>> guest: action started in the 1990s and worked on it until very recently. >> host: potomac book says the editor of "world in the balance." >> catherine crier argues politics are heard in the night dates and discusses a of issues in putting the economy, health care and political debate. catherine crier speaks for about a team minutes. >> we are privileged and i too have with us an extraordinary woman and author of her new patriot act, what americans must do to save the republic, catherine crier. [applause] ..

high-profile cases such as the scott peterson case and the susan murder case. katherine has hosted episodes of court tv signature prime time series the system and numerous other specials such as the jury speaks with dominick dunn, osama bin laden on trial and safe passage, voices from the middle

school part of the networks' public affairs and initiative choices and the consequences. prior to joining court tv, catherine incurred the report for fox news channel. our nightly our program during which she interviewed the leading newsmakers of the day. catherine currently manages her own production company and communications developing television film and a documentary projects and now may i welcome with great pleasure catherine crier. [applause] >> television has been very good to me. it's been about 18 years on abc, fox, court tv but i wanted to do

all the way back to probably five or 6-years-old and i've gotten to the point now i think it is genetic. i remember during the 1960 elections are doing with family members about politics, so much so that my step grandfather would pretend to fall asleep so i would shut up. [laughter] obviously i didn't have a clue but as long as i can remember, i had been a passionate about the republic about the founders about our history, about politics, and my pre-law background degree was all politics and international affairs, government, history. i sort of would argue with the post but it was an extension of that love because what is our law, it is the rule of law which is essential cornerstone democracy of the republic if we didn't have this amazing ruler

of all, you my friend, the rules apply, you on the other hand i can do with what i want. there's an amazing will flop it is supposed to apply the code applied equitably to all citizens and in fact my first book was called the case against lawyers but it was a political book. this of heil was house legislators have turned the law to an instrument of tyranny and what citizens have to do about it. so it was a political book and then i wrote a book about the supreme court. so i've sort of balanced and this is a third of the political books, and much more broadbased book but 1i would like to believe is very timely because i am frankly very troubled about

events today and while some in the room they immediately think it is because obama hornets because health care or particular issues, no, i am concerned more than anything about the integrity of the republic, of the constitutional republic in which the founders of this contemplated liberals and conservatives, republicans and democrats as they evolves would have a vigorous fights and we would all carry-on about which direction and the voters could decide every two or four years how we would shift and change, but all of that the dating would take place on a relatively level playing field governed by certain rules set out in our constitution. what i mean by that is you have extraordinary wings, liberals and conservatives back in the founder stays go back and read the constitutional debates.

our founders were not on the same page. they have a lot of fights. in fact you have to one side john adams alexander hamilton's conservatives who when you go back and read the remarks they wanted markey. they wanted a hereditary sentence. they liked the system has existed in england. on the other hand, you had been franklin and thomas jefferson who said we want one house and congress to be elected every year, the people's house, and we want an executive committee. we don't even want the presidency. when you go back and read it much like what was happening in the french revolution there were problems with both sides. you have a tyranny by monarchies and the other a tyranny by the masses. sir james madison is credited with creating the grand compromise, the constitution, where he says neither the left

nor the right as they existed in 1789 or going to dominate. we are not going to create a system that favors one or the other. we are going to create a system in fact is as level a playing field on which the various ideologies can russell as we possibly can. certainly when the constructive sentence was going to be a bit more back in those days it would be hard to get support across large swaths of territory. so someone with a little more power and money wasn't likely to get elected. the people's house, the representative was going to be more common for the man. jefferson and franklin got a little bit and adams and hamilton got a little bit. we had a president that was going to be elected every four years, so it was an amazing level of pleading field.

