>> and it's making people mad. and what i'm loving, and i don't know if all of you are following this, i certainly am, what's happening in state legislatures across the country? so we are seeing all around the country not just the horrible legislation, but we're seeing women legislators using the platform that they have to speak out. so i want to read you just a couple of the pieces of -- if you can -- [inaudible]

we've got some great legislation that women are putting forward around the country, and it's not that they expect it necessarily to pass, but they want to really show what's going on and use their voice. and this is why we need more women in office. so in virginia senator janet howell proposed legislation mandating recollectal exams -- rectal exams and cardiac stress tests for men seeking erectile dysfunction meds. [cheers and applause] in georgia we saw a representative who wrote a bill outlawing thousands of vasectomies because they leave thousands of children deprived of birth. [applause] in ohio senator nina turner would compel men to get psychological screenings before getting prescriptions for impotence meds, and i'm quoting

her now: we must advocate for the traditional family, turner said, and insure that all men using pde inhibitors are healthy, stable and educated about their options including celibacy as a viable life choice. [cheers and applause] in illinois senator, i'm sorry, in illinois state representative kelly cassidy proposed requiring men seeking viagra to watch a video showing the treatment for persistent erections, an occasional side effect of the little blue pill. and as she explained, it's not a pretty procedure to watch. [laughter] so this is happening around the country in response to this, and this is just, i think, another example of the anger that we are seeing out there. um, and so we really have to work to kind of galvanize around this issue and not let it pass and not let it go.

and i think there's some good news about the numbers as we move forward. now, so far 24 states have had their filing deadlines. so these numbers are still very preliminary. there are 26 states, 27 states left to go here, um, and so we need to make sure that we're monitoring this. but right now we have 37 women who are filing or planning to file for the united states senate. that number -- [applause] at this time. now, i want to say that the record was set back in 2010 with 36, so if all of these women actually do file, we will have beat the record, but only by one. but at this point in the cycle with about the same number of states having filed, in '08 we had 11 women, and in 2010 we had 28 women. so we are ahead of the game, um, at the u.s. senate level. but here's where i think it really, we really want to watch this is in the united states

house. right now we have a total of 270 women who are considering filing or have filed for the united states house of representatives. at this point back in 2010, we had 227 women, and in 2008 we had 184. the ultimate record was set in 2010 with 262 women, but we're, again, ahead of the game. but we are really ahead of the game in what i consider the most important kind of race that women can be in. and, again, that goes back to those open seats. so remember what i said about 1992, year of the woman, but also the year of the open seat, okay? so right now women are either filed or say they are planning to file for open seats, 70 women are planning to run for open seat races in the united states house. back in 2008 at this point only 32 women were saying they were filing for open seats.

and in 2010, 37. this is the number to watch. this is what we have to keep our eye on. we have been looking at this at the 2012 project, now at the center for american women and politics for about two years. we have been going out and talking to women all over this country, women who are engineers and scientists and women in business and finance, organizations of women of color, leaders in the nonprofit community. and we are saying to them now is the time. why not you, why not now? run for office. this is the, this is the payoff, is the increase in the number of women who are saying they're going to run. and now we have, i think, the galvanizing issue where we are seeing the difference that women can make, we are seeing what happens when women's voices are not at the table. there's that great line, you know, if you're not at the table, you're probably on the menu. well -- [laughter] we need to make sure, we need to make sure that we are all at the table. and so as i look out in this

room and to the folks watching this on c-span, if you are in one of those states where there have not been filings, i hope that you will consider running for office, or that where there is an open seat or a vulnerable incumbent, that you will identify a woman who you know could run because that is what we need to do. and if you are in a state that already the filing deadlines have passed, find a woman. go to our web site. we keep track of all the women running for office around the country. find a woman who is running, support her. if it's not somebody in your state, find her in another state. but we need to get more women elected. our tag line for the 2012 project has been don't get mad, get elected. and i think that's absolutely true. [applause] and if it's not going to be getting you elected right now in 2012 -- maybe in 2014 or 2016 -- i would say don't get mad, get a woman elected.

so thank you very much, and i hope that sets the stage for you quickly. [applause] >> i knew that she could do it. he has all those numbers and figures at your fingertips. do you have the deadlines on your web site so they -- >> yeah. all the filing deadlines are on our web site. we have, um, we have an election tracker. if you go to the web site or to the 2012 project.us, we have something called the election tracker, and we have all the filing deadlines for each of the states, and we have links to each state and the women who are running for congress. and then as soon as the state legislative elections are held, the primaries, we will have all the women who are running for, um, for the state legislature postprimary. >> great. okay. so now you've set the stage, and dr. williams is our next speaker. the national congress of black

women which began, i believe, i'm saying 28 years ago. and it was, its mission has been to encourage more african-american, more women of color to run. because all the data that you hear on women as a whole, as you know, the underrepresentation of women of color is even worse. and, but they've also broadened their mission. you do other things besides this. but dr. williams has done the mission impossible too. she's not only now taken over after c. delores tucker who was the founder which was tough enough, but she also has run for congress. now, she did not take an easy site. she ran for congress from louisiana. and that was quite something. because you only lost, i think, by 500 votes? >> [inaudible] >> six-tenths of 1%.

can you imagine? but that didn't stop her. [applause] she kept going on. and she's had a career of encouraging other women to run and for all of us to fight for our women's rights, civil rights. and wherever there's a social justice cause, dr. williams is there fighting for all of us. [applause] >> thank you, ellie. is there anybody left here who doesn't understand that there is a war against the women? [laughter] we know that it's the first shot fired by the far right, but let me tell you this afternoon, it's not who fires the first shot, it's the one who's still standing when the war is over. we women plan to be still standing. [applause] sojourner truth, a woman whose memorial we have the honor of placing in the united states capitol making her the first

african-american woman standing there with a permanent me mother yum, she said that if the first woman could turn this world upside down, surely all of us together can turn it right side up again. [laughter] and we intend to do just that. [applause] because we are on the same team. rea before we talked about fighting for issues that are issues of all people. not just what we consider our personal issues. because the time comes when we need to unite, and we want somebody to help us with what we do consider our issues. and you've heard about the young minister who was there and said i said nothing because i was not involved. and then they came for me, and there was no one left to be involved. so we must form our coalitions, we must collaborate on those

issues that are all of ours. we must begin to learn how one issue impacts the other. now, we are not playing football, i understand that, and i've attended a whole bunch of football schools. but sometimes i think some of those people out there who are working against our best interests believe that, indeed, women are a football field, and they can just form their little t formations. you know, they can say one thing to us and then do another. but we are ready because we are on the same team. and we women understand what teamwork means. it used to mean that we did everything. but each of us has got our role to play now, and that's what makes us stronger. because when we collaborate, we can make everything that we do mean something. if you want to eliminate once

and for all pre-existing circumstances and conditions like being a woman, then we're on the same team. [laughter] if you want to insure equal pay for equal work, then we are on the same team. if you want to make sure that your child can stay on your health care, your health plan until they're 26, then, yes, we are on the same team. yes, if you want to have access to affordable health care and want everybody else to have it, then we are on the same team. if you want to preserve social security as we know it, we are on the same team. if you are one of the 99% or care about the 99%, then we are are -- >> on the same team. >> if you want to see more women

like nancy pelosi and amy klobuchar and carolyn maloney and barbara mikulski and all of these wonderful women, then we are on the same team. if you want to see another shirley chism rise -- [cheers and applause] we are on the same team. if you want to let more women serve on the supreme court like elena kagan and sonia sotomayor, then we are on the same team. if you want to see more women like hillary clinton over at the secretary of state being head of that office, then we are -- >> on the same team. >> if we want to see more melissa harris perrys and rachel maddows on television telling our story, we are -- >> on the same team. [applause] >> if you want a fair pay act in your lifetime, we are -- >> on the same team. >> if you want to see the tea

party disappear, we are -- >> on the same team. [applause] >> if you want to reach that 51% that you heard about this morning in the united states congress, then we are -- >> on the same team. >> all right. if we want a congress that's responsive to our needs, then we are -- >> on the same team. >> if you want to keep title ix as our sister spoke about this morning, arlene, then we -- >> are on the same team. >> all right. if you want the equal rights amendment ever to happen, we are -- >> on the same team. [applause] >> if you want to put down divisiveness, you want to put down sexism, you want to put down homophobia, you want to put down racism, you want to put down taking action against people and not giving them fair opportunities who have physical or mental disabilities, then we are -- >> on the same team.

>> all right. if you want to put down ignorance of people who are supposed to be educated but don't act like it, then we are on the same team. [laughter] my sisters, if you want to experience concepts like truth and justice for all, equality for all, fairness for all, then we are on the same team. we've been through the fire, my sisters. but one thing that is clear to us is that we're not going to go back because we are on the same team. if we're on the same team, then it seems to make sense that there is something we have to do. how do we do it in 2012? because we can't wait, as dr. martin luther king said, we cannot wait. it's time for us to do it now. so we cannot just get mad because as my friend dick

gregory always says, when we get angry, plain old anger can consume and destroy us. but if we are on the same team, there are some things we must do immediately. we can't just get mad at old fruity-newty. we can't just get angry with old tricky ricky and all the stuff he's saying. [laughter] we can't get mad at the other people in the races that aren't for us, you know who they are -- [laughter] but everything that they say is something that we've got to listen to because somehow it's connected to preventing women from doing something. it's against our interests. so some of the positive things, you've heard 'em all today, and we're going to just rush through them. instead of getting just plain old angry, every time somebody comes on and says something crazy, just go and register another friend, somebody who just hasn't made it to register yet, somebody who just didn't

get a chance to vote before, somebody who didn't have the money to go and find that birth certificate, somebody who just doesn't even know where the courthouse is or where they register to vote. let's make our anger mean something if we're really on the same team. let's put our dollars where our mouths are instead of cussing somebody out, let's just go and send a dollar to people like elizabeth warren or other people -- well, we can't do that. but anyway -- [laughter] you know the people who support our issues. let's make sure we do that. if you want to be on the same team with us, be sure that you motivate somebody to vote who didn't even plan to vote. we want you to explain to somebody how the affordable care act works, what is in it. because we know when people understand it, they like it. when they're asked individually if they want the pieces that are in that act, they then say they want it. but when you just ask them if they support the act because they've heard it so much about

whatever care and all that kind of stuff, i just add an s on it, you see, and say cares. but anyway, the vast majority of us are concerned about our brothers and our sisters all across this country, all across this world. but we can't do it if we don't have a congress there. and we need a senate one of these days before long where 51% means something because right now they can get 51%, and they still haven't done anything. but since we are 51%, let's make the senate mean something for us too, because that's a stupid law, and -- rule, and they've got to change that. you know, if we're silent about what's going on out there, then we are told by dr. martin luther king again that violence gives consent. and surely we are not consenting to all of the things that are happening to us in this most recent war against women. again, we must collaborate now.

we must stop all the foolishness about being angry with somebody because they didn't do one thing that we wanted. we've got to look at the whole picture. we've got to look long range. we've got to think about who is usually there with us, who is generally there with us until we can put somebody there that is with us all the time. we women are a majority. but, you know, sometimes we act like we're just a little part of the constituency of what it is out here that's voting. we are the majority. do we know what the majority means? we've got to start acting like we are in charge. now, the people who are against us aren't hiding. it's not difficult to find them. all we have to do is listen to cbs, nbc, abc, msnbc, even that other station over there, and you'll find out who the real enemies are. so we just have to say no, no, no, no, no, we won't go back. and we've got to mean it when we

say it. we've got to tell them we have come too far, we have suffered too much, we have struggled too much. so many of our women friends have died waiting for things to happen while they worked. we were not always there with them. but we must be with women today who are for us, and we must know who those people are who are against our best interests. again, as i conclude i bring to you a remark of sojourner truth who said that she had suffered so many indignities, but those indignities never stopped her because she was fighting for dignity. and like many other women -- susan b. anthony, lucretia mott and others -- she was fighting for us to gain the right to vote, and we won't go back. there was gloria steinem, shirley chism, there's kim gandy, patricia ireland, terry o'neill, harriet tubman before

them, ella baker before them. all of these are women who who e fought too many battles for us to go back. so we won't go back. it's time for us to take our own stand and stand the ground for women and insist that we won't go back for any reason. so we've got to get it on when we leave this conference today. we can't wait for the summer. we can't wait for november. we've got to get it together now. i want you to know that it is time that we understand that all, each of our interests is somehow related to all of our interest. so the far right, as i said earlier, may well have shot the first shot, but it's the one who's still standing when the last shot is fired. and, women, we intend to be there because we are a team. thank you, i love you, god bless you. [cheers and applause]

>> i forget that e. faye is also an ordained minister. [laughter] and you can hear her voice ringing there in indignation. we're going to throw open, we have a little time -- not much -- for q&a. the reason i stopped some of the candidate stuff is that we're here as a nonprofit organization, and, um, and so, basically, we want to keep it in the philosophical range especially with eagleton institute standing right here encouraging more women to run. anyway, i also want -- for those of you who were not here before, we have an historic figure in our audience who might want to

say something about running. care mosley brown -- carol moseley-braun who was, obviously, the first african-american u.s. senator, is attending which we're very honored with her attendance. [applause] she is on the national advisory board of n.o.w. and, obviously, she ran for president of the united states. so she knows something about running. and if you want to go to a mic, carol, could i encourage you to? [applause] yes. good. take hold. right now she is running a, she's an expert on food -- expert on food, organic food. and you ought to hear her on this subject. my grandson, yeah, my grandson happens to have this terrible peanut allergy, and she was telling us about the food be -- food processing. this woman's got a lot of hats.

been elected statewide how many times in illinois? lots. [laughter] and she is -- i'll never forget when you first took the floor. this might be a little-known detail of why it matters when women are there. you took the floor, and she had her pin on, right? first african woman, american woman to take the floor, and they stopped her, remember this? at the gate, at the door. sergeant in arms stopped her and said she couldn't enter the floor. she said, wait a minute, i just got elected, a pin on. anyway, she had pants on. [laughter] this wasn't 100 years ago, this was 1992. and women were not allowed to wear pants. and so do you want to tell the rest of the story, or should i? [laughter] i mean, this made a difference

because she refused to get off the floor, she stayed on the floor, and one of the reasons -- [cheers and applause] that women can wear pants is senator and ambassador carol moseley-braun. [cheers and applause] >> first off, ellie, i want to thank you and the feminist majority for this conference. this has been just a magnificent opportunity to get energized and inspired all over again. we've been calling it old home week because you see so many women, so many warriors, people who have been out in the forefront making the case that equality is an american value. and women hold up half the sky. and we're entitled to be participants in the golfer nance of this -- governance of this country just as anybody else. and so you are making the case and all these wonderful people, and i love the fact that you bring the young women into the conversation. because many of them really need to know that this is not just a

battle that's going to be over with tomorrow. it didn't just start yesterday. and that we have to all work together, and in dr. faye's language, we have to be a team to make certain that we come together and make these things happen. i'm going to tell a quick story, take me -- this is called a point of personal privilege since i have the mic. the worst thing you can do is give a politician a mic, right? [laughter] my first meeting, i first met ellie fighting for the equal rights amendment in the state of illinois. it was 1970 -- right? [laughter] because my apartment was right across the street from the capitol, we became the war room for the passage of the equal rights amendment. and we took on, this was the very beginning of that other lady who will not be mentioned, of her organization. and so it was truly a faceoff, it truly was a faceoff. unfortunately, illinois failed to pass the equal rights amendment, and that was one of the reasons why we still don't have it. but that fight continues, and i

think the fact that we are still talking about it, it's still important. it's got to happen. our daughters deserve no less from us than an e-mail rights -- equal rights amendment in this country. [applause] but to talk a little bit about running for office, no easy thing to do. particularly in light of the fact that the laws have changed in terms of money. if anything, i think campaign finance reform is the new face of the civil rights movement in this country. and i say that because the way -- the role of money is so corrupting on the process that it really is beginning to lock out a lot of voices that ought to be heard. lock out and close doors and foreclose opportunity particularly for women from all walks of life who might be encouraged to step forward but can't figure out how they'd manage to handle the fund raising and all of the money part of the process. that is really the hardest, the hardest part of it.

and if representative democracy means anything, it ought to mean that women will have an equal voice, women will have an opportunity to participate in government. and you have that opportunity when you run for office. and so i want to encourage everybody here to do what you can to move not just in terms of personal contributions because that's kind of a cup on a corner way of doing it nowadays unfortunately, it's the pacs, it's the corporations, it's the superpacs, it's the efforts to get the money out there so the candidates can be competitive. because without that, you know, you may have the most brilliant thing in the world to say, but if nobody can hear you say it, then you don't get your message out, and your chances of being elected are minimized. and so i just think that it's, that gatherings like this are so important. i want to thank all of you for being here and for your activism because i am encouraged and inspired. i'm doing food now, and i want to tell you -- i want to end with a quick food story. and this is some good news.

no, seriously. two things happened in the last month. the two big drink manufacturers, coke and pepsi, agreed with the fda to change the formulation of their beverages because it had been determined that an ingredient they were using caused cancer. and the fda was going to require that they put this product causes cancer on the cans, and coke and pepsi both decided, well, no, we don't want to put any reference to cancer on our product. so guess what? we're just going to change the formulation and take that out. great victory. you saw that much of it in the news, okay? that was the first. the second, though, and this is just happened, there was an article about this today, and i hope you'll look it up, that's just as important. has to do with bpa which is this plastic coating that they coat the inside of cans with,

particularly that have tomato products in it. and what they found is that the word of mouth got out, and moms, mothers who make purchasing decisions -- remember, women make the purchasing decisions across the board -- decides they were just not going to expose their children to this packaging material that might cause cancer and any number of other ailments in the children. ..

so it's those kinds of things. i think that's a great victory and is a great victory and should be inspirational to everyone here. the people really in the end do have the power. people coming together and expressing consensus around an issue like that have the power to change things and to change the direction of this country and to keep this country moving in a direction that we will all be proud to leave for our children. that applies whether it is politics, or food or any other level of activity. how we define our times, our world and our times starts with each and every person in this room. so i want to congratulate everybody here for reaching outside of yourself to make a difference and to make this an america we can all be proud of. thank you. [applause]

>> so i just want to actually follow up with what carol just said and i want to say it's wonderful to see carol because she is one of our litman chairs and political leadership at rutgers university. see everybody should come to rutgers university. it is the place to be but one of the things we want to know why women tend not to run for office because they think it is sort of an ugly place and a place where you can't get things done and what they end up doing is doing what we call work around in government and politics and they do it themselves. so their work as activists like on an issue the ones carol is talking about but they may not think they can get it done in government. they watch the gridlock and see that is place where heads but the and you can't get stuff the accomplished. the place where you want to make and place to make the systemic change where you get the regulation through so you don't have to keep asking individual companies to make changes and out of

their sort of largess they do it where we get women inside who are making sure that the regulations change, at that that's what we need. which know when we ask men and women who serve in state legislatures what was the most important reason they ran in the first place, and i'm sure carol would back this up from her own personal experience, they run for office because they care passionately about something and they want to change it. they try to change it outside the system and they can't get it done and so they run for office and get it done on the inside. men are much more likely to run because they have a long-standing interest in career in politics. so our shorthand, men run to be somebody and women run to do something. we need more women inside doing something to change things systematically so we can see some real, long-term change in this country. [applause] >> there are two women at

the mic, then we have to end this because the room will expire about this time. so would you, say your name and -- >> i'm from frederick community college. my question is for miss walsh. thanks for giving us the good news about 70 more women candidates are running this time for the offices. my question is that can we assume that 100% of these women are for women's rights such as equal rights? >> that's your job, to go look up who are these women and find out which are the women that you can support and support the things that you care about. but what we are seeing is that, if you look at the party breakdown, there are more democratic women running than republican women right now but that is pretty much historically true. right now in the united states house of representatives democratic

women make up 32% of the democratic caucus and republican women make up only 17% of the republican caucus. part of what's happened for republican women they tend to be a bit more moderate and they have a very tough time making it through primaries. and i think, you know, for me, watching, a real tragedy happened this year in losing olympia snowe in the united states senate. a moderate republican women. one of the few voices who was really capable working across party lines and trying to seek some places of compromise which i think we all agree we sorely need. so there are an array of women, more democrats than republicans but probably varied on their positions on issue within each party as well. so that is up to you to take a look and see which are the women but they're out there and find the women that you can support that you believe in and help them get elected if you're not going to run yourself.

