suggest that the market is declining in its ability to distribute income by selling debt that is an important issue? the question being, it doesn't this in fact show the market's performance? >> the flip side of that charge, the charter says that and come is defined as excluding transfers basement to the payments but also benefits such as employer paid medical benefits. that is a big part of it. that is a different way of getting compensation. if i were to flit around just the other part of it as a transfer payments as a share personal income, their rising dramatically? you bet they are does that mean it's at the expense of the market economy? sennar later it has to be. transfer payments are just what they sound like, transfers from one person to another.

usually from people who have some money to those who have more political clout and can get a big transfer payment like corporate welfare and subsidies on the electric cars a windmills as something. >> next question up in the back there. >> thank you. as far as the progress, the cbo has said that the tax system is effectively progressive. here is a "from 2009. the overall federal tax system is progressive. effective rates generally rise within come. they have shown in four or five different reports over ten years . with the quintile charts and the

top 5 percent in the top 1%, the effective average total federal rate is about 28% on over 250,000. the income under 250,000 is taxed at about 15-20%. this state and local is actually regressive according to the itc charts. but since the federal is the bulk of it overall its progressive, someone. 34% total on the income over to 50. about 25-28 for the end come under that. so the president and the democratic party and the media implying that there is not shared sacrifice is 100 percent erroneous. there is no equivocation on that whatsoever. also, it should be noted for the sake of completeness that there are indirect costs which are,

you know, for regulations, tax system, externalities', and excessive legal system costs. those are about 22%, universal. those are progressively incurred as well. to take 26 for that, added to the 34, a 60 percent effective government-related cost on that income over to 50. if you want to raise the top statutory rate, i think cbo says you get a 3% effective increase. talking about 63%. that is the democratic party position. and i'll just finish up on this. one way they get people to believe this, and they have half the country believing the tax system is somehow regressive, but one method to use, the top 400, more assets than the bottom

half of the country. well, each year we spend for over five and a half trillion, just about 3 billion of indirect cost, so let's say 8 trillion of government-related costs each year. last year 15 trillion. that's 54 percent which is the cost of government they estimate revised. and if you take 25 percent of that 8 trillion as waste, which i certainly believe that there is, that is $2 trillion per year of waste which is more in one year than the bottom 50 percent have in total accumulated assets so for birdies founders to be saying -- >> what is the question? >> i just wanted to put that out. you guys can't comment on it. >> responses to iraq. >> i am going to say that i came to praise, not to bury them.

they actually wrote a great paper in 2006 saying that the effective top income-tax rate has not changed of the last 50 years. the effective top income-tax rate, their data was 30% in 1960, 30% in 2005. even the statutory tax rate went from 91 to 35. >> do i have time for one last question? >> adam paul from the university of southern california. you said to the first speaker to rest today, the real income has fallen throughout the 20th century. so are you saying that all of their growth in income in the united states over 100 years went to the non rich? >> all i'm saying is that we have said get into the database. a nice mile-long, nine years of life. it is time to marry that with

the tea i discussions to see how areas of high taxation bring about lower reported income and areas of low. i have to admit to my do not know what the answer is, but i do know it will be a lot flatter than this shape. >> let me ask one final question for everybody. one area where i assume there would be universal agreement, it would be good to have policies that improve the living standards of the poor. if you were to identify 30 seconds with the policy "everybody proposed? we will start and come down the table. >> shrink government and cut taxes of the rich can pay for everything. in know, the poor will have no tax break whatsoever. >> there are many regulations such as minimum wage loss. you can't get a job.

welfare hurt the poor, that has been proven. we put a work requirement on it. poor people went to work. things like that. i think that the best thing to help the poor would be to reduce their dependency, and we are not moving in that direction. we are providing you don't work too hard or try to hard or go to school to long we will pay for your food, medical care and give you a check and so on and so on. that just keeps you down at the bottom forever. so incentives. it's all about incentives. transfer payments are bad incentive. tax rates are bad incentive. >> not very, but i think i would do three things. i would try to change the aspirations of poor kids and families through a number of -- we should try something until we

get it right. if you provided savings accounts tickets when they were bored, potentially universally to make a progressively funded. so that poor kids could know that if -- estimate they can get into a school they can actually afford to years of it through this savings account when they reached that age. that could shift incentives for kids and families to sort of aspire to do other stuff. not so luckily i think we could reduce unplanned pregnancy. i think that is becoming a big problem. people who don't have a college degree out-of-wedlock births are, i think, now half of all births. if i remembering that right. and then the third thing i would do would be a grand bargain between the left and the right. through a lot more money and education in return for more accountability, more flexibility , things like that.

>> with that, let me give some final announcements. lunch will be on the second level in the conference center which is up the spiral cirque -- staircase that presumably everyone passed in a way to the auditorium. their restrooms on the second floor under way to lunch. look for the yellow wall. i assume that will be obvious. i work here. i should know that. i don't. please join me in thanking our speakers. [applause] >> here on c-span2, each stay at 6:00 p.m. eastern this week we have been taking a look back at some of the luncheon speeches from the national press club.

this afternoon we hear from filmmaker ken burns on his tax entry on prohibition. ended 7:00 we conclude our q&a series focusing on the military with our interview of award carol, editor of military dot com. his website provides news and support the current and former service members and there families. >> you want to come to america illegally caught don't waste your time going across the border or through the desert. it's dangerous. get in an airplane. fly here and overstay your visa. we have no ability to check you are and did you back. the total number of undocumented has been going down for a long time. we solve the problem by having our economy. people don't come here to put their feet up and collect welfare. they come here to work. if there are no jobs that don't come here. they're here and can't find a job, they go back, because america is not a good place to sit around and think the state will support you.

in the case of your son, somebody is going to create the business that he is going to go to work for. all of the numbers show, as we pointed out to mammograms and i think it is because it is as of selecting think. it can't be easy to leave australia, come to the other side of the board literally, give up all your friends and family and everything. everything you know. start out from scratch. and that is what people are willing to do. of course immigrants are going to be more aggressive, more risk takers. that's why they come here. >> the mayor is joined at this event by news corporation ceo rupert murdoch. you can watch their entire discussion tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span. >> this weekend on american history tv 75 years since a millionaire heart failed attempt to circumnavigate the globe. former u.s. air force surgeon an air of kraft crash investigators shares his findings on the life

and disappearance. also this weekend, more from other contenders to our series that looks at key political figures who ran for president and lost the changed political history. >> i draw the line in the dust. segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. >> this and a former alabama governor george wallace. american history tv this weekend on c-span three. >> which is more important, wealth or honor? it is not as is set for years ago, the economy, stupid. it is the kind of nation we are. it's whether we still possess the will and determination to deal with many questions come including economic questions, but certainly not limited to them. all things to not flow from

wealth and poverty. i know this firsthand, and so you. all things flow from doing what is right. [applause] >> look at what happened. we have the lowest combined rate of unemployment, inflation, and home mortgages in 28 years. like what happened. 10 million new jobs. 10 million workers. getting the raise they deserve with the minimum wage law. >> c-span has aired every minute of every major party conventions since 1984. now the countdown to this year's conventions. you can watch our live gavel-to-gavel coverage every minute of the republican and democratic national conventions live on c-span, c-span radio, an austrian online at c-span.org all starting monday, august 47. >> next to my discussion on the

recent book the new deal which chronicles the impact of the $7,807,000,000,000 stimulus program pushed by president obama and passed by congress in 2009. from washington journal, it's 45 minutes. >> now on your screen, the author of this new book, the new new deal, his story of change in the obama era. do you agree with the president that the recovery act, the stimulus bill was the beginning of the end of our economic problems? >> certainly the beginning of the end of our economic disaster people forget that in the fourth quarter of 2008 gdp dropped at an 9% annual rate. that is a depression. at that rate we would have lost an entire canadian economy without but. in january 2009 we lost 800,000 jobs. that turned out to be the worst month. february we passed the recovery

