help people who can't support themselves. we've made a decision in their retirement years people should have a decent standard of living. we have a whole wealth of things to support economic development and if anything we have to do more because our competitors are. same thing with scientific research. same thing with technological expansion of access. same thing with education. so we need to do is identify those things which governments should do and do them while at no greater cost than is absolutely necessary. and those things the private sector should do and figure out how we step closer partnerships. >> host: you are well known for the era of big government is over address to congress. you have 46 policy recommendations in this book.
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is this a consistent with that? >> guest: yeah, i never said the era of strong mint was over. what i said was i not the air in which big government bureaucracies would deliver services and would on-demand estoril model was over. keep in mind was when i was president of the social security administration won a national award for customer service. we began to let people file their tax returns electronically. i try to simplify government to make it less bureaucratic. we got rid of 16,000 pages of government regulations on people. i think we should continue to try to modernize and streamline government, but if there is something that we need the government to do because we have a generally shared interests at the market won't fix like clean air, clean water, safe food or because we have to do it to be
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competitive. then we have to do it and do it well. >> host: mr. president, could you have written this book while in office? >> guest: well, it deals with a lot of things i'd been concerned about since before i started running for president including the pneumatics upsurge of income equality and shank at the middle-class prospects, which i was concerned about. but i know more about it now i think we have more historical evidence. we have the 12 years before i was president, he years after mma efforts to struggle out of the financial crisis with president obama's first years essentially before it got to the congress. so i could not if written this exact book, but this book is consistent with my philosophy. post that we are at the new york historical society with bill clinton talking about his book, "back to work."
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there is an event tonight with chelsea clinton. just go yeah, she's going to ask me questions about my in it. i you do about every muscle in sure that will be on display tonight. >> host: thank you for your time. c-span will also be covering the event with chelsea clinton. >> former president bill clinton's book presentation from the new york historical society. >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen. my name is sunny messe and on behalf of all my colleagues at the publishing group, i would like to welcome you to the new york historical society for what promises to be a memorable
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evening of conversation. tonight's conversation will reach across the generations. we use that term with the older interview by the young will focus on something of interest to everyone in this room collective future. the american dream is a powerful concept. of being derailed, people are worried about the jobs. they are worried about the economy. they are worried that we lost our competitive edge. and they are concerned that america -- they are concerned the american seafood has "back
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to work" sfa, i came of age leaving that no matter what have you and would at least be able to support myself. it became a crucial part of my identity. it drove me to spend a good portion of my adult life trying to guess at the same chance. president clinton goes on to say, it is heartbreaking to see so many people trapped in a web of idleness, debt and doubt. we have to change that. we've got to get america back in the future business. president clinton and dedicated public servant will be joined on stage tonight by one of our brightest youngest citizens also a champion of public service, chelsea clinton chelsea clinton is a graduate of stanford, has
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earned a masters from columbia and is currently pursuing a doubt turgut oxford. she is also working with the clinton foundation and the clinton global initiative to recent professional and academic work is focused on improving access to health care for citizens around the world on equal rights and that education for children. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming president clinton and sequencing. [applause] [applause] >> thank you. before we begin, i should
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acknowledge the fact that it is certainly not an unbiased interviewer. i am unapologetically and unbiased towards my father. we don't always agree, but i certainly always learn from him, whether in conversation or the pleasure of reading many drafts of his book and finally getting a hard copy myself last week. so i think it would be a good place to start a bit worse on the left off, saying that you wrote this book largely because he worried for many of us the american dream had become opaque and for others had been lost. so i think it would be helpful to hear why at this point in time you were compelled to write this book. it is brief, distilled, production oriented. >> guest: well, i first was
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inclined to do it after the 2010 elections because i went out and did more than 130 events. i wasn't particularly surprised about the out islands for the reasons i stated in the book. people tend to hire democrats when things are messed up. if you think about it in the last 30 years. so they hire us to fix things. they also -- the american people are always deeply ambivalent about the role of government they have been from the beginning. keep in mind we were born in reaction to unaccountable government power. i just had my picture taken with the stamp act. imposed by the british government under king george and is the first time the stamp act has ever left the parliamentary
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archives in london. it is here for the dolby here to new york historical society through april. so we didn't want too much government, but we want enough. what is enough and not too much is a source of constant debate. and so, what bothered me was the election was almost completely fact free and i think that is not good for us. and then i started thinking about the last 30 years in american politics, unassertive antigovernment paradigm had led us into one blind alley after another, arguing only about whether we should always be against more taxes and always be against more regulations and government would always mess up a two-car parade set of going to the end of working backwards. how to rebuild a country that is
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a country that promotes shared prosperity and new jobs and opportunities in broad-based educational opportunities for people of the 21st century. and then working back from that, how do you get that? if you look around the world of the most successful countries, they have both a strong economy and a smart and affect his government and they work together. so that is what propelled me to write this. i've been saving all these articles have gotten out of the newspapers, blog sites, magazines since 2007, since the recession started about the economy and other thinks about the books i'd read and i finally decided i should try to distill it figures a political and economic history of america for the last 30 years and here's what we should do now to put our country back in to business. what i was thinking about when i did it would be a good thing if every american who cared could