>> one more question? >> would you like to go? >> oh. okay. two things. one i just want to encourage the younger women in this audience to reach out to older women to get them social media culturally literate because there is a divide in age in terms of comfort with the social media which, you know, older women are, if you just sit with them, get them online. >> some of us who can do it. >> i know that. it is a generality. it is a generality. >> can't be ages. >> i'm just saying it breaks at a certain point sometimes. the other thing, ms. walsh when i talk to people about running for office, they go, i don't want to come up through the party. i don't want to put in time on the school board. you know, i would just like to run. that isn't, not the way it works or is that breaking down a little -- >> it is break down. in fact in our most recent

study of men and women who serve in state legislatures we found well over half of them, that was the very first office they had ever run for. i think one of the things we do particularly to women we tell them -- >> all of this program available in our video library at c-span.org. we're going to take you live now to the united nations in new york. u.s. ambassador to the u.n., susan rice will be taking questions from reporters on a wide range of issues including upcoming priorities and syria. live coverage here on c-span2. >> good afternoon, everyone, we have a lot to cover so i will turn it over quickly to ambassador rice who will go through the program of work through the month and then take your questions. >> good afternoon, everyone. thank you for coming. what i'd like to do as mark said, go you there the program of works. tell you a little bit what we plan for the month, make a few comments on mali which

we discussed this morning in the council which i otherwise would have briefed you on but was briefing the nonmembers of the council just now and coming to see you here. so i thought we could kill two birds with one stone. and then of course take your questions all before joining the secretary-general at lunch with women prs and senior women in the secretariat. let me go through the program of work swiftly as i can. i hope you all have the latest version in front of you. i want to just highlight various agenda items without necessarily going through it in chronological order. let me begin with the subject of the 19th of april which is a session on nuclear nonproliferation, disarmament and security. from the u.s. point of view the greatest danger that we

and all states around the world face is the nuclear weapon in, or nuclear materiel falling into the hand of terrorists. as you know at the beginning of his administration, president obama put nuclear security and nonproliferation at the very center of our foreign policy agenda and set out concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons in his prague speech three years ago this month. a crucial part of this effort was the adoption as you i will recall of resolution 1887 during the security council's historic summit level event in 2009 chaired by president obama. when we were first in the presidency of the security council. resolution 1887 recognized the need for all states, quote, to take effective measures to prevent nuclear material or technical assistance becoming available to terrorists, unquote. with the conclusion of the

second nuclear security summit in sowell last month and -- seoul last month we think it is appropriate to take stocks in international efforts on this issue. so the goal of the up copping council session to highlight efforts to combat the threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism and to underscore the international community's broadly shared interest and responsibilities to respond to these threats. it is also an important opportunity to reinforce the council's support of the work of the iaea as well as the importance of each u.n. member state implementing resolution 1540 to prevent proliferation of wmd and related materials. i also want to point to the event on the week, the day of april 25th, the following week in which there will be an open debate on the elicit flow of materials, goods and people. the title of the event is, threats to peace, international peace and

security, securing borders against illicit flows. the security council has consistently identified through its resolutions and presidential statements how such transfers whether we're talking about wmd, small arms, drugs, terrorists, even human trafficking, can field some of the most critical threats to international peace and security and trigger instability, that these threats, these flows, we often look at in sort of a stovepipe fashion. each individual threat, and we have instruments both in the secretariat and in some of the specialized agencies that are designed to assist states that need assistance and want assistance to build their capacity to deal with each of these threats, whether it's drug flows or terrorism or what have you and we have, you know the cted, we have the 1540 committee. we have sanctions panels of

experts. we have unodc all essentially trying to assist states to build their capacity to deal with the same essential problem. whether, whatever the good or person that is being transferred across borders it is in fact securing borders. it is building the capacity of states to control what's coming in and out of their sovereign territory. and so we wanted to look at this issue from a more holistic point of view and to see these efforts, these mechanisms and these challenges as part of a larger whole. while there is substantial bilateral, regional and multilateral efforts underway to help states develop effective customs and immigration systems or to foster enforcement and intelligence cooperation the security council has never undertaken a comprehensive effort to consider how the u.n. structures can most effectively support states in addressing illicit trafficking.

so this session will provide the council with an opportunity to hear from the secretary-general who will also brief on the 19th on nonproliferation and nuclear security. we'll hear about the structures that the u.n. has to help states accomplish better control of their borders. we'll consider and appear, asking the secretariat to provide us with a better understanding of what the current structures are and how they might be strengthened and streamlined to better support member-states. let me turn to some other items on the agenda. throughout the month we'll have at least a couple sessions on the situation in sudan and south sudan i which as you know remain high on the council's agenda. on the 11th the council will get a briefing which may shift potentially but we'll see, by the head of mission in force commander on the situation in abia. on the 26th we'll hear from

undersecretary-general on darfur around we'll remain ready as a council throughout the month to address the situation between sudan and south sudan which is quite fragile and volatile at the moment as needed. with respect to syria obviously that remains an important perennial on our agenda. we had the briefing yesterday by joint special envoy kofi annan. we heard that the regime has apparently committed to begin and to complete by april 10th the cessation of all forward deployments, the use of heavy weapons and to withdraw its forces from populated areas. the security council is now working on a draft presidential statement which we introduced this morning as a presidential text and will be negotiated today and probably tomorrow which is essentially aimed at trying to give support, further support to joint special envoy annan's initiatives

and to underscore the central importance of the syrian government adhering to its commitment to halt all offensive actions by april 10th. and i'm sure we can return to that in question and answer but let me say that from the u.s. point of view, and think the point of view of many member-states, what we have seen since april 1st is not encouraging and that the, should the government of syria use this window rather than to deescalate, to intensify violence, it will be most unfortunate and it will be certainly our view that the security council with will need to, to respond to that, that failure in a very urgent and serious way. we will be talking with joint special envoy annan about the potential to have

him return to brief the council soon after april 10th so we can have an update and proceed accordingly. quickly let me also mention it on the 24th we have a session on women, peace and security where u.n. women head michelle batile, will brief the council, her semiannual briefing and she will be joined by undersecretary-general ladsus we are eager for the opportunity to do this that president obama has launched a national action plan on women peace and security and has built a foundation for powerful change in the way that the world prevents war and makes peace bringing the role of women to the front and center of that. let me turn to one other point and that relates to young people. we think, the united states thinks, that it's very important for the council to bring the voices of half the world's population, those under 25, more directly and

immediately into the work of the security council. it's the lives of young people being shaped by what we do or don't do every day and in so many ways they have the greatest stake in the work we do. that's why 15 months ago when the u.s. last held the presidency of the security council we organized what was an unusual, even unprecedented opportunity for young people to participate in a discussion with members of the security council on what they viewed, these are young people from around the world, what they viewed as the most pressing issues facing the world and indeed the council today. this time around we want to return to the theme of youth and do it in a somewhat different way. so i hope over the course of the month you will be seeing a few younger faces around the halls including in the council itself. we'll be partnering with high schools, universities,

and ngos to invite younger people and young audiences to come to open sessions of the security council. we'll be organizing a special program for young journalists that i hope will be of particular interest to you. we'll be inviting them to come to the u.n. to report on what we believe is an issue of critical importance to young people and their generation which is of course the issue of proliferation of nuclear materials and nuclear weapons technology. we're going to draw young people from area schools but also from several councilmember states who will be able to participate via video. we will hope that you will take some time to join us in engaging with these young journalists, encouraging them while they're here. if they happy to break a story ahead of you that you don't let professional jealousy get in the way of bringing up the next generation. finally as we close i will

take at the end of our press conference one question that has been selected among many that were submitted via twitter and, the question comes from handle entitled,@free people. the question i will answer at the end, why are you not acting swiftly towards the killing in syria like you did in libya? but i will come back to that at the end. let me say a few quick points on mali and open it up for questions. this is the readout of our session this morning. we heard a briefing from undersecretary-general pasco on the situation in mali and mr. pasco told the council that the situation has taken a turn for the worst over the course of the past several days. the nmla and al-dean groups capitalized on the confusion caused by the military seizure in key towns

including in timbuktu and these towns in the north, have fallen to the rebels. and pasco reported that government forces are effectively abandoning their positions in the north without much of a fight. the council is working on a prst on this topic as well which we hope will be be issued as soon as possible. we heard from undersecretary-general pasco that ecot imposed measures yesterday including border closures, blocking financial transaction of junta members and reported that echo was placed a force of 3,000 troops on standby both to respond if necessary to the coup d'etat as well as respond to the rebellion that is of grave concern in the north. pasco also noted humanitarian situation is deteriorating and underlined

that idps have increased to 90,000 and refugees to 130,000. council members were united in their demand that the hunt at that leaders immediately -- junta leaders step down and restore constitutional order. let me stop there and take your questions. mark. madam president on behalf of the united nations correspondent association, thank you for coming. i have this question. do you think the announcement by the friends of syria will help your position or will interfere with the mission and timetable of kofi annan and if not, why? >> i want to be sure i understood the question. did -- >> did the announcement in istanbul of the friends of syria could interfere with the mission and timetable of kofi annan and if not why? >> i assume you're asking in my national capacity? >> true. [inaudible]

>> in my national capacity the answer is no, we don't think it interferes in any way. friends of democratic syria very much expressed and underscored their support for the work of the joint special envoy and his six-point plan. the, the syrian government has a decision to make. it's made a commitment to accept the annan plan. it is further committed to halt all offensive military operations by april 10th. in the meantime it is thus far not doing so. arguably quite the opposite. and that has nothing to do with what was done and said in istanbul. that is a pattern that this regime has pursued over the course of more than a year where it has used excessive and outrageous force against its own people. the friends of democratic syria recognize that against the overwhelming force that

is being inflicted on the people of syria that the opposition which is far less capable of defending itself, needs political support and some members also have agreed to enhance material support including the provision of financial support to elements of the opposition. we, united states, as you know, are providing not only a doubling of our humanitarian assistance to $25 million but also communications equipment and related nonlethal support to strengthen the cohesion of the opposition. >> media letter. >> madam president. question -- >> only get to say that every 15 months with the current council composition. >> sound -- madam, we just did mr. president with the

president of the general assembly. i would follow up on, i would follow up on syria by asking, you mentioned initially that if, if there is an escalation, that, the council would need to respond in a very serious way. could you give us some indication of what you would envision? any kind of sanctions? do you think that they would have, even a threat of sanctions would have a more reasonable chance of being adopted if this failed? >> well, first of all, it's, the hope, although i wouldn't say the expectation, of members of the council that indeed when we review this situation after april

10th, that the violence will have seized on the part of the government and we will be in a realm of considering how the council can reinforce that halt to the violence but the reality is that that's not been the pattern thus far and, indeed, from a national point of view the united states is concerned and quite skeptical that the government of syria will suddenly adhere to its commitments. in the event that it does not, we will be certainly consulting with colleagues on the security council as to what are appropriate next steps. it's no secret that the council has been divided in the past on actions that might take to halt the violence in syria. what we hope may be different now is that we are

now united around the initiative of joint special envoy annan. the council has endorsed the six-point plan. hopefully we will also endorse what we were told yesterday and in that context, should the syrian regime continue its violence, we hope that would create a climate that would be perhaps improved over the past in which all member-states see the wisdom of delivering, not just a strong message but strong actions that might change the calculus of the government in damascus. >> tim will cher. >> madam ambassador. mr. annan said the syrian government exchanged sees fire of hostilities. if they carry out the three points the envoy will go to the opposition and call on them to carry out cessation of hostilities. >> i said a halt to offensive actions. if you take the three

elements of the secretary-general's proposal, withdrawal of forces from populated areas, withdrawal of help weapons, no further advances, et cetera, that amounts to the government halting its side of the military activity, the offensive military action. the joint special envoy was clear that the subsequent step would be to prevail upon the opposition within 48 hours to recipro rate in halting violence on its side and at that point he was asking that the council be ready should that both steps occur, to swiftly consider endorsing the dispatch of a monitoring mechanism. >> joe and then ali. >> you just, we just said that the government should stop offensive actions and the rebels violence. do you see the rebels as truly offensive force to protect civilians are or they offensive force to

overthrow assad? if they are what sense do they have to stop fighting when they have millions of dollars in the pipeline? >> you're parsing my word more carefully than i intended them to be parsed. i'm making a very simple point, speaking really trying to relay what it is that we understood mr. annan to be explaining to the council yesterday. first step is for the government to implement elements a through c of his plan under item two which amount to halting, as i have described, further military action against populated areas. and then for the opposition, as a subsequent step, to halt all violence on its side. i wasn't attempting to characterize, put a moral character on either set of -- i'm sorry? >> are they purely defensive or offensive? they're trying to overthrow

assad or are they just protecting civilians? if they're trying to overthrow assad why would they stop with millions of dollars coming? >> i will answer that in my national capacity. from the u.s. point of view we've taken the view that, you know, this began obviously as a peaceful expression of popular will among the a large swath of the peel of syria against a government that it viewed as repressive. the government's response was to use unrelenting and overwhelming and indiscriminate force over the course of more than a year and during that time what began as a very peaceful civil protest has evolved in part, not in whole because that still exists, the peaceful civilian aspect of it, into opposition elements taking up arms in self-defense and, and we've been very clear that while we want the violence to cease we understand that in the face of such overwhelming

violence directed by the state against his people, that it is to be expected that eventually people will take the steps necessary to defend themselves. now what that subsequently evolves into, i'm not prepared to predict. we've said very clearly that this is a very worrisome and volatile situation. we want to see an end to violence. we don't want to see this descend further into all-out civil conflict and that is among the reasons why we and others are supporting the diplomatic efforts of joint special envoy annan. >> okay. ali and then colin. . .

>> well, with respect to the second question on refugees, that as you know falls under the broader report of the humanitarian situation about which the council has expressed concern that we are looking to the humanitarian agencies, both the u.n. and regional or indigenous to try to address the very serious and growing problem of refugees outside of syria, u.n. acr obviously has a lead from the u.n. point of view, with respect to that. on the monitoring mission, i think there may be some confusion at least implied in your question. joint special envoy and and has not asked the council to endorse

a monitoring mission today or yesterday or tomorrow, and nobody that i am aware of expects that can be accomplished without a resolution. it would be an observer mission, however small, it begins. there will need to be a resolution. i think all councilmembers think that you cannot send unarmed military observers into a hot conflict as is the custom of the united nations around the world. we need the cessation of the violence and one that is credible for unarmed monitors and observers to be able to effectively deploy and operate. so what joint special envoy annan was asking for is the council be in communication and coordination with the secretariat at the appropriate time the secretariat will present proposals to the council and the council will be ready to respond swiftly when that time

comes. >> i thought that there were already members who advanced the rotary mission headed to the country this week. isn't there sort of an advanced piece of the monitoring mission that is beginning without the security council? >> no. >> and also, just more broadly in terms of, as a u.s. representative, if you can give us a sense of what the americans are thinking about beyond the commitment that was made in istanbul on the occasion, night goggles and things like that, what the u.s. is considering doing to support the opposition. >> the first one was? >> i thought that the plan was -- >> first of all i think it is six.

it's not an advanced team. it's a second iteration of a planning team, so you may recall a couple of weeks ago, there were maybe wasn't even as long as a couple of weeks ago -- they were perching dp kayo as well as from the joint special envoy verse and a team, his office that went to damascus to have technical talks with with the government about the modalities of the potential monitoring mechanisms. my understanding is that another iteration of the team, perhaps with a somewhat different composition, we'll go back to continue those discussions with the government and to the extent possible with the opposition so that information and planning can inform ultimately the secretary-general's proposal to the council if and when that is appropriate. >> they are not going to come back. they are staying there permanently though aren't they?

>> that is not my expectation our understanding as briefed yesterday. with respect to the united states, and our approach, we have been very clear that the outrageous violence that assad is committing against his people make him unfit to continue to govern and we believe as we have heard many say that his time is limited. we think that the best approach now is, rather than to fuel a additional violence, is to increase the pressure of all forms on assad to make the commitments that he has made. the pressure that the united states and many countries in the region have imposed is economic and we stepped up the sanctions, both on a national basis over the last several days and in coordination with other states. we think that is vitally important. we have also said it's necessary

for there to be accountability and we have put in place the beginnings of what will be an accountability clearinghouse in which we provide assistance and support to train syrians to gather evidence that might be used down the road to provide a legal basis for accountability. we are also increasing our support to the people of syria through humanitarian assistance. we are working actively, diplomatically and politically to help the opposition develop a more coherent approach both internally and externally. as part of that, we have contributed and our country beating certain forms of nonlethal assistance including enhanced communication support. this is all part of a larger effort to enable the opposition to be in a position at the appropriate time to negotiate and to chart its own future.

>> another change on the ground is likely. how long before declaring that diplomatic action? >> i'm not really going to get into a hypothetical. there are many different ways the situation could unfold on the tenth or thereafter. i think as has been the case, from the start, there will be different views among members of the security council as to how to approach any number of different contingencies. from the u.s. point of view, we have been clear that we think that it's vitally important that deadline, which in our view was already too long, let's be real and be credible and be adhered to and if it's not we will certainly be consulting with our colleagues in the council about right appropriate next steps are. but, we are united around the view that the work with the joint special envoy annan is

doing. we supported and we think as difficult as the diplomatic terrain is and he would be the first to a college that, that supporting him is a wise and the best course. >> so in keeping with 100% of all of your questions, a trigger question is also an syria and why are you not acting swiftly towards the killing in syria like he you did in libya? >> let me be very clear because i'm supposed to be in a luncheon with the secretary-general and the i don't know if i should believe the tokyo clock or the new york clock, but seven or eight minutes. i'm happy to answer the sudan question and i will answer this twitter question at the end. please understand that i'm not trying to be rude, but i am trying to accommodate a all of these different requirements in one morning. who has suffered the sudan question? >> go ahead. >> the situation between this two sedans.

what is your assessment, your evaluation of these -- [inaudible] >> again i will speak in my national capacity. the united states is deeply concerned about the growing violence, the escalation in fighting along the sudan, south sudan border and indeed within the south. we have urged both sides to hault the violence, to return to negotiations in a spirit of seriousness and resolve with the many underlying issues related not only to the south but relations between sudan and south sudan u.s. at the heart of this conflict. you may have noticed that our diplomacy included a conversation yesterday between president obama and the president of south sudan,

special envoy princeton lyman continues his intensive efforts to support the mediation process that is ongoing and on a national basis as well as the council. we have lent their strong support to the efforts of the eea you highly implementation panel under mbeki. >> you said as to president assad of syria that he is unfit to govern because he has killed his people and all these things. the u.s. and certainly the security council is calling on their position in sudan not to seek regime change, to disarm and become part of the door for process another way so what is the difference given bashar and the defense minister have all been indicted for war crimes and genocide and crimes of humanity? what is the difference between asking, telly opposition not to seek a change of government at the same way -- >> first of all our policy in syria is this would be resolved

if possible through the negotiated syrian led political process. the democratic dispensation for the people of syria. that is quite similar to our view as to what is the optimal out come in, in the context of sudan, where there has been war and fighting for generations, and it is not lead to greater freedom or greater security for many of the people of sudan. the challenge of southern kordofan is inherently a political one as both sides recognize in the context of the cba. the problem is the government in khartoum has decided not to deal with this at the negotiating table and so they are facing and intensified rebellion. but the prescriptions are analogous and yes, we have been at the forefront of demanding justice and accountability for genocide and war crimes committed by president bashar and many around him, and that remains the central part of u.s. policy.

