she never lets politics, and it was always going to be if you're going into politics you have this lofty vision of the you're going to be. the administration, the health care deals, like the nebraska one that were unpopular and did not look great and barack obama la starting to look like a more ordinary politician, and that is really what she was reacting to. ..

getting our debt under control is crucial if the u.s. is to avoid a complete financial collapse. it's about a half an hour. >> good afternoon everybody. welcome to the heritage foundation. by name is michael franken i'm the vice president here for government studies and it's my honor today to introduce one of the elected officials in washington who does not fit in the 84% disapproval rating that congress gets these days. he is one of the good guys i want to welcome senator jim demint. senator jim demint started out in washington in 1998 when he was elected to the house of representatives where he served three terms. we got to know him well during those years and worked with him on a range of issues, none of them small. he tends to think about the biggest problem statement

country and introduce legislation to address those problems and create solutions to them. he represents south carolina. he was elected in 2004. national acclaim, we remember him for this, as a tireless advocate to end earmarks and in fact in 2006 he single-handedly at the end of the session stopped 10,000 projects from going forward. "the wall street journal" estimated it save the american taxpayer $17 billion the taxpayer's greatest ally. and 90 -- 2006 he was elected chairman of the sentence hearing to many which is a caucus of senators, majority republican senators and senators andy is worked with conservative legislation in in a variety of areas. he has been the speaker at the cpac conference in the "national journal" ranking as number one

senator voting for responsible tax and spending policies. he serves on the commerce, science and education committee foreign relations and economic committee and he is here today to talk about his new book, "now or never" saving america from economic collapse. one of the things he does in this book, he goes through all the details but his instincts as a legislator lead him to coalitions to seek out allies and build support and not surprisingly the format of the book involves introductions to each chapter by a friday of conservative heroes including senator rand paul, pat toomey, marco rubio and mike lee and tom coburn and congressman steve king, frank luntz to the political consultant and former house majority leader dick armey. all of them contributed introductions to the various chapters that he will be discussing with us today, so please join in giving a warm

heritage welcome to senator jim demint. [applause] >> thank you mike. bike has been an ally since my house days helping to run the republican study committee and i appreciate your help and the heritage foundation is without equal as far as being the best resource for conservatives here on the hill. ed fulmer is here and since almost the first day i walked and it seems like we had some big piece of legislation reforming social security or the tax code measuring dependency, the heritage foundation has the resources to get that done. so thank you ed and mike and i understand bob pennington is here one of the trustees. i haven't had a chance to shake your hand that i know you have been a big help to the heritage action group which is really increase their leverage as conservative legislators to have

more pressure on the outside. one of the things we have found out is good ideas don't necessarily win out here on the hill unless there is pressure coming in from outside the beltway. and the heritage action has certainly played a key role in the first year or two just to let people know what we need to do here in washington to pull america away from a cliff. i want to wish our chinese visitors a happy new year. thanks for joining us here today. this is where the action is, here on capitol hill for the right ideas. but thank you for the opportunity to talk about "now or never." i will put it into context of what is going to happen this sunday in our country. two of the best professional football teams are going to meet on the field. they know that this is make or break for them.

for some, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and they know they have got to give their all on sunday. they know time, the coach knows, players know that the other team is there to beat them. no coach sending their players out to the super bowl is talking about the need to cooperate and to work with the other guys. because they understand something. they understand the other team is there to beat them and their goal is on the opposite side of the field. it's not the way politics is supposed to be, but in washington i am afraid that is where it has come. we hear a lot of let's work together to stop the gridlock but we are in a situation now as conservatives and the other team has a different goal than we do. and they are here to beat us. i can't tell you uncompromised

with democrats over the last 10 or 12 years i've been in the house or the senate that didn't result in more spending, more borrowing, more debt and bigger federal government and importantly more concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a few people. that is a lot of what "now or never" is about. i really do believe that this could be our last chance to turn things around and i know a lot of you and a lot of folks across the country are cynical when they hear a politician say, this is the biggest election, or that this is a crisis. but if you look at the numbers, and i look at it still is a businessman looking at a balance sheet because that is what i did most of my life, is the nation is effectively bankrupt at this point now. if you're you read appointed a in a business where you cannot take your pills without borrowing more money every month, you are totally in the