act. as spring we had the greatest improvement in jobs numbers in 30 years. of course it improve from absolutely cataclysmic to just kind of bad. so in that sense it was the end of the utter catastrophe but, of course to my you know, 2 percent growth that we are having today is not fantastic. it's just a lot better than-9% growth. >> overall in your view in your research was the recovery at successful? did achieve what it was supposed to? >> it was. it is an imperfect peace of legislation put together by an imperfect human beings there an extremely imperfect but such a process. but it is called the american recovery in reinvestment act. it did a really jump-start the recovery. not a great recovery, but it created 2-3000000 jobs which did not fill in a billion job whole but was certainly better than it would have been without it. what i read a lot about in the bucket where you get the title is the reinvestment part this

was also the poorest distillation of what obama meant by change we can believe in that he is talked about during the campaign. there were going to have to spend $800 billion. clearly this is an historic downturn that would last for a while and we would need some stimulus for not just six months, but a few years. figured this is the time to do the things he said he would. things like energy that they put in a $90 billion for clean energy and we were to spending a few billion dollars a year. education, race to the top. a landmark education reform bill of the last few decades. health and permission technology were you port $27 billion into essentially taking this pen and paper medical system that we have for your doctor can kill you with his chicken scratch handwriting and in a few years pretty much every american will have an electronic medical record. this kind of changes. in addition to distended middle-class tax cut, victims of

the recession, aid to states of the don't have to lay off teachers and cops. it all pretty much did what it was supposed to do. >> the phrase shovel-ready. >> you know, obama said some of this was not as a shovel-ready as we thought. in a way that is a little bit misleading. it actually kind of voice. and things like cutting checks to states are sending all seniors $250 or getting out food stamps or unemployment benefits, that went out very quickly. that's why you saw that immediate end of the free fall. and then some of the other projects camino, those were the construction projects, the highways, subways, world's largest solar farm, world's largest wind farm, i half dozen of america's first battery

factories for electric vehicles, the health i t stuff, some of that took a little longer, but it was also kind of by design. the obama administration did hit every one of its spending targets on time. >> in your book the new deal you're right, obama fought a lot about the new deal while assembling the recovery act. in some ways it is an apples to bicycle comparison. well president fdr forge the new deal through a barrage of sometimes contradictory initiatives enacted and adjusted over several years to my the stimulus was a single piece of legislation, together and squeezed through congress before most of obama's appointees or even nominated. the new deal was a journey, an era, and more, the recovery act was just a bill on capitol hill. it was an astonishing -- astonishingly big bill. it was more than 50% bigger than the entire new deal.

>> it was a big deal. the first, i was in south beach. the public policy paradise. so i was not part of this washington groupthink. i lived here for many years, but if i was here i doubt i would have thought to write a book like this because in washington this was seen as an $800 billion joke. it was just, you could not even talk about it without rolling your eyes as nickering. it was just considered incredibly uncool. even the president joked after its annual thanksgiving pardon that he had just saved a created for turkey's. as a reason he does use the word stimulus anymore. when i read a lot about energy and said there was $90 billion for clean energy, unprecedented investments in wind, solar, and other renewals and energy efficiency, clean coal and the smart creed and electric vehicles and advanced biofuels and everything, and me to my this was clearly a game changing thing. many think, there is all this

for energy. what else is there? it really did turn out that all of these campaign promises that obama had made, people did not pay that much attention partly because they were interested in his race and is pastor and the ads about him and paris hilton partly because his agenda with basically the standard democratic agenda reversing the bush era and investing in the future. nobody really focused on what he actually want to do policy lies. it turned out before his aides knew where the bathrooms were they went ahead and did it. >> you probably seen this ad. this is mitt romney's at on the recovery act. >> where did all the obama stimulus money go? friends, donors and a campaign supporters, special-interest groups. where did it go? solyndra, 500 million taxpayer dollars. bankrupt. where did the obama stimulus money go? windmills from china, electric

cars from finland. >> 79% of the 2 billion in stimulus grants went to overseas companies. >> i mitt romney, and i approve this message. >> you know, i don't come at this as a cheerleader for obama or anybody. i am a reporter. i have been a mainstream media reporter for 20 years. i follow facts. that at makes my head want to explode. my favorite, and we can talk about solyndra, but you know, sort of a non scandal, an unfortunate $500 million problem . only 1 percent of the clean energy portfolio. the wind turbines from china, that is the one that makes me crazy. actually because of the recovery act to the domestic content of u.s. wind turbine has doubled. it may have tripled. and this was an in sourcing bill rather than an outsourcing bill. it is just a classic example.

you know, you see schumer demagoguing. some of this money went to foreign companies. it does not matter who corporate name is on the polo shirt. the jobs are created in america. it is just a really ludicrous argument. i understand the politics. it sounds like all this money going out, cronyism. the republicans subpoenaed 300,000 pages of documents. i've spoken to the people who made this decision. there was not an iota of political pressure to actually make that loan. and the reason solyndra failed was because solar get really cheap and because the recovery act, more installations have increased since 2008. it is an unfortunate story, but the idea that this somehow, you know, discredits the rest of the recovery act. before the stimulus independent experts predicted that 5-7% would be lost to fraud. they put the toughest investigator in washington in

charge of this thing. he is the guy who busted jack abrams off who found it well regulators sleeping with or executives. so far they have found about $10 million in fraud. he says he is flabbergasted. whether you're a democrat and republican, communist, you have to be excited about just that this has not been the big criminal boondoggle full of cronyism that people expected. >> back to your book before we go to calls, critics often argue that while the new deal left behind iconic monuments, hoover dampen a skyline drive, fort knox, the stimulus bill will leave a monday legacy of sewage plants, repaved pot holes, state employees who have been laid off . even the recovery acts architects feared that like winston churchill's putting elected team. creating its own icon, zero energy border stations in the state of the are battery

factories, and he go from the coast guard headquarters of the washington aside. one-of-a-kind advanced light sources in the new york lab. also restoring all the icons, the brooklyn bridge and the bay bridge. >> i mean, what i go on to say is its main legacy like the new deal will be changed. you know, obama had talked about not just giving the economy out of the gutter but essentially this new economy where you have a better educated work force, lower health care costs, less dependent on fossil fuels and using energy in ways to double oil. having a fairer tax cut with a middle-class pays less. you have a better infrastructure, but research, better transportation. and this was really a huge down payment of just about all those priorities. the one thing, one campaign promise that is not in the recovery act and that the

recovery act is a perfect example that he did not keep it is the idea that he was going to change washington and do things in a different weight. after campaigning as this change the system outsider he really governed as a work the system insider because he realized that, you know, those that don't pass congress don't make change. >> talking about that inside outside changing, campaigning in iowa on wednesday, here's the president. i want to get your reaction. >> we need folks who are working to in source to create jobs here and higher american workers so we sell american products around the world stand with three proud words, made in america. that is what i believe. [applause] on energy, governor romney cassette deck he wants to get rid of the tax credit for wind

energy. does not believe in it. he says, these sources of energy are imaginary. congressman ryan calls and of van. in these to come to iowa and he will find out that there are 7,000 jobs in this state that depend on the wind industry. these jobs are not of fat. they are the future. we should stop giving $4 billion of taxpayer subsidies to oil companies that are making money every time you make to the pump. let's start investing in clean energy that will create jobs and secure our future. that is the difference in the selection. [applause] >> i'll bore you with some numbers. in 2009 when obama took office, this is right after the financial collapse. a lot of these wind and solar companies really do rely on these tax credits. at the time because no investors have any tax liability because they did not have any profit, the industries have religious

shutdown. wind turbines were literally resting in the fields. projects were not getting finished. at that time the federal government energy forecast, we had 25 gigawatts of wind at the time, 20 -- 25 gigawatts of wind. they said that by 2013 we would have 40 gigawatts. it's 2012 and we have 50. seventy-three years we have done with more than they said would take 20. it really has commanded is all because the recovery act essentially rescued those tax credits and turned them into cash grants. i think there ought to be a kind of great debate in this country about the government -- the extent of government intervention into the economy, the green industry a policy where they work on trying to interest the stuff, but instead we have this debate over this kind of bizarre stimulus where we're talking about museums and crony capitalism, snowmaking machines in duluth.