>> we do need to take our last question, sorry. >> we could stay here all day. >> i could stay here all day. excuse me? >> can i ask one? >> no. with all due respect, the secretary-general, let me do as i said and forgive me. i'm sorry? so the question that we have received, would you read it again? >> why are you not asking towards the killing of syria like you did in libya? >> and i take that as, in the first instance directed at the security council and i think as it is well-known, and i will say for the benefit of the folks of free people, security council has been shamefully and

willfully divided on the issue of syria and unable to adopt resolutions that even would entail relatively modest action. in the case of libya, we had resolution 1970 which impose strong sanctions and made a referral of gadhafi to the international criminal court and then we had 1973 which was the result of the regional group, the arab league making a request to the security council for intervention in the council coming together to authorize protection of civilians in the no-fly zone. the circumstances in syria are quite different and i'd be the circumstances in the various countries within the arab world have evolved in a different way. there is no such request from the arab league. there is no such unity and the security council and indeed the circumstances on the ground are quite a bit different and more

complex with an opposition that is struggling to unify, that doesn't control a clear and geographically identified swath of territories, which was the case in the east and libya, and therefore daree regrettably had much to the frustration of the united states, and many others in the international community, the security council, the international community has not been able to respond robustly and swiftly, as we have sought, and even to goes to the step of implementing meaningful sanctions. but we will keep at a. >> thank you all very much. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations]

>> we collected photographs interested in the 19th century, the civil war in particular. these are two friends, union and confederate, who knew each other prior to the civil war, who fought against each other at the battle in 1862. survived the war, came out alive and remained friends after the war and here they are at age 100 sitting on the porch talking about the old days. >> he wrote a wonderful book called the artists of come on and it meant surviving the unsurvival, and she talks a lot about how the arts and the crafts for sort of how they kept

their sanity and he gave them something to do and about how depression was so bad in a lot of the camps, and there was a high incidence of suicide. so people would make these little things, of beauty to give to each other just as a way to say we support you and we care about you. >> the annual meeting of the clinton global initiative university was held last week you're in washington. former president bill clinton and founded the organization, moderated a panel discussion and focused on public service and how to foster a broader culture of civic engagement. among the speakers, president clinton's former secretary of state madeleine albright. this is about an hour and 45 minutes. [applause] >> thank you very much and welcome to the this clinton

global initiative university meeting. i thank you for being here tonight and i especially thank president and the whole staff here at george washington university who has been so great to put this together. they have done a wonderful job. [applause] dw is the perfect host for this conference. more than 200 years ago, president george washington called for the establishment of a great university to force citizen leaders. today the george washington university is the embodiment of that vision. under the president knapp's leadership the university has established a center for civic engagement and public service, to help develop the next-generation of public service leaders. and last year the steven and

diana robinson math fellowship entrepreneurial service learning was established. a fellowship inspired by the deep commitment, the service and community engagement that gw students exhibit every week. i would also like to thank the sponsors who enabled us to have this meeting free of charge. the victor pinch victor pinch up foundation, microsoft, international universities, joan and irwin jacobs, peter kobler, the prospect fund and bruce allen hamilton. thank you very much. [applause] tonight, there are more than 1000 of you here from more than 300 universities, more than 80 youth organizations, 82 nations and all 50 states of the united states. you have already made 915

commitments to change your schools, your communities and the lives of people across the world. you represent your generations, young people who have a greater ability to enact change than any before you. in the past year, more than 30,000 students, faculty and administrators have become engaged in our commitment to action. as a result of the commitment in 2011 alone, more than 146,000 people have improved access to health care health care and social services. nearly 31,000 students have improved access to education. more than a million dollars has been raised for scholarships, humanitarian relief, hospitals and other worthy endeavors. i am fortunate to see a lot of amazing examples of people taking this kind of action. this september we will have the eighth annual meeting of the clinton world global initiative

convening with heads of state, ceos nonprofit directors, philanthropists from all across the world. they have in seven years made nearly 2000 commitments which already have improved the lives of some 300 million people in 180 countries. both cgi and cgi you are global networks. the people seeking to use resources at your disposal to make a difference. but you have something they don't. more time, for one thing. [laughter] all the years i was in politics, i loved it, but we spent most of our time arguing over two things. what are you going to do and how much money are you going to spend? you are going to cut taxes or put more money into education? what are you going to do and how

much money are you going to spend on it? we didn't spend much time in the third question which i think is the most important question of the 21st century which is, whatever you propose to do and however much money you have, how do you propose to do it? so that you turn your good intentions into real changes in other people's lives. one of the reasons i think we see so much innovation coming from college students is that you don't have all that money so you have no choice to think about the how question. [laughter] but if you think about it and implement it you might draw tons of money to it, and really over the last 10 years or so, one of the most hopeful things about our future is that it is now possible to raise very large amounts of money in very small units. when the tsunami hit south asia, americans gave $1 billion. half of it over the internet,

the first half. and the median contribution was about $56. when the earthquake hit haiti, the americans gave $1 billion. and the median contribution was even smaller because you could not only give over the internet, you could simply text a number of your favorite charity, the red cross or the clinton haiti fund or whatever it was, and immediately transfer $10. so, when we recognize the commitments that are made here today, they are worthy in their own right, but some of them are capable of dramatic expansion or adoption or modification. creativity is really important. i will just give a couple of examples of the commitments that

have been made this year by you. christine of duke, will work to connect female engineering students with girls aged 14 to 17 for mentorship and partnering to assemble low-cost medical devices for distribution to clinics in the developing world. she plans on obama this program in all 40 and generic world health chapters worldwide. why is this important? because only 14% of america's engineering are women and only 15% of engineering students in our universities are women. it is well-known that the united states has a shortage in the so-called stem fields, science, engineering, technology and mathematics. what is not so well-known is if we could abolish the difference between women and men in those fields, and the difference

between asian-americans, european americans and americans of middle eastern descent and african-americans and hispanic americans, within a few years are shortage would disappear. meanwhile we ought to give them more visas i think. [applause] virginia tech is committed to replace replicating phase hands for haiti model. in order to increase employment of food security. she and her colleagues started a very successful egg laying facility in haiti and they want to take the scale across the country. the country has a serious approaching decision that can be remedied partly with chickens and eggs, which ever one comes first, and partly by growing their own fish in an environmentally and help a responsible manner.

you are going to hear later about a student from vanderbilt university who has now graduated, who started a couple of years ago, a program to train a offenders vendors who have been sent to prison and who were in halfway houses having been released from prison and not into society yet so that they were employable and they are helping them find good jobs. this is a huge deal. people who go to prison and get out, which is more than 90% of the people who go to prison, are much less likely to become repeat offenders if they have jobs, and yet even though we say we are a people of second chances, and once you pay your debt to society, you are supposed to get one, the truth is one of the first casualties of the breaded -- budget crisis has been the job training and job placement programs for former inmates. this is something nearly every

college and university in america could adopt. so again, i say don't be discouraged if what you are doing starts out with helping a relatively small number of people, because if replicated or taken to scale, if you change the future for a huge number of people. we are going to try to address these challenges step-by-step, knowing that as my good friend, former governor of new york mario cuomo used to say, in politics you campaign in poetry, but you govern in pro. the same thing is true of citizen service. you work and you take one step at another step and another step and pretty soon you look around and you walk several miles and a lot of people's lives are better as a result of it. i thank you for your commitment to take those steps. now, i want to introduce our

host, who has worked tirelessly to make education possible for thousands of students, the president of george washington, dr. steven knapp. i want to tell you a little about him. he has a long history of supporting students. he was a professor of english literature at the university of california at her glee. dean of the college of sciences and provost at job hawkins university in baltimore. as president of george washington is made it a priority to increase student opportunities for public service. in order to be accessible and better served for the students here he chose to take up residence on the campus. the first president of this university ever to do that. maybe he was just trying to avoid the well-known washington d.c. traffic. [laughter] but it looked to me like he was trying to remain open to the

students. he has made a lot of green renovations demonstrating his strong commitment to sustainability, and trying to make the university a model for sustainability. this kind of complete view of public service, how it permeates every decision he makes, makes the president's knapp not just a good president for the students at gw but an inspiration to people everywhere. please welcome the president of george washington university, steven knapp. [applause] >> thank you. thank you president clinton for that very kind introduction and above all thank you for the inspiring leadership that has launched this extraordinary initiative. let's all recognize that leadership if we could.

[applause] ladies and gentlemen is truly an honor to host the fifth annual clinton global initiative university and i'm pleased to acknowledge that presence of quite a number of distinguished guests. our distinguished panel is. we have a number of university trustees of our university you are present here as well as our presidents and mertes, lloyd elliott and steven joel trachtenberg. above all, i'm delighted to welcome the more than 1000 students who successfully completed -- competed to participate in this year's cgi you. as the president mentioned you come from some 82 countries, all 50 states of this united states. you represent some 300 colleges and universities. now, the president was very kind to mention the fact that the founding vision of our university goes all the way back to our namesake, who dreamed of

the university in the nation's capital that would educate the leaders of the very new nation he helped to found. and we have reserved that mission except that now instead of training citizen leaders just for our nation, we educate citizen leaders for the world and at the core of that mission is a commitment to service. it's reflected in the way to years ago, first lady michelle obama challenged us to perform 100,000 hours of service during the course of an academic year and we greatly exceeded that so she spoke at our commencement. for the third year in a row last spring we sent more students to the peace corps than any other school our size and we passed the thousand peace corps volunteer mark this past spring. for the past four years, the number one employer of george washington graduate has been teach for america. but in fact, this generation of

students is marked by a deep commitment to serve not just at gw but worldwide. just to give you one statistic that was published in "the washington post," in 2010, more than 3 million students in the united states alone, more than 3 million students volunteered more than 300 million hours of service. two nights ago, we held a reception for gw students participating or volunteering to support cgiu and i was inspired by the variety and creativity of our students commitments to action. they range from a plan to make bicycles out of bamboo. [applause] and extremely inexpensive, sturdy and renewable material that will really make a difference in many parts of world and in fact they are so inexpensive that this program will be able to donate one bicycle for everyone that it sells. they include a program using

therapy to prevent suicides among adolescents in the tribe of the lakota people. they include the collection of unsold food from local restaurants for donation to d.c. homeless shelters. but in fact we could multiply those examples 100-fold and you have heard many examples from the president just a few moments ago, so you realize how much imagination and dedication and creativity has gone into these commitments to action. i would like to thank the clinton world initiative and the university's department of relations for setting up such a terrific weekend. i urge you all to take advantage of the activities we have in store for you including the plenary and breakout sessions tomorrow and the service project on sunday. and let me close simply by saying congratulations to all who were chosen to participate in this weekends events. you are making a transformative

difference in our world, and i hope you will enjoy your time here at the george washington university. thank you, good luck to you, god. god speed. [applause] >> i'm going to begin as we always do first with the announcement of two new commitments and i would like to ask the people who made them to come forward. first, a commitment pay it forward, an undergraduate of illinois state, caroline shannon undergraduates at michigan state, christine christina the an undergraduate at the university of minnesota, twin cities campus. the students are all involved in a group called -- today leaders forever. they are committing to creative programs for community service

opportunities for young americans across the country. between september of 2010 and september of 2011, just under 25% of americans between the ages of 16 and 24 volunteered even once. a thing caroline will develop community service richards to new areas of the east and west coasts and topic specific service tours. shelby will use her campus tubes bring community leadership opportunities to public high school students in lansing, michigan. christina will implement an afterschool literacy program for multicultural students and inner-city schools to give them access to multicultural mentors. these projects together will help the organization scale up by 37,000 hours of service over the next year, and involve a lot more young people in doing this. let's give them a hand.

that's a good idea. [applause] [laughter] [applause] now i would like to invite us to the stage, sam king, an undergraduate at stanford university. [applause] he is wearing his commitment's name, codes of change. here is the issue.

more and more and more individuals and foundations that donate money to not-for-profit operations want to understandably keep down the percentage of the donations that goes to centralized costs, things that don't directly touch the intended end of fisheries. that is a laudable goal, but there are certain unavoidable costs for computer systems and technologies for example. so, to better connect the world of nonprofit and computer science, sam will increase the national presence of his organizations, code of change. it. >> host: jams, daylong events in which computer science volunteer up to 24 hours of their skills for nonprofit

products -- projects. currently code of change holds six jams every year, starting this fall he will expand the program to 10 additional universities, specifically targeting schools with strong computer science programs. each event the next 30 computer science with nonprofits for day long coding sessions. with a proposed expansion, codes of change will provide 60 additional days of volunteer programming addressing 480 additional technology needs for nonprofits. it is a good deal. let's give him a big hand. [applause] [applause] now i would like to introduce

our panelists. and as all of you know i'm going to ask them a question or two and they are basically going to tell their stories in a way that makes it relevant to you and your lives and why you came here. after which we are going to take your questions. so, supply us some. first, president knapp who is our to be introduced. i would like for him to come out and take a chair. [applause] the first one ever to be secretary of state in the united states appointed by some long-ago president, madeleine albright. [cheers and applause]

[applause] [applause] do you know what that reminded me of him -- of? the time we went to blindness aris -- buenos aires and went to the thank place. anyway here is what i want you to know about madeleine. she is the professor at georgetown school of service, my alma mater, but in her current life, she is a citizen servant, chair of the national democratic institute president of the truman scholarship foundation, on the boards of the aspen institute, the center for american progress. third, i would like to call out the founder of carolina -- rye

barcott. [applause] he wrote an amazing book that some of you are familiar with, on the way to war. he cofounded carolina four berra, non-governmental organization to prevent ethnic and gender violence in nairobi while serving in the united states marine corps. he's a graduate of the university of north carolina at chapel hill. [applause] the kennedy school in the business school at harvard, where he was a reynolds social entrepreneurship fellow. he lives in charlotte, north carolina with his wife and daughter and among other things, works in duke energy sustainable facility department has a as a special adviser to the chairman.

i would like to invite sadiqa basiri saleem. [applause] she wins the prize for having worked the hardest to get here, and to do what she does. when she was -- during the soviet occupation and returned to afghanistan hampered by her own lack of education. to afghanistan which was hampered by a lack of education. there are about 30 million people in afghanistan, and when she came back, fewer than 900,000 children, mostly boys, had any access to education.

along with three other women, she cobble together enough money to begin the education of 36 girls in an abandoned mosque in 2003. the learning center she now educates more than 3400 girls in six schools, 200 women and for literacy centers. [applause] and 120 women and community college. sheshe has is has established a family welfare center for the elimination of violence against women. domestic violence prevention initiatives that serves 14,000. she received her own bachelor's degree in international from mount holyoke college in 2009, and she founded her nation's first women's community college that trains college-age women in management leadership advocacy

and lobbying skills. we are all in our debt. thank you. [applause] our last panelists is a good friend of mine, known to the larger world as a token old friend. not old friend, old friend. known to the world as usher. [applause] usher raymond the fourth, has been an award-winning artist for more than 15 years, known for his fluid voice and his dynamic dance moves. his acting in films, television and on stage including a broadway stand in the toni award-winning musical chicago. he has won many grammys for his

work but in addition to all of that he has been a staunch advocate for youth empowerment and education and is proven to be a powerful force by mentoring young people around the world through his new look foundation. in july of 2011 usher held the second annual world leadership conference and awards in atlanta, where 500 people from around around the world convened to develop were a world solutions to global problems. he is a very good man, who is doing something that someone in his position does not have to do, and i have been down there at his event and i can tell you, it's not for show, it's the real deal. please welcome, usher. [applause] and. [applause]

somebody shouted, marry me. he cannot do that. he's got a family, but he likes your applause. i would like to -- i want to begin with rye. you are in the marine corps, and you should tell everybody where cabrera is. what skills did you get in the marine corps that got you involved in that kind of work, and how did you decide when you left the stand of the service to do this? >> how many of you all have heard of cubero before?

