i am really getting a hard copy myself. last week. so i think it would be a good place to start a bet where sonny left toscana thing you wrote spoke largely because he worried that for many of us the american dream had become opaque and furthers that have been lost. so i think it would be helpful

to your wife this point in time you are compelled to write this book. it is distilled this action oriented. >> well, i first was inclined to do it after the 2010 election because i went more than 130 events. i wasn't particularly surprised about the outcome for the reasons i stated in the book. people tend to hire democrats and things are messed up. if you think about it, so they hire us to fix things that i didn't feel six. the american people are always so deeply ambivalent about the role of government and they have been from the beginning. keep in mind we were bored in reaction to unaccountable government power. i just had my picture take what

the stamp act imposed by the british government under king george and it's the first time i think the stamp act discover that the parliamentary archives in london. it is here for an exhibit that will be here at the new york historical society to april. so we always wanted to -- we didn't want to match government, but we want a knife and what is anathema to much as a source of constant debate. and so come this have happened. but bothered me was the election was almost completely factory and i think that's not good for us. and i started thinking about the last 30 years for the antigovernment. i had led us into one blind alley after another, arguing

only about whether we should always be against more taxes than always be against more regulation and government would always messed up a two-car parade instead of going to the end and working backwards. how do we build a country that is a country that promotes shared prosperity and new jobs and new opportunities and broad-based educational opportunities for people of the 21st century. and then, looking back, how do you get that? if you look around the world that the most successful countries they're both a strong economy and a smart and effective government and they were together. so that is what propelled me to rate this. we've been thinking all these articles to newspapers and magazines since 2007, since the recession started about the economy and other things and of all the books i've added a next

chart distillate and take a political economic history of america for the last 30 or so here's what i think we should demand a better country our country in the future business. what i was thinking about when i did it but i thought it would be a good thing as every american who cared could have a slim volume with the fact that it would prove the case about how we got where we are and i could make the argument about what i thought we should do going forward. >> one of the things you clearly articulate in the book is one in your estimation is just the right amount of government and what the role of government should be. one thing you to articulate a book is what should the role of the private sector be what do you think it's just the right amount of engagement and action, particularly opponents like these are the private sector. and certainly for my edification and that to units of the former and the latter together so they're sort of a clear and

coherent vision of what should be rendered under government emma should be rendered under the private sector. >> i think in general the air should do the work of the country. basically the private sector is better the competition committee building businesses that work and hungry people and creating jobs. the government should set the rules, the boundaries, how do you get -- out of clean-air? had with a water, safe food? how do we produce energy in a way that maximizes the positive impact and preserves the environment and should do in the way that leaves the largest number of how questions to the private sector as possible and still get good results. when i was president we had

43 million more americans can clean-air and we had to pass a chemical right to know law, which favors transparency, but we tried to set up a system where the private sector was incentivized to meet the subject is at the lowest possible cost to the shortest amount of time. many changes over time. we privatize some upper management of nuclear stockpile, non-bomb making material. over time they would be more and more functions for government use to do that might be profitably time private sector, just as the government should do things that help us get into new areas of economic opportunity or deal with new problems that are broadly shared that the market won't solve. i'll just give you one example

of something that was done in 1980 is probably more relevant today than it has been intent to. in 1980 was a bipartisan charge of the congress passed a law that president carter's, which provided for federally funded research to the universities that results in commercially valuable premiums to be licensed to the private sector in terms determined by the university because it was recognized the private sector would be able to make the most of the commercial development at most colleges couldn't run their own businesses shouldn't be starting businesses and doing it. that transfer system has worked pretty well for 30 years and one of the things i argue in my book all the colleges in the country doing that than i have a young cousin who does this work at

texas a&m university. >> he does get a shot at in the book. >> yeah, yeah. what the heck i've got to take care of my family. [laughter] but the best transfer program is probably mit's because they never take any money. they only take stock in the new company. they will give a professor here half to work in the company, but the professor must promise after a year to bring in a professional business person to run the company and they cut a lot of other things. but it works really well. and there's some other models. but in general, i think this question is simply had to always be constantly asking ourselves. should this be privatized or should it 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 virtually the only big country that does almost all of its large infrastructure with 100% public funding. other countries don't do that. so the president actually has asked the congress to adopt an infrastructure bank proposal that has bipartisan support in the senate to have the government ceded infrastructure bank with a relatively modest amount of money, 10, $15 million by suggesting the book ways to get it. and then allow the bank to sell bonds to allow american citizens to invest in the pen also take money from overseas interests and pension funds but also sovereign wealth funds from governments all over the world because these infrastructure projects yield a very high rate