all this stuff that actually wasn't in the stimulus. i felt when i was covering this that it was kind of like this bizarre world think. i was writing about this bill that was on time and under budget. pretty well managed. kind of making the change that was pretty much supposed to happen and i was the only one. vice-president biden even made fun of me. take all your articles to bed. i sleep with them. i love them so much. that did not get into journalism to write the kind of articles that joe biden would want to cuddle with. you know, i do like debunking myths. i do like following facts. this just felt like a gigantic story that was hidden in plain view. >> national correspondent with time magazine, longtime washington post correspondent and the author, this is his second book, the new deal, the hidden story of change in the obamacare. it is your turn to talk with him. we will begin with leonardo, a

democrat, and newark to of newark, new jersey. >> hi. >> my question, i mean, 787 billion, that's a lot of money. i'm just trying to figure out, you know, i mean, you mentioned waste, fraud and abuse. i just like to know, is there any are none, 5%, you know, i mean, there has to be a $787 billion beat nobody can trust anybody with 787 billion expected to do the right thing and be honest. >> i'll tell you, the guy who is overseeing this to my former secret service, hard as cop. what he said is, this is the most scrutinized money in the history of the the pro-government. there have never been so many

guys on it. you can go online and see what is being spent and spent in your neighborhood. that has created a lot of problems for the administration. remember, there is the money being spent inventing congressional districts which turned out to be typos. this is all up in the open. vice-president biden said, every word uc, that is really, there is a reason that 5 percent of this would be lost to fraud and so far has only been less than a percent. if you are a crook you would be an idiot to steal this money. goes to some other money. >> yes. but i am trying to figure out, i have always wanted to ask this question, whether the federal government have the rights to redistribute wealth and invest in the private market? and if it was a good investment

why did they allow private industry to invest in this? of course they wouldn't up because there would be no return. it has always been said that even during coolidge, the early twenties, because of the cats, if you allow the market to sell when people like myself, icky go out and buy these homes. the market would turn around and start right back. the federal government sticks its nose in a place for an absolutely does not belong. people like me, we don't have a chance to invest in these places. ..

his famous line about liquidate real-estate. let's purge the broaden this out of the system. there are people, a lot of people -- in my book they are represented by the former governor of south carolina mark sanford who is an extremely principled conservative who told me that essentially he thinks we should have just had a depression. we needed more pain. if that is what we needed to get through to fix the system we should have done that. the problem is -- i hope i am allowed to see this on c-span but as one of the president's economic aides and a student of the depression told me,

depressions really really suck. they create a believable human suffering and they also create unbelievable deficits. when people don't have jobs or pay taxes corporations that have profits and you do create this incredible vicious cycle where things go down the hill and you end up with hooverbill senator is a decision you had to act with bipartisan support. governor stanford was the only governor in america who tried to turn down the stimulus money and he had to fight republicans in the legislature and ultimately failed. to answer one of your other questions, how come the private sector was allowed to invest and you have it backwards. one of the ways money was given to thousands of companies, the way they've beddedhese companies is due diligence and bringing in independent experts to the energy department with 4500 peer reviewers looking at

these applications also acquired companies to put their own skin in the game. generally matching funds were 50/50. clean energy where you spend $90 billion you raise $100 billion in private capital off the sidelines and that is the idea of the stimulus bill which until january 20, 2009, republicans and democrats agreed when the private sector has gone dark and is in hiding that the public sector needs to jump-start it by putting in money that will start circulating the economy and in 2008 every republican and democratic presidential candidate had a stimulus plan and mitt romney was the largest of the candidates. republicans voted for $750 billion stimulus with tax cuts and spending similar to obama's which was $787 billion. never quite clear how $715 billion was good public policy and $787 billion was

freedom crushing socialism. >> host: "the new new deal" is the new book. this is the cover. this article from the new york times. he erred in seeking stimulus money. what was paul ryan's roll? you write about this in your book. what was his role in opposing the recovery act? >> he is taking aot of grief because he is one of the democrats calling him the cash and trash republican. they trashed the stimulus bill and voted against it but when running around trying to get cash and going to ribbon cuttings claiming credit for projects in their district. there's a certain hypocrisy to that and paul ryan shouldn't have denied that he did try to get that money but not necessarily awful to vote against something and call it bad but then try to get the benefits for your own district. >> host: there was a fight in the republican party.

>> guest: when it was being put together. the republican leadership almost all of it be sided with the document in this book even before president obama took office they realized their halfback to power was they had to oppose everything president stood for no matter what it was even if it was a bill with tax cuts and unemployment benefits and health information technology and things that have always been bipartisan. they realized in a couple years if the economy is bad and we said no that could be our ticket back to power. they were very clever that way. that is what was happening. mike pence was arguing at the time we are republicans. we should be trying to do a new new deal. let's just do tax cuts. eric cantor who is just as conservative said we have republicans who would like to vote for some high waist and

they like concrete or they are moderates and don't want to be seen as being against everything. let's have the $715 billion stimulus and what paul ryan ended up doing was voted for both. he voted for the ideological aversion and the political version and went and trashed obama's version. it is politics. >> host: richard is an independent from north carolina and you are on washington journal with mike grunwald. >> caller: good morning. you sound more like the democratic talking head or strategist than you do a reporter. i have been sitting here listening to you for ten minutes and you haven't said one thing positive about the republicans and you haven't said one thing negative about obama and his stimulus package which has been a total failure.

the unemployment has increased. the money that went -- supposed to go to these shovel ready jobs obama admitted they were knocked shovel ready. as far as solyndra there were several solar panel companies that went under that obama pumped money into. gm is still in trouble. the automobile's turned out to be an automobile that was overprice and self-destructive. it catches on fire. president obama's economy and he is poison to the economy. i don't think he cares about issues. he is an agenda driven president. basically trying to restructure the government under a global

system. >> host: let's get a response from our guest. >> guest: i am a reporter and i am interested in facts. sounds like the caller wouldn't have known a fact if it slapped him over the head. it is true that there are not a lot of nice things to say in this book about republicans. i plead guilty to that except that they were extremely politically shrewd. their strategy -- i have really good republicans forces and they shared it with me how they were able to distort this from the beginning and had a relentless message that they were going to make it look like a big government boondoggle mess no matter what it was. you are wrong about i don't have anything negative to say about obama. in fact i bring some stories in this book the white house are not going to be happy about. i mentioned how there was no political pressure on the

solyndra case. i don't even want to start correcting your facts on that one. it turns out there was a loan where there was an appropriate political pressure for a company that president obama made a promise in ohio during his 2008 campaign that he was going to help these guys and the department of energy rejected their application for a loan just like solyndra's and the guy who rejected it was called into the white house situation room to talk to valerie jetblue edge you know the president made a campaign promise on this and he said i know and she said what is going on and started to explain why they were rejecting a loan and even if you gave them the loan that would not be enough to build their factory and she said if you are sure you better be sure. he was actually shore and to their credit they let him reject the loan and the white house has gone out of their way to help in

other ways. the long winded way of saying i hold no beliefs with the president. i came out as a reporter. the facts don't add up. i don't try to judge overall whether the economy ought to be better than its is for whether it should be at 6% or 5%. everybody would agree they would like a better economy right now. i looked at the facts about this recovery act and how it has been reported and described and even if you read the book you might learn something about what is in it. >> host: mike grunwald writes in "the new new deal" that the stage manager of obama's visit to "the new new deal," quote, can you confirm that his readers will be wearing their normal everyday work clothes and safety gear. want to make sure we have a construction worker. confirm along with a 20 foot or 30 foot american flag and a

robotic arm that will display a solar panel on stage during the president's speech and the team wanted a solid backdrop behind obama preferably not white. something darker and not glossy. republicans claim the reams of solyndra remain a document the administration turned over to investigators exposing the true nature of the obama white house with tammany hall masquerading as an institute. it reveals why south aids obsessing about the political appearances -- white house aides -- chapter not glossy. this week from john in north carolina. $1 trillion willy-nilly at an economy and you expect a few jobs like the gm bailout. what were they? he asks. barbara is a democrat in detroit. go ahead with your question. >> caller: i believe obama has done an excellent job.

all the bills he has put through republicans have stopped. anything to further getting us out of a desperate situation. if he had not bailed out the big three we would have been devastated in detroit. totally devastated but because he bailed the amount we are picking up jobs and we are starting to pick ourselves up if we stick together and work very hard i do believe that he should be taxing the private sector. i think of private-sector is not going to develop jobs. just going to be -- mitt romney should disclose more tax papers that he has. >> host: her stimulus comments?