[applause] a few hands are up. it's located in, on the outskirts of nairobi kenya and it's one of the larger informal settlements, residents there call it a slum and it is a slum community. about a half a billion folks live there in the area the size of central park and i was a junior at unc-chapel hill, and i knew that i was going to the marine corps is because i was really my first calling in life. my father served in the marines and like all of us here in this room, i wanted to make a difference. and the marine corps appeared to be a way to do that. and so i chase that dream and it had a clarifying effect as you know when you are at college you often hear that use this opportunity to discover what you want to do. and i think it is an amazing moment in life to discover what you want to do. but it really helps if you have a little bit of an idea going

into it. and so i was able to kind of craft my studies based on my service going into the marines. this was in 2000, so before september 11 and most of the missions that the marines were engaged in repeats keeping mission so i want to have a better understanding of why did violence happen in the world. a mentor of mine who is an anthropologist at school, told me that there is only so much you can learn from books and if you really want to understand why something happens in the world you have got to go someplace and actually put yourself into it. so i have taken some swahili classes with their starting lineups of the men's basketball team. we were all in class together, and that was important for me because you had to learn some local language before going to the place that is very different from your own. the marine corps really gave me, as i was in training at that time, it really gave me the courage in some ways to go to a

place that is very different from my own and confront some of my fears in doing so. and so i rented a small 10 by 10-foot shack in cubero with a young person who is about my age and i just asked questions and i just listened. listening, president clinton ask what some of the skills were from the military that translated to the ngo world. listening was not one of them. [laughter] listening is actually a skill that translated from the ngo work in the military and what we can do better in the military but i was not intending to start an organization. and when i realized in these was a fundamental truth in the world and that is that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. talent is universal but opportunity is not. [applause] it is really the truth and so the question is how do you best can that talent with opportunity and i didn't know what the

answer was but i continued to form some relationships and over many years we built an organization called carolina for cubero. one of the cofounders was a neighbor of mine named tabatha, and she was a former nurse. she was widowed with three kids, and toward the end of my first summer she confronted me and she asked me for 2000 shillings which is the equivalent of $26. i've made a habit of not giving out any money, in part because i didn't know where to begin and impart because her my own safety, so i asked her what she was planning to do with it. she said i am going to sell vegetables. i'm going to sell veggies into berra and i'm going to sell them across town in a somali community where i can undercut the competition. so she looked at me and she said, believe in me. she had a plan and i was leaving the next day. there was only 26 box. and so i handed her 2000

shillings and i came back to the united states and went to boot camp for officers, officer candidate school in the marines. and then i went into my senior year and as i was going into my senior year of of the line to the marines kept sticking in my head. the line was, have a bias for action, a bias for action. what i was doing back in school as i was writing this research report, this thesis. i wasn't giving back anything to the particular community into relationships that matter. i decided to start an organization and we called it the carolina cubero and my dorm room senior year, about midway through. initially the goal was bring to bring different ethnic groups together. by race a little bit of money and we returned. the marine corps gave me three months of unpaid leave to do this and impart military commanders that i served with had an appreciation and preventing violence, the cost to

prevent violence are always so far lower than the cost to intervene during it. and we see that today for sure. i return back to give there and i had no idea and i barely remembered her from the previous year but she found me. she found me and took me a into the alleyways to her own 10 by 10. and what she had done and she had taken her savings from selling vegetables for six months, about $100 pursued her dream. she started a small medical clinic out of her shack, and she was a nurse. she was in quality care and it made a lot of sense for her to become a part of our organization carolina for cubero and as we grew together for many years taking what we called a participatory approach, she grew that clinic and today that clinic treats over 40,000 patients a year. [applause] 40,000 patients a year.

i am going to wrap up but it started with $26. $26 in the hands of remarkable person working in partnership together taking a long view, taking a participatory approach over 10 years and when i stepped back and i think about it, remember just feeling so overwhelmed by the number of options that i had, that you all have in school. i still think, real change, real social change in particular takes that commitment to a particular place. that is what i hope you will be able to find with the causes and the places you care about. [applause] >> madeleine, i want to ask you to talk a little bit about what you do now, and why it is fun

even when you are not a college student. why you and i do what we do, and what do you want to say to them about what you think their potential is to have a world that is more peaceful than the one we are living in? >> well thank you and i'm really honored to be here on this panel. let me say, i have always tried to look for something that is more interesting to do than the thing i did before. it's not easy if you have been secretary of state. but what i have done is to put the scales that i learned that secretary of state in terms of trying to solve problems, finding people that can help solve problems, and then do whatever i can to give back. so it's a combination of things. i do believe that one of the greatest problems that we have in the world today is the gap between the rich and the poor. there are by absolute numbers --

[applause] there are fewer poor people, mainly because the chinese have brought so many people out of poverty, that the gap between the rich and the poor is the most serious one. it's wrong and it's also dangerous. and so the things that i've been involved in our one actually that was, that i was asked to do by the current secretary of state called partners for a new beginning, which is to try to get private corporations to work with the government in terms of economic empowerment of people, primarily at this moment in muslim communities, to try to get their -- a way to have economic and harman, science and technology education and people exchanges as the vertical pillars and the horizontal ones to get youth and women involved. so we are in a variety of places, using the skills and trying to get our corporations to be helpful in terms of

creating job opportunities. so that is one thing. the other thing is, as the president mentioned, and chairman of the port of the national democratic institute. you can't impose democracy. that is an oxymoron, but what you can do is try to support those who want to learn the skills of democracy. so they the national democratic institute we are in about 70 countries where we train people in terms of how you form coalitions, how you create campaigns, supporting women candidates, and it allows people to work on behalf of of those who need help. i also, i love teaching, because i think that it is a way really to talk about what the opportunities are for you all, in terms of giving back. my whole life has been about giving back. i wasn't born in this country. i came here when i was 11 years old in order to escape communism, and i have been grateful ever since. public service i think is an amazing way to be able to give

back, and i will forever be grateful for this wonderful president who allowed me to be able to use the goodness of american power to make the difference for an awful lot of people, to end ethnic cleansing, to make sure the people had an opportunity to live a free life. i took those skills now in a way to give back in this way and particularly working with young people. i was in kubera actually. i went there for a project with a wonderful program about empowerment for the poor. poor people aren't stupid. they are very entrepreneurial. they may be more unsure of -- entrepreneurial than a lot of people and they just won an opportunity. and the kind of things that cgi does that president clinton has been doing is giving people who want to make a difference the opportunity to do it and i just hope i will be able to do that until the day i die. [applause]

>> artist want to point out that both of my first term when madeleine was in the united nations, and american military action ended the war in bosnia and led to the peace agreement and my second term where we did the same thing in kosovo, the primary big dems that we sought to save for almost all muslims, and i thought it was very important to prove that the united states meant what we said when we said everybody is welcome here and we believe in human rights, people all over the world and it was just fortuitous that when it was sad for them, but it was a fortuitous opportunity that was our responsibility to stop the ethnic cleansing of european muslims and bosnia and kosovo, and she was great at it. [applause]

so, sadiqa i need to ask you, you need to fill in the blanks of the introduction i gave you. a lot of people will hear your story and they will say, my goodness, the woman was taken out of afghanistan as a child, and she went back. then she graduates from mount holyoke, very distinguished american university. she could have gone anywhere in done anything and she goes back home to one of the poorest places on earth where most people think they have poor political prospects. i have always thought that when people say afghanistan is a dead loser and we should not be involved in their -- the british got run out of there and anybody who has ever tried to conquer afghanistan has gotten run out of there. that is because you shouldn't try to con great place. you should try to empower the people to conquer their own

future. [applause] so a, why did you do it? why did you go home when you could have taken a pass? and b, when you started this, how did you begin and how have you funded the expansion? tell them a little bit about what you did and why. >> well, the reason i came to mount holyoke, i have the onus in saying it was my luck that i made it to mount holyoke college, but the reason why i went back home, well the initial reason to come to the united states to get education was to really get education myself and contribute to the cause that is so dear to me, and i see connections, a huge connection between educated people and a powerful nation.

.. they are great needs. but then, now that i reflect back i see that there are questions that has really shaped my mission. the first question it is coming from an angry -- angle, and that

is when i was a child, i was questioning the education that i was getting. the system that i was getting education and. it was a poor refugee school, and then later in life i questioned myself. i was challenged by women who did not have any idea what in education means or how a school looked like. so to tell you my story, when i'm going to my school, the refugee charter, it was a school that was established by a community in pakistan. so basically my school, it was a huge school, for over 3000 girls, conducted in concessions in the morning and also in the afternoon. but it was not a real school for me as a child.

because the real school formulas the school that would look like in western movies. the school but a winter, it had only 20 classrooms, about more than 30 tenths, and a huge playground that was taken out over my classes conducted in open air, including mine. so what i did, i was not a passionate student. and i have not really shared this story, but i am sharing today. i was an extremely slow student. i was getting a lot of -- i was fighting for my class, whenever we had a new blackboard, we could only enjoy it for one week at the most. because senior classes would steal our blackboard. usually they were of core quality. they would develop cracks. they were even fighting for space. so the way we could identify with our classes to put stones

and make a square and put our blackboard in it. so the school, that was not an ideal school for me. and, therefore, i was not studying. and wendy my teacher, she beat me so hard -- one day my teacher, she beat me so hard, she was using a stick that had attacked us so my hand started bleeding. i still have the scar in my palm. and that was the time that, i would say but a great life, that was the time my father made a decision to take us back to afghanistan. in afghanistan in 1984, it was still civil war. the reason my father wanted to take us to afghanistan was to experience what is life like back home so that when we return we are not caught by surprise. so in 1994 when i got up home, one day i was walking in an

orchard with my cousin. they asked me questions. sadiqa, tell me, what does your school look like? how do teachers look like? is a true that you go to school alone and you returned by yourself? i was angry in the first place but i thought maybe they were making fun of me. but later i discussed that with my father, and my father asked me a different question. did you notice any school all the way coming from pakistan to afghanistan? in hospital, any clinic, any store, anything? and my answer was no. so basically for me, it was all these questions that really shaped my motive, that really shaped my mission. and it is easy to criticize things, as i did in my childhood. it's easy to be angry at things, but it is equally as important to reflect back and see that

okay, we could be critical, but then i think it's important to answer one question. what can i do to make a change? and i think that was a beautiful gift that my father ever gave us to take us back to our home when we initially came from, and see that i was way the village before my own cousins when they were living in afghanistan. and so i think it was, for me that was the beautiful gift that my father had given to us, because out of afghanistan and provide education, but it really helped me to reflect back and really get things that i could not have received if i were working, if i was living back home. and that motivated me to go to afghanistan after the taliban, established the first class with 36 girls.

and later on i received proposals from other communities to establish further classes and schools. and here my life is. that is my vision, to bring education to girls and women. and the most remote areas in afghanistan where they will not have access to education if we would not go there. [applause] >> usher. anybody gets kind of reception you come out here, and it's maybe -- may be kind of money you have, the profile you have, would have to set up some sort of charitable operation. but, you know, as well as i do that a lot of people in your position in the past have done

that, just checked the box. and i know you haven't just checked the box if you thought about what you wanted to do. you thought about why you want to do it, and once you did it you went all in. i've seen some of your kids. and i must say i didn't know that india we did our deal together when you kick it off, that you were perhaps the discover of justin bieber, which will get you some more of applause from these people. [laughter] ipoi want you to tell these youg people why you decided to do exactly what you are doing, and how you stay involved in it now, to make sure it achieves the objectives you want. >> absolutely. you would assume to whom much is given, much is required. there should be a consideration.

well, i've got to flip that. because i was given a lot at a very young age by simply someone believing in me, somewhat encouraging me to move in a positive direction, which a lot of people my age at the time, coming from at risk environments, underserved communities, didn't really have a lot to believe in. but it was simply someone. a few people actually, who really made the difference in molding me. they said, you know, it's not how you start, it's how you can. but for me, i flipped that, too. alternately, my entire perspective was a new look on life. it is how you start. it is the seeds that are planted at those very key moments in our lives that truly do make a difference in terms of the outcome.

then the next step was the evidence. my mother, who at the time served as my manager, we had conversations about the use in atlanta. and she sat in a courthouse in atlanta, georgia, and absurd court cases where children were coming from foster homes and just really were devastated. no track for success, nothing, no want to be there for them, nothing. and it really pains me that there's someone out there who could actually make a difference in our world, and there's no motivation for them. so i began to speak on panels. i began to go to high schools, schools, gyms, anybody that would accept the. and just talk about the evidence of the reality of having an education, finding a career, recognizing my talent. and now being able to use it as a tool to offer service in at

least the hope, the optimistic hope that you could make a difference with your life as well. after that, i decided that i would start a 501(c)(3), and i would really focused specifically on youth. you know, there's many things that we can do, you know? you travel all around the world. you are successful, you go in stages, but i wanted to be remembered for something else other than just screaming fans. you know, i really wanted, i really want to make a difference but i really wanted to do something significant with my talent. so i figured i would be that motivated, that motivated me. i would be the mentor that was able to look out and recognize talent, and encourage those who had yet to acknowledge the talent that they had to an interim it had been beneficial to me. justin bieber would be one of

the many kids that i've been able to recognize talent in, and encourage them to move forward. but as a philanthropist, there was a velocity. there was the idea of what i just said, you know? that education is so important, so key. having a talent obviously recognizing the career, and in turn offering services a result of you find these things. and that is what the new look foundation ultimately became. since then, the reality, the evidence that see that could be planted has harvest. and you have actually participate in come as a matter fact, in 2006 we had a conversation and it was pretty motivating. here i had been doing a lot of work internally and i felt okay, i'm going to talk to him and he's no -- he's going to know i've been doing. he did not lie was as a philanthropist at all. [laughter] but i thought that was great because that meant that it

wasn't fluff to the artwork that i put into what i done had touched the surface. and the ground had been laid, the seeds have been planted, but yet the harvest had fully come. and the opportunity of been there with you getting the opportunity to expand much further than i had ever even imagined with a clinton global initiative, and we created power by service. power by service led to many, many different campaigns of disaster relief. those individuals who came from underserved communities, they work truck and truly affected by katrina as well as we do, and then on to haiti as well. after that, of course we made a connection in africa, at your event, and was able to establish another campaign. and then on to the world

leadership conference in atlanta, georgia, which you were there supporting -- he is obvious a very supportive man to me, right? [applause] little did he know through all of it yet been a mentor and a motivator from the beginning. and all a long you have planted a seat at a very, very young age, but i felt like i could make a difference in my community. maybe it was through my mother, but through that indication that the youth could make a difference, i felt like i could make a difference. and the new look foundation became what it is today, now 12 years later, successfully leading the charge and being a youth voice. and also for repairing future leaders with a service find of course, because the only thing that i ask is that they be as influential to each other, as one was to me at some point. and you know, since then i hoped to be successful, other than

just music. and it happened. and we are able to sit here on this panel, and i don't know if he told you guys go we just had a celebration not too long ago. for his birthday. you probably saw it, but we were backstage joking, and there's this one little thing that really hated that actually performed in front of the president with all hanging out. mike pence split actually on stage. [laughter] not many people can say that they did that. [laughter] but we have been able to share -- spent it was not an x-rated split. [laughter] and he never missed a beat. he did the whole thing all the way through. [applause] >> but happy that we been able to share those experiences, and

that -- [laughter] you've been able to be that motivator to me. thank you very much. [applause] >> specifically, i want to get all of your story, because this is something you can all do when you go to school with people. when i was a governor, more than 20 years ago, and my primary responsibilities for public education and colleges, you know, helping people go to college, and generating economic opportunity, i read a study, the name of which i have long forgotten, but this sociologist followed for a period of 20 years, these kids who grew up in absolutely horrible circumstances, mostly. they weren't all for. a couple of them were middle-class and appearance were

drug addicts. one of them was wealthy. did some horrible crime. but anyway, and most of their brothers and sisters got in trouble, but these kids had all been great. and so he studied in over 20 years, and he tried to figure out how the young people turn out okay amidst adversity, which is relative to what you do. and what he discovered was that at critical points in their lives, everything one of them was made to feel by a caring adult that they were the most important person in the world. that they could do something, they could be something, they could amount to something. [applause] what i will never forget is there was one young man he was part of four brothers, and they were abandoned by their parents who had terrible drug addiction. their poor grandmother tried to raise them all in a little apartment in new york city. they spent half the night sleeping outside and everything.

three of these guys wanted to. one of them became a doctor. the one who became a doctor, every day when he walked to school and when he came home past one of those kiosks on the street in new york where they sell magazines at the newsstand, and the guy there saw him, took an interest in him. he told him when he went to school he could learn something and he should. and when he stopped and we came home and said show me your homework, and then when the kid went to school the next day, he would show the man that he had done his homework. it sounds simple, but what you are doing can change the lives of thousands and thousands and thousands of people. and you, too. and you, too. so i thank you. [applause] >> mr. president -- i'll let you wrap up and then we'll take questions. we've got more than 20 minutes for question. i hope we have been coming in. >> tell me exactly what you do

to promote student service at gw, and how you can delete it was so important. tell them, not tell me. [laughter] >> i have to say it's rather humbling for an english professor, an english teacher defined himself on the panel with people who have these kinds of stories. these kind of stories can aspire all those, take an interest in service, i'll give you a concrete example of what got me thinking about this when it first wrote this weeks after arising at gw, not quite five years ago. i was talking to a student who was an undergraduate, had gone to college and had noticed that there were young women who were subjected to sexual abuse and from the head of militia at the time of conflict, and were suffering from terrible trauma and lack of self worth and the rest of it. so she founded her own soccer

team called girls kick it, which never exist. none of these women had ever had any expense in athletics before, and all of a sudden they were joyfully involved in athletic activity, performed comradely, and it was transformative for her and so she made that her life's work to continue that kind of effort. and as i listen to these stories, i do think that their number of things that come together here. we've talked about disparities that exist across the world. this capital city of our great nation that has some of the most striking disparities of health disease and outcomes, income and education levels. every city can point to, problems everywhere in the world. and so one of the things we do here at george washington university is find ways engaging our students who live in one part of town, has run high education rates, fairly low unemployment, and we make sure they go across -- interservice

projects and one of the things we are doing is commemorating every september 11, not only with a vigil to remember the terrible loss that occurred on that day in 2001, but also have a day of service where we span out across the entire city and paint schools so that children when they come back after the weekend, suddenly find that their school has been cleaned and painted freshly. they had no idea the students would be doing that for them over the weekend. we have engaged our veterans. we've had a really strong outreach to veterans. we have over 700 of those. we find that they are tremendous leaders. they have the experience, the dedication, the excuse that they brought back with him that enable them to be leaders. one of the things i'm really impressed by is our veterans have stepped up to educate younger and less experienced students in the guise of service and the discipline of service and creativity of applying their skills in exactly the way we've

been hearing about. at the same time we are developing initiatives that are more formal than that. one is a center for civic engagement and public service as we brought a person to lead that effort to have more of a formal and continues focus on servers throughout the year. we are also launching some activities. i will mention one that i think is germane to some of the things we've been hearing about. it's our new institute for global women's issues, and we're doing that, looking for one -- that would simultaneously improve public health, promote economic development and reduce violence. it's the education and empowerment. [applause] >> so it is a range of things, it's everything from hands-on experience, but what impressed me about this generation of students, mr. president, is what you picked up on this whole initiative of global initiative university is we've got students that don't just go to

activities. they activities. that's a hallmark of this generation. it was not true my generation. we were involved in political activism on one or another end of the political spectrum but a lot of that was going on in my generation. no doubt also in your generation. but what we didn't see was this extraordinary inventiveness and creativity that goes into the projects that have been chosen and are represented here. students come to my office and they will come up with an idea and i was a that's great, you probably ought to explore the. have you talked to anyone? and this did was say here's my list of endorsements from the city council, here's my business plan. you know, here's the capital funds i started collecting for this. that's a hallmark for this generation as reflected in the imagination and creativity you see here. that's what i congratulate the students because they're doing something my generation could not imagine that would be possible. [applause]

>> we are going to go to questions now. the reason i saved him for last is to make that point. when i was at georgetown in the '60s i participated in the university's community action program for a semester. at night. i went into poor neighborhoods, when into peoples homes that invited me, you know, we tutored the kids can we talk to the parents of other problems. we help them solve them. that's fine. but i didn't do it a second semester but i didn't go recruit 10 other people to do it. it was an institutionalized. and what i've been trying to do with this and with the clinton global initiative at large and with one where for the american economy is to convince people that in this century the definition of citizenship has to include this. is not just working and being a good parent, paying your taxes and voting at election time. it is doing this kind of work and helping people.

okay. question number one comes from james lee, and it's for rye. asked him to love dreaming big and discussing ways to change the world, how can we become more action-based? >> love that question. thanks, james. is a mentor of mine who is a writer named stephen preston the. and he wrote this book called gates of fire. great book. yeah, and he was coaching a little bit when i was working on a book. and i was hitting this roadblock because i was confronting my own fears of how do you get words down on a page. and stephen preston yield wrote a short little manifesto called do the work. and in this manifesto, it's about the creative process with your starting a business, whether you're starting a social enterprise and an ngo, writing a book, writing a song. we're all speaking about ushers

creative process before backstage. that's a critical moment in my life. [laughter] but whatever you're doing, as stephen concludes, start before you're ready. start before you're ready. confront your fears and put yourself out there. there's no shortage of things to care about. so choose one to connect with your own life narrative and start before you're ready. thank you. [applause] >> good question. secretary albright, what's the role of the private sector in creating opportunities for public service, especially through cross section partnerships? >> well, i think there are so many opportunities, because the private sector really has the desire and the need to create jobs. there's no question but in order to make it work and has to

create jobs. and so the private sector working abroad particularly which is what i've been involved in, wants to be able to be a part of the societies in which they are operating. and so what they do is provide opportunities for young people to be able to earn a living. and to be able to get an education and to get trained. and i think one of the most interesting things recently about the private sector is understanding that it is not just a matter of putting people to work, but also giving them an education that allows them to take part in innovation and be a part of developing new ways of operating within their society. the other part that i find interesting is that the private sector's operating abroad need to also do good things. so many of them established foundations. they work on creating schools, and they like to combine with people such as the young people here in terms of getting them involved in it also. so i have learned a lot in terms of how public and private sectors operate together.