of return. and i think we've been a little too hidebound. we shouldn't be the only country in the world's afraid to take private sector money to build our infrastructure and i don't mean roads and bridges. i'm talking about a decent electrical grid. faster broadband connections all over the country. tisha b'av view south korea's broadband are four times cars. so having good government policy doesn't preclude something is being done by and with the private sector. >> one government policy to discuss in a few different places in your book that i know you're personally advocating for is the extension of the 1603 green tax credit, which is particularly germane to the title of the book, but to work because as you articulate, roughly a billion dollars

invested in a power plant yields about 187 jobs and a billion dollars invested in building retrofit field somewhere between any order 7000 to 8000 new jobs. so maybe he could talk about the green tax credit and why it is set to sunset in 2011 and sort of back to the first part of the book with political history and how those of us in this term 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 be a bad idea to raise tax economy, one of the things the republicans said his

tax cuts are always wonderful in a down economy, but spending cuts don't hurt at all. which is self-evidently crazy. there's really no difference from a macroeconomic point of view as our friends in the u.k. are spending now. i know it for posterity response for the current circumstance. one of the things they wanted to get rid of was the 1603 tax credit. they said it was a spending program. this is the kind of argument that ought to be held in a seminary over some obscure provision of scripture in my opinion. you be the judge. the republicans say we ought to get rid of 1603. it's a spending program not a tax cut. and it is but it isn't. when the congress did things like loan guarantees for new energy companies like the

infamous lender loan guarantee was actually adopted during the bush administration signed by president bush and supported at the time i am most other republicans on the energy committee. and it's hard sometimes to pick winners and losers. that's not what 1603 does. 1603 recognizes that a lot of people building solar and wind installations or startup companies. so if you give them a 30% tax credit that should ordinarily give someone for building this new fact to read, it will be worthless to them because they have no income to claim the credit begins. so what 1603 does is basically gives them cash equivalent of a tax credit if they are startups. now if you just don't like solar and wind energy and you want to keep all of the allowance for any of the other tax credits for traditional energy, you can make that argument.

but the very significant number of the new solar and wind projects have used 1603. so my argument is about to be extended because they've got thousands of more facilities in solar and wind power, which are becoming more economical every time the price drops about 30% for solar and wind every time you double capacity in solar in particular has had significant logical advances in the last three years. it's ironically one of the reasons to wonder when down because the technologies cheaper faster than anyone figured. and to come out of a competitive mix. i like 16 note and i'll make to think we should be supporting startups as well as existing companies in a very significant

percentage of america's new jobs over the last 20 years come not just of small businesses but from small businesses that were five years old or younger. so this is the kind of thing i think i argument his wishes he were to want to go? white shirt prosperity in an pack up and say how do we get there? puts the government supposed to do in the private sector supposed to do? if you do penance for the singh government and no government you come and say this is a heckuva good deal and we have to keep doing it. >> since you mention the end of 2010 i wanted to give you an opportunity to sort of repeat something is said to me earlier, which is one part of your book we feel he gave the president a bum rap as a rummage that feeling that. that's been a coverage a lot. >> 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. >> when we saw the majority. the mac any of the congress meeting in november and december 2010 and i knew who'd waited until junior republicans would drive a hard bargain. and so said in a muted way that for reasons were still unclear to me this did not and gene sperling actually sent an e-mail and said you work for me and is an unscrupulous on a person of we tried. we didn't make a big deal out of it because the research -- the main subject was where the bush era tax cuts were going to be, but the shows are trying to force myself to say today either i don't know or i was wrong because i think it would be therapeutic if everybody in washington did that. and so i want to be as good.