hands of your creditors. we found out last august during the big debt ceiling debate, the president said unless we can borrow more money, we won't send out the social security checks and we cannot pay our bills. we passed this crazy debt limit deal that did nothing but kick the can down the road, push us further into debt. we don't have a sense of urgency here and across the country that we need to solve our problems. that is why i wrote this book. it's really my last effort to sound the alarm, to tell americans where we are, but to tell them there's still time to fix it. because this country is now at a point where our debt is larger than our economy and the plan is to keep adding a trillion dollars a gear to that debt into the foreseeable future. and when we talk about balancing the budget, which means we are

going to stop spending more than we are bringing in, that idea was called extreme by the president of the united states. and put down by the democratic leader in the house in the senate as essentially a ridiculous idea. now even a fifth-grader can tell us that if you have got more debt than you can deal with, and he keeps spending more than you are bringing in, something bad

who are dependent on the government who want more from government. that is what the party is about, and they can't work with us on balancing the budget. their whole platform is based on more promises from government and more government spending. a balanced budget amendment to the constitution would effectively put the democratic party out of business, because campaigns could no longer be based on all the promises of what else the government is going to do whether it is

partnering with businesses or redistributing wealth. it doesn't work in a scenario where we have to stop spending. what it would do though is put all politics on the same page. we would at least i'll have the same goal. we could compromise. we could debate. whether to raise taxes or cut spending or some combination of both. but it makes no sense to have that debate if there is no agreement that we need to balance our budget. what i try to do in "now or never" is we start out with a chapter of american -- america in peril and give some of the detail. these are very general but most of you who have been paying attention know that we are in a hole that we have never been in before. but the next chapter is remembering american exceptionalism and this is maybe the most important point in the book. is this country as different

than any other country in the world for a reason. we grew up as a bottom-up nation, very individualistic. millions of people making their own decisions about they what they want to do and what they value. americans were entrepreneurs by necessity. there were no programs to support them. we have no social caste systems. there was upward mobility, downward ability and the way people wanted to go. we were really the only country in the world that was not a top down country and even though initially there was a king that came with separated by the atlantic ocean and americans were very autonomous and their families, their local communities and their volunteer organizations. it was a bottom-up country. and that is what we found in business over the last 20 years. if you want to improve quality, reduce costs and be very competitive you push decision-making down, u. you thiessen july's power and that

is where quality and savings come from. that is what america was all about in the beginning, very decentralized and individualistic. the constitution was put in place to guarantee that power would not concentrate in washington, because our founders knew that when political power concentrates so does economic power and that is when you get the corruption. that is when you get crony capitalism. that is when you get major corporations coming to the politicians to help them compete rather than compete in the marketplace. what has happened over the last several decades in america is that decentralized concept has changed in the fact that more and our power and control and money has come to washington. that is why you see the exponential growth of lobbyists here from the business world in all sectors because this is where the money is. this is where the power is. this is where we can change things but that was never the

way it was supposed to be. so those principles of american exceptionalism that began with individuals and individual liberty and decentralized for legal legal and economic power has been changed with policies and we take tail it back from fdr all the way back to what we have done in both parties with all good intentions, have fundamentally changed the concept of america. but this is not doomsday for us and that is what i recount in the book. we are at a point in our country where we can still control our own destiny. we can pull ourselves away from a cliff. we don't have to balance our budget this year, but we do have to put our country on a course towards a balanced budget. we have to show ourselves and the world that we are committed, we are determined and we have a plan to move towards a balanced budget and begin to get our

fiscal situation under control. we can do that over a ten-year period in a very rational, transitional way that did not cause hardship except for maybe some federal government employees that would need to seek other employment. and i detail in the book what we call freedom solutions. heritage helped develop a lot of those, what we can do with our tax code to get people more freedom and more prosperity, what we can do to open our own energy supplies not only creating jobs but the revenue to the federal and state governments to deal with our debt could be extraordinary. there are good ways to solve the social security and medicare problem. we don't have to cut and if it's to those who pay for it in their whole life and retirement. but we could offer better less expensive solutions to younger workers who choose 401(k) style plan and a second rather than stay on the same plan they have because there are not many young