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have a slim volume up enough facts in would prove the case about how we got where we are and i can make the argument about what i thought we should do going forward. >> host: one of the things you clearly articulated the boat is what in your estimation is just the right amount of government and with the role of government should he. one thing you don't articulated book is what should the role of the to be and what do you think is just the right amount of engagement and action, particularly at moments like these by the air. certainly for my edification, i would like to hear you answered the farmer and the latter together so that there is sort of a clear and coherent vision of what should be rendered under government and what should be rendered under the private side there. >> guest: well i think in general the private for should
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do the work of the country that basically it is better the competition of building building businesses that work, hiring people, creating jobs. the government should set rules, boundaries, how do we have clean air, how do we have safe clean water, how do we as safe food, how do we produce energy in a way that maximizes the positives in pac-10 preserve the environment and should do it in a way that leaves the largest numbers of questions to the theater and still get good results. when i was president, we had 43 million more americans breathing clean air and we had to pass the chemical raids to know law, which favors transparency, but we tried to set up a system where the
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private sector was incentivized to meet the subject is at the lowest possible cost in the shortest amount of time. but it changes over time. we provided some of fire management of nuclear sap pios, on bomb making material. over time they would be more and more functions that government yesterday for my needs profitably done by the private sector, just as the government should do things that help us to get into new areas of economic opportunity or deal with new problems that are broadly shared that the market won't solve. but i will just give you one example of something that was done in 1980 that is probably more relevant today than it has been in decades. in 1980 with the bipartisan majority, congress passed a law that president carter signed.
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which provided for federal research to universities that results in commercially by means i'm terms determined by the university because of us recognize that the private sector would he able to make the most of the commercial development and most colleges couldn't rather dismissive. shouldn't be starting businesses in doing it. that is tech transfer system has worked pretty well for 30 years. one of the things they are doing might hook is that all the colleges in the country gameness and i have a young -- the nike does get a shout out on the boat. >> what the heck, i've got to take care of my family. but the best tech transfer program is probably an i.t.
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because they never take any money. they only take stock of the new company. they will give a professor a year off to work in the any, but the professor must promise after a year to bring in a professional business person to run the company and they've got a lot of other things that works really well and there's other models, but in general this question u.s. is we have to always be constantly asking ourselves, should this be privatized and should not? but if you have a doctrinaire position each way, you might wind up with a bad decision. i'll give you another example. the united states is the only country that does almost all of it large infrastructure with 100% structural funding.
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other countries don't do that. so the president actually has asked the congress to adopt the infrastructure bank proposal that has bipartisan support in the senate conceded infrastructure with an amount of money, 10, $15 billion senescent chest in the book ways to get it. and then allow the bank to sell bonds to allow americans to dispense to invest in it and also to take money from overseas interests and pension funds, but also sovereign wealth fund from government all over the world because the infrastructure projects yield a very high rate of return. and i think we've been a little too high balanced. we should be the only country in the world that is taking private sector money to build our infrastructure and i don't mean roads and bridges. i am talking about a decent
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electrical grid, faster brought in connections all over the country. they should bother you that south korea's broadband speeds or four times hours. and so, having good government policy doesn't preclude some things being done by and there. >> host: one public-policy discuss in a few places in your book and your advocating for the extension of the 1603 green tax credit, which is particularly germane to the title of the book, back to work because as you articulated your vote, roughly a billion dollars of that good and new qualifier power plant yields about 187 jobs and a billion dollars invested in building retrofit deals between somewhere in the order of 7000 to 8000 new jobs.
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so maybe you could talk a little bit about the green tax credit and why it is set to sunset in 2011, sort of back to the first part of your book of political history and how those of us in this room could try to help change that dynamic for 2012. >> when the president and the congress were debating after the 2010 elections whether the bush tax cuts would be extended because of the recession and whether it would be a bad idea to raise anybody's taxes this down economy, one of the things that the republican senate's tax cuts are always wonderful in a down economy, the spending cuts to hurt at all. which is self-evidently crazy. there's really no difference from a macroeconomic point of view as their friends in the
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u.k. are finding out when they went for an austerity response to the current circumstance. one of the things they wanted to get rid of was the 1603 tax credit. and they said it was a spending program. this is the kind of argument that to be held in a seminary over some months or provision of scripture in my opinion. but you be the judge. the republicans say we have to get rid of 1603. it's a spending program. it's not a tax cut. it is but it is in. when the congress to gain like loan guarantees for new energy can't be like the impermissible interim loan guarantee was actually adopt it during the bush administration, signed by president bush and supported at the time by almost all the republicans on the energy committee. and it is hard sometimes to pick
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winners and losers. that is not what 1603 does. 1603 recognizes that a lot of people building solar and wind installations or start up. so to give them a 30% tax credit that she would ordinarily get something for building this new fact very, it would be worth because they have no credit. what 1603 does is give them the cash equivalent of the tax credit if they are startups. if you just don't like solar and wind energy and you want to keep the depletion allowance or any of the tax cut at for traditional energy, you can make that argument, but it's a very significant number of the new solar and wind projects have used 1603.