here's something i was wrong about. since raising the debt ceiling simply ratifies a decision congress authority made to spend money and since the budget is the only thing that the senate votes on that is not subject to a filibuster, i thought that raising the debt ceiling boat was not subject to a fellow sister and i was wrong. so gene sperling sent a message and senator mcconnell said he was going to filibuster unless we agree great thing to all their could run on. so turns out he couldn't raise the debt ceiling and i was wrong. it didn't hurt me. and that's when we get less ideological policies. >> living up to washington, one of the things you do frequently

in the book is to cite examples of where you think this appropriate partnership and shared responsibility between government and the private sector is working at the state level. maybe he can talk about your theory of that and also some examples particularly from your time as governor of arkansas what worked then and also let us continue to work in knotwork subsequently subsequently in arkansas. >> well, first i think we americans are used to be what the state and local level hustling business, tracking to see businesses can expand businesses, locate businesses and it's largely a bipartisan activity undertaken perhaps with varying levels of occurrence by elected officials. but one reason i was able to stay governor for a dozen years

and never got bored with the job and loved it his whole economic development aspect of it. the interesting thing is that most terrorist in the country although it's cut more partisan now serves 2010, but i think i will settle down, it's largely a bipartisan activity. so i tried to cite some areas in the book, for example, to give you a practical example, there is a long section in the book about what i would like to see done to clear the mortgage debt more quickly and i guess i should back up and say, these kinds of financial crashes take historically five to 10 years to get over and if you have a mortgage component to push it towards 10 years we should be trying to beat the clock. we can't do it in my opinion, even if we adopt the presidents

plan with a lot of good ideas in there. give us 1.5 to nine jobs according to the economic analyses. if you want to return to full employment economy, what i think we average 227,000 a month for eight years. if you want but you've got to push this debt and get bank lending going again. and so, kenneth rogoff at harvard recommends that since some people say well, if we lower mortgage rates, if we bring mortgage to the value of the house, then the people hold the mortgages will lose money. who's going to compensate them? and what is it going to be? will cost us adjusted the settings for the people who told the mortgages instead of writing them down just cut them in to

take an ownership position in the house so when the house was ultimately sold to people who issued the mortgage will share in the profit and you get the same practical result. you no longer have a patent on the book and the homeowners got a mortgage that he or she can pay. i said 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 just having a couple of bad years and they couldn't pay their final sauce and they didn't want to take possession of these farms, so we allowed the banks -- were changed a lot to take an ownership position in the fund and give the farmer by that price to take his arm back once they could pay off the farm loan. that is the sort of particle

thing you see done at the state level. the republican governor of south dakota will never forget it called me on the phone and said, this is unbelievable. i wish i'd thought about it. send it a lot. i said it will but you know that your neighbor in north dakota, which was more republican than south dakota is the only place that a state-owned bank may be doing this since the great depression until he got got the idea. but you get the idea. doesn't matter whether we are right around. the point is we sit and talk about how to keep farmers on their land. how don't like putting our our banks in trouble. nobody should've thought of it. and even after the beginning of all this ever partisan era in the 80's when represent and the governors with the republican and the health care reform bill with the reagan white house and 87 and 88 and i went to the

signing of president reagan on the white house lawn and i had a republican counterpart in democratic counterpart, worked with the committees and democratic chairman and republican minority leader and we were at the white house and there is never a look of politics in the poll time. we are always talking about how is this going to work? what would we do? and when president bush comes in the first president bush was in office i represented a democrat and rewrote the national education bill to make a invited to the state of the union address with my republican counterpart. we stayed up all night at the university of virginia writing these. all we talked about was what would work where we need that again. every time an election with record turnout we still we still disagree with enough to have a heckuva collection. but when the election was going on we actually thought we were supposed to go to work for you. privet, right? like to give you lots of

examples of other things, 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 competing with it to get this cash. i think it's $200 million or something and they haven't decided how much they're going to provide it. other regions had to come up with regional development plans. 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 up with these plans and i am telling you, even the regions that don't get the money are going to be way ahead because they are doing something they never had to do. they talk about what they want to do and how they are going to do it instead of having some idle political debate. so that's the kind of thing that i can chelsea is referring to.