i start their because today we are hearing that my party represents the founders. no, my party does. i'm thinking you've got to go back and figure out these guys worked on the same page and in fact it was an extraordinary playing field that is what distinguishes our amazing republic and it is under attack today in many respects. a favorite quote of full - from john adams, and he said ideologies is the science of indy idiots. today we ought to carry that around and where it on our lapel. the reason i say is we had agreed playing field and i try in the book to take everyone back and then show how both conservative and liberal ideologies have developed over time and hour in fact when you get up to the present day you

will find the will of almost reversed positions in several very important respects, which means if you are bred to an ideology swearing it is the founder's ideologies, guess what, it's the science of idiots because instructed is not all what was going on in 1789. today if you listen to republicans those conservatives will tell you states' rights, small government. low taxes, right, keep the government out of our lives this was an agenda that was in 79. that was the radical leftist possibly -- thomas jefferson. that was franklin and jefferson because think jefferson was a sort of a gentleman farmer living in virginia putative he didn't need the country to be big and dynamic. she imagined small businesses and farmers and quite a bit

isolationist to stay away from the world and that was jefferson the democrats today, they are trying to tax the people and the government should be building jobs and doing things creating alexander hamilton considered the father of conservatism. the first secretary of the treasury, the very first thing he did, he demanded the country establish a deficit and he bought all of the revolutionary war debt of the state. jefferson is screaming i can't do it, unconstitutional, construction of the constitution said the liberals. he said i'm big enough to do it and i have to have a very big powerful central government to do what i have in mind and that is to create this grand global

powerhouse that can compete with europe. we will show them we will not be treated like this peon call money over here and you're going to take our resources and sell them back to us. no, we are going to beat you at the game. but he needed to be able to borrow money. create a deficit in this country. he needed to tax and by god the whiskey rebellion is because he was taxing the little guy to the high year rate than the big guy. what a good are the farmers? they can't give me but i need. they can't give needed revenues. so the taxable get them out of the way because what i want to do is i want to have this powerful big government. i want to marry it with the powerful wealthy elite in this country and by george i am going to come together and we will

build canals and bridges and we are going to be able to compete. so that was conservatism in 1789. it is phenomenal to me when we cannot get infrastructure of legislation passed in this country and i checked like both sides in the book i assure you that i really chastise the republicans, the conservatives today? even when i was a kid at the republican family, which party was going to build things, was going to make this country this competitive entity in my mind? it was the republicans. the democrats were kind of wandering around and disorganized and didn't want to do any of this stuff and then when i got into the history and started tracking it through, i realized this was quite the republican party until the great

depression and from that moment on, we began to see a down and that is when really i think it seems most of the reversal when the republican party's began because when franklin roosevelt ran an office in 1932 was still the old time a traditional democratic platform, low taxes, he went after hoover for the big financial the industry married to the government that of course he asserted and led to the crashing 29. but then he comes in and of course the economy is crashed and there are all of these very desperate people. his first new deal policies there are actually two, the first new deal he was creating it allowing monopolies in the country he brought the core protests into the white house. what are we going to do to fix

things? there was a mess in the supreme court reversal on what he was doing but if you look at the first new deal, it was a real effort to bring business and government together to fix the problem. but somebody ran to the second new deal that is where a lot of conservatives began to object because those were the social policies he created to build a safety net. and of course he didn't really support welfare without work. so instead of handing out of unemployment checks, he put people to work, the wpa, the sec a and built a lot of things, but that's where you begin to see the democrats developing the reputation as the party of the big government. yet i read an article in 1937 where the economist said binkley tecum basically franklin roosevelt saved capitalism, and this has happened several times

throughout history when you see teddy roosevelt did this and franklin roosevelt and others where at moments of tremendous instability which actually is an inherent in capitalism because you do have wealthy class created inevitably which is not a bad thing. oftentimes though it is a disparity that is really great or if we go through the boom and bust period which happens with capitalism as you get more risk and build up assets and you have the wealthy out there sort of speculating there is the housing boom here or the tech bohm and you will have the boom and bust and when the middle class, the majority of people in the country are becoming desperate, when there is no safety net and you see the government has to step in oftentimes the country

has been good at creating the stability that capitalism needs to survive and flourish. if you allow the disparity to increase and you don't have jobs and you don't have opportunity, not equal the outcome but opportunity for the wide swath of american citizens you create instability that can result in riots ultimately in revolutions. we have seen in other countries, 1910 was sort of the socialist moment in the sun, and that was a time when the workers of the country, that was the sort of upton sinclair era the workers were getting desperate and you had that teddy roosevelt smart enough to say i love corporations and big businesses that this is a moment when we have to take action to begin to