>> guest: when obama ran in 2008 he had a large political theory which was washington was so broken and so nasty and so partisan and so obsessed with minutia and trivia and idiocy that until you fundamentally fix washington you couldn't really fundamentally change america. then he won the election. the economy fell off a cliff. he had to decide you going to change the capital or just try to get things through the old way? what happened was he proved himself wrong. it turns out you could make a lot of change even while washington was still fundamentally broken and nasty and ridiculous. the recovery act is the approved. like it or not it did big things on energy, education, health care and the way the economy is

structured. these intractable problems we have been talking about for years without making a lot of progress. some people won't like what obama has done. the idea that he certainly hasn't been sitting around twiddling his thumbs. things like the recovery act which set the stage and wasn't pretty. a kind of ugly process. there were deals cut. had three republicans whose votes he needed and half a dozen centrist democrats he couldn't afford to offend and suddenly someone from alaska demanding this or that and arlen specter of pennsylvania, a very dicey deal. we are going to give you that or give you this and doesn't always look good but bottom line is big things happened and the story of the stimulus is a microcosm of the story of the obama of era. the president, policies,

enemies, achievement, difficulty marketing of those achievements and if you pay close attention to what happened in the stimulus nothing else that happened in the obama presidency should have come as a big surprise. >> host: the only problem with stimulus was that it was too small. anyone propose a bigger one? >> guest: there were a few liberal economists talking at the time that it needed to be bigger. very few. in fact a lot -- 387 left-leaning economists including some who regularly complain the stimulus was too small and obama is a whim wrote a letter in november of 2008 demanding that obama and congress pass up $400 billion stimulus. obama got twice that. $50 billion stimulus failed to get through the senate six months before. $800 billion was a pretty big list. absolutely true.

more tax cuts would have put more people in people's pockets and more state aid would protect more teacher and police officer jobs. more public works would have put more unemployed construction workers on the job but as i said there was not political appetite for one penny more than obama could have gone. i interview everybody in those meetings including some people who fought the stimulus should have been bigger and they were like you have three republicans and half a dozen democrats, blanche lincoln wasn't going to go for $800 billion or ben nelson, and mary landrieu plus three republicans, how are you going to get this through congress? the economy was collapsing. they needed to do something. this was an emergency. really not enough time to quibble over a few billion dollars here or there. after words over the next two

years obama did go back and quietly get another $700 billion worth -- would have been helpful if it had been bigger and would have lost fewer public sector jobs. over the obama era of the u.s. have lost public sector jobs while gaining a lot of private sector jobs. you have to deal with the democracy you are given and given that just about as much stimulus as he could. >> host: in princeton, you are on with mike grunwald. >> caller: i have firsthand knowledge. i was in central illinois and for the past two years we have been dotted with these windmills everywhere. these -- you don't know your facts. the company is doing a bid -- >> guest: i said that. the factories are located in the

u.s.. >> caller: the company here is from spain. [talking over each other] >> caller: the most fertile land in the world. these things make people sick. they killed birds. they only produce 5% they estimated of anything. it is a big scene. these companies from spain and affixing the ones in spain because they cannot afford both systems so they are letting their windmills rest out and quit because you always have to have a backup. this has moved over to us and we are fools if we think this wind is going to do something for us. >> guest: the wind industry has its critics but what i will say about the spanish company which in 2008 shutdown most of its u.s. projects. couple in illinois that i know of and a couple in texas.

bj the stimulus pass to the chairman turned around and invested $6 billion in the united states projects so that money was spent in the u.s. regardless of whose name was on the shirt. if you don't white foreign companies doing business in the united states, that is a legitimate position to have but it would be a pretty lonely economy. we welcome foreign investment and we want foreign companies to come here and create jobs. that would be the argument. >> host: the phony green jobs is one of the biggest scams to hit taxpayers in a long time. next call from minnesota. jennifer on the independent line. >> caller: i have been listening to everything going on and they

didn't like -- one of these callers who spoke his view. the government has no right to take my tax payer money or our taxpayer dollars and pick and choose what energy company or what industry is going to survive and what is not. that is for the private sector. you are talking about the stimulus dollars which for one thing was supposed to help people, to create jobs, help the homeowners who were under water and it mostly went to stupid things like -- one thing i saw was a visitor center that was opened and a forest service place for a window built some place or a botanical garden in

hawaii. another thing that is very obvious and very clear that this administration only cares about the public sector. features, you never hear them talk about anybody other than teachers, firefighters and police officers and sometimes construction workers. you never hear them talk about anyone else that they're fighting to get their jobs. toledo's -- i can tell you as an independent and all so sit on a town shipboard in minnesota and i talked to a lot of people. we do not like hearing this divisive -- this administration picking who they want to help. >> host: we got the point. thank you. >> guest: she raised two points. one is this idea that the stimulus invested in the public

sector. it is interesting. the 4 original new deal created these vast armies of public-sector workers that these alphabet agencies, and the obama stimulus did not do that in the private sector. and over the obama years government has shrunk. and if you put money into the private sector this is the question of picking winners and losers which is a legitimate debate we ought to be having. it is unfortunate we have been debating this imaginary stimulus, obama has a thing for the solar industry. what obama did in the energy sector, didn't pick winners and

losers but picked the game. and the reason for -- the u.s. is too dependent on foreign oil. and broiling of a plan that. and volatile energy sources and with the price of oil goes up the economy goes into the tank. and clean energy -- sort of a wave of a future. and solar manufacturers. didn't just invest in solar and wind and geothermal. and making internal combustion engines more efficient and investing in gasoline but also biofuels and just about every

kind of biofuel invested electric vehicles and not just one battery co. but all kinds of technological and entrepreneurial approaches and the idea is the history of innovation has always involved the government. that the biotech industry--there has always been some seating done by the federal government and ultimately eib a is you get these companies going and let them compete against each other and the market will decide who wins and loses and some of them going to lose. 100% of these companies were succeeding that would be something was going wrong because that would mean the government was propping them up after the initial investment but that is not what is happening. you get your money and have to prove that you deserve your money as opposed to the usual entitlement mentality where it is like check the box as the personal did this study, i qualified. i complied with all the regulations so hand me my check. you have to show your project is

worthy and has economic and environmental benefits and you have a solid business plan and they will bring in independent investigators and make choices and some of those choices are going to go back and people will yell at them and that is their game. they know they will get yelled at but it is opposed to the usual way where i gave everybody money. they complied with the rules so it is not our fault. one guy in the white house told me some people that get held grants and other tuition assistance will end up drunks on the street and some companies get tax breaks will end up going under. it has always happened that way. sees get more attention because they are high profile cases. >> host: we scratch the surface of "the new new deal" with dr. michael grunwald. thanks for being on washington journal this morning. >> tonight and q&a washington

post columnist walter pinkus talk about his views on extravagant u.s. spending overseas and criticism of the defense department budget priorities. >> you build a $4 million facility which is about 40 people. and -- you spend $3 million on elementary school. >> more with walter pinkus on c-span's q&a. >> this weekend on american history tv 75 years since amelia earhart's attempt to circumnavigate the globe for u.s. air force flight surgeon and aircraft crash investigator dr. wallace andboard shares feelings on her life and disappearance and more from the contenders. our series that what that key political figures who ran for president and lost but change

political history. >> i draw the line in the dust and cost the gauntlets before the feet of tyranny and i say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever. >> alabama governor george wallace. american history tv this weekend on c-spanread. >> which is more important? her honor. it is not like four years ago. the economy, stupid. it is the kind of nation we are and whether we still possess the determination to deal with many questions including economic questions but certainly not limited to them. all things to not flow from wells or poverty. i know this first hand and so do you. all things flow from doing what is right.