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my argument is that to be extended because we've got thousands of our facilities in solar and wind power which are more economical every time the price drops 30% for solar and wind every tiny double capacity. they had significant technological advance the last three years. ironically one of the reasons one who went down because the other technologies get cheaper, faster than anybody figured. it took them out of a competitive mix. so i like 1603 and i think it should be continued because i think we should be supporting startups as well as existing companies in the very significant percentage of america's new jobs over the past 20 years have come not from just small businesses, but small businesses five years old or younger. so this is the kind of thing that i think my argument is we should say where do we want to go with this country?
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lets you build shared prosperity in modern jobs and be competitive and backup from that and say how do we get there? was the government supposed to do in the private sector supposed to do? if you do that instead of seeing government, no government, you say the 1603 is a good deal of it to keep doing it. >> host: since you mention the end of 2010, i wanted to give you an opportunity to repeat something you said to me earlier, which is the one part is he gave the president a bum rap was surrounded that feeling today. >> host: i was really upset and i didn't know whether it was the white house or the congress that resisted raising the debt ceiling in 2010 after we lost the election. >> host: would we still have the majority. >> guest: the congress is meeting in november, december 2010 and i knew we would've the republicans would try very hard target.
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and so, i sat in a muted way that for reasons that were still unclear to me this up in. and gene sperling actually sent me an e-mail and who is a scrupulously honest person said we tried. you know, we did make a deal because there was the main subject was weary of the bush era tax credits going to be extended. but this shows you -- i am trying to force myself to say what a day coming either i don't know where i was wrong. because i think it would be therapeutic if everybody in washington did that. and so i want to be as good as them. so here's something i was on about. it's raising the debt ceiling, simply ratified the decision congress has already made to spend money. and if the budget is the only
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thing that the senate votes on that is not subject to filibuster, i thought that the debt ceiling was not subject to a filibuster and i was for. so gene sperling sent me a message. he said senator mcconnell said he was going to filibuster unless we agreed right thing agreed rate than to rent out their budgets they had run a. so it turns out he couldn't raise it to dealing and i was wrong. and that is one way we get less ideological politics is if people find errors in a confessed that. >> host: moving a bit out of washington, one of the things that you do frequently in the book is to cite examples of where you think this sort of appropriate partnership and shared responsibility between government and private your is working at the state level.
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maybe you can talk about your theory is that and also share examples particularly from your time as governor of arkansas what worked then and what is continue to work and not work subsequently in arkansas. >> guest: well, first taking we americans are used to people at the state and local level hustling business, trying to save businesses, trying to expand businesses that locate businesses and it is largely a bipartisan activity undertaken perhaps with varying levels of its brands by elected officials. but one reason i was able to stay governor for a dozen years and never got word that the job is the whole economic development aspect of it. and the interesting thing is that most every state in the country and scott moore since
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2010. it's largely a bipartisan activity. so i tried to cite some areas in the book, for example to give you one just practical example. there is a long section in the book about what i would like to see done to clear the mortgage that were quickly. i guess i should back up and say, these kinds of financial crashes take historically five to 10 years to get over it if you have a mortgage component to it, tends to push the first 10 years. we should be trying to beat the clock. we can't do it in my opinion even if we adopt the president jobs plan, there's a lot of good ideas in there. and they'll give us 1.5, 2 million jobs according to the economic analyses. but if you want to return to full employment economy of 240,000 jobs a month, i think we
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average 227 of them for eight years. if you want that, you've got to flush the debt and get the win go going again. and so, kenneth rogoff at harvard recommends that some people say well, if we lowered the mortgage rate, if we bring the mortgage down to the value of the house, then the people who hold the mortgages will lose money. and who is going to come and take them? and what's it going to be? broca's has suggested that the banks are the people who ultimately hold the mortgages instead of writing them down, just cut them in half by taking an ownership position in the house so that when the house is ultimately sold, the people who issued the mortgage will share the profit and you get the same practical result. you no longer have the bad debt
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on the book and the homeowner has a mortgage that he or she can pay. they sat in the book, i know this'll work because when i was governor in the late 70s and early 80s and farmers got in trouble, we had hundreds of small state chartered banks who did not want to foreclose on the farmers. they knew they were having a couple of bad years and couldn't pay farmlands of them they didn't want to take possession of the farms, so we allowed the banks to change the law and take an ownership position in the farms and then gave the farmer in absolute buyback rate to take his fireback and the full title once they could pay off the farm loan. that is asserted practical thing you see done at the state level. the republican governor of south dakota called me on the phone and he said, this is unbelievable. wish i would've thought about it. i said it will, but you know
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that your neighbor in north dakota, which is more republican than south dakota is the only place in the country as a state owned bank and they have been doing this since the great depression and that's how i got the idea. but you get the idea. it doesn't matter whether we are right or wrong. the point is reset her and talked about how to keep farmers on their land, how to avoid putting our banks in trouble. nobody gave a thought of it. and even at the beginning of all this hyper partisan area in the 80s when i represented the governors with the republican in negotiating the welfare reform bill with the reagan white house and 87 in 88 and i went to designing with president reagan on the white house and i had a republican counterpart, we worked with the committees. we worked with the democratic chairman and republican minority leader and we worked with the white house and there was never a of politics and it will time.