regulate, to modulate the concentration of wealth and power. so, when we look at moments in time we are increasing government participation we are increasing social safety nets there are bad things about it, but there are good things. you don't overdo it, the bureaucracy of handing out checks, but understand that stability, economic opportunity, the ability to earn a paycheck, and of course by the consumer in this country all of these things are necessary for capitalism to forge. for small and medium businesses, entrepreneurs, innovation, all of that must have that kind of a social setting. so it goes back to balance. madison, james madison, have to

have both the liberal voice and the conservative voice to keep things balanced. so as i was working on the book, one of the things that hit me looking at the current predicament was what has gone wrong? what has brought us to this point in almost all the other issues revolved around the economy and i don't care if you are talking about national security issues or education or immigration or the obvious where are the jobs tax issues is all an economic conversation so i went back to adam smith. interestingly published in 1776 right along with the declaration of independence and i thought i want to go back to the principles of capitalism because my gut is telling me that it has gotten really skewed in this country and that may be part of the big problem we are having with creating jobs, expanding

economic opportunity and with the growing disparity between the well-to-do and even the middle class and even the poor in this country and in reviewing him it was like a light bulb going out adam smith wrote one of the nation's in response to the events in britain, and what was going on over there the big corporations then called joint stock companies, the big guys were married to the government. the government was sending the military all around the world to protect resources and they were off to india taking care of the problems in the colonies to protect it for big business and those entities were married and what it did is suppressed or eliminated the broad economic

opportunity that adam smith actually thought would boost the nation's production and resources and revenues so in his book he talks about how to expand that opportunity for anyone and headline come big warning watch out for the concentration of wealth and power into the small elite class because that in fact is ms destructive capitalism as an overbearing tyrannical government he called the big corporations accountable sovereign's. my conversation here is not class warfare. it does not denounce corporations. eileen capitalism was supposed to increase the standard of living for people here and around the world, it has done so

without the data but we have to remember his caveat because they apply as much today as the moment he wrote them and as any time you have that kind of concentration, you are skewing the idea of the free-market spirit you are skewing fair pricing and all of the essentials elements of capitalism and we know this. a big corporation can come into the community and demand that the state and local government pay for the roads and the sewers and we know these enterprises because the taxpayers are picking up everything. we know that they are getting sales tax. we know that whether it be pollutants in the air or other

costs of doing business they have been able to basically neglect or put on to the taxpayers to repair in essence they skew the system of capitalism. even frederick hayek, ronald reagan, and of their favorite economic philosophers wrote the road to serfdom. he said if you don't have pricing come if you are allowed these hidden costs and this is not capitalism and even hayek said you have to have the government in about one thing. back to adam smith, the only entity big enough to is the government, the people's government, not the tyranny but the people's government. you have to regulate the big guys so the middle sized small businesses individuals, entrepreneurs can flourish in

this broad based economy. i'm not talking about over regulating, i'm talking about rational regulation. so i realized reading adam smith and tracking it to the present day hamilton basically began to institutionalize the more corporatist system in this country as our economy and sure enough when you start reading through history, henry clay handling the economy for abraham lincoln in 1854, give a break. never. and you sort of track it through and you see. it is inevitable that in the capitalist environment you may have real dynamos and begin to earn the money and you build it up that's great and everyone in this country including the people occupy wall street going we want jobs, we want the american dream, we want the

opportunity to make money and grow and do all of this. nothing wrong with that. it's when the concentration becomes so great that it begins to manipulate and skew the economy and the market and reduce the opportunities a broad base in this country that we begin to see damage. today the reason i think that it is so necessary to relearn this is there is a new piece of the puzzle and that is 1910 or the gilded age corporations could be big and powerful and rockefeller and carnegie, when they made a lot of money even if the balance was skewed the money stayed in the circulation in the country influence in washington getting things their way we were still

exchanging the currency here. now the same guys are playing in glycol fogle ether -- global e for. the same companies now are seeking policies on capitol hill that will help them in china or india around the world. they may be flagged in the states although many of them where elsewhere but in fact their interests, much of their revenues, not only the plans but now you see the research and development is moving overseas therefore if we continue to bolster their interest than we are bolstering the lead to bolstering the interest of the entities that are not concerned with the well-being of the

domestic economy, with the american economy and when i say this again i'm not talking about the well-being union workers for welfare moms, a trucking about the united states of america its economy on the global playing field and so many of the policies in the last several decade, the financial industry or the wall street conversation and beyond are helping the big multinational transnational entities who are no longer concerned if we are doing the things in this country who to build innovation or expand our infrastructure or educate our kids to provide new workers because they are making their money someplace else. and if we want to restore this country and restore capitalism as it was originally