americans who believe they are going going to get anything for social security. if they were actually offered real savings i think a lot of them would choose it. there are better ideas that don't cost the taxpayer money. they are good solutions, but we have got to have the right messengers running for public office and we have a chapter on that. and "now or never" talks about picking candidates and doing it in a way that is better than what we do now. it's not about just giving a good speech. but it is about people who have the character, the confidence and the courage to leave the most complicated and largest organization in the whole world. you know we discount the skills and capabilities of management and when we are picking the president of the united states this is not just about picking a salesman. we have got to pick someone who really understands how to lead a great nation and in this case how to turn it around.

i think we are going to have that candidate one way or another as president but we also need for the house and the senate to elect congressmen and senators who understand american exceptionalism, and we can call ourselves conservatives or whatever we want the label to be but i want people to tell me face to face that they understand how america is doing and that if you understand the goal was to decentralized local and economic power, the solutions become pretty simple. because you don't want the government to run your health care. you want the individual to have the right and the access to the best of the most competitive health insurance plans in the world. all of your policies would focus on how do you help the individual control their own health care? but if you believe in centralized power as they think the man in the white house and the people who control the senate right now too, they are

automatically towards universal solutions. they are towards collectivist policies that don't work. if they worked, we could argue about it, but our world poverty is not cured proffered he. it has created intergenerational poverty. at his encourage folks to stay dependent on the government. it is taken away their dignity. we are not helping people and making them dependent on the government. but the point of "now or never" is that this may be our last chance to turn things around. and if i look out into the future where we are from a fiscal standpoint or a policy standpoint or a cultural standpoint, four more years of what we are doing now, don't know how america can survive in the form that we know america. but the good news is this, we saw in the last election that if only a small number of people get active and get involved, and

we think it was a big turnout in 2010 with less than 30% of americans over 18 even voting in the 2010 elections. what if we got 40% or 50%? what if we got all those people who were so busy raising their families and working and living life that they don't get involved with politics, what if we got them engaged in this year's election? that is what i hope we can do, sound the alarm, create urgency and let people know there are good solutions and let people know what made this country great in the first place and how we can get back there in a reasonable way that doesn't put people out in the streets as we are often accused every time we come up with a good idea. but i hope those of you who are here and those that are watching will just realize that we have a chance to make this country better than it has ever been before. the things that make us work that made us great are still at work today. you don't have to have traveled

too far visit to many businesses. around the country very much to realize that it is still there and america is still very exceptional. but we can't go down this wrong road much further and expect to be that same country. we can pull ourselves away from a cliff. what we have to do though is holed up the right ideas. that is what the heritage foundation has been doing for years, and then insist that the people who are running for office and who are in office adopt those principles that made us great and that is decentralized power based on individual liberty and constitutional limited government. i think we are very close to that. we have seen in some of the things that happened in the senate that i think near majority of republicans are tired of the status quo and are ready to change things. i'm going to keep working on that on the senate side and hopefully we can change things in the senate and put a new person in the white house who

understands what makes america great. so i would love to hear from all of you and thanks for the opportunity to chat with you today. [applause] >> thanks mike. >> he has agreed after his or marx and after the q&a that he will have time to sign copies of the book which are available outside, "now or never." we have microphones here. please hand up -- put your hand up if you have a question and please identify yourself. the gentleman right there. >> i understand that most spending cuts in the program social security medicare and medicaid are health care programs. aren't those precise as the programs that -- [inaudible] >> there is a lot of spending there but actually the payroll tax covers what we are spending for social security today. in fact the social security has not added a dime to our debt.