i think often there's been this thought that there are integral to each other and they're not similar interest. and i think we have learned, for instance, that the private sector can do well by doing good. and so what they do in society is make sure that the health care programs are good, that there is education, and they employ women and young people. so i think it's a very important tool that one hadn't thought about before, or at least i hadn't. and i think that they want to operate well, and i think we need to take advantage of them. [applause] >> i agree with that. one of the things we try to do in my foundation is to work with companies and with the governments, and hope that we find a way to do something faster, cheaper or better. in a way that will make a business want to incorporate it into the business model, or a government sees that now it's affordable to adopt. so i think this is really

important. next question is for usher from ferdinand. what about, what do you think about the power of the performing arts as an education tool in developing country, in poor countries, can it help? should we think about that as a luxury, or should we try to use the culture of performing arts in these countries to promote education? how can it be done? >> the passion lies in something that is identified in talent. most certainly. but no different than the four pillars that i've created with the foundation. it obvious he starts education. you have to have an education. and then identify that talent and allow that talent to offer a career, or a sustainable career to at least get you to the point where you are able to make a difference. and then obviously leading to service but it would. or at least that's the hope. that if you are blessed, and

there is an opportunity to make a difference in your community, then you will. [applause] >> sadiqa, here's an interesting question from dash the i don't have a name. it says from a million-dollar scholar. i don't know who that is. we all want to be that. how can men join the movement to empower women? do you have mail supporters in afghanistan? [applause] and how important is that? >> i think it definitely in a patriarchal society like afghanistan women actually make decisions for everything, everything, men are 15 in supporting -- men are the key in supporting women and making their dream come true. i have seen in my life, and i have witnessed in the lives of so many friends, not only in

afghanistan but worldwide, that women, they do care. not only for themselves, but they care for the world. and they are the ones who are making difference. so i think if i were not supported by my father, and if i were not supported by my husband, who lets me, -- he sent me to study. and come back and make change in the lives of women who don't even know what education means and what education, what kind of difference education can make in their life. so i have always said to my father, why don't we have many fathers like you? and actually i made a complaint, an official complaint. i asked my father, why don't you have a coalition of fathers who should be supporting their

daughter's so that we keep the ball rolling and really have -- [cheers and applause] >> and i think my father is getting that. i think that he will be soon that he wrote. >> one of the question i asked you before that you didn't have to answer, maybe you can briefly tell us. how did you go from your first relatively modest education project to educating so many young girls, and then having a community college and then your other training programs? how did you grow this thing? did you get financial help from others? how did you do that? >> definitely. so, i knew that they need is great but i couldn't do it myself alone. i mean, as a teenager, 14 years old in grade nine, i couldn't do anything. but i knew that there must be a way to change this perception,

and i believe that the status quo must be change. so the initial support that i got and work for my father, i want him to support me in taking to afghanistan because i couldn't travel myself alone. and i got a positive note. and then mount holyoke, really that help me to develop my leadership skills. i grew in many, many ways at mount holyoke. and i was inspired by the founder of mount holyoke, mary, that she was able to establish his first woman college, and she didn't have funding. basically she had a small house and she was writing, collecting points. and the students in return, in return for the education will bring eggs, butter, milk.

and that's how mount holyoke was started. so i compared myself with mary lyon. and i said well, now that the world is paying so much attention to women's rights in afghanistan, and a lot of support is coming and a lot of money is coming to afghanistan. yes, women are not able to be benefited to actually see the impact. and i said i think this is the right time that one has to start so at mount holyoke i learned what you said, that try not to be intimidated by the tracks you will see, by the danger or risk associated to your work, but seize the opportunities that are available there. approach those opportunities and use them strategically. so that's why, it was a big dream for me. as an undergraduate student to start a women's college, but

then i shared this idea with my professors at mount holyoke college. i got support. i got support from huntington public service award. there was a national competiti competition. the for senior students, seniors and colleges, and it was actually difficult for me to even enter the competition for i felt that i don't have, like my writing skill isn't that much to compete with american students, and write a proposal. but i ended up one of the two students who got the award your antennae, with the assistance of mobile partnerships, i was able to get some kind of exposure to organizations that really care about women's education in afghanistan. and then an award, that helps me to basically find a building for the school.

and then later on i started writing draft proposal, so it all actually made a difference. and it happened when i was in senior year at mount holyoke. yes, i work hard trying to meet the deadline, and that was the important thing, but at the end i graduated not only with a degree from this prestigious college that i love and i miss it so much, but also enough funding to start the women's college. and i realized that don't intimidate, just do. and there's always time to work and make a change up on deck. >> great. mr. president, the question on the floor really should be for you. education allow younger people to learn, earn and return.

what idea did you have about how every college and university in america -- first of all, we know they all have vigorous committee service programs to a lot of schools do this. but not every school has integrated as part of a core mission of the university the way you have a. is there some way we could accelerate that. and in so doing to increase the numbers of young people at universities and colleges around the country who do this? in other words, instead of doing what i do which is try to bring everybody, as many people as we can every and get them to go home and respect others in a positive way,. [laughter] is there some way to work from the base of the colleges out and get more people to run universities and colleges to institutionalize this sort of thing? >> i think first of all, i just

want to wreck has a lot of the impetus for we're doing is really coming directly from a students. it's really our students who are i think pushing university in this direction it goes back to that since that is talking about earlier where this generation of students will he wants to make a difference and really wants to make the connection that is not traditionally been made. what they do in class and from what they do in the real world. i think what was impressive about what we just heard, an extraordinary story is the way in which she is thinking consequent about her leadership skills she is developing in her college experience were going to be translated into real action. so it's getting that kind of thought process early on in a students career. get students thinking about their careers earlier, not just the last semester, but all along try to think what the shape of their lives and connect that with her intellectual experience. the sort of term jargon and service learning, i think in many faculties, trying to reduce the intellectual seriousness of the classroom and replaced with

something that is not as academic. what we are finding that is as our students begin to make more and more of these connections, it's becoming somewhat contagious. they are starting to exemplify how you take was one in a classroom at connected in inventive ways with real-life opportunities, and do things that reflect the skills that they are developing. i think we're starting to do that were systematically. we have a long way to go but i've seen a tremendous change in the attitudes of my colleagues just in the last few years in being responsive to that kind of initiative from our students. [applause] >> thank you. very briefly, when i set my presidential library in arkansas, the university of arkansas agreed to establish a graduate school for me, that is a public service. there are 40 such institutions around the world, but ours is the one that gives you a degree in public service, not public

policy. and we have half the time spent in the field during service projects. half the time. and i find that there are people that are, we had an older student of nontraditional student about 45 years old from thailand come back because he wanted to know, he was happy to do the academic work but what he really wants to know was how he could get the show on the road. once he started. so i think time is on your side. madeleine, you had a couple of questions that i particularly like this one. from alyssa wong, as students, this is partly what this did was talk about -- what sadiqa was talking with her father needing more fathers. how do we get over generations involved in our work so that we can motivate more young people? in other words, not the just you and i do what we're doing but how do we help do more?

>> well, i really do think that crossgenerational partnerships year are very important. i do think that in many ways young people motivate people our age. i have just been listening to this and i am blown away, i've got to see. and one of the things you are comparing classes from before i taught at georgetown in the '80s, and i was asked by the president when there was a reunion class, how do the students of the '80s compare with the students today? and i said well, the students in the '80s were interested in the retirement program, and all of a sudden there was booing. and i thought i am addressing the students of the '80s. [laughter] but what i found is the motivation that the young people have for what we are doing -- [laughter] and i think that what is useful, for instance, there are many programs where older people are going abroad and working with young people and partnerships, so some of the experiences of being older are then matched.

and they do think that there is a great opportunity for cross mentorship. it isn't always as the older people can mentor the younger ones, but in terms of the activity and enthusiasm that the younger students have. i also do think, if i might speak from also trained young women, i think that what is very important is to look at how to do it and did -- interdisciplinary training. what we have attempted to think that one discipline may be the best one for operating in a service, doing public service. it's across the board. any people that understand help and understand music and understand biology, and a number of religion. and work people together. and they do think that older people can have a great partnership with younger people, and i've been to your school, and it's fantastic in terms of people being motivated. i also do think, mr. president, i have to mr. president your -- [laughter] to have the possibility of

understanding that you learn by doing. that it is a great way as you get credit for doing more than just sitting in the library. you know, or really understanding the practical aspects applaud that and what i believe so fully as i believe in democracy but democracy has to deliver. people want to be able to work and to understand what they're doing and get back. and i think the most exciting thing about everything that you are doingthem at all these young people are doing, is understanding the giving back is the way to make the world work better. [applause] >> go ahead. >> i just want to add something. sometimes, well, most of the times, when we're in the student mode, i am done with my college, not the next thing is grad school, yes, i will do my ph.d afloat and then i have great

plans to change the world. i think that will be too late for thinking of, you know, getting education, up to ph.d and then going out to the work and saying hey, i'm year and a want to a change. actually, when i graduated from mount holyoke college i was offered a scholarship by georgetown university. and i dare to ignore and i dare say no. i wanted to go really bad to home, and i wanted to because i've done fundraising fundraising. i knew my plans. and i wanted to implement. i wanted to deliver before i take more. and i did it in two years time, it works. and then what happened? i went home, i establish the school and then i wanted to be not the sole -- make sure everything is okay and everything is functioning the way it should. but in our government, government, the minister of higher education said i am not

qualified enough to do so. wide? i am not 35 years old, and then i don't have masters. so in a way i had to leave the country back because it does not offer master degrees a lot, and now it is the open society institute based in new york, and also at the university of ottawa. that is investing in the to make sure that i'm qualified enough enough to go back and work for the university. [applause] >> let me say, i asked madeline to answer this question but most people i work with, not all but most, the vast majority are 30 years younger than i am, or more. and you know, i like it. a lot. but one of the things that happens to people just naturally, most people spend most of their time with people that are more or less in their age group is their university

president or something. and i think, give a serious and to the question that was asked, my view is, all of you know your likes of older people to have to raise money or they've got experience, or they've got time. you might try asking. it may be as simple as that. there's a lot of older people who want to feel like their life has meaning all the way to the very end. all the way to the very end. their idea of retirement may mean that they don't do the job they used to anymore, but they want to be useful. they want to keep doing something. and i think you would be, if you really are serious about this you would be shocked at the number of older people who would tell you yes, if you asked for help or guidance or support or involvement. because a lot of times once your hair gets great and your hearing gets better, you think no one wants you around anymore. it's a big deal, and i think

even though the baby boom generation in the united states and in many other countries cannot afford to be mentally or physically as rapidly declining as previous generations seniors, otherwise because we're so large we will really cramp your style financially. and that of our grandchildren. so i think you be doing a good thing for society as a whole by getting more older people involved in whatever your endeavor is. now, we are out of time, but i cannot resist this. first i'm going to give, i'll ask one more series question and then i'll ask an unbelievable question we got from twitter. but first a series question. from someone doing a webcast. it was asked of madeline that anyone else can answer it. how can women like me who want to win in haiti and other places across the world actually do that? in other words, i'm one person out here following this, i want

to help women in haiti and other places. where should i start? if you have never done it, where should she start, what is your advice, anybody? >> i do think first of all you have been doing an amazing amount of work in haiti and are able to get money and support into a variety of areas, so it's important to get with someone who is doing something. dr. farmer, there's people that have a project. or for instance, the national democratic institute. we had been in haiti trying to figure out how to help people be able to identify their needs and works within. i think that there are organizations that are the best way to do this. i also do think that there are those, one can go there and be helpful, but the best thing i would say is to get involved with an organization that contract, because the individual can help the organization and the organization can help them.

and then talking about it. do you know what i think the problem is? americans are the most generous people in the world with a short attention span. so what we have to do, a lot of people have forgotten about haiti. it was very much in the news all the time, enough people have forgotten, and things are still not good the. they need to operate to your kind of an organization. >> let me just say this. haiti has second only to india the largest number of ngos operating their per capita of any country in the world. next only to india. it's much smaller but there's a couple thousand that operate their. a few hundred seriously and deeply. so my recommendation is that you first of all figure out exactly what you want to do, if there's an organization you know about, go to that organization's website and see if they work in a place you want and then give

them time or money. or you could go to my foundation, clinton foundation.org website and track it to haiti and see what i do things are going on in haiti. ride across the board. and you can find an ngo to work with that fits what you care about. we have lists of a lot of that and you can follow it through. it's the simplest way to start. >> i'm going to lose a friend over this but i'm going to ask this question anyway. this question is from twitter. sure, what inspired you to do service, singing be answered is encouraged. [cheers and applause]

>> you guys just won't be happy until i do a concert. [applause] >> no, -- [laughter] i didn't say no. i said no, um. no. truly the evidence that by applying these that i agree, that we spoke about on the panel the entire night to engage youth at a very young age, to support those who are in need, for you to be engaged, ask and except for help, all of those things are what leads me to do the committee work that i've been able to do. it is simply the evidence that it is a reality at the very students that i was able to meet when i first started, and now in college, they have now tracked a

career. they have now identified a talent and the also are continuing to get back to the community, as we travel the world, have been able to take you as far as nairobi, kenya. [cheers and applause] >> she went actually. and actually be able to go all over the world and truly make a difference by identifying the similarities between the issues that are in our communities, not isolated by the differences. so, that is the thing that motivates me. now, you want me to sing? [cheers and applause] you guys can probably help me buy this one does that with this one by the way. ♪ i believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way ♪ show them all the beauty they possess inside

♪ give them a sense of pride to make it easier let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be ♪ everybody searching for a hero people need someone to look up to ♪ i never found anyone who fulfilled my needs ♪ a lonely place to be, and so i learned to depend on me ♪ ♪ i decided long ago never to walk in anyone's shadow if i failed, if i succeed, at least i lived as i believed. ♪ [laughter] [cheers and applause]

because the greatest love of all is happening to me ♪ ♪ i found the greatest love of all inside of me [cheers and applause] >> thank you very much. thank you. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, the plenary session is now concluded. students again, thank you for attending. please remain in your seats. you will now be directed from

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or does your studentcam competition we asked students to create a video explaining what part of the constitution was important to them and why. today we are going to speak with her pride -- prizewinner

middle school. >> hi. >> sinclair you chose the first related to the new cigarette warning label. what are those labels and why did you choose this topic? >> they are all very realistic. they show the long-term effects of smoking. we chose the topic because we thought it was a good kind of story, like not being told that much in the media. advertisements about smoking as about the new labels. what was your goal and including both of these? >> 50 or 60 years ago, all the images were so glamorous and everyone is smoking and oh you should do it too because it's so cool and now, they have like images of, the same in edges but

the techniques they used to market their smoking is really like, you just don't expect the realistic images. for tobacco free kids. what did you learn from him? >> the campaign for tobacco free kids, they prevent people from smoking and getting people to not start smoking altogether. i think we agree agreed with all of this and whether company really stood for. >> and then you also interviewed students. how did those interviews help you understand the different sides to this issue? >> it really just brought everybody's opinion out and it really helped us get a lot more points of view. and showed a lot of different people and different situations. who watch her documentary to

learn? >> the main thing that our group was thinking of is that these labels could make people, if they are just thinking about smoking, to look at the label and be like oh my gosh, i don't want that to be me or a person that has been smoking for 20 years and looks at the label and says, oh my goodness, this could really be me. i think those are just like, what they are doing. >> thank you for talking with us today, sinclair. here's a portion of the sinclair's video, "freedom of speech - a memory?." >> this message to smokers, or those who are thinking about smoking or thinking about starting to smoke just got a lot easier. these nine new graphic health warnings that will appear on every cigarette pack, tobacco display show start images and bold messages that will illustrate on every ad on every pack of cigarettes the painful

and deadly reality of tobacco use. >> for years we have watched tobacco rates fall in the country and in 1965, we were in a situation where over 42% of americans smoked. by 2004, the good news is that it had fallen to just under 21%. a fairly significant drop. the bad news is that in recent years, despite the well-known health risks, youth and adult smoking rates have been flat. it's been dropping for decades, and then they stalled at about 20%. >> you can watch sinclair's entire video along with all winning documentaries at studentcam.org and continue the conversation on her facebook and twitter pages. >> applications for social security disability insurance have dramatically increased in recent years with about

3.4 million people applying for benefits last year. earlier today, social security administration chief actuary stephen goss addressed what's behind the spike thomas setting the high unemployment rate and an increase in mental illnesses. he was joined by interest groups representing the disabled, talked about better ways of incorporating the disabled into the workforce. the national academy of social insurance hosted the event. >> specializing in coverage of retirement. i write frequently about social security and medicare and other health insurance issues as well as pensions and personal finance. i would like to welcome everyone and thank you for joining us this morning for our forum on why are more people claiming disability insurance and what should be done about it? a special welcome to our viewers joining us live on c-span this morning and our thanks to c-span for covering this important issue. is that better? sorry about that. could you hear me when i said

all that? the forum is sponsored by the national academy of social insurance, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization made up of the nation's leading experts on social insurance. nasi's increases public understanding of how social insurance contributes to economic security. the social security disability insurance program currently provides income support to more than 9 million people with disabilities and their family members, a total of more than $9.5 billion in benefits monthly. the number of people receiving benefits has increased significantly over the past several decades. 6.5 million people receive benefits at as recently as 2005 and a 1995, the number was almost 4.2 million. the disability insurance trust fund is projected to be exhausted in the near future, as soon as 2016 according to cbo and 2018 according to the 2011

social security trustees report. journalists, researchers in congress have focused a great deal of attention on the growth in the number of ssdi beneficiaries. a number of questions have been raised about the program. does the growth reflects demographic trends and changes or is the growth due to ssdi program rules and policies? what is the role of the recession in the growth of ssdi? is ssdi becoming the new unemployment insurance? is ssdi fundamentally sound and sustainable in its current form, or does it need changes to ensure a long-term viability? can these changes be small, or does long-term solvency require radical change? does ssdi discourage work? could more be done to encourage people to stay at work when they become disabled, or could more be done to encourage beneficiaries to return to work after receiving ssdi benefits?