contemplated and as it intended to expand economic opportunity listing all votes making everyone more money including a wonderful wealthy class in this country we have to remember those caveat and understand the effect of globalization liberal alike we have to go back to the three legged stool of the sort of innovation and economic opportunity, education, infrastructure, legal immigration, the best and brightest calling them back to this country incentivizing them to get educated here to build their businesses to stay here and understand how much of the decision making and the policy-making for decades now has in fact been helping

overseas discouraging the building and the sustaining of these amazing foundations, foundational elements of this successful republican, said that is the reason i wrote the book is trolleying to take us all away back and then explain what those philosophies were, where they hit roadblocks, where they succeeded and how we got to today and get people to understand that feed it ecological messages that we are being told are the cornerstone of liberalism or conservatism. we must follow this little box or we are not loyal to our philosophies that have that is nonsense, and we need to go back to the amazing unity the founders were able to find for

the moment that amazing republic, the level playing field and also understand the philosophy and principles on the one hand fought for individual freedom and liberty is and a non-intrusive government and the other policies often conservative policies have said we are going to build the infrastructure of this country to educate our kids, we are going to use good business capitalistic principles to build this competitive nation and the ideologies of today does not support the principles and values that established and sustained this republic. it is in danger and we need to be aware that the citizens do something about. [applause]

>> i know this group is certainly a political grouping and i would love questions if that is the only way i learned i get feedback, so microphone is right here. i know you'll do this on a regular basis and i would love if he would step up and let's get some questions. >> the was a wonderful treat to hear the history of the country and for you to go back and go for this. have you taught because you should if you have the patience to do it i don't know if that is what you desire to do but it is almost as if i was thinking that this woman was a very attractive female newt gingrich. [laughter] [applause] >> i don't know whether you would appreciate that. >> that as a complement because he has a great -- i'm not --

>> he is a historian. it's very important for people who were involved in politics today to have a grasp at in knowledge of what you have and to know what happened in our history. i'm a very conservative republican. so when you kept talking about infrastructure and we need to build an infrastructure and schools and all that, i was hearing president obama because that's what he keeps talking about, and my problem is what you have been saying and i agree with a lot of what you said, the problem with president obama for the simple, and i'm not trying to make a political statement but i just feel like when you talk about infrastructure and building schools i believe the same thing but i think the problem today is that what these politicians are telling us they want is really they are lying to us. i don't feel president obama if he gets another stimulus package

and he taxes the rich more that he will take that money and use it in a positive way i think that he's been to take that money and he's going to give some to his friends, the union or some to the teachers or some to the people who are going to elect him, and as you've said that is what has been happening in our politics for centuries and for our whole history, but i fear that now all of these things it sounds as if you are positive and you are talking about them all upside down and they are being used in a very -- i don't want to be an alarmist or have a lot of trauma but i think they are evil. i really do. i think all of this is skewed. the internationalists' like if i may say george soros, they want money, they want control of not

just the united states, they are thinking about the world. they want to consult the world, and i don't think jefferson and adams and george washington were thinking about the world. i think they were thinking of the best interest of the united states of america and i don't see it anymore. >> you covered a lot of territory. >> you did, too. >> my question is -- >> i write in the book that i still to this day believe in our system of government, the founding of the republic which is why we must preserve the republic and yet what always messes it up, people. yet the system has a lot of rules in which we can play now if it is flexible and you can have something succeed for 200

plus years and not have the flexibility to adapt its flexibility, the need to understand that when we expand power for one party or one president, and you see this. remember george bush whether you agree or disagree there's a lot of conversation about the unity of the presidency come a lot of executive order, signing statements, things done where when the republicans were in control of congress our dhaka was in office. we are going to let it go, and i keep reminding people in the book that if you do that, you were institutionalizing in acceptance of an expansion of power. the next might not be the guy you like. and guess what, he or she -- there won't be one -- he or she will i promise you use that power as well, which is why we've got to as citizens make