>> look at what has happened. we have the lowest combined rates of unemployment inflation and home mortgages in 28 years. look at what happened. ten million new jobs. ten million workers getting a raise they deserve with the minimum wage law. >> c-span has aired every minute of every major party conventions since 1984 and now we're in the countdown to this year's conventions. live gavel-to-gavel coverage. every minute of the republican and democratic national conventions live on c-span, c-span radio and stream online at c-span.org starting monday, august 27th. >> next documentary filmmaker ken burns talks about his pbs series "prohibition" which chronicles the ratification, implementation and eventual repeal of the eighteenth amendment to the constitution.

he talks about how prohibition became a social experiment for legislating human behavior and he relates the movement to today's political discourse from the national press club. this is an hour. >> thank you. you know that signature style when you see it. that slow hand or zoom across a photo of a confederate soldier, narration of a comfortably familiar voice like tom hanks or morgan freeman perhaps with the sound of harmonicas and banjos set against the backdrop of a historic american tail. it is literally called the ken burns effect. the technique made famous in such documentary's as the civil war, baseball, jazz and the national parks. the creator as a filmmaker known for leveraging american history into a compelling television programming as no one else can

spend. the baltimore sun wrote that he is not only the greatest documentarian of the day but the most influential film maker period. that includes the likes of george lucas and steven spielberg. our guest joins us in part to launch his latest series which began airing last night on pbs. i hope you had an opportunity to see it. like all work highlighting pivotal years in american history like all of his work, this three part series examines the rise and fall of the eighteenth amendment to the u.s. constitution. the season title "prohibition". our guest has a history, called history at table around which americans can all have a civil conversation. with the release of his "prohibition" series this veteran film maker is taking the opportunity to call for a new dan national discourse on stability and democracy. particularly relevant as "prohibition" airs in the midst of this heated prohibition campaign season when the absence of civil discussion is causing

distress. with the prolific record of film innovation and documentary work his films have won 12 many awards and two academy award nominations. among numerous accolades our guest is the recipient of the academy of television arts and sciences lifetime achievement award. this brooklyn-born filmmaker capelin on to the scene in 1981 with a project that explore the world's first steel wire suspension bridge. that film brooklyn bridge. it was his landmark series broadcast in 1990 that was to become the highest rated films series in the american public television history. that is the civil war. our guest won 40 major film and television awards including two emmy awards and two grannys. prohibition is our guest's twenty-second documentary for the public broadcasting system marking a 30 year collaboration with pbs. when the interest of full disclosure of the pbs partnership may rival that of

our guest's relationship with the national press club because he stood at this podium no fewer than six times to talk about his films. remembers who might have missed sunday night's broadcast of "prohibition" press club tonight will screen episode 1 during our special sir easy evening upstairs and members reliable source restaurant. once again please give a warm welcome to mr. ken burns. [applause] >> what a generous and kind introduction. i thought the press was supposed to be balanced and agnostic on this but you jumped right into a speakeasy night i see. in that spirit let's raise our glasses and coast to and intended consequences. i would be remiss if i did not thank the very important people

that bring me, compel me to this tableland this podium and that includes our corporate underwriter bank of america who has been with us five years and has been among the most enlightened underwriters we have seen in 30 years of making films on public television. we also enjoyed the support of the davis foundation, park foundation and a new group that we started called the better angels society. little more on that later. to attract new donors to public broadcasting of and in this case montrone the family. we have long term support from the national endowment for the humanities. they were instrumental in us being able to finish our film on the brooklyn bridge in the late 70s and instrumental in making sure we were able to finish this film.

two other sponsors deserve special note. with out there and longtime support i literally would not be standing here. the first is public broadcasting service itself led by my friend paula krueger who has made a long-term commitment to our films. not only this but others in store and others dating back 21 years. the corporation for public broadcasting takes the cake. they have been supporting us sins the very first film and have been involved in all but one of the films that we have worked on since we started making films. i am so grateful to the corporation for public broadcasting and to its current ceo for their unwavering support. during the last 30 years i have enjoyed as a production partner one of the most distinguished

affiliate's in the pbs system, local washington d.c. a philly for public television. if you are not familiar with how public television works it is a bottom up model in which we depend on local stations to produce programming which is sent upstream and distributed with -- by pbs. it is not a monolithic central network that besides what to show and when they are going to show it and for the last 30 years i have enjoy not only the partnership but the friendship of sharon rockefeller and so great to share this table with her and they are dear friends as well. we couldn't leave home without them. we make a kind of cliche to filmmaking. that it is a collaborative medium. it is. it is important today particularly to acknowledge what i will call a negative space of

creation. i do not mean that pejorative we. a sculptor brings a block of stone for her studio and works on it and what we get to see is the finished product. what she understands in her heart is all that is lying on the floor of the studio. the negative space of creation. that is true in many creative process. certainly in film making were quite often we might have 40 or 50 times as much material as we filmed and collected and can make it into the final film. is the shooting ratio. i have to live in new hampshire and it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. this is very much like documentary filmmaking. i realized given the subject of our film today i might have used kentucky's model which would be a process of distillation in which the ratio is also about the same.

two people are not here. definitely not the negative phase of our creation but positive space and that is my coat director and co-producer who has been in every stage of this production in any way, equal in every decision we made and all aspects of the production and i wish she was here to be able to share in your attention this afternoon. i would like to acknowledge our co-producer who found many of the images and much of the very rare and in many cases never before seen footage that helped to populate this program on "prohibition". not dispensing with those but acknowledging those very real supporters let me try to begin and tell you first of all how honored i am to be back here at the national press club and how honored and delighted i am to be talking about the special

messages our common heritage continually directs our way. let us listen. let us listen. too often we have ignored this joyful historical lawyers becoming in the process blissfully ignorant of the power of those have wives and stories and moments have over this moment and indeed the vast unknown future. i am interested in that power of history and its many varied voices. not the voices of the top down version of our past which convince us that american history is only the story of great men and certainly not those voices that have recently entered our study. voices which seem to suggest that american history is only a catalog of white european crimes. are you interested in listening to voices of a true honest complicated pasts that is unafraid of controversy and tragedy but equally drawn to those stories and moments that suggests an abiding faith in the human spirit and particularly

the unique role this remarkable but sometimes dysfunctional -- more on that later -- republic seems to play in the positive progress of mankind. that quite simply has been mike reid, the men's through which i try to see and share our history for more than 30 years on public broadcasting. i have to admit that in a way we have made the same film over and over again. each film asks one piece of the simple question. who are we? who are we? who are those complicated people who like to call themselves americans? what does an investigation of the past not only where we have been but where we are and where we might be going. each film tries to answer the question it can actually never answer it fully of course. one hopes that with each successive project you have the possibility of a deepening of the question who are we? who are we?

american history is a loud collection of noises that often in the aggregate combine to make the sweetest kind of music and we have tried to listen as much as we can to this music in putting together the films we have made. it is a kind of emotional archaeology's that we are attempting. listening to the ghosts and echoes of an almost inexpressible wide path that paradoxically leads us confidently toward those future verizon that will comprise our destiny as individuals as well as communities and the country and that is what i am interested in. this new project on prohibition, i appeared here 21 years ago for the first time for the civil war and are still at this podium and told you that if i told you i had been working on a film project about the imperial presidency, about new weapons of mass destruction at a level and

seen before, about unscrupulous military contractors who sold shoddy goods to the government at exorbitant processes, a growing feminist movement, you would tell me you have abandoned history and your working on the present moment. but of course those were only a handful of the themes that compelled the story of our history of the civil war. i come back to you again redundant we to begin to tell you that though we have in our mind safe and familiar images of prohibition that now have unfortunately been distilled down into our children's textbooks to a paragraph or two and they seem to be model ts careening around rains like chicago chefs streets with machine guns blasting. the story of the popular and familiar gangsters. or the bob hair short skirts

frolics flapper dancing on the tables of a speakeasy in this new expiration of the literally roaring 20s. we will have ignored at our peril for central themes that for us brought us to the project and seemed to reverberate today. if you know your bible in ecclesiastes 1:9 it says what has been will be again. what has been done will be done again. there is nothing new under the sun. vegas and gentlemen, let me tell you something about prohibition and see if it sounds familiar. this is the story of single issue political campaigns. wedge issue campaigns that metastasize with horrible unintended consequences. this is the story of the demonization of recent immigrant groups to the united states and always the demonization of african-americans. this is the story of on funded

congressional mandates. of the loss of civil discourse. of smear campaigns during our presidential election cycle. about a whole group of people who feel sincerely that they have lost control of their country and want desperately to get it back and will do anything they can to take it back. th is the story of the role of government. what is the precise and correct relationship to its citizens? this is the story of warrantless wiretaps. this is the story of a growing and developing feminist movement. does it all sound familiar? these are only a handful of the themes that animated our interest in the prohibition story. we have made a three part nearly six our series which began broadcasting last night. the first episode is called a nation of drunkards. it details the century of activity in the united states that led up to the passage of

the eighteenth amendment. the temperance movement, the understandable temperance movement in a country awash with alcohol where we were drinking seven times the amount of alcohol we now consume and the problem of drunkenness as they called it then was a huge social problem being addressed first by the clergy and later by a new group of people who were feeling their first agency in this new republican, women. they did not have the right to vote and had no rights at the beginning of the nineteenth century but threw their support of abolition and temperance began to find that voice and achieve that agency and act outside the house in powerful and interesting ways. that movement was of course hijacked by those who fought not just temperance but total abstinence, t total abstinence would be the best thing and a

new modern single issue movement was born that blotted out efforts of the women's christian temperance union and other periodic crusades that were sponsored by women and taken over by the single most effective and powerful lobbying organization in the history of the united states. a group that i had never heard of going into this project called the anti saloon league. its leader wayne b. wheeler was as powerful as any human being has ever been outside of holding public office in the united states and i had never heard of him either. he could make the senate of the united states sits up and beg and he did and they did. it is an interesting and fascinating story as the women's christian temperance union was shoved aside and the anti salute week was a single issue campaign. 1-to-1 bowl.