a variety of reforms have been proposed. some propose augmenting ssdi to provide more assistance aimed at keeping people at work are returning to work. others have suggested creating another public disability insurance program which would be offered to people with a disability but significant capacity to work. requiring employers to purchase private disability insurance to keep workers employed is another idea that has been suggested. other proposals seek to completely change the way the disability benefits are designed and provided. this forum will explore whether number of people receiving ssdi has grown, whether that growth will continue, and the implications of the growth for programs. this will include discussions of some proposals for reform and reactions from members of the disability community to the presentations and the proposals. first we we are going to hear fm three speakers, steve goss who is the chief actuary of the

social security administration, lisa ekman senior policy adviser and david stapleton director of the center for studies of disability policy at mathematica research. next we were here brief responses to the presentations from marty ford, director of the public policy office at the arc of the united states and from tony young, senior public policy strategist at nish antonius on route and will be joining us when he gets here. the full -- powerpoint from me presenters and in a point, counterpoint article on ssdi published recently in the journal of policy analysis and management. one side of that debate is argued by virginia of nasi and the other side was taken by economist richard or kaczur and mary daly. you will also find it blew a valuation form in your packet and we would really appreciate it if you would fill that out

and return it to a nasi staff member before you leap. we also encourage you to pick up copies of other nasi resources which are available outside the meeting room. so, to begin i would like to turn to steve goss. steve. [applause] >> thanks mark and thanks virginia for setting this up and giving me the opportunity to talk to you about the social security disability probe in which i assume everybody in the room and hopefully you are hearing this event from elsewhere knows that social security disability program now serves almost 9 million disabled worker beneficiaries in our country and a couple million people who are children and spouse dependent. so it's a big program and it serves a lot of people. what i can really speak to probably most effectively and hopefully usefully is the first of the two questions that are

raised today, why more people are claiming or applying for social security benefits? so let me address that in the context of the projections that we make, working for a board of trustees at the administration, working with our advisories board and their technical and lead others in developing assumptions and projections into the future and what the cost of social security, the retirement system and the disability system, are going to be looking like in the future. first of all, let me flip to a slight. we have got to have a picture. there are two ways i think that we can really address this question of why we have this run-up in claims in people applying for disability. the near-term cyclic phenomenon, which relates to the fact that we have had a recent pretty significant recession in this country. as you all know. the recession resulted in a lot of people coming unemployed, up to 10% unemployment rate and when people come in employed

they seek a way of continuing to having command people qualify for a disabled worker benefit of course going to play so we did have an increasing number of applications and we did have an increasing number of people starting to receive disability benefits. it is really the number of people getting disabled worker benefits divided by the number of people who are insured to get the benefits if they apply and qualify. the time of recession we have a runoff in the number of people getting benefits, as happens but this is a temporary phenomenon from the cyclic economic downturn. we are projecting of course the number of new disability claimants, who become disability beneficiaries, went up to around 2010, and will be coming back down. you can see the red line on here showing what we are projecting the number of people starting to get disability benefits had there not been a recession. well there was a recession at

that changes everything and we had an increase in the number of people coming on the rolls that exceeded what we have. a number of these people would be people who might not have ever filed for disability benefits and might have been able to retain their employment status. other people are people who may have started to get in if it's two or three years later as their personal impairment deteriorated further. but this really sort of is the first effect that we might talk about in terms of an increase in the number of people claiming disability which is the short-term cyclic effect. a longer-term effects if we speak to what mark mentioned, which is the solvency of the social security prague ram and a longer-term effect for the solvency of social security program does depend on this classic relationship regina numbers of beneficiaries and people paying in and what the tax rates are in benefit levels are. solvency for the social security program, we have two different trust funds, the old survivors trust fund and separately the

disability insurance trust fund. the latter one is the one we are talking about today. on this chart you can see we are showing what the trust fund ratios are. the trust fund ratio is the amount of money we have in reserve, the trust assets abide by the annual cost of the program so how many years could be paid out of just the reserves that are retained and of course they don't have to pay our benefits are that because we have continuing income coming in all the time. you can see on this projection that for the old-age and survivors insurance probe berman the 2011 trustees report as brian mentioned we are looking to be get up to 2038 and the combined old-age survivors insurance and disability, we would be good until about 2036 for solvency based on the 2011 trustees report. also as mark mentioned the disability trust fund which is a separately legal entity and we really have to pay attention to that in our trustees report to

become exhausted in reserves to become exhausted in 2018. mike mike also mentioned the congressional budget office and you should understand since the time of our development of the assumptions and the projections for the 2011 trustees report which was issued last may 13, that is last year, something's happened. we had a run-up in inflation early in calendar year 2011 and as a result we ended up having a cost of living adjustment of 3.6% instead of the 0.7 that we had been estimating. the price of gas went up and we all know what that does to the general price level in our economy. we had a 3% higher loosed a benefit levels for 2012 and that will persist for years into the future because that stays with people who received it and at the same time by the way year 2011, the level of the average attackable earnings, the earnings that are subject to our payroll taxes grew by 1.5% less

than we had been projecting so the combination of a bigger benefit level and a lower earnings level resulted in some negative effects for the trust. you can anticipate our upcoming trust report will come out a little bit sooner. the bottom line though is 2018, 2016 cbo, they are both states that are quite soon and people who do a lot of work in this building in the next two buildings down are paying a lot of attention to this and will surely make changes in the not-too-distant future. the one thing you might notice on this graph, the little blue line, which is this trust fund ratio for the disability insurance program in particular, back in 1994 when it was heading down quite sharply before, and then you can see it bounces after 1994 and starts heading back up. what actually happened at that time was that the congress simply enacted something that we refer to as the payroll tax reallocation. they took the pet -- total

payroll tax that at the time and still is a total of 12.4% payroll tax, employers and employees each pay 6.2, is split between a oasdi and d.i. funds. they reallocated that from the away as i fund to the d.i. fund and that more equalized the financial prospects in the future for the oasdi and d.i. funds and cause the fun to go back up again. that is why we sustained the solvency and i have got to tell you right after that was enacted in 1994 and next trustees report that came out projected trust fund exhaustion for the disability insurance fund would be in the year 2016 so it turned out that was a pretty -- take your pick. so this is really, this speaks to and let me just mention this, this speaks to the solvency as we describe it as mark mentioned for these programs and the reason we describe this is the solvency is because solvency in the context of the social security program means the ability to pay the scheduled

benefit in fall and a timely fashion, and in order to do that we have to have money in the trust fund for one simple reason. by law the social security trust funds do not have the ability to borrow. of the government if it does not have the ready cash reserves, to pay for things, social security trust fund cannot funds cannot do that by law. that is why when we see the numbers dropping, issue two out torch 2036 or even earlier for the d.i. trust fund, that represents a real problem that the congress absolutely has to address. i should mention though for the d.i. fund under our projections as of the year 2018, assuming nothing were done and we reach trust fund exhaustion we would still have enough continuing income coming in from taxes that are scheduled in the lot that time to pay for 86% of the scheduled benefit so it's not as though the trust fund goes out of business and we don't have any more benefit payments but we would be 14% short of the funds necessary to pay the full scheduled benefit on a timely

basis. so if we can go to our next slide, this gets a little bit different one. rather than looking at the trust funds and seeing how they look relative to solvency, this next slide gives you what the cost of the oasi and the d.i. come the social security programs look like as a percentage of gross domestic product. gross domestic product is the total value of the services we produce on our -- in this country and that will represent the basis for providing everything we all consume from day-to-day, including everything that are beneficiaries consume and to receive in the form of their benefits. you can see when you look at this the lines for the oasdi and insurance program and trust fund and for the combined old-age survival insurance and disability insurance, the cost's percentage of gdp which we are looking at this line to represent has been pretty constant for the combined program at 4.3% of gdp ever

since 1975. over the next 20 years it's going to be ramping up what we call level shift, shifting to a higher level and stabilizing and the reason for that is something that has been discussed much, the fact that we had a drop in the birthrate in the baby boom will retired and followed by smaller birthrate generations that we expect to persist in the future so we have a fundamental shift in the age age distribution of our population. while this will be happening over the next 20 years for our retirement program, you can see in a subtle way on this, the disability insurance program is really already mapping and if we flipped to the next slide, you get a better look at it. this slide shows you the fact that the cost of disability insurance has already risen from 1975 to 2010. you can see the cost of the program, which is the blue line, has been rising and rising

pretty dramatically. you can see the bump where we are history now because of the recession. but there has been a general rise up in the cost of the program as a percentage of gdp and we project that will be essentially stabilized and declining ever so slightly going into the future. why has this happened and what should we believe will be happening in the future? for that we look at the ways and means subcommittee staff who had a hearing backend december to address this issue and look good with the drivers of social security disability costs really are. in regard to be looked at it in one of the first things of course, one of the first things that comes up as is the number of workers we have for each beneficiary, and back when the baby boomers when they prime working age as we have a lot of workers for every beneficiary and that made the cost as percentage to gdp as percentage of our attackable payroll relatively low but you can see

how we are now moving across time into a position of having a much lower ratio of workers per beneficiary. this is happening and has happen precisely as the baby boomers have moved from where they were 20 years ago, ages 25 to 44, the ages of which there is not a lot of disability, but people to work, to ages 45 to 64 which is where the baby boomers are essentially now in 2010 and 2011. those are ages of which are prime age is for people receiving disability benefits. let me flip to what we refer to a sort as sort of our first cost of social security disability and beyond those demographic factors and just the aging of the baby boom and being replaced by smaller generations coming behind. the first one of these drivers is just be insured. being a person of an age where you could receive disability benefits isn't enough to get benefits from our program. you have to actually be ensured.

there are some work requirements and you can see here the percentage of the population, male and female, has been rather constant for men, brown 75% and we project that to stay in the future but over the last 25 or 30 years, the percentage of women who are just insured has risen quite dramatically and the reason for that is because there are certain work requirements, years of work requirements and even -- five out of the last 10 years and in the past, women when they got into their 40s and fifties many of them did not satisfy that work requirement. we moved over the last 25 years to a point where women are essentially in parity with men in terms of work requirements so we have gradually moves towards women being as much insured and we project that will continue in the future. the other real driver of disability costs is given the current insured, what is the probability you are actually going to become disabled, file for benefits and get the

benefits allowed for you? we can see the blue line here is males and it bounces around a lot for lots of reasons. but you can see it's staying at a little bit over five per 1000 on the males. females however if we go back to around the 1990 period, there has been rising quite dramatically. female disability incidence rates, that is the likelihood of becoming disabled given your insured, used to be on the order of half a or a little bit more than half of what the male disability rates were but they also have moved up to a sensual parity with men over time. both of these factors have, once where women have moved that up to parity with men we don't expect a crossover so basically this change has occurred, has played out. we don't expect further changes. this is something you might want to look later and we will take -- won't take the time to go through it now. this is essentially a slide

showing the ups and downs of our disability costs and some of the reasons for it. recessions like the most recent one obviously have a lot to do at this but there've been a number of changes in the nature of how we define disability. going a little bit further on these drivers, the effect of these drivers has resulted in our having disability preference rates, which is the percentage of people who are insured that are actually receiving disability benefits, and our disability prevalence rates have been rising for males and females over the last 20 years and projecting them to be fairly flat in the future. the drivers we have been talking about, the aging of the baby boom, increasing insurance status of females in insurance rates have all really happened already. the males though, were most of these have not really been operating, the male prevalence rates have been rising too and that brings us to one more driver that i would like to put up here to show you.

one other thing that has been happening in our disability program is there has been a shift in our disability incidence towards a higher extent of disability incidence at younger ages. it used to be a was mainly people 50 and over. we had somewhat of an increase in the number of people at younger ages, and this slide shows you that back in 1980 for both men and women, the disability incidence rate, the probability you would become disabled was only one fifth. only 20% as large for people at the ages of 25 to 44 as compared to the incidence rate for people at ages 45 to 64. it's much lower but by 2010 and we project it will stay that in the future that issue has really changed now people at aged 45 to 64 are closer to one third as likely. that is up a pretty big change. the shift towards more of our people coming out of the disability rolls at younger ages of course means fayette tend to be receiving benefits for longer

period of time. let me just flip to one last little slide and i will skip over a couple that we have here. the one last little slide i would like to just show you is the history and what our projections are for once people start to receive disability benefits, they stop receiving disability benefits of course when they reach retirement age and they are transferred over to the retirement, that are disabled workers have a chance of dying but also have a chance of recovering the recovery rate has been about 1% of the disability rolls and we project it will stay at about that so since i am out of time, i will just completely conclude with repeating one side that you have already scene, showing you what a projections are and you have now seen the basis for it. a rather dramatic rise in the cost of social security disability insurance over the last 20 years. we believe that the components of that increase have basically completed this and we expect the

cost of percentage of gdp to be pretty stable in the future. the extent to which changes are necessary we think should be looked at in that light. let me stop there and pass the torch. >> thank you, stephen x. we will hear from lisa ekman from health and disability advocates. >> good morning. thank you, mark. thank you d. for that great presentation. i am going to start out by talking a little bit about the importance of the social security disability insurance program. people with disabilities. it is vitally important. it provides critical income support for many people with disabilities and their families. in fact, it lists many people out of poverty. almost half of ssdi beneficiaries rely on these critical income benefits for more than 90% of their total income. it is the one thing that keeps

many people with disabilities from a leading a life of abject robbery and homelessness, and i want to share just a couple of very brief stories of some people who receive social security disability insurance benefits, where in both cases it did actually prevent them from being homeless. the first is a man named henry, and he was in his fifties. he had severe cardiac problems, had worked in the insurance industry for a very long time, paid into the social security system and earn his disability benefits, until the point at which his heart condition made it no longer healthy for him to work. he applied for benefits, or he stopped working and did not apply for benefits right away, tried to make a go of it without them, went through his 401(k), all of his savings, became homeless and lived in his car for almost a year. before he finally took the step to apply for benefits, and he was able to come after being quickly approved, get an

apartment and his ssdi benefits allowed him to continue to have a home after that. another story is a woman named angelise and she had type 1 diabetes, that she developed as a teenager and she works for many years and eventually she became ill with diabetes-related complications. she actually continue to work when she probably should have stopped working, to take care of herself, and ended up a hospitalized. while she was in the hospital she applied for social security disability benefits and was approved for them. in the meantime, she didn't have the kind of savings to rely on that henry did, and she had to get help actually from a charity to help her keep her apartment. they paid her rent for her for a couple of months until her benefit kids get approved and then she was able to use her social security disability insurance benefits to help pay for her rent. the importance of these benefits to people of disabilities and their families cannot be overstated.

i think steve goss did a great job laying this out, but i just want to go over a little bit of a recap for you. more women qualifying for benefits has led to a big increase. the baby boomers entering their high disability years, the increase in the normal retirement age as something that steve didn't actually mention, but as you all know, the retirement age and has gone up from 65 and is now 66 for people retiring, for people born after 1968 will be 67. the way disability benefits work is you get them until you reach our normal retirement age, so for every month at the retirement age goes up, that's another month that benefits come out of the disability trust fund instead of the retirement trust fund and in 2009 approximately 300,000 people received benefits from the disability trust fund that under the previous law would have received and if it's from the retirement trust fund, so that does also contribute to

the increase in cost and the growth in the number of people's receiving disability benefits. as steve said, we really hit the top of the increase and it will level off and then it will go down but there are other factors that do contribute as well. and as steve also mentioned, the economy is one of them. we expect applications and beneficiaries to increase during times of economic downturns and steve showed you that chart. you can track where there are recessions and we do see an increase in the number of applications and people get approved. employers are less likely to hire and more likely to fire people during times of a weak economy. when they are are a of workers for every job, there is a huge focus also on productivity, and when they are perceived concerns over productivity, although all of the research and data show that people with disabilities

are no less productive than their nondisabled peers, there still remains a perception among employers and so when times are tough it's even less likely that people with disabilities will get hired and they have to let someone go, some of those perceptions around the productivity of people with disabilities can lead them to be the first to let go. it is harder to find a job if you are laid off if you are a person with a disability and that is especially true if you are an older worker with a disability because now you have two potential things that an employer might consider when they are looking at a huge pool of applicants of who to place in the job that they might look at, and be negatively, even though they shouldn't, and there aren't any real concerns, the perceptions are to make employers make different choices. there are a couple of other reasons i just want to highlight, why the roles of grown over the past couple of decades. in the past decade, the past couple of decades, we have seen a decline in the number of

people with health insurance coverage, decline in employers offering health insurance coverage to workers. if you're a person with a disability having health insurance coverage is not an option. it is a life or death situation and you need to be able to get your treatments and you need to be able to afford her prescription medication, and if you can't get health insurance through a job, people get health insurance through applying for ssdi and they also get access to medicare, so that is an easy choice. if my choice is that i am going to play to get ssdi benefits. there is also a less forgiving workplace. the emphasis on global competition and being competitive and again, the productivity concerns perceived productivity concerns that i discussed a few moments ago make the workplace less forgiving and people -- it is harder for people who are receiving ssdi benefits to compete in that less

forgiving workplace and most of that is based on perceptions, but whether the perception is chore not, the perception means you don't get hired, it means you don't get a job. the americans with disabilities act has done a really fantastic job in helping people with disabilities get the reasonable accommodations they need and to be able to sue when they are fired for disability -- it is also available for discrimination in hiring, but unfortunately, it is extremely hard to prove in terms of discrimination in hiring,, especially if you have a thousand applications for a particular job. is really hard to deal with that so they're still discrimination hiring and it has not been eliminated by the americans for disabilities that are go to a much lesser extent but still to some extent their other programs that require people to apply for social security disability benefits. there are a handful of workers comp programs that require you

to apply for ssdi and they have said your workers compensation benefit amount based on the receipt of disability benefits in the same is true for private disability insurance. many policies were require those receiving private disability insurance benefits to also apply for ssdi and many of them to have the same kind of offset. so what does is increase this increase mean for the future? as steve pointed out, it is leveling off. it is not expected to continue into the future, and it does not mean that the program is not affordable or not sustainable. sustainability and affordability are both a matter of priorities. in poll after poll, americans say that they would rather see their taxes for social security go up than to see any benefit cuts and they support doing that. as steve also mentioned, we can solve this by reallocating some of the current factors that go

into the retirement trust fund into the disability fund as we have done in the past. obviously the political situation today is a little different than in 1994, but that is a matter of political will. it is not a matter of it ain't hard to do. i want to just go over a few beneficiary characteristics, and that is that people who receive benefits are -- and you can see the list of different types of disabilities that people have. some are terminal as we discussed, and some have very debilitating disabilities. so when we think about reforming social security disabilities, we have to keep in mind this is not a homogeneous group. what works for one person is going to work for another person. every individual is different in their situation is different. their condition is different and a likely track their condition will take even if they have the

same condition as different. it's an individual situation and we have to keep that in mind. as i mentioned, some beneficiaries are terminally ill. about one in five male beneficiaries and one and seven in seven fema beneficiaries die within five years of beginning to get benefits. they tend to be older. in 2010 the average age was 53. seven and 10 beneficiaries are over the age of 50 and nearly three and 10 are over the age of 60. many have lower educational -- two-thirds of have a high school diploma or less and almost one third did not complete high school. would we think about trying to find -- in this changing technology base, skill-based economy, we have to keep in mind what the characteristics of the people receiving benefits are. so can a significant percentage work and become self-supporting?

ssdi beneficiaries should be given every service, support and encouragement to go to work but as i have just gone through all the reasons why it is unlikely a large percentage of -- have the capacity for ongoing work at a significant level. ssdi does not present a disincentive to work. the benefits are modest. is an average of $1110 per month for february of 2012. that is more than 10% less than a person working full-time at minimum wage so it is a modest benefit. designate reform? ssdi is functioning as assured. it is providing vital wage replacement to maintenance of people with disabilities and their families who needed. more must be done to help people with disabilities stay at work if they acquire disability and more should be done to provide supports and services to ssdi beneficiaries with more capacity to obtain and maintain employment. but that is the role of an income support brogue ran.

is not the role of ssdi nor should it be, but we should do everything that we can to help people with disabilities work. the employment situation for them is not good and we should do more but that is not the role of an income support program. people pay into it and earn a benefit through it. i want to and with some principles for reform. if you think about reform we have to really think about fees as we evaluate from the perspective of people with disabilities as we evaluate the reform proposals. and a reform should preserve the structure of ssdi program, including the definition of disability. it is appropriate. is to wage replacement program for people who don't have work capacity so the structure the program are appropriate for that function. efforts to increase employment opportunities and improve employment outcomes for people with disabilities receiving ssdi should not be achieved through tightening eligibility criteria, narrowing health care benefits,

removing the entitlement to benefits or devolving responsibility to the states. ssdi benefits receive should not be time-limited. we can predict the course of a person's disability, and so that is what governs whether not a person can work. is what their health condition is and there is no time limit on that and we cannot predict it, so we shouldn't try. work activities and work reparation activity should be voluntary for ssdi beneficiaries. their family and health care providers are in the best position to decide whether or not a work attempt is a healthy thing to do for a person with disabilitya disability, not any other arbitrary work limit or work requirement that we would set for them. and the social security administration adequate resources to perform all the program integrity functions before we begin reform. we should allow them to have

enough resources to complete disability determinations in a timely manner. to continuing disability reviews to ensure people continue have disabilities of the people receiving benefits are entitled to them and we should provide them with adequate staffing resources to prevent overpayments to people who do try to work, because that is a huge disincentive to people. i have a couple more slides, talking about the specific reforms, but i encourage you to take a look at them. i have run out of time, but i just want to close by reiterating how important the ssdi program is to be both disabilities. as we think about any type of reforms, we have to remember that these represent the difference between being poor and homeless and being able to live independently in the community for millions of people with disabilities and their families. thank you. >> thanks much, lisa.