the federal government ought to be doing this. we have to be -- do you want to give the chinese and the germans the whole solar market even though we have greater capacity just in domestic demand and much better venture capital than they do and the prices dropping precipitously? and if you don't, which we do about it? which of the government do in the private sector do? same thing with the wind and building richer for it. governor cuomo just denigrate the new york called on billy coming. but here's the bottom line. if you retrofit your home or your office building, you can get it financed that way and then you can pay it off only from your utility savings because i'll just add it to your utility bill. so it is they just say yes

system and it will create 10,000 or 12,000 jobs in new york and put billions of dollars into this economy within a matter of months as soon as implemented. those are the kinds of things we had to do more of. >> coming persecutions like these and writing books and advocating coming to think this is a niche of civil society should fill enough conversation? having discussed with the role of the public sector is at the royal private sector is? in many ways this book just stated out of cgi america, you clearly have a unique convenient capability, but i think a lot of us can make these sorts of contributions, yes? >> yes. but i'd like to explain 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. and he was doing old-fashioned ngo work, 18th century style. that is there's always going to be a gap between what the private sector will produce on the government can provide. we did not enough government to afford a fire department and there weren't enough tires to make it profitable to be a private business. on the other hand, if it was your building, you thought there were enough pairs. we organized volunteer fire department. one of the morning television shows i did today, the today show after i left they had what is fast becoming the biggest family in america, this did you

see a? this family with 18 children about to be 19 -- about to be 20. that guy is a conservative republican am losing the arkansas legislature in may last year as president. that's the first time in london 11 years ago. but we were talking to his kids because one of his kids as part of the fact he was a volunteer fireman in the little town where they lived, where i established the fire department. as governor with a seven under fire departments. i was in rural arkansas. the and is what the private sector can produce in the public sector can provide. the new additional and improve its ngo is to basically hopefully work with public institutions and private institutions to do things faster, cheaper better and i

like the government you don't have to be embarrassed if he failed. you can take a bad story and say i tried to do this it didn't work. we're going to do it some other way. and so, that is what you do with the schools. you go when they try to figure out how to take otherwise statistically disadvantaged kids and improve care just as smart as everybody else and come at things like everybody else and having the chess tournaments and organize the way you organize them will increase driven novels. so i think that what we did was cgi america was a version of the latter appeared which had to bring people together to think about what we could all do to create hubs and i think there's a lot of things -- there's other examples where private foundations are creating employment directly and partnerships with public and

private groups like in san diego which is now the genomics center at civilian america has the largest number of nobel prize scientists. they have the university of california san diego. in some hundred of their i.t. companies. but they've got great runners foundation and other foundations they are investing and all of them worked together on a car and plan and not works in the modern world. it does. i'm not being cutesy year. it does. for everyone serious on the ngo world. >> i don't know if i don't know if that's feeding conflict exactly. >> but anyway, you get the idea appeared we need the ngos to fill the gap.

the robin hood foundation fills both kinds of ngos. the harlem children's zone does both kinds of work. so there's differences. but you get the picture. so there's a real important role for ngos here because they take a lot of heat off businesses especially the first time. they take a lot of heat off government who want to try certain things that may be scared of getting too much even if it fails. >> state for the laboratories of democracy in 18th the 18th century and ngos for the laboratories -- >> the cities are too now. the only difference between now and when the framers wrote the constitution is the cities are just as much laboratories as democracies. they steal mike bloomberg data putting up $100 billion to build a whole new university labs lab center to generate high-tech jobs, you know, i don't know

who's going to get the contractor to worship insertion in new york university we get it. >> at the stanford alumni i have to somewhat -- >> stanford is in competition for the money. the point is that it's a hack of an idea. it's the way the world should work. i think it's wonderful. los angeles just announced a vast new consortium to a major retrofit buildings that include greater energy efficiency and putting up more solar power and how they were going to finance it and it's going to be the biggest pressure for a project and they figured out how to do it. but all we did was provide technical help and support. they figured out how to finance it. the congress at least should not make decisions which make those things were difficult.