the elimination of alcohol and they worked tirelessly to do it. and to compromise on nothing and willing to make a licences with anybody if it would advance their goal. when myron t. herrick who with a popular but moderate republican governor of ohio said he thought that local towns should have a voice in what they doing the anti saloon league got him unelected and the democratic challenger who was thought to have no chance in the race elected in his place. it is a fascinating story which seems ultimately modern in any respect. they were turning out tens and tens and tens of anti liquor propaganda every month for their plan in westernville, ohio just north of columbus. is a fascinating story but what is more fascinating is how a

majority of americans come to embrace the notion that we needed an amendment to the constitution that actually limited human freedom when every other amendment to the constitution has actually expanded human freedom. that has been the american model. we have moved forward into our uncertain future by extending to our citizens more rights than they had before. this is the only amendment that actually curtailed those rights. by the turn of the 20th century and in the first two decades of that tumultuous century we found a huge strange collection of people who were for prohibition in some way, shape or form. progressives were for it as well as the conservative anti saloon league. democrats as well as republicans. prohibition came to be seen as a way to solve all of society's hills. if we could just swallow this pill, take this magic bullet

which would change everything, every family would be improved. the slums with empty. men would walk upright the evangelist billy sunday said. women would smile. children would laugh and held would forever be for rent if this amendment went through. industrialists like andrew carnegie and john d. rockefeller were for it because they thought that alcohol weakened the output of their working men. the radical labour union of the i w w, international workers of the world were for it too. they stop prohibition, based on alcohol as a capitalist plot to destroy the working man and joined this odd band wagon towards prohibition. we had the naacp was for it. booker t. washington arguing always and fashionably for a black advancement in the development of a black middle-class saw the obstacle of

alcoholism as central or as a huge enough problem that they needed to join that bandwagon. then the ku klux klan was for it too. they were anti catholic and anti-jewish and anti-black and they feared a black man with a ball with one hand and the ballot in the other. everything coalesced around it and finally as we move into the second decade of the 20th century two things sort of made it a reality. the first was the sixteenth amendment. the anti saloon league shrewdly allied themselves, many would say cynically allied themselves with progressive groups interested in the redistribution of wealth in the united states because there was in that time as we argue and debate today a huge disparity between the halfs and have nots. the gilded age and the robber barons squeezed the middle class. the 4 were rising in their ranks.

the rich were getting richer and the progressive movement wanted a number of agendas to redistribute the wealth in the united states. they thought the best way to do this was to pass an amendment to the constitution that would initiate an income tax. strangely the anti-missile league joined with them because they knew that by supporting this amendment they would insure that the liquor industry, brewers and distillers would no longer have the symbiotic relationship they had with uncle sam because of the that .70% of all internal revenues for the federal government came from taxing beer and spirits. despite local prohibition movements the beer and liquor industries were confident that they would never be cut off from the person most addicted to them which was the federal government. the income tax proved them wrong and they found themselves in deep trouble.

the second event not of the anti saloon league's doing as far as i could tell was the first world war. that of course made in this country all germans, third or second largest immigrant group depended on how you're counting the enemy. that you could in essence equate beer with treason and they did. the government propaganda office and anti saloon league working almost hand in hand were able to convince people of the threat that came from the evil hon not just from without but within the united states. we stoned docks ands to death. german american citizen was killed for no other crime than speaking german over a backyard fence to 8 neighbor. we renamed sauerkraut liberty cabbage. sound familiar? it only took a few more votes and we had passed by huge

overwhelming majority in the house and senate a prohibition amendment. the draws wanted a prohibition amendment because we had come to see sins the civil war that the constitution was much more than a hand book, emanual for making this country run, it was a place in which we could fulfil our utopian dream. this notion of a city on the hill, a more perfect union as the preamble suggests was an unbelievable wind mill and we had begun to initiate amendments which we thought would do good. the prohibition amendment fit into that. so it passed overwhelmingly by the house and the senate and moved on to the state's to ratify it which they did in record time. the west had shrewdly they thought given the drys eight years or seven years to do it and they did it in 13 months.

the ratification. the west had been confident that no amendment could work its way through all of those states passed with the majority required in all of those states and became law but it did in 1919 and it would go into effect a year later in january of 1920. i have just given you a short precis of what you missed last night. tonight is an episode called a nation of -- tomorrow night the third episode which details the second half of the 14 year rule of prohibition is a nation of hypocrites. may i for say that these are titled we did not impose on the material from the comfort of our present position as amateur historians and documentary film makers but what came out of anxiety and descriptions of that

period. a nation of drunkards, a nation of stock laws legally nation of hypocrites. what resonated out of every moment of working on this film was a sense of how little we knew about this period. i spent a lot of time in the 1920s jenne temperature and alongside emancipation and the family made about women's right and away suffrage and a more radical idea was made mainstream by its attachment to temperance. the idea that if you gave women the vote they would help those against alcohol. all of these things i thought i knew. but we were staggered daily by the sense that we did not know anything. that harry truman once said the only thing that is really new is the history you don't know.

this was an extraordinary and fascinating journey into another territory which i hope you have an opportunity to see because it is a different kind of take. we got those gangsters and we got those flappers and we think the film is sexy and exciting and wonderful and dangerous and all of those things but it is deeper because you realize after a while that the focus on all capone makes us forget that ordinary citizens, most of us in this room had we been alive then would have broken the law and ordinary citizens did. journalists and filmmakers, doctors and lawyers and lobbyists and the guy on the corner and the guy around the corner all were breaking the law. one of the things our chief creative consultant told us when we were making the film is, the law that was used to apply the

amendment was draconian in one sense it they find alcohol as one half of 1% content which made german chocolate cake and sauerkraut, liberty cabbage illegal. it also had unusual loopholes for medicinal purposes. lots of doctors wrote prescriptions that only alcohol could apparently cue. and we also had a loophole for sacramental uses. so congregations and temples would grow by tenfold. and while there is often a very precise set of guidelines how you become a priest in the catholic phase, not so certain a roots in the jewish faith and who is to say who is not for who is not a rabbi who is or is not a rabbi and in that case lots of rabbis named oshanahan and ke y

kelly. this is american ingenuity at its best and the unintended consequences are so impressive and exciting that we have to think about them and consider them as we wonder about drugs and the horrible record of organized crime not just in that brief period but still with us. we would not have organized crime without prohibition and of course female alcoholism jumped severe. what we are reminded of too and has compelled good deal of our conversation about this film around the country as we take it around the country is this sense of the loss of civil discourse. i asked why the civil war happened when we were making that documentary series. it happened because we failed to have a genius for. americans think of themselves as uncompromising people but our

genius was for compromise and when that failed we nearly destroy each other. is the periodic loss of our ability to compromise. our willingness not to see that the moral absolutists have it right, that it is all black-and-white, right and wrong. strange and wonderful combination of all sorts of people struggling for one part of the truth. george will said democracy is the politics of the have followed. you never get it all but in prohibition we saw an example where we had a group of self righteous people absolutely convinced they knew what was right and what is wrong, unwilling to compromise, thereby doing their so-called noble experiment to failure and i think the lesson of prohibition whether it is single issue politics in this loss of civil discourse, in all of the ways that i described, demonization of recent immigrants because many of the people doing the

demonization today word there -- words themselves once the victims of the very discrimination. prohibition stands as one of the most effective teachers i ever come across and i so enjoyed the opportunity to be able to work in it. to dive into a sensitive american psyche that is both generous and greedy. ..