we borrowed a lot of money from social security. medicare is another issue. it's a big problem and medicaid is a problem but what we have seen is with a few states that have experimented with locke granting medicaid back to the states, that they can deliver better health care for 10 or 15% or even more savings. there are good solutions are for the challenge and goes back to what i talk about in the book, is we know there's a better way to do medicaid. it is decentralized it. let the states manage it and create a best practice competition between states but the democratic party right now is not really an adjusted in the facts or the best solution. it is the control that seems to be at issue here. leading medicaid go back to the states, we know it will work but yet we cannot get there. we can do the same thing on medicare and while paul ryan

came out with the idea that hey you can stay on medicare the way it is or you can keep the private policy and medicaid can help you pay for it. this was something the democrats can't accept, not because it doesn't work, not because people won't get even better health care. it's because it's no longer controlled in washington. that seems to be the common denominator of everything we are dealing with and social security, we can move it more towards an individual plan rather than something that is controlled in washington. we could save money. we could save the program. became give people better choices but that is the main point of the book here, why we can't compromise. it's not a matter of what works and i know this sounds cynical but i have been here 12 years and you can show the facts to the other side and it's not about whether or not it works. over whether or not we would be better off. it's controlled.

that is why i talk about some of these compromises in the book. "no child left behind," president bush's proposal, his first proposal had an option that states could opt out. it was a state flexibility option but in order to give -- get democratic support for that bill, that option was taken out so that it became more centrally controlled in washington. the same thing with prescription drugs for medicare. only about 25% of seniors needed help and republicans have several solutions to help folks who could not afford prescriptions to get them. a lot less expensive but the only plan the democrats would support was a universal plan where everyone had access to this government-sponsored prescription plan. it moved us closer to socialize medicine which is what they want so that is what we are up against right now.

we can solve these problems and i've got laid out in the book, some of the solutions. it's not going to be easy because we have dug a big hole that we can do it and we can end up with something better than what we have got now. >> the gentleman right over there in the aisle. >> hi, i am jesse. you talk a lot about mobility in america is really one of america's foundation and it and heritage studies have confirmed the report of social mobility. it was mentioned in several debates we actually have fallen behind western european countries and social mobility and i was wondering if you have any ideas on how to -- social mobility? >> it's a good question and debate it's a big question in this election year. somehow the folks that are successful in america are

causing hardship for the middle class, which is a distraction from what is really happening. there's several things i can mention. first of all a government-run education in america has clearly failed to give people the character and skills to compete in the global economy. we need to do something with their education system where public education no no longer synonymous with government-run education. there are a lot of good solutions but we are spending upwards of 14, $15,000 a year on public school students and we are still losing ground to the rest of the world. when we can't compete we can have a middle-class if our folks don't have the skills to succeed. we are also creating a large dependent class who are trapped in dependency and they are no longer socially mobile because they are no longer motivated or have a the necessity to move on and they are effectively

trapped. some of the things that medicare that you lose when you start trying to work, it's discouraging to people from getting out of that. i think the other thing, the big drop him in america as i mentioned the concentration of political power results in the concentration of economic power. and that is where you get a situation where the middle class suffers and fewer and fewer benefit because it's more politically controlled bank controlled by the markets. but what we need to do is return to the principles that make free enterprise work. that creates the economic and social dynamic that we want in our country. it doesn't guarantee everyone success but it does guarantee more people opportunity to succeed. that is what we want in our country. >> right there in the aisle in the back. >> david hersey a fellow north

carolinian or carolinian i should say. a question for you with regard come you didn't really speak about it but given the kind of state of economic disaster that we are in under this president and the and the state of the union he talked about you know the fact that we look strong in the world and some other things that i felt weren't true. could you speak just briefly about how our economic situation is impacting our ability to get things done around the world and leverage foreign policy and how it is tied in with the debate right now? >> it was hard to listen to that speech. it was like we were living in different worlds. wide-awake canceling a major pipeline of oil supply from our biggest energy provider and then next week saying we are doing everything we can to create and

make america more independent. a number of things like that, like making us a manufacturing nation. i go to a lot of manufactures and the biggest problem they have is obama karen dodds frank, the government pick eating winners and losers, the lack of skilled workforce coming out of our education system and the things that he is not talking about. so, the economic situation in america would not be hard to solve because it's out there fighting back despite the policies of washington. but we are making it harder and harder to succeed and uncertainty has now outpaced the rewards and that is really how our economy works is individual takes a risk in hope of getting a report in if you get millions of people doing that you have a dynamic vibrant economy but when you raise the risk level and