it should empower that unrewarded incentivizing it. >> is an election day today. not in new york city but certainly many cities across the country mayors are being in san francisco, baltimore, houston, phoenix and yet i don't think questions like this house happen very central to the coverage in advance of even the local elections. albeit what she said earlier is credible having been a governor certainly that people expect governors and mayors to hustle business. that seems to not be central to the discourse around even local elections. how do we make that more fundamental? and i are racing around the country trying to do that. but since you're not a scalable research on almost inexhaustible

one, how do we think about that dynamic? >> priority cut to say wrong. now i have to say i don't know. they do have some ideas about it. when i was a governor, i really retired in the national governments association and all these regional associations and education associations and there were a lot of things we did when i was governor were arkansas was the first state doing it. we were the first state to require counselors or kids in elementary schools. i was proud of that, but i was always more proud when we were the second state to do something because it showed that we were too proud to learn on the edge of learning one of the real problems of education and health care. i'll use it a because they both

bear on the economy is that a lot of the challenges faces in providing lower cost and higher quality so we can be competitive in areas. the ideas on travel. almost every challenge in american education has been met by somebody somewhere. the ideas on travel. part of that is a complication when you in the public terror a monopoly on revenues and customers and in the terror of the status quo has more power, more resources and more lobbies in the future does. but one of the big challenges i try to talk little about in the book with admittedly not have an answer to if you make these ideas total clicks to give you an example. ask yourself how many unionists. what city in america has the

highest energy efficiency standards for new buildings? answer, the oil capital of america houston, texas. >> that's why it's so important was elected mayor there. when he was president a long time about leon kass, but also wanted to build an oil energy economy. the first thing he did was retrofit every home of the 20% of houstonians who are homeowners income was lowest and then he had the highest new buildings at any city except for vancouver, canada. he elected over 80% of the vote.

but they do travel better than you think a lot of this bubble from the bottom-up. the next american economy talks about this prosperity centers. and people learn from each other on the basis of them. >> one thing i want to ask you something not in your book, but that cannot yesterday that the census bureau announced a new draft methodology for how we calculate an ssi reading the united states. and it sort of early hypotheses out of that new paradigm are that we have 49 million american and poverty, our highest absolute number of her.

and more culturally americans living in poverty than previously assessed, largely because of higher out-of-pocket health care expenses because although the vast majority of older americans are covered under medicare, medicare only covers 80% of in-hospital expenses. extensively although still somewhat challenging given the hospital that numbers, children living in poverty is actually lower that had been previously determined the largely because of chip and supplemental nutrition programs, chiefly free school lunches and preschool breakfast. have you think about that nato merging data, how does that impact both what you do notice his challenges in the book, chiefly around sustainability

and also your recommended prescriptions. >> first, the childhood poverty numbers are so appalling that they are smaller. the children's health insurance program which was started when i was president was expanded beginning in 2007 we had 5 million kids. i think there's not 10 million kids that get health insurance under and they will be maintaining the number will be expanded soon in the health care reform bill is implemented. that plus international supplements like school lunch programs has lower the percentage of people who are in poverty in fact. what is to the seniors is even though the social security checks go out more than the real

cost of living exclusive of health care for seniors, the cost of health care has gone up so much that it's a relief that in older people who are on medicare but is josie pointed out, 20% of the states for example are not covered. if you're really poor and old you get medicaid, too. so what has happened is especially since the states are busted right now and are lobbying against raising the eligibility levels for medicaid, what is happening is that this money is going on. the amount of money to pay out of pocket is going up and the number of older people who qualify for both medicare and medicaid is not going up to make the difference. >> is to insert commence early changing their medicaid parameters quite

>> yes and because of their budget problems. for example in 2007, 2009 at the nadir of the recession, gdp is going on 7.5%. most people worry about going broke. health insurance profits went up 60% and 5 million americans lost their health insurance and 3.5 million went on medicaid. so ironically the private sector to 3.5 million people to the public sector all the time bashing the public sector. the states have no money to pay medicaid makes and the federal government in greece. so what do i draw from not? i draw from not the conclusion one of the best things about the so-called thin symbols commission, the bipartisan budget commission is it recommends not only saving in the social security program, but 200 billion of the decade is a lot of money, but to the

government budget it's not. but they recommended the program are designed in a way that channels more income to lower income seniors so if we don't fix the health care gap problem, at least people have enough money to be lifted out of poverty and it can be done and still save money. >> one of the things that you say you believe in the book but don't go into detail is that the united states could actually move from spending 17.8% of our gdp on health care to spending 11.8% of our gdp on health care, which is what france and switzerland approximately spent on health care. that would save us about $187 billion a year. how would we do that? >> it would save the federal budget. it would save you $850 billion a year. that is for every year which are