both parties rain in themselves, pullback and respect the rules themselves so that the system is preserved and that way if obama comes in and believe me there are people on the left you are abusing power that george w. bush a few. you are not training yourself in and whether it is militarily or sort of patriotic cause a lot of issues and it is because we have allowed one side to write the rules and the next i'm not giving back that power, so again the system is brilliant but it is up to us to make sure that human beings that cycle through to play by those rules, so right now it is that inherent mistrust of the government. at the moment is a democrat in

the presidency but you hear both sides we don't trust our government anymore. but i go back to say we have an amazing system we are not making both sides played by the rules. in terms of the infrastructure you are telling me you don't trust they will use it, there are plenty of ways. they can legislate anything up there. believe me, to ensure that those dollars, the stimulus dollars are going where the need to be. >> do you have any idea where that money went? >> let's remind everybody the first stimulus money was thanks to george w.. >> that was the first -- it's kind of like what republicans really went after obama when he says we are pulling out of iraq and all of a sudden you hear this you are in danger in.

george w. bush signed an agreement with the iraqi government. we have to be out by -- obama didn't get the credit but he shouldn't get the derision. the wish george w.. so when we talk about stimulus dollars it's both parties. it's both parties that have been manipulated and misusing and in many ways helping a very select group. when you see george soros worried about the sort of international conversation, you look at the five or six big investment bankers on wall street. recent studies show that 147 corporations basically control the majority of wealth on this planet. that's on the planet, not in this country. a sort of george soros of the world and then many people think that is just a bunch of the

liberal agenda. on the power it is this a corporate power. it can be used well. it can be very good for the world, but it can also be bad. when you allow the concentration of the financial wealth and their pursuit of the stock prices and big payouts for the ceo and creation of the derivative world where we are not brick and mortar building things they are not putting money in investment where it used to be into things the will build a domestic economy that they are basically creating a casino which with the punch of a button on a computer there making the profits on both sides of the game scrambling around to produce nothing they produce the assets could show up on the bank account somewhere but they are not producing much of anything except throwing around computer

numbers. that is to me a big concern so when you are being told that it is a threat not to any kind of concentration of wealth and power particularly now when a global scale that is interested in a tiny percent doing well and not at least stimulating the economic growth so that they've got consumers in the country so people can spend or make money and keep the economy growing than they are in real trouble. it doesn't mean you deutsch being conservative or liberal but what they are telling you is that you are appropriately on a challenge both the democrats and republicans to defend those given the political origen's history study of economic and

politics and how they've gotten us into this mess. i just talk to mitch mcconnell and listened to him in a very small group the other day and at the very and i did ask him. i said senator, what i'm hearing is the deregulation, lower taxes, small government and whether you agree or disagree that is what kind of got us to 2008. it's how we got there. how come that is the same that was supposed to get us out of the mess and the alternative isn't the big government and texas. all i am a pragmatic balance on this and i couldn't get an answer that is because that ideologies, that's the message and whatever the effect has been, whatever the actual prod maddock results, by george, if we say it often enough, people will believe it and they will

quit thinking and by the ideologies and the domestic from all of us. >> we often need term limits. i don't know if they envision the politicians would be in power for all of these. >> i will address that. i want to be doubled to vote. if i'm going to vote for the same person over and over again and then it's gotten so frightening i begin to think maybe the term limits but until you realize it is the power on the hill it is the long-term staffers, the institution and not just the individuals in the front, and so where i come back down is unless we have literally supported a constitutional amendment to ban corporate money and politics you can raise the amount individuals can get so it is we are not going to allow people with more money you get

your tener box and its it. you cannot allow corporations to buy politics and that is what is going on. with the citizens united decision of 2010 when the supreme court essentially legalized the corporations purchasing power system and i assure you that is not what the founders believed in and if he were to fix the campaign finance reform and slow the lobbyist revolving door, we could fix so many problems. the conservative lobbyists to come out with the new book and in it he says he went to prison, he says let me tell you how i bought capitol hill and don't kid yourselves, i bought capitol hill. and he said best thing i could ever do is i walk into a congressman or senator is office and i find the top staffers and

i say when you get tired of doing this stuff, come and see me. i will have a six or seven to your job waiting for you come and the minute that their eyes lit up, he knew he had them. he said not only what they say jump and say how high they would bring me the hurdles and say here is what is going on in the office, don't you want to know about this and don't you want to influence this, and again he's a great conservative example. the whole system, the whole system is so corrupted by money if every representative of their represent the people who put them at riss jacob lew steve, conservative, liberal, let's have the grand clash the founders intended that isn't what is going on and if the american people on both sides of the political system.