[applause] next we will turn to david stapleton, mathematica policy. >> thank you and thanks to nasi for setting this up and i'm glad to see a great crowd here. it's terrific. so far we have heard from steve about the financing and the history of the ssdi program which i think is the issue that is really bringing us here. and things look a little better in the future than they have in the past. i agree with that. we have also heard from lisa that the ssdi program is extremely important for people who are beneficiaries and i would agree with that as well. but i have a fundamental disagreement with lisa on the issue of the structure of the program. it's not just the ssdi program alum but it needs to be seen in the context of the larger disability policy future. i'm not going to focus on ssdi

and we will talk about but i'm going to talk about why i think the social security -- i'm sorry the disability policy in general is failing people with disabilities and also failing taxpayers. i'm going to brush over fairly quickly a number of ideas for reform, which is not enough time to look at all of them. then i will close by saying we are not really ready for reform and we need to do things in a measured way to move the ball forward so that we can be ready for reform. a lot of my remarks are based on a paper that i wrote with david mann who is sitting here in the third row and is also an issue which you may have picked up on the way in on the table there. the research was sponsored by the national institute for disabilities rehabilitation and research so i have to give them credit that you are not allowed to give them blame.

so current policies are failing people with disabilities and i think exhibit number one is this chart which as been around and keeps getting updated for many years. looks at the relative employment rate for people with disabilities, working age population disabilities, relative to those without disabilities and their peers and it goes back to 1981 the first year we had data. what you can see is that there has been this really steady decline in the relative employment rates have started in the late 1990s and peaked in 1980 -- 1998 at 30% and now it is down to about 22% in 2010. and along with that relative decline has been a decline in the relative household incomes of people with disabilities, and here the situation is a little better. income support plays a very big part in white is better, but there has been a decline from a peak of about 64% to about 52%

today. so, the other really important set of information about how current policies are failing people with disabilities concerns poverty rates for people with disabilities. my colleague gina livermore and dana sheen did a recent study looking at the, people who are in long-term poverty so that is people whose household incomes are below the federal poverty line for at least three years in a row of four. they found that 65% of those people who are in long-term poverty have a significant disability of some sort. we have also done work, and again using social security, survey we did for social security of the beneficiary population. we found in that survey, and this was from my believe 2005 or 2005, that 50% of all ssdi and ssi recipients combined, working age recipients, lived in

households with incomes below the poverty line. we just looked at ssi at 70%, and d.i. only it goes to d.i., it's more like 30% but that is very high party rate relative to the overall population. there's also been a body of research on this slide about the hardships that tebow with disabilities, who lived in the impoverished households come experience. they experience hardship such is not going out -- going without food, not being able to get medicine much more frequently than people without disabilities who live in poverty at the same level of income. so i think going back, i think this is another reason to consider disability policy broadly and whether or not it needs restructuring. but the thing that is an interest in disability policy, even with these factors, which i think they should be, they have been around for a long time and

we have talked about them for a long time, but it is the fiscal situation. it is the perception that current policies are failing taxpayers. so now we are going to look at the ssdi program quickly and these numbers are going to be consistent with what steve told you earlier. this charge is shows you the number of beneficiaries on the role, working age population on ssdi starting with 1970s when rates -- 22010 and i won to focus for a minute on 1980 and the period after 1980. 1980 to 1981 was the last time that both congress and the administration were so concerned about expenditures in the program in the number and the roles that there were significant cuts in eligibility. and you can see that after 1980, there was actually a significant drop in the number of people on the roles. this happened during the worst recession that we have had since the great depression up to that point and still the worst recession except for the recent one. and after that, there was such a

political backlash that congress in 1984 enacted amendments for the social security act, which basically reversed what had happened earlier to that date, and some people would say it more than reverse. it's very difficult to determine, but the growth in the rolls was pretty moderate after that group. we had a pretty strong economy up until 1990 and what you can see is starting it starting in 1990, there's this acceleration of growth of people on the rolls, and that growth has continued pretty solidly ever since then in the last three decades. now, of course steve explained a lot of that growth has to do with growth in the number of people who are disability insured, especially among women and it also has to do with the aging of the baby boom population. my generation. and so we are more prone to disability than we were when we were younger unfortunately, but we did some calculations to show

you what the effects of those factors are. so that is what this redline is showing you. and we anchored this redline in 1980, so what is shows you is how the number of people on the rolls would have grown if the prevalence rates for those who are disability insured and qualified for the program, the prevalence of those on the program who did not -- stay the same as they were in 1980 and we concede is there would have been overall growth and it would have been substantial over the years since 1980 in the next few decades but not nearly as large as we have seen the growth since the early 1990s and in fact the difference between the values and 2010 is 28% or 2.2 million beneficiaries, so if we roll back the clock, the prevalence rates for 1980, we have 2.2 million fewer people on the role. that amounts to over $50 billion in benefits if you count of the

ssdi benefits and medicare benefits that these people are eligible for so that is it big number. but it turns out that the medicare benefits in the ssdi benefits received by ssdi beneficiaries is less than half of what the federal government spends for people with disabilities currently. and these numbers are from a paper that gina livermore and i did that was published last year, where we tried to do an accounting of all the money that the federal government spends to support the working age population with disabilities. i won't go into -- i don't have time to look at the details but the bottom line for fiscal year 2008 which was the last year we had complete data for it, $357 billion, and that was growth after inflation adjusted of 30.6% and we did the exercise or fiscal year 2002 as well, so

just over a six-year period. the total amounts to 12% of all federal outlays in that year. the ssdi medicare pieces only a little over 5%. so along with those programs we have medicaid and we have ssi of course and we have veterans benefits, of which is a large and growing number but they're also lots of other little programs that contribute to these totals. so, i think the fiscal issue and the overall issue with the federal budget is going to drive attention to these programs because they represent such a large share when you look at them together of all the federal outlays, and it will be very difficult to purge -- protect these programs in the way they are. that is probably going to drive more than the issues that i race raised first, the policy, what we should do with a disability policies. in the past we have tried a lot of incremental things to improve

visibility and improve specifically with people with disabilities and the evidence shows that they have not been successful. there was the ada, americans with disabilities act of 1990, the rehab act which is now part of the workforce investment act. there've been important reforms with that and the disabilities education act and the 1999 the work incentives improvement act which had a number of different provisions typically for ssdi and ssi to increase employment. and, you know if you look at the numbers they just haven't paid off in the way that we expected, that we hope that they would and some expected it would go so why is that the case? there are lots of very specific reasons but i think there are couple of fundamental problems. one is that we are layering complexity on top of complexity and i think everyone would agree that programs are enormously complex and we worked on this work evaluation. the ticket concept is very simple but when you overlay at

over it is -- these very come to get programs it became difficult for the social security administrations to administer. the other thing is we are still stuck with what we call it benefits first, work later approach. in order to get most benefits scored by the federal government you have to get on ssi or ssdi first and that sort of drives everybody towards those of the programs, when they run into trouble, such as in a recent recession. so there have been many proposals for reforms. another of them concern what are called early intervention for workers. the social security advisory board in 1996 pursue these ideas, the more specific proposals, the work insurance program, called being american with ryan mcdonnell and people on the west coast. it is a public program. it's a new social concern program to ensure people can

stay at work. very recently mark duggan propose what i call universal short-term privacy disability insurance pay partly by employers and partly by individuals, but it would require and the idea is to give employers and individuals more say in the labor force. experience rating with a disability share of the social security, i'm sorry, the payroll taxes, which most other social insurances are experienced, not medicare but certainly unemployment insurance and workers compensation. we have talked more about the more fundamental reforms, and i think there a lot of people that would say those early intervention approaches are addressing and probably should be looked at more, but they are not going to be enough to reverse the trends that we see historically for the well-being

of people with disabilities so david mann and i have looked at some of these, dressing work incentives for comprehensively. the work capacity approach that would determine eligibility so you look at the work capacity of individual first and it's only when it's clear that you cannot tap into that capacity that you give them the long-term benefit. call-in. ..

we've also will take a look at this and we want, we think it's important to consider other options involving the states. it just seems incredibly important, local people are going to be delivering services to people with disabilities, you give them some flexibility as well as responsibility to administer benefits. but also of a very strong oversight capacity. but i think one thing we can all agree on is all of the structural changes, they are not ready to go. we can't roll them out the way they are. it would be incredibly irresponsible to do that. it would end up costing more than a current programs, but more problematically they could really harm people with disabilities because we just don't know enough about what we

are doing. what we think we need as a long-term program, at least 10 years, to start pursuing some of these ideas, try to build the evidence base, build the political consensus and develop policy reforms. that requires enormous amount of demonstration work and research work. that's got to be collaborative. there are many federal agencies that have got to be involved as well state and local agencies and private organizations as well. and in order to do that you really need legislation that would promote that. so just to close, it seems to me that we really have sort of two viable options. and one is we can continue with the current programs the way they are, but given the country's fiscal situation i think that means trimming eligibility and benefits in the decades moving forward. we can probably eat small efficiency gains out of a programs. but i think of him i would be further deterioration in economic security of people with

disabilities the alternative is let's launch a long-term structural reform process where we do the groundwork on build the space so we can move forward. maybe that would buy us all more time to try to preserve the existing programs. thank you very much. [applause] >> thanks, dave. next we will hear to read responses to the presentations, and following that we will be moving into q&a. so we have structured the morning to have plenty time for your questions and for a conversation with our panel. so be thinking about your question. our first response will come from marty ford, drugs of the public policy office at the united states. marty? >> thank you very much. i'm pleased to be here today. i will move quickly because i know we have certain amount of time. i did find steve goss is information very helpful in describing exactly what is happening in the programs.

and i want to say that i agree with lisa ekman's principles on reforms that i thought they were very useful and absolutely on target. i do want to comment a little bit on david stapleton's proposal. i'm sure you not surprise, david. and go into a little bit of what was not covered in the slides but in more detail in his written proposal. and david has actually proposed that there be a program that includes a disability allowance that, as i read it, would be a bit less than what is currently an income benefit under current law. and my question is since the benefits under current law are already so low, wide in the world are beneficiaries intended to live on? how were they going to cover their basic income needs for food and shelter? the program also seems to call

for reducing these benefits and spending them in another way, not necessarily for food and shelter. and serving more people in the same program. and i have very, very serious concerns about what this means. the proposal does not seem to guarantee health insurance, except for people in one category out of three categories. very unclear where the money would come from for the other folks to purchase their own insurance on the open market. and when you're talking to people who are already very financially vulnerable and there are questions of affordability, i think that's a big issue. one of the proposals is that it would be a group of people who are deemed to be, deemed to have little work capacity. and from my perspective i think this would be limiting and labeling people in a way that is not productive. i think many people do try to work, and i think the ssi

program shows that, that even with limited work history, and what many people might think of as low work capacity, people do attempt to work and they are successful at it, and in supplementing their benefits. and i would not want to see something that would discourage that or in some way to prevent people from trying to intrude the situation there in. and, frankly, i don't see the damages of creating three new categories. what i do see in terms of evaluating people, putting them in three categories is a whole new administrative process. it would cost money. i can see all the appeals that are associated with that. if you don't like the category you're put into, and the administrative costs that would go to the. to what end i'm not sure. so those are my reactions to sort of the deeper end of that proposal. but i want to take this opportunity to make a few comments of my own. i think it's important to

remember that the basic purpose of ssi and ssdi is income support for those who are experiencing significant limitations in their ability to work due to disability. the intention is to replace income, to provide food and shelter but it may be temporary. it may be permanent. the programs, particularly work incentives, have evolved over time. as congress has attempted to address its own evolving understanding of disability and the nature of work and support. and people who depend on these programs are in a very financially vulnerable situation. they need the cash support. they need health care. they cannot necessarily handle major swings in policy decisions, or in cash flow, or health care eligibility. on the other hand, attempts to improve the program, congress has been faced with issues of cost estimates.

this is a huge program. every time there's a new and great idea, and believing i think we propose lots of great ideas, the changes have had to be incremental because the costs year to addressing any of the pieces of the program are so huge. unintended consequences are that things just cannot be done in a big way. and often we end up with layered complexity and that i do agree with you, david, there are layered complexities in the program. we did attempt, when the second 1619 program was made permanent in the ssi program, we did attempt to have that added to the title ii program. and we were not able to do within. in the days of working on the early part of senator gephardt's bill actually in his version of what became the ticket to work bill, there were provisions in

their to do that. it ended up being a demonstration program, and also the medicare eligibility, permanent medicare eligibility was part of that. it is time to look at that again. and effect in the president's budget for this year there is a request to look at the proposal for work incentives. and that would include some of those elements of continued attachment to medicare and simplification of the on and off and the removal of the penalties, and ultimately to join up again with that two-for-one offset that is currently being tested. these things have worked in the ssi program. we need is a work in the title ii program. we know that they work. they are incremental, and people with disabilities have been asking for them for now decades. and i believe it is time to see

these things be put into operation. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, marty. now we'll hear from tony young, senior public policy strategist at nish which is a large national community based organization doing advocacy on behalf of disabled individuals. tony. >> good morning. can you hear me back there? thank you for this opportunity to talk to this morning. [inaudible]

they don't always tell the full story. behind each of those numbers, we try to maximize their potential. [inaudible] some people it means trying to be the ceo of the company. for other people, it means just getting by. complex medical conditions, keeping her family together, keeping your house over your -- or roof over your head. and daily activities of that sort. even the gao in their research have found people with

disabilities face multiple barriers to employment. including the lack of education, lack of skills, lack of training, barriers at the workplace, no reasonable accommodations. and, of course, the discrimination which we have heard about before. i want to go give two quick examples of how this works. first example, you have a person with cerebral palsy who has a speech impairment, uses a wheelchair and a speech board. has an advanced degree in economics. if that person were to be, were to lose either the wheelchair or the speech board or wasn't available of an opportunity to

get that advanced degree, they won't be able to work. that's the line. the second person, a person with quadriplegic c-4 level which uses a wheelchair which costs in the neighborhood of $25,000, uses an adept band in which will cost about 22000, days, and another 10 or 15,000 for accommodations. uses personal services at the workplace and at home, which will throw an additional 15 or $20,000 annually into the cost, and you can see that if any of those tools or supports are withdrawn, the person is not going to be able to work, and is going to be, in fact, on the disability rolls. until something, and till that

could be rectified. dave stapleton has proposed major structural reforms, including comprehensive didn't incentives, program consolidation and more state control. i'm going to concede the point that the system must improve to facilitate work. but i want to put out to basic principles of my own, and i think they are pretty widely shared by the disability community. first principle being that reform begins with do no harm. we don't want anyone to be more disadvantaged after reforms than they were before the reforms started. secondly, the disability

community point of view is that it is not too easy to get on ssdi. it is too hard to exit from ssdi. as marty said, the disability community itself has been very active over the last 20 to 30 years in trying to make changes to help people go to work, to get the supports they need, the training, the education. so the question is, which problem when we try to solve right now? if we see the conflicting conclusions can be drawn from the data. when i look there, i was unable to physically tell if the di rolls were growing, or if they're going to be stable in the future. that's an important question. another question, should are incremental ideas that were previously not adopted he tried

again? should it be expected that systemic change succeed now when it didn't succeed before? and is it possible to impose new taxes on employers and employees going into a fund of the ideas that are being floated. these ideas, especially the ones addressed at this incentives reform, i think are the way to go. incremental i believe is the way to go. simply because when not going to be able to convince the congress that massive changes are appropriate at this time. again, if the economy turns

around, certainly that will help, but without these incremental changes, especially to the work set up, the problem is not going to be resolved. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you, tony. we are going to open the floor for q&a. and since the session is live on c-span and been recorded, it's going to be important that you find a way to one of the microphones around the room so we can be sure to capture your questions. and also please introduce yourself. before asking her question. and so i just do as i say, not as i did when i forgot to turn the microphone on at the beginning of the session. while you are funny or what the microphone i will kick it off with the first question. to stephen anyone else on the panel who might want to discuss this, and lisa, you touched on this. certainly one effect of the

recession and joblessness has been a dramatic increase in the number of older americans without health insurance who are too young for medicare. the commonwealth fund reports that there are 9 million people age 50-64 now who are uninsured as of 2010, and that's a figure that is up from my point remain as recent as 2002. so my question is, is it possible to form, to find the link, and what is the cause and cause-and-effect relationship of that rise in general lack of coverage in health insurance, and the rise in disability insurance applications? can one actually quantify that, or not? and then a second sort of follow peace to the question is, with the affordable care act now up in the air, one of the most important things the aca certainly do is get many of those people covered again. so i'm wondering what the panel sponsored.