vicki for your attention. [applause] >> thank you. thanks again for coming back to the press club. i know that our many members and members of the audience are anxious to use peak is you just did and also to pose some questions. we have those now. that's just take it from where you left off there. when documentarians many years from now turn to for industry and the current moment what do you think there will say let us up to this particularly argumentative time in our history? >> well, i think that we understand that the -- a wedge issue which in retrospect looks to us to be a parent is actually

expedient and politically effective. quite often the shortest distance between what you think c-span2 in getting what you think you what are those sorts of tactics. i think that is our politics have become in large measure due to our complicity and i mean within the establishment of the media have said this piece. it becomes easier and easier for us to become independent, free agents and not participants in a democracy willing to compromise. as long as that happens then we will see the kind of gridlock, the kind of like a compromise, their for the lack of progress that every citizen once regardless of whatever point on the political spectrum the come from. >> you said when we had a chance to speak before and today that in many ways though this does seem very parallel to other parts of our history, and i think since we are in having this time we have a tendency to want to make the most something.

so can you put it in it the kind of context in your view, helen francs compared to other portions of our history? is it as dramatic as it may seem to those of us are living it? >> we are always, because we're living in it, and the most dramatic times ever. this is our bias, great areas of the present is somehow because we are live in it is happening test this is the most important time. those people in the past could not have lived as full a life as we do. that is one of the things that history has that ability to lift that bale and make the distant past to and not only just our distant past, our pre revolutionary colonial history, but 10,000 years ago, we can lift the veil and extend to those human beings there humanists who lived and loved, hated and were read in the same capacity that we do. this is not as tough economic times. and many films and the depression which was the

ultimate in their a prohibition. and in that time, and that very desperate time in some cities the animals in visit were shot and then be distributed to the port. when that happens here please let me know and we can now begin to change our descriptions on recession and depression. the election of 1928 in which al smith both a new wet and catholic was so effectively eviscerated by the dry forces and by other and tolerant forces in america stands as one of the worst election campaigns i've ever seen. it looks very similar to the election of 1800 between john adams and thomas jefferson. and we have had a lot worse and a lot better between. and so i don't like the fact that historians often like to say that things are in cycles or that whenever we don't remember we are condemned to forget. that seems an obvious corollary to the very central theme that i

hope i have made. human nature never changes. we are the same kind of people we work 10,000 years ago. the grievance and the generosity, the hypocrisy and the sincerity exist in equal measures not only between but with dennis. that has to become our struggle. that question who are we is actually a convenient mass to the real question that all of us face regardless of what we are in which is where my, what am i doing here, what as my purpose, when will i leave? >> of a political question. having studied the prohibition era you think any of the modern efforts to implement a constitutional ban such as a ban on gay marriage or abortion can all might be successful? >> one of a lasting positive legacies of prohibition has been our now natural suspicion of the next new good thing, the next new magic bullet which will cure everything, the next panacea.

and so i think we have become dreadfully suspicious of those amendments. if you just pass the buck the blank thing everything will be all right. those single issue groups feel that they can see the whole of american history in the whole of the american political system, all of our problems through the tiny, narrow lanes of this single issue and by doing it everything will be all right. hell will forever be. well, let me tell you. the standing-room-only about lying to get into hell because of the loopholes and the enticements of prohibition, the intended consequences that is sponsored, and a thing that has been a healthy of the american thing. we have gone back to amendments that are merely mechanical. there are about how you keep the machine going, how often you add oil to it, how often you do this , what the president's succession is, when you're going to inaugurate. we are no longer tinkering in the same way, i think in large part because we have this deep

suspicion of people who will try to sell us that solution, and that comes from prohibition. >> at the to address this. do you think it was a product primarily of a conservative or liberal political ideologies? >> let us remember about autism was a huge social problem in the early 19th century. it was a huge social problem in 1920 when we passed prohibition or prohibition went into effect. it is a huge social problem today. we, as a community, as a government, whether you would like to say have obligations to address this problem. and so the reason why the prohibition initially was passed is because that brought a wave of people, no matter what their ulterior motives might have been , sincerely thinking we

could take this big problem of the table. suffered by preston percent of population. remade the unfortunate decision to apply the solution to 100 percent of the people. it did not work. it does not leave us free of the moral obligation to try to improve society. does the role of government, organizations, individuals, churches. that is our role. and so this is not an issue that is left. this is a human issue. >> here is a personal question for a member of our audience. now that you have been dealing with the subject matter for so long we have been asked on the road whether you were a teetotaler or something more let's say energetic in the consumption of all them that. has your own research and production had any effect on your thoughts about that? have had to wear so many hats

that we tend to work long days. i always found that stopping for the drink and everybody else was not conducive to continuing that work for much longer. i decided in the course of prohibition to my just as i did when i was making a fell on the sill of the religious sect that, the shakers. conceived with my co-producer on that film my first of four daughters. it was important for me to balance out that teetotaling aspects of some many of the individuals in our film that i felt compelled to drink and drink significantly during. [laughter] [applause] >> all in the name of creativity >> absolutely. >> absolutely. professional responsibility. >> that leads us to the next question which actually makes me a little frightened. [laughter] we had a presidential candidate vying for the republican

nomination not that long ago as an advocate of legalization of marijuana. what parallels to use the with the violence in mexico? >> as lin and i approached it we would assume, we assume that that would be what we would be dealing with. the parallels with extend that far. they were overwhelmed and essentially pushed aside by all the other parallels that i spoke to. more to our incentive character. these comparisons still remain. their net income @booktv significant. we ought to use the occasion of history, that table around we can still have civil discourse to me be engaged questions. it is our largest cash crop in more than soybeans, corn, wheat. we live in difficult economic times at a source of potential

revenue if it is taxed and regulated. we hope that there could be a concurrent stimulation of the violence attending to its distribution, but i would say that we would have to step back a second and realize that alcohol has been consumed by human beings as long as there have been human beings. there is broad not just popular usage, but acceptance of it in all manners of society. drug use is more and marijuana to be specific is more ace of cultural manifestation that comes and goes in various places at various times. that is quite different. and so applying the same sorts of things that we will move may not be adequate. i would urge those whoever they are who are considering is to proceed slowly and to remember about unintended consequences. the single most difficult aspect of this amount of violence that tended to it is also connected

to cocaine and heroin trade. inextricably connected by pulling marijuana out you don't suddenly lose violent drug lords in mexico or columbia. in fact, who knows what the unintended consequence might be of denying them the marijuana business. and then, i think, if you ask cocaine and heroin to join the same conversation as marijuana, a huge amount vast overwhelming majority of americans cannot go there. you are now back, not so much as core one, but at a very cautious , experimental phase in which you try to figure out the ways of which the decriminalization of marijuana could take place. >> to the extent that your work ultimately it seems always involves the grant question, how honest are we with ourselves about the role of all, all in our society, both for the good and the bad? >> i think we are rarely honest

about anything in our society, whether it is sexuality or faith, whether it is greed or any of the things that have been , you know, tangentially the topic, the energy, if you will, of the subjects of our films. as someone not interested in making or scoring political points in the film, but in sharing the conundrum of american human existence and hoping that the distance from us to that moment provides us with some measure of perspective that we might be able to apply it however each individual the your wishes to apply it to the king current situation printers your question just that, an excellent question. [applause] >> thank you. [laughter] >> of take that in lieu of another answer. >> until they give a speech so

why and a yellow dog democrat. you get it to a democratic and it endorsed president obama, barack cobol for president and produced a video for the two dozen a speech. in light of all of that to another person wants to know how you separate your personal opinion and from your work as a documentarian, steve wants to separate them? >> i want so passionately to separate. my own personal beliefs whenever they might be in all of that question, it merely picked up some things. they don't describe french ship across the political spectrum or conservative aspect to myself that need also, i suppose, to the included in a fair question. but i am interested in the facts . the fact that the battle of gettysburg took place on july july 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of 1863 is not a democratic or

republican questioned. it's a fact. the fact that the women's christian temperance union might be a progressive organization in the anti saloon league might be conceived as a more conservative one into the standards or in how we would describe it for today's people is neither here nor they're in terms of my own political calibrations. so what i do in my spare time is my own business. i will continue to have my own business, but it -- but all of my work for public television has been free of that kind of bias advocacy. in the end that kind of found only preaches to the congregation, and it has been my mission since the very beginning and it has been the fact or response to these funds that they have reached out across the very superficial definition of party lines to the much more important sense of the broadness

and the majesty of our country and spoken to people from every walk of life. if they were merely a reflection of isolated aspects of that question the films would not have the power that i think that they have had. >> the question, i think, a journalist has asked themselves as well as a historian and obviously there are a lot of things that are in common in those pursuits. obviously there are some things upon which all of us will agree in some things that none of us truly agree in some things that are in the middle. when you're looking to present essentially the story how you decide that is okay and that is not. >> that's a very good question. what we do is what any good mutual fund manager would do. we average. we are dependent as a result of the grants we receive not only from the national humanities but other groups to have with this a variety of historical advisers.