the system is being corrupted as a result. john courts line had for lobbyists who himself was a great lobbyist because he knew everybody to try to get special favors for his firm but one of the good things but capitalism is that too many risks that failed. i think what is great is not for him i don't mind -- >> and understand, you don't want people to -- >> he didn't fail, he had the lobbyists and until corporations are willing to say no more the institution of lobbyists and government it's the staffers but they sort of run things and

politicians, their major objective is to get reelected and the only way they get reelected is money. i happen to agree 100% on term limits but they are the ones that have to give the term limits that will never have been. >> it's like the campaign finance reform unless we do it from the ground up. >> but one of the things i think it's sad that people on different sides of the ogle we have the crisis of the leadership here and to me for ronald reagan is a great leader and he knew how to get things done. four. we have a crisis of leadership and that is what americans are looking for but unfortunately we don't see it. another thing to comment on because i don't think this has been historic in our country is that one of the things that gets nothing done in the united states senate is closure where you're not going to get 60 of anything and you also have a president who doesn't use a

veto. i think if we could let congress pass things if the president doesn't like it, veto it. so i will end up there. >> i like what you are talking about but we have a great system and when i said things are going on to literally manipulate the system itself to favor one side or the other hand right now the impetus seems to be in the hands of the republicans and so i'm not saying the democrats have never felt that but let's just take a moment in time. the changes whether it is to limit voting rights in this country and there are some really dramatic attempts to limit voting rights in this country. of course gerrymandering of the district is, but by george we ought to have the independence because there's an interesting article i read on my phone coming over here and it's not whether it is a constitutional

issue but it is a deprivation -- >> [inaudible] >> absolutely. absolutely. and i remember i think it was tom coburn, senator from oklahoma, talking to the constituents and he actually got booed when he said let's quit the name-calling, the character assassination and fight them on policy. either our policies are right and we can win on policies or we should lose, and that applies to both sides. so it's back to you that all of this insane 60 votes to get something to the floor and vote, the gerrymandering of the districts to guarantee, ensuring that we have prevented millions of people from going to the ballots even though study after study, conservative institutions and liberal alike show that voter fraud in this country might come up with 20, 30, 50

cases over a long extended period and yet that is being used as a rationale to prevent millions of people from voting and again if both sides want to win, but you don't do it by cheating. you do it by presenting the best policies for the american people, and you win on the merits. when we allow that to happen, we are destroying the institution of our constitutional republic and we are going to pay a price. >> on the democrats' side and the republican side sometimes we have the primary for the good general primary to be a good president or senator from your state or your country. >> that's right. the american people i think both sides. they want -- they want integrity. they want to know who a person is. we have now accepted the game of running to your primary voters.

we are going to go really for to the left or far to the right and then of course they are going to run to the center. how can we possibly know who these people are on either side but it is a game and we are the players and that when we allow both the citizens in the media with a giggle and a smirk and everyone goes to the center and surprise to some of the stuff that comes out of the white house on capitol hill because we don't know who these people are and when we are complaining again it is allowing our team to skew the system because our guys are at office which oversight. whether first respecting the system, knowing that we will all be okay, all of us if we respect

the integrity of the system and we put that first, make both sides play by the rules and then may the best man or woman when. [applause] >> for more information about the author, a visitor website, criercommunications.com. >> when the congress and the president were debating after the 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 in this economy, one of the things the republicans said is tax cuts are always wonderful in the down economy but spending cuts don't hurt l, which is self evident like crazy. for instance, there is really no

difference from the macroeconomic point of view as our friends in the u.k. are finding out. when they went from the austerity response of the current circumstance. one of the things they wanted to get rid of was the tax credit. and they say that it was a spending program. this is a kind of argument that ought to be held in the seminary over some obscure provision of the scripture. in my opinion. but you be the judge. the republicans say we ought to get rid of 1603. it's not a tax cut. and it is but it isn't. when the congress did things like loan guarantees for the energy companies, the infamous solyndra was adopted signed by president bush and supported at that time buy almost all of the

republicans on the energy committee, and it's hard sometimes to pick winners and losers. that isn't what 1603 does. 1603 recognizes that a lot of people building solar and wind installations are startup companies so if you get a 30% tax credit you ordinarily give someone for building this new factory it would be worth less to them because they have no income to claim the credit against. so what 1603 does is basically gives them the cash equivalent of the tax credit if they are in start up. if you just don't like solar and wind energy and you want to keep the depletion allowance or the ever tax credits from the traditional energy, you can make that argument, but a very significant number of the solar and wind projects have used