maybe see you can start from a numbers perspective as to what is this relationship look like an health insurance for older americans? >> a really good question. as you will point out a very complicated one. we do of course have, if some has health coverage in their employment and daily their employment, that they get a 24 month continuation detention to buy but they have to pay the whole bill. most people have lost their job, that's difficult for people to do. one of the issues of course with the nature of our social security disability insurance program is if you lose your job you do have benefits, you get the benefits. you not on have a five month waiting period before your monthly social security disability benefits start, you have additional 24 months before benefit start coming. so clearly these contribute towards a lack of insured status. many people of looked at, among other possibilities, to help improve our prospects in the cost of social security disability, but more important

to improve the prospects for people who come to have an payments but make it difficult to work. not only as dave mentioned, and others, to try to find better more effective ways to help people have greater work opportunity, but also to provide additional assistance to people even before starting to receive disability insurance in terms of having health care that might be able to maintain them and better health status. >> preventive care. >> preventive care. now the affordable care act that you mentioned mark, i've easy will have big effects. the affordable care act on the one hand will provide people with that adequate care much more gently than we have now, and that may result in fewer people filing for disability benefits, if they maintain their health status in better condition but on the other hand, it would also remove the disincentive we have now instead of waiting 24 additional months to get medicare, because people

would have greater access to health care benefits. so which way that plays out exactly, it's not clear. >> comments on that? >> i would just say that i don't know who can track it or if it can be tracked but we do know people do delay getting health care because they don't have the funds to go to the doctor, or get health coverage when they need it. their health conditions exacerbate to the point where, you know, they are more costly when they do finally show up, you know, every physician's office or in the emergency room or a hospital. and even when the affordable care act goes into effect, people will need to have the ability to pay for health coverage. they will have to be able to pay for the plans if they are not on medicaid. so it's still an issue as to

being able to have the funding, to pay for. i think the whole issue of the two year plus five month waiting period is a big issue. and hopefully will be addressed so people may not even need to consider medicare. and that would be a tremendous, you know, step ahead. but there are still issues out there, and medicare, i mean and health care will not be totally eliminated as an issue for people to consider in terms of their pocketbooks. >> under tranninety would have roughly half his age group would be covered under medicaid under the expansion medicaid which a very dramatic and the rest would be shopping in the exchanges with various levels of subsidies for the premiums. >> right. >> let's turn to the floor. and we have anybody with a microphone? >> mark, if i could just also just add to what marty said. one of the things, the imports of health care for people with

disabilities can't be understated, and -- can't be overstated. i think when the ticket to work legislation was passed, congress created an option for states to enact something called a medicaid buy-in program, which would allow working people with disabilities to purchase medicaid so that they could get affordable health care that really provides all the services and supports they need to continue working. and most states have taken up that option, but they allow for different levels of earnings, and some still are pretty strict resource test. so i would say that as a country really want to address the health care situation for working people with disabilities, we should support a national medicaid buy-in without a resource limit, similar to what the qualifications now for the medicaid expansion that would allow people with disabilities to work, to save, to be independent in the community,

and never risked losing their attachment to that final health care and services and support that allow them to live in the community in the first place. >> so the buy-in sector of the at the state-by-state level? >> they occur at the state-by-state level. some of rather generous income limits and resource limits. some have rather strict income and resource limits. but regardless of how much you earn or save, a person with a disability cannot self finance the services and support that they need to live independently in the community. so the best way to ensure that that happens is to create a program that allows people to buy medicaid, regardless of whether income or resources is, to allow them to have uninterrupted access to the services and supports they need. >> thank you. let's go to the floor for some questions. and we will start right back year. >> thank you. >> please introduce yourself. >> i am working at the army institute and the have a question to a panelist about,

the topic of the event was why has the number of people on the di increase and what can we do about it. you heard a lot about the first question, a lot about that. and then people talk a lot about reforms, but i think what was missing in this whole debate was the kind of notion that because we have this increase we need reforms. and i was really encouraged to see from you -- [inaudible] is this good or bad? one stand it is good because we ensure much more people. it's very important we see poverty rates are very high, we provide very important income benefits. the counterpoint is that this is bad, right? that you have program expanding and we need to shrink it. then the third measure you hear is, maybe, is it's just not related, right? we have to think about reform

independent of the size of this program. thank you. >> sorry. this gets back to the beginning of my talk. it seems to me that the real reasons to consider reform are not the fiscal issue of the number the people on the rolls. it's their economic status, the decline in employment. it's just harder and harder for people with disabilities to be self-sufficient as time goes on. that's what the statistics show, and many live in poverty. it seems to me that's a fundamental reason to consider reforms. >> i think i said during my presentation i completely agree that the employment situation for people with disabilities is not good, and we need to do a lot more as a country to assist people with disabilities to go

to work. when they are able and up to their capacity, whatever that is for the individual. i think if you go back to one of the slides in dave's presentation, the one area where we have cut spending and we've seen a-minus 2.6% in -- is on employment, training and education services. and so if we're serious about helping people with disabilities go to work, we shouldn't start with a violent income support program and looking at what we need to reform. we need to look at how can we improve our special education, how can we improve the outcomes of people in school, how can we improve our job training programs, and how can we improve our employment support programs. and so my answer to that second question is, there's a lot that should be done about it but it doesn't have anything to do with the social security disability insurance program that provides income support. that's what it does and that's

what it should do but we should do a lot more to help people get jobs, keep jobs, and not have to apply for benefits in the first place. >> one of the problems -- sorry. one of the problems that i see is, even if a person gets a job, there are all these extraordinary expenses that people, particularly people with significant disabilities, have to cover. it's not just food and basic transportation. it's the personal assistance both at home and work. it's the cost of accessible vehicle. it's the cost of a wheelchair or automated communication device. ..

>> or through additional support. we're going to have to find a way to help people with disabilities to pay for these, these devices and services and supports. >> thanks, mark. yeah. >> i guess a little further perspective, when we talk about reforming a program, of course, there are two ways to do that. we project in the future that the cost is going to be more than the scheduled taxes coming in, one way is to try to find a way to pull down those costs, another way is to come up with more revenue to be able to pay for the costs. we have as, i think, everybody

knows the definition of disability is a really strict definition. and it's applied pretty strictly. there's been some changes over time, but it still continues to be a strict definition of disability. i think up at the retirement age where people transfer over we have only 10-15% of our population that's insured receiving those benefits. so i think going forward that has to be something that we consider, are we going to pay for what we have, or are we going to find ways to try to pull back on the costs on that? i'd just add one little rejoinder. the numbers that i put up, the numbers that dave put up, i think, are exactly in consonance. dave had the one chart where he showed that the number of disabled worker beneficiaries is something like 28% higher than the age-sex-specific rates. it stayed exactly the same over the last 20 years or so, the difference simply is because women have had increased

incidence rates relative to men, they've basically moved to parity, and both men and women have had a shift in incidence rates towards younger ages. i would just add that one thing a lot of us would hope i know in my office, we have some fantastic people in our office. alice is here, ely donker, our deputies who work on this stuff all the time with dave and others understanding more why there has been this shift towards younger ages relative to older ages would be a real step in the right direction to understand why we've had the increase in costs we've had. >> i'd just add to that if you look at the general job market and the slack we still have in terms of joblessness and the slack in the market, the challenge on the discrimination side seems to me to be really a big, tall hill to climb. you've got already very ram .discrimination -- rampant vision in the workplace -- discrimination in the workplace.

so, you know, you step back and look at sort of the marketplace conditions, i think, suggest that this is a big challenge. let's take a question right here. sir? >> yeah, good morning. hi name's nathan, i'm from the hiv medicine association. i have a follow-up question on your discussion about health care reform and its significance for the program. i suppose i'll frame it by saying, for example, 40% of people who have hiv and are receiving care are paid for through medicaid program, but most of those people only receive that benefit after becoming disabled due to their illness. and so i'm wondering to what extent are people who have a preventable disease or a treatable disease who have lacked health care driving disability costs, whether or not that's a factor, um, and whether or not health care reform is something that will really address that. you know, i'm wondering how big of a piece of the pie it is, is it large or is it really small? >> dave. >> i think it's really hard to

put a number on it. i think it's pretty important, and the example you're alluding to is just one example of how i indicated that we, i think we get things backwards, right? we don't figure out what people need so they can continue to work first and then we get them in the benefits, a couple of years later we get them into medicare. and my college -- colleague and i did a paper on beneficiaries on their way into ssdi and medicare and how many didn't have insurance at that time, and these were data from the mid 1990s, and at that time about 15% didn't have any coverage at all. you know, some of them died before they became eligible for medicare, right? so what you're saying is just an example of how we have things backwards. you know, we don't figure out what people need so they can continue to work and be productive. we let them get into these programs, and then we start

giving them services such as health insurance. >> just want to respond to that a little bit. i don't disagree that we ought to provide different, um, provide people better services ahead of time. but again, i will reiterate that that doesn't mean we have to change ssdi. it means we have to change the other programs that make someone go apply for ssdi before they can get access to health care or employment supports as opposed to changing the vital income support program that people with disabilities rely on to keep them, a roof over their head. >> take another question. >> hi, i'm kathy with congresswoman schakowsky, and i kind of want to follow up on that. i was actually surprised by the two charts, david, you had on current policy is failing taxpayers, defining that as, essentially, too many people are on ssdi. and i don't think that's failing

taxpayers, i think that's a good thing as a taxpayer. i'm glad that people are getting ssdi because without it, i don't know what would be happening to them. i assume that you're saying here not that there are too many people getting ssdi, but that there should be other things for them in the workplace. and i guess i hope that's, i hope that's what you mean. i hope you don't mean that we should take 2.2 million people and just throw them on the streets. but in terms of the workplace, i'd like to know what you, how you think we, um, get employers to provide not just jobs for people with disabilities, but good jobs for people with disabilities that provide good benefits and the supports that they need particularly in this time, but in this political time when nobody seems to want to be

required to do anything in the employment sector. do we require that they provide adequate health coverage? do we require that they provide supports? i mean, how do we do this? >> so i certainly didn't mean we should throw whatever it was, 2.2 million people off the rolls. and i actually agree largely with lisa about, you know, the issue isn't reforming the ssdi program. it does provide essential benefits. i do think there are some changes we could make in the context of larger reforms with ssdi, and i think one thing that has happened is that because ssdi is the program that's available to workers when they have a problem, we've made changes in ssdi to make it easier for them and more attractive for them to work while they're on ssdi. and we wouldn't have had to do all that if we had something in front of ssdi so that not so

many people were getting on the program in the first place, or something to help them continue to work rather than get into ssdi before they could get support. as far as getting employers to be more interested and supportive of hiring people with disabilities, that's really tough to do. and i, you know, the health insurance -- and, actually, this gets back to one of marty's comments, the paper that david and i wrote -- have assumed that the aca would be implemented and that that would be the sort of basic form of health insurance for everybody. we probably should have consulted with the supreme court first. um, but it is incredibly important. i don't think forcing employers to provide health insurance is, is the best way to do it, though, because that imposes costs on employers, and if they're having to split the cost for an employee's health care

and that employee happens to have a lot of health care, why would they want to keep employing that person? so i think it's very difficult to find options that would encourage employers to hire people with disabilities, but i think they have to be, you know, we have to look at those more carefully whether they're tax incentives or other things. people have suggested, for instance, reducing the payroll tax if you hire somebody who has a disability that's at the level that they would otherwise qualify for ssdi or ssi, so that's an example. >> i guess i'd just like to add that i think in a broader context the one possibility is, and we've talked about this in the context of as our guys like david and i are aging and trying to encourage people to work longer, provide tax incentives for people to work at higher ages. that really just means they have an edge over younger workers to get a job, that's not the best of worlds perhaps. i would suggest the best of worlds is something that is in

the broader context. it's sort of the rising tide floats all boats. and what we really need is more economic opportunity, more jobs in general. we have an eight-plus-percent unemployment rate, but looking forward competitiveness, job opportunities in this country and folks who have medically-determinal impairments will always be at a slight disadvantage, but if we have more job opportunities in general, that really will be to the benefit of all of us. more taxable payroll, more money coming in. it is sort of the root towards solving the problems for programs like this. so i think beyond just disability and what we do just for folks with medical impairments enhancing the job opportunities in this country in general would really go a long way. >> just to add to that a little, i think one of the things we could do, again, not to sound like a broken record, is to have

a national medicaid buy-in. if employers knew that the health care costs would not effect them, that could remove some of that misperception and fear. i think another thing that we can do, um, is encourage the federal government to fully comply with the executive order on hiring people with disabilities in the federal government. um, one of the biggest ways that we can encourage employers to hire people with disabilities is to show them what good workers people with disabilities are, the fact that they have lower absenteeism, generally have at least high productivity as their nondisabled peers, and the best way we can do that is to lead by example. and if the federal government were to become a model employer, it would help educate employers about the truth of workers with disabilities. and if we could also have their health care taken care of, it would remove a lot of the fear and anxiety around hiring people with disabilities. >> let's go to another question

on this side of the room. >> thank you. good morning. i'm with america's health insurance plans. i really appreciate and enjoy the robust and interesting discussion this morning. going back a ways, a question for mr. goss about the rise in the disability population in recent years and outlook for the future. question, basically, is you mentioned the great recession, you mentioned, both you and dave mentioned the changing participation of women, but are you able to offer an opinion on whether you think that some of the rise is actually a success story, a success story in, um, dealing with certain, certain disabling conditions; cancer, hiv? that we've progressed to a point where survivorship is strikingly higher, and perhaps there's a way to progress even further to a point where work capacity can be preserved and maintained.

>> that's an extremely important question. and in if -- one sense what you're saying is exactly right. we have had a success story in so many areas where there are disabling conditions of maintaining people at sufficient health to survive, to continue to live and live a good life even if not able to recover to the point of being able to go back to work. and that has contributed towards people who come on our disability rolls, staying on the disability rolls, surviving longer. and, certainly, that increases the percentage of our population that's receiving disability benefits. in that sense it's no question that it's a success story, just as i think we would probably agree if people reach 62, 65, if they live longer, that would increase the costs, but hopefully we all agree that that's a success story if people live longer after they reach age 65.

>> good morning. my name's glenn shore with the u.s. department of labor, and i've got a question that gets to the main question of why are more people claiming, and i wonder about these substitution effects that might happen. some people talked about the raise -- the rise in the retirement age as being one reason, health insurance going away for some people being another reason. i'm wondering if anybody's investigated the devolution of other social insurance programs like worker's compensation and other things where the state reductions in benefits might be causing some of the increases in d.i. costs? >> i'll mention a couple things. one is welfare reform which the law was passed in 996, i -- 1996, i believe, and the, there's been quite a lot of research on the effect of welfare reform on low-income parents obtaining disability benefits. mostly initially ssi, but to the

extent that they've had some work experience and for fairly young people it doesn't take a lot of work experience to qualify for ssdi. so i think part of the rise in the disability incidence that steve has pointed to for women could be -- and for younger people could be explained by the welfare reform. but i, it may be a fairly small amount. worker's compensation is interesting, interesting controversy about the research in that area. there have been a couple of papers published, one that finds that tightening of worker's compensation state laws, tightening of eligibility and reduction of benefits has increased the number of people on ssdi. there's another paper that finds no relationship. so, and it's very difficult to tell which is correct. but i think it's an important thing to think about.

and, certainly, when people have studied changed in disability policy in other countries, they often see there's a ripple effect in other social insurance systems. so, for instance, there was a tightening of eligibility in austria, i guess, in the early 2000s for older workers, and they have something that's equivalent to our vocational factors, and they increased the age of eligibility for the vocational factors, and they found that more people worked at that age level. but they also found that more unemployment insurance or other types of benefits from the government. so that is an important issue. >> to your very good point about substitution effects, we actually have one of those that operates right within the social security program. when we raised the normal retirement age which lisa mentioned we've already gone up one year, the benefits that are available, say, at age 62 if you take your retirement benefits drop from it used to be 80% of a

so-called full benefit down to 90% once -- 70% once we get up to age 67 or retirement age. however, if you start to receive disability benefits, you get the full benefit. so shifting the retirement benefit from 80 down to 70% provides incentive for people to be a little more inclined to apply for the disability benefit if they may qualify for that, and we take that into account in our projections into the future and certainly see that that has happened so far. >> marty? >> i just want to point out that it's not going to, um, be a complete transfer of people from one program to another though. the social security test is very difficult, it's a very high standard to meet. you have to be unable to perform substantial gainful activity due to a physical or mental impairment that will last one year or result in death. so not everybody who is on the other programs is going to be

able to meet that high of a standard to qualify for social security. so it is not a one to one transfer from other programs into social security or ssi. >> i don't see anymore people at microphones, but i do have one more question for steve, and if you have -- if anybody else does have a question, please, head for the microphone, and we'll start thinking about wrapping up. steve, a question for you about this discussion in the broader context of social security reform and specifically the retirement program. periodically when we hear proposals for further changes in the oasi/d.i. program, we hear about yet another increase in the full retirement anal. what would the impact be, how do the two interact, and do you really make meaningful gains insofar as what it might do with disability? is. >> really good question. usually, when we look rightly or

wrongly at reforming or changing, having legislative changes to the overall social security program we usually look at the two trust funds on a combined basis even though they are legally separate entities. lisa was exactly right. when we raised the normal retirement age, inted of only paying people out of that fund be up to 65, we're now paying them out of that fund up to 66, an extra year. well, that extra year benefits that is paid out of the disability insurance trust fund is one year less paid out of the old age and survivors insurance fund, so it's kind of a trade-off, and that doesn't make a huge difference. what does make a difference, though, was the substitution idea that we were talking about before. when we do raise the normal retirement age, i mean, think of it, when you raise the normal retirement age by a year, if people decide to take the retirement benefit exactly the same age they would other or they can delay starting their benefit by one year, get the same monthly amount but for one

year less which forwards their lifetime benefit by about 6.5%. so raising the normal retirement able clearly does -- age clearly does save money, but there's a little bit of an offset on the disability side just by virtue of the fact that ages 62 up to the normal retirement age, the disability benefit becomes more attractive financially as compared to taking the retirement benefit. and that offsets a little bit of the savings for retirement age. but the net effect clearly is significant savings. >> and is administrative cost an issue just with all the administrative procedure that goes into applying for d.i. as opposed to the almost automatic way that you apply for retirement? >> there is certainly that. there's no question. the administrative costs for disability benefits are significantly higher, clearly, than for -- [inaudible] because of the work that has to be done in making a determination. so there are some costs in that regard. >> if i could just add a couple things to that. one of the -- there's also

discussions about not just increasing the full retirement age, but also the earliest eligibility age which is currently 62. and i think there's been a lot of concern about that precisely because of people with disabilities. and not so much that they're going to end up on ssdi and, in fact, some people would suggest maybe we need to make it easier to get on ssdi for those over 62 if that were to happen. but because there are many people who experience medical problems in their 50s, early 60s that, you know, really find it hard to continue to work. and they're using early retirement benefits because they, you know, really are having a hard time continuing to work. and i think that, you know, some of those people would get into ssdi, but some of them would not. so i think one of the important issues for people with disabilities if there is a reform, retirement policy reform like that is what do you do about those individuals? and there are various ideas.

we had suggested an increase in the earned income tax for people of that age, some kind of a health benefit depending on what happens with the aca, but there are various things you could do that i think would be important to do in the context of a retirement policy reform. >> tom? >> yeah, tom bethel with the national academy of social insurance. question for anybody. on the composition of the ssdi population, has there been a marked change in the ratio of mental health-related disabilities to physical disabilities, and is anyone tracking that in terms of the relationship to economic conditions and perhaps, also, to what lisa was saying about the absence of programs to help people not be on ssdi? anybody? >> well, tom, really actually had a couple very colorful slides in the presentation, we

just didn't have time to get into them. as it turns out, this question has arisen before, and we looked at it very carefully. if you look at people who start to receive disability benefits at any given age, younger people coming on our rolls is a greater proportion of them that come on our rolls with a primary diagnosis of mental illness as opposed to more physical determinants of disability. but what we've found is if you look at people age 25-44, the percentage of them coming on the rolls that are mental and other reasons has been pretty stable over the last 20, 25 years. that's true for higher ages also. there's a much greater proportion of muscular-skeletal impairments, but the distribution of reasons for disability have been quite stable across the ages. where things have really changed, though, is the item mentioned before that we've had a relative shift in the average age at which disability

incidence occurs. we've had more people coming on our rolls at younger ages because people coming on the rolls at younger or ages tend to have a likelihood that they'll come on with a mental impairment. and when people come on at younger ages they have the prospect of staying on a long time, until the age of 66. >> if there are no other comments, i think we're going to wrap up. i want to thank this terrific panel for their comments and thank you for attending. thanks to c-span for covering the event. let me remind you all to, um, fill out your blue evaluation forms and turn them into a staffer before you leave the room. to check the resource on the table on the way out, and i believe that you can also find presentations and other resources about today's event at the nasi web site probably sometime this week, i would guess, as nasi.org. and thanks to everybody. [applause]

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