double cast does health outcomes in wealthy countries and they generally conclude that america ranks about 30 in the overall quality of health care, that's not fair. but what is true is germany and france were not only at the very top and it is true they get better health for spending less money. it is also true that even if you had -- if you give us more credit for being -- having the longest breast cancer rates in the world and being greater heart surgery underestimate ask give them. >> thank you. >> you still have to face the fact that we are not getting what we pay for and it's being

driven primarily by the way refinance health care and fee for service. chelsea is to work for mckenzie sowell. >> i didn't distempered credit. >> kenzie issued a three volume study trying to analyze the differences between what we spend for health care and american and other risk country spent an essentially concluded that the biggest deal was fee-for-service medicine instead of pain and overall enrollment fee, which start with another people say has led to 40% of the american people getting health care likely to be more expensive than they should get in being the optimum care. second was the way refinance a private insurance company is

which have massive amounts of administrative cost of not just the insurers, but also the insured. and if you have insurance on the job, then it's more paperwork for medical providers, employers and for the insurance companies themselves. it's about a $200 billion item that we wouldn't pay if we had the administrative cost in any other country. the third thing was we pay more for medicine than anybody else. but if we bargain more for medicine.invoke we could do that. but it's about 25%, 80% of the difference. the biggest chunk left, about $150 billion is because we have higher rates of diabetes than any other country in the world with its attendant consequences, which is what childhood obesity

is the number one host problem in this country in my opinion and there's a thousand other little things make up 5%. >> so given that we are almost out of time, if he wanted to ensure people left here with one either clarion call to action or sort of one fact it would help kind of lead to more fact based to base as we move tomorrow from this election day looking towards the next election they next november, what would it be? >> if i could only say one thing, i say everyone should at least be involved where they live in trying to support state and local initiatives that do bring government into the private sector and ngos together to do what we did at the cgi america. start with where you are. look, this is still the biggest

economy on earth. as much as i worry about retirement of the baby boomers than i am one of them, you should feel about this. 10 years ago i was about to leave the presidency, made in hometown of arkansas deterrable tornado and ridiculous part of the city and a little african-american community next-door next-door was virtually leveled or a done work for 20 years. so i went down and did the end. i had dinner with 20 people. i ate barbecue, back when i could do that. i had barbecue at 20 people went to high school it. besides me only two others finished college. besides me only to have ever made for the $50,000 a year. their number one goal was that their retirement was going to imperil their children ability to raise their grandchildren. so whenever you give up on

america, you just member that. it's still basically a good country. people make rational decisions based on what they know. now, despite all of that, average worker sage is still younger than europe and japan, the other longest in wealthy places. canada may be a little younger than us, but not much. it's easier to start a small business here than almost any other place. we still have laboratories for r&d that most countries don't have. we have a lot of indigenous strengths here. we have the better sophisticated venture capital and other things and we know what we need to do. there's plenty of money out there to bring the economy back if we can figure out how to unleash the money and corporate treasury snowbanks. so i am not pessimistic, but

they are doing this kabuki dance in washington now over the same old thing we've been debating since we were told in 1981 the government is the problem. it isn't. i mean it may beat that it's not the only problem and it's got to be part of the solution. so my view is that i could tell you to do one thing it would be coming you know, bloom where you're planted in do something to support your community and the state here and use that as evidence to try to change -- break the logjam in washington. because there's not a single -- one of the most important points in this book as i go through all these other countries that are now ahead of us in certain embassies. faster broadband download speeds for modern infrastructure. higher percentage of young people with college degrees. less income inequality, faster job growth, lower unemployment.

there is not a single example on the planet earth of a successful country that got their on in antigovernment strategy which is the most important thing you can ever do is never taxed somebody. never, ever. not one. of the 33 oecd countries we rank 31st in the percentage of national income going to taxes. mexico and chile are lower than winner. we are ranked 25th in the percentage of national income going to spending because all this money we had to come up with to avoid the calamitous consequences of the financial collapse. so what you do change national policy, but we have to somehow find a way to break the psychology.

and i'm happier if i is something to look forward to in the morning so i don't describe all the time. so if you asked me one thing you can do, make something good happen. go hire somebody. i've got a friend at a company called acxiom which is the largest mass mailing company in the country. if you get "sports illustrated" every month, you got it from them and most other magazines. on november 1st, they challenged every company in the united states with 50 or more employees to hire one more person. they said if everybody hired one more person, everybody was 50 or more people could afford to do it there'd be another million people working within a month and it changed the psychology of america. just do something and then you will be a lot to tell the members of congress what you did and ask them to follow suit.