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we're always talking about how this is going to work, what would we do? and when president bush -- the first president bush was in office, i represented the democrats and we wrote these national education goals and i got invited to the state of the union address with a republican counterpart. we stayed up all night writing the schools. we talked about was what would work. we need that again. every time an election rolls around, turns out we still disagree with each other enough to have a heck of a good election. but when the election wasn't going on, we actually thought we were supposed to go to work for you. god forbid, right? so i could give you examples of things that these economic strategies have been developed. andrew cuomo did a great thing. organizing your content regions and got the legislature to set aside money and the reasons are
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competing with it to get this cash. i think it's $200 million or some thing. they haven't decided how much they're going to provide it in all the reasons have to come up with regional development plans. in new york is a very diverse state. so i went the other day up to albany to meet with the thousands of people that represent these regions coming out with plans and i am telling you, even the regions that don't get the money will be way ahead because they are doing something they never had to do before. they are talking about what they want to do and how they are going to do it instead of having some vital political debate. it's about is the kind of thing that i think chelsea is referring to. the federal government ought to be doing this. do you want to give the chinese and the germans the whole solar market even though we have greater capacity, just in
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domestic demand a much better venture capital than they do and the price is dropping precipitously. and if you don't, what should we do about it? which of the private sector do. same thing with wind and building retrofits. governor cuomo centigrade the new york called on bill accounting. but here's the bottom line. if you retrofit your home or your office building, you can get it financed outlay and then you can pay it off only from your utility savings because they will just add it to your utility bill. so what is it just say yes system and it will create 10 or 12,000 jobs in new york and put billions of dollars in today's economy within a matter of months as soon as it is fully implemented. so those are the kinds of things they think we have to do more of. >> host: having conversations
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like these and writing books or advocating, do you think this is sort of the niche that civil society should fill in this conversation having discussed with the role of the public sector is in the private sector is? in many ways, just stated at cgi america, you clearly have the unique teaming capability, but a lot of us can make these sorts of contributions. >> guest: jazz, but i'd like to explain why. the nongovernmental organization in america has largely done two things in the modern era. one goes all the way back to before we became a country. the first ngo in the united states is the volunteer fire department, benjamin franklin organized in philadelphia before the constitution was ratified.
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and he was doing old-fashioned ngo work, 18th century style. that is there is always going to be a cat between what the private sector will produce than the government can provide. we didn't have enough government to approve a fire department and it wasn't profitable enough to be a business. on the other hand, if the wizard building he thought there were enough fires. so we organized a volunteer fire department. one of the morning television shows i did today, the today show after i left, they have what is fast becoming the biggest family in america. did you see a? this family with 18 children about to be 19 -- about to be 20. that is the conservative republican who was in the
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legislature. we are talking to his kids because one of his kids is proud of the fact he was in the town he lived where i establish a fire department as governor because we set up 700 fire department. i was a girl art of. the point is that it's the ngo deal. the gap between what the private sector can produce in the public can provide. the new additional and improved control for ngo is too basic way hopefully work with public institutions and private institutions to figure out how to do things faster, cheaper, better because unlike business you don't have to turn a profit every quarter and unlike the government you don't have to be embarrassed if you fail. you can say i try to do this. it didn't work. we're going to do it some other way. and so, that is what you do in
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schools. you go in there and try to figure out how to take otherwise statistically disadvantaged kids and prove they are just as smart as everyone else. they could things like everybody else and having chess tournaments organized the way you organize. so i think what we did was cgi america was a version of the latter. we try to bring people together to think about what we could all do to create jobs. there some other examples, or private foundations are creating employment directly and partnerships with public and private groups like san diego, which is now the genomics center of that unity in america and has the largest number of nobel prize-winning scientist of any town in the
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