they represent a whole spectrum of politically but also academically on any particular subject, and our phones, these are -- there are not wind addressing. they're people that we consult at every juncture, major juncture in the production and come in and help to center and remind you of other things. you know, we had interesting discussions with prohibition in which we were reminded again and again and again and i think had to be reminded that this was as much a progressive movement as it was a conservative movement. it did get hijacked. it became the agenda of a kind of nativist anti-immigrant thing , the notion that we say in the very beginning of our film, nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits which is to say that this is prohibition for someone else and everyone woke up with the worst hangover without having a drink which, as it turns out, it was for them as well as someone else.

we permitted the extraordinary advice and influence of scholars to make sure that gettysburg still remains on the first, second, and third of july 1863. >> so your career has been, as best i can tell, entirely devoted to producing material for public broadcast. >> yes,. >> in this politicized environment in which we live there are real budgetary pressures of the congress and the president working to manage. how fearful argued that some aspects of pubc broadcasting to fall to the budget ax. the other part of that question would be, if it were truly an environment where everybody had to give something of, would it not be fair for public broadcasting to give something up as well? >> these are all important questions, and i wish i had my friend william f. buckley who appeared on public television for 30 years and only on public television for 30 years tell me answer your excellent question.

we have given up, and we continue to give up again and again and again. that means the national town of for the humanities his contribution to the civil war from approached 45 percent and now we often receive we're looking into the due diligence for producing the door stopper, proposals that they still in quite rightfully require receive sometimes less than 10 percent and still receive the largest grant we have given up and given up and given up. i think like prohibition we sometimes fall prey to preconceived notions that permit the discussion to fall into the realm of the cultural wars, if you will. it is so interesting that we are an organization that helps to stiff the country together, we represent a fraction of 1 percent of the budget. we are as central to the lives

of red stairs and perhaps even more so than we are to blue stators which betrays a sense that there is some bias. no one can ever pointed out. i remember during the 90's, the clinton administration railed against public radio and broadcasting. it is often power feels uncomfortable in the face of good journalism. i don't need to be preaching that in this cathedral. rewrote the people could understand that while we had nothing to do with the defense of our country we helped make this country worth defending. everything has to be in the marketplace. in your house is on fire et not call a marketplace. we would like to suggest that this underfunded and quite often much maligned network, pbs and

national public radio, nevertheless producing the best children, the best science, the best nature, the best parts, the best public affairs, and then told the best history on the dial. that's a pretty good record. [applause] >> almost at a time. with some regret this institution has a cathedral to the first amendment. at a time when newspapers are struggling so mightily and in the broadcast on traditional broadcast outlets have also suffered during the downturn, part of that is the digital transmission and part is the economy. let's focus for a moment on newspapers. what does look at newspapers as a source for material, however

board is it in your view, printed or digital, they continue to survive? >> it is essential to the survival of our republic. it is important for our survival. i can tell you, when we began to the publicity, you'd go through a bit cute as city. filled, the size of a football stadium. ego by ten years later. the tumbleweeds were going through, this is terrifying. we now rely on an internet in which with some notable and really excellent exception, a lot of rumor and innuendo. nobody is watching this city councilman to find out if he bought the property adjacent to the thing there are about to buy. that is the role of newspapers. nobody, we have one newspaper in this country that has to representative -- as a reporter in southern sudan.

that is really important, whether we know it and not. we need to have that top to bottom possibility. the great terror of the transformation that is going on, is both the changes in our economic system in which we are extracting more than we are putting in. we are manufacturing less and servicing more. all of them suggest dangerous, dangerous threats on this important institution which, as we know, our founders saw as central to the survival of our public. anything that strengthens these institutions, online and afraid to embrace new forms of distribution and technologies, but let us also be clear that the rumor and opinion is not the same as the dog research. the person who merely offers to push the idea of the line down the road is not important as the

person who is willing to do the difficult work to find out what the truth might be. that is one of the reasons why with many other enticements before me i have remained loyal to public television because i believe that this is a place in which i can exercise whatever talents i have in this area of american history into it to the best of my ability. i have been offered marketplace included no other venue that would permit me to do as steep dive in the subjects that i am interested in without interference from sponsors or interruptions of commercials than any other place in the country. >> i no there are many journalists and people who feel passionately about journalism as you do in our audience today, and we are thankful for those comments. almost out of time. before we ask literally the last questions, a couple of routine housekeeping matters.

reminding us some upcoming lunch and speakers. on the fifth of october congressman ron paul, candid for the gop nomination will be here. later in the month speaking of and tennant delivery of days, tmz harvey levine attack but the changing landscape and entertainment inch covered deck to to before. and something that you are familiar with i believe, and that is the tried and true tradition of presenting you with a token of our appreciation. that is the national press club coffee mug before we ask that last question. thank you for being here. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> one final question. >> i now have half a dozen. >> indeed. and we don't want to see those on the bay. one final question. >> before you do that. my work has always been bottom-up mystery. we don't feel that a top down version is enough, and i think it is important to acknowledge that today is actually mark your birthday. in that spirit of historical investigation i would like

everybody to sing happy birthday . happy birthday. ♪ happy birthday to you. happy birthday, dear bark. happy birthday to you. happy birthday to you. make a good wage. [applause] >> has certainly takes the cake. [laughter] i think you very much for that. i would not have rather been anywhere else in all truthfulness. i appreciate that. my last question as, you know, as you said earlier, you live in the public broadcasting and material. can you share with us a guilty pleasure that you share in the commercial broadcast from or film environment that perhaps we wouldn't have known that ken burns was a fan of?

>> well, you know, my biggest commercial television vice, and it is a vice because i actually travel around the country and found myself stuck at hours in a tolerance. don't have the benefits to iraq commercials. the many commercials that we still do not have in public broadcasting. and i get, i am addicted. i don't mean the of the spinoff, the pure chemistry, income and need as they would say in the burgeoning business law-and-order. even if i had seen them it is sort of like the equivalent of the japanese no drama. it is such a perfect plastic form you can see things over and over again and still marvel at how they connect the dots. i remember doing that the other day when i have something much more important i should have been working on.

i was addicted to that. >> talk about a round of applause for our speaker today. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much for making this day even more special than i would have expected. i would like to thank our national press club staff for organizing today's event. you can find out more about the club. thank you, and we are adjourned. [background noises] >> if you want to come to america illegally, don't waste your time going across the border into the desert. it's dangerous. adjusted on an airplane to fly here, and overstay your visa. we have no ability to check your did you back. the total number of undocumented has been going down for a long

time. we have not solve the problem. we have our economy. they come here to work. if there is no jobs they don't come. if they're here and can't find a job they go back, because america is not a very good place to sit around and think the state is going to support you. in the case of your son someone has to create the business that he is going to go to work for. all of the numbers show, and we pointed out, emigrants and i think it is because it is a self selecting thing. it cannot be easy to leave australia, come to the other side of the world literally to me give up all your friends and family and everything. everything that you know and start out from scratch. that is what people are willing to do. of course immigrants are going to be more aggressive, more risktakers. that is why they come here. >> mayor bloomberg is joined at this event by news corporation ceo rupert murdoch. you can watch their