1603. so my argument is about to be extended because we have thousands more facilities in solar and wind power which is becoming more economical every time the price drops about 30% for solar and wind every time you double capacity and solar in particular has had significant technological advances in the last three years. it is i ron ackley one of the reasons solyndra went down because the technology, other technologies got cheaper, faster than anybody figured, and took them out as a competitive mix. so i like the 1603, and i think it should be continued because i think that we should be supporting the start-ups as well as the existing companies and a very significant percentage in the last 20 years the of come not just from small businesses that from small businesses that were 5-years-old or younger. so this is the kind of thing

that i think my argument is we should see where we want to go with this country? we want to build shared prosperity and modern jobs and be competitive and then back up from that and say how do we get there what is the government supposed to do, what's the private sector since to do? i think if you do that instead of saying government, no government you say that 1603 is a heck of a good deal and we ought to be doing it. >> since you mentioned at the end of 2010i wanted to give you an opportunity to sort of repeat something that you said to me earlier which is that the part of your book you feel like you gave the president a bum rap was around the debt ceiling. it's been in the coverage of what i thought. >> 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 still had the majority. >> when we lost the majority because i knew that they were in november and december of 2010 and if we wait until january

they would drive a hard bargain. and so, i said in a very kind of muted way for reasons that were still unclear to me this didn't happen, and gene sperling actually sent me an e-mail that said, he worked for me and said we tried. we didn't make a big deal but it because the main subject was the busheir tax cuts are going to be extended, but this shows you i'm trying to force myself to say once a day either i don't know or i was wrong because i think that would be therapeutic if everybody in washington did that. i want to be as good, here is something i was wrong about. since raising the debt ceiling, simply ratifies the decision congress has already made to

spend money and since the budget is the only thing the senate votes on that is not subject to a filibuster, i thought the debt ceiling wasn't subject to a filibuster, and i was wrong. so gene sperling send me a message and said senator mcconnell said he was going to filibuster unless we agreed to write all of the budgets of that and they run on. it turns out he couldn't raise the debt ceiling and i was wrong. it didn't hurt too bad. [laughter] and that is one way we get less an ideological politics is people find the errors they make. >> moving a bit out of washington, one of the things you do frequently in the book is to cite examples of where you think this sort of appropriate partnership and shared responsibility between the

government and private sector is working at the state level maybe you could talk about your theory of that and share some examples particularly from your time as the governor of arkansas what worked then and then also what has continued to work and not work subsequently in arkansas. >> first i think are used to people at the state and local level trying to save businesses and expand business and locate business and it is largely a bipartisan activity undertaken perhaps with varying levels of exuberance body elected officials but one reason i was able to stay governor for the dozen years and never got bored with the job and loved it was the whole economic aspect of eight and the interesting thing

in most in the country although it's gotten more partisan since 2010 but i think that will settle down, it is largely a bipartisan activity claimed so i tried to hide some areas in the book for example to give you one just practical with sample, 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 taken strictly five for ten years to get over and if you have a mortgage component that tends to push it out for ten years we should be trying to beat the clock. we can't do it in my opinion even if we adopt time for the president's jobs plan and there's a lot of good ideas in there, but they will give us 1.5, 2 million jobs according to the economic analysis but if you want to return to the full

employment economy want to have to under 40,000 jobs a month i think we have reached 227 a month for ten years. if you want that you have to get banks lending going again. and so, kenneth at harvard recommends since some people say if we lower the mortgage rates, if we bring the mortgage down to the value of the house, then the people who hold the mortgages will lose money who's going to compensate them and what is it going to be? they suggested the banks are the people will ultimately hold the mortgages instead of writing them down just cut them in half by taking the ownership position in the house so that when the house is ultimately sold, the people that issue the mor