>> thank you all very much. i hope he'll do that. can buy the book. thank you. >> thank you. [applause] [applause] [applause] >> for more information on president clinton's book, "back to work," go to knopf doubleday.com >> next or birmingham, alabama, interview with warren st. john, author of outcasts unite it, recently visited as part of our cities tour exploring the literary culture across the

southeast. >> the fuji's are a soccer refugee boys from 15 or more countries around the world that experience conflicts and live outside of atlanta georgia and eight town called al smith. care for mostly i've can countries, but not entirely countries like algeria, burundi, sudan, but also in my book news from kosovo, bosnia, from iraq and afghanistan. >> they come through formal refugee resettlement program through the united nations and then their pastor to care of resettlement agencies that handle the relocation and help them a foothold in this country

and those are organizations like the rescue committee and other nongovernment organizations. >> how do those resettlement programs work exactly? >> basically agencies get a safe and worry budget for refugee families and the government admits some assorted hands them over to these agencies and theoretically the agency is fine at home for them, place to live, try to upsell its job placement, possibly language skills. it's a lot of debate about how well the agencies actually do that. but they're pretty low on resources. there's not a lot of resources given to the organization better resettling refugees refugees in the country. >> tell me about the town of clarkson, georgia. >> clarkston is a fascinating

town. it's a little over a square mile am not perfect circle and it was basically a little suburban town at about women with a lot of middle-class families and their train tracks a roll right through town the way it did back at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and in the late 80s and early 90s the settlement agencies begin to place refugees for three reasons really. the first was clarkson had cheap housing. a lot of apartment complexes were sort of run down and had some available apartments and the public transportation grid was important because refugee families don't have cars were the money to buy cars and finally disclosed that when i wished for a long time was a big room in economy. the refuge is incredibly difficult, they are fleeing lives of violent, placed in

littletown and they don't know the linkage. they for the culture they are given 90 days of government assistance and it's very, very difficult. it's especially difficult for the young people because they sounds to take out of public incense they are different and outsiders and this means them culture. they try to dress like american kids. they learned english and start listening to american music and they go home and their parents say, what are you doing? we don't dress like that. we don't talk like that. it respect where we came from. it ricocheted between two worlds that one accept them for who they are. >> that something interesting is in his apartment complex to people from all these different countries that have been settled there. neighbors can speak to each

other. but the children, whether or not they speak to each other in a common language, they have this game they play in common and that is soccer. so soccer team sort of pop-up and parking lots an open lot on complexes in empty around town and it really becomes a sort of public square in a way for people from all over the world to actually interact with one another despite the fact that they seemingly have little else in common. all sorts of things are happening with the fuji's. they have purchased a property just outside of town to try do build the school and home for their broker. there's a lot of information about time on their website which is fuji family.org. they are sort of a girls team and school for refugee future use. so the program has expanded and continues to impact young

people. >> how did you first hear about this? >> i heard about the fiji's are just a casual conversation with someone who happen to work in refugee resettlement. i was in atlanta giving a talk in on a conversation with a gentleman and he said resettle refugees with international rescue committee and i think is a southerner, someone who grew up in alabama i was immediately curious how that was going. how this worked to take people from 70 plus countries and put them in a small -- relatively small southern town. over time as i began to learn more about clarkson -- i begin to see clerks in a sort of and a way of looking at america and they are 2050 and the change of diversity at pepe never happen

in this town overnight. my thought was by maybe understanding what works in this community, what challenges they faced we get a better sense of what's coming further up. >> on your screen as the tower in the center the university of texas at austin campus and booktv has been on location here at the university of texas connect in interviews that some of their professors who are also authors. every sunday during the month of november we will be bringing you those interviews at 1:00 p.m. eastern time as part of our university theories. >> coming up next, booktv presents "after words," an hour-long program where we invite guest host to interview