the shift away from our green agenda. would my right honorable friend -- [shouting] -- take the opportunity to scotch these are scurrilous allegations and reaffirm our commitment to be the greenest government ever? >> can i first of all congratulate the honorable lady on her new role in the treasury? she has every ability to make sure that this government delivers on its green commitment. but what i would say to her and all right honorable friend, it is this government that has set up agreeing investment bank with 3 billion pounds to spend. is this government that is committed a billion pounds to carbon capture and storage. we are the first incentive scheme anywhere in the world for renewable he. we're putting money into refurbishing vehicles. we have smart meters and also the first government to introduce a carpet and floor price. these are all steps of a

government that is committed to the green agenda. ..

establishment of an independent body to a coal standard of regulation sew it is never compromised. >> as my right honorable friend will know all fracking operations for shale gas have been suspended while we study the minor tremors that occurred in blackpool last year. the royal society has a full independent review in the risks of fracking. what i can assure my right honorable friend about any shale gas production would have stringent safety and environmental standards and consultation with local communities and would have to fit within our overall energy commitments. >> order. statement. the prime minister. >> thank you, mr. speaker. with permission i would like to make a statement own the report of the hillsborough independent panel. today the bishop of

liverpool, the right reverend james jones is publishing the report. >> here on c-span2 we'll leave the british house of commons as they move on to other legislative business. you are watching prime minister question time aired life wednesdays at 7:00 p.m. eastern while the parliament is in session. for more information click on c span dod original and series, prime minister's questions and legislatetures around the world. watch recent video including programs dealing with other international issues. >> i've been astounded that, you know, for a piece of history that we know so much about, right, columbus kept numerous journals, wrote lots of letters, took four trips to the americas and then on starting with the second trip there were lots of official describes and

army officials and doing lots of writing missionaries we know what happened. 30,000 people had their hands chopped off within 30 years. two million inhabitants of he is pan ol' la by spanish estimates were killed. this is part of human nature. no human being wants to be judged by their darkest day. no change wants to be judged by their darkest day, when nations have dark days we have to acknowledge that. >> the latest government figures peg the unemployment rate at 8.1%. the american enterprise institute recently hosted a discussion of federal programs designed to assist those looking for work. this panel on job training

programs included two business school deans, and a labor department's chief economist. this is an hour 15 minutes. >> welcome back for the third and final session of this conference. we've got three distinguished experts. let me very briefly introduce them. paul decker is president and ceo of mathematical policy research. nationally recognized expert he is, in the design and implementation and execution and evaluation of education workforce development programs. he's one of the nation's leading experts on employment and training programs targeting displace, targeting dislocated workers and other unemployed individuals. he is also the president-elect of the association for public policy and management. betsy stevenson, by the way, paul is to my far right. betsy stevenson, sitting in the middle, is a associate

professor of public policy at the gerald r. ford school of public policy at the university of michigan. among her many past roles she served as the chief economist of the u.s. department of labor from 2010 to 2011. she is as you might have guessed a labor economist. she is published widely in leading economic journals about the impact of public policies on the labor market with a focus on women and families and the value of subjective well-being for policy analysis. some of you may also know her from her many media appearances. among other things she is a columnist for bloomberg view. ken trotsky, to my immediate right, senior associate dean of the gadsden college of business at william b. sturgel professor of economics at the university of kentucky. he is research fellow for

the institute of labor in bonn, germany. his primary research areas are labor and human resources economickings. and his most recent work is focused on evaluating various aspects of the workforce development system in the united states, the role of human capital in promoting economic growth of a region and the impact of tax incentives on the creation of jobs in a region. so without further adieu, let me turn it over to paul. paul? >> thank you, steven. in preparing for these introductory remarks i wanted to conduct a scan of a research literature and get a sense what are the themes we can identify in the literature that can provide us framework for thinking about possible reform. interestingly i went through the same exercise larry did in preparation for his presentation. nice thing is i largely came up with the same findings, my comments, what i will try to do is fit my comments on the edges rather than repeat what larry said already.

but as i said, i came up with three approaches that i thought were worth highlighting based on literature. the three we largely touched on already. the emphasis on sector focused training but generally getting employers more engaged in the training enterprise as a potential key to success. programs that are intensive, comprehensive or customized in providing training and support and the evidence that we see that that can translate into longer term impacts. then finally reemployment assistance and success at those services and in providing at least short term impacts for participants. with respect to sector focus and greater employer engagement, larry is already described the concept here. the employer's more directly engaged in the training enterprise, thereby lower the risk for anybody. the employers are making clear what their needs are. making clear that the training that will translate into a job, the participants

don't have to forecast what the labor demand is. they it right in front of them employer telling them what the jobs they will move into are. positive evidence cuts across different population, different program settings, includes youth, workers, et cetera. and final piece of evidence is the market is already evolving in this direction. a lot of the programs that we've already talked about but it is happening slowly. now one of the reasons it's happening slowly we still need more evidence here how these programs translate into effective, evidence translates into effective programs at the, at the street level. but it is also the skiability issue that harry already mentioned which is in order for these programs be succeful likely to be the case that you have to build strong relationships. you don't want them fleeing when things get tough. so you have to build strong relationships. you have to do that employer by employer and that takes time. a final comment about these,

as you can imagine you bring employers and potential employees closer together as part of this process you can imagine the public sector role evolving over time and maybe becoming smaller over time so the, public agencies could begin to remove themselves from the process and maybe just play the role of providing the right financial incentives to make sure the disadvantaged are served as well as other individuals. second area is training support that is intensive, comprehensive or customized because when we look at programs that have long-term impacts we tend to find they are programs that have one or more of these characteristics. it doesn't work the other direction. we have intensive programs that aren't effective. when we find a long-term effective program they tend to be the intensive ones. again the evidence cuts across different population and program settings. going down to the bottom of the slide you heard folks already mention the ita experiment here.

so i wanted to spend a little bit of time on that. the it experiment was attempt to customized different approaches, to present itas, individual training accounts or training vouchers. essentially this is a random assignment experiment where individuals as they entered the program were randomly assigned and seeking a training account, randomly assigned to one approach or another during the course of the experiment in order to administer their way through the program. essentially the two treatments here, i want to focus are, one we call guided choice and the other we call structured choice. the guided choice is essentially the status quo and there are a variety of characterics of that but one of the critical characterics the local sites tend to fix the amount that is available to spend. it fixed at a farrell limited level. in the course of this experiment about $3,000 per

participant. in contrast we were testings that against what we call structured choice. part of our intention there in structured choice was to provide individual participants with more intensive, more prescriptive counseling. trying to more explicitly steer them to training opportunities that promised a good return on investment. the second aspect of that was to take the, take the cap away. so the if there was a high return training opportunity that promised high return but is expensive the local agency could go ahead provide a individual training account that would fund that training. i say this is critical, turns out this was the primary difference between these two treatments. this differs a little bit from the way larry was talking about this experiment because it really was the amount, it really was the resources that were available here that ended up being the difference as opposed to the style or the amount of the counseling.

so what happened in that comparison? well you see here outcomes in the form of average quarterly earnings measured over long periods, seven plus years after random assignment and you can see that the group was assigned structured choice and those assigned to the traditional guided choice. they're not only sizable earnings differences here, $400 over the entire 7-year period but they tend to persist. those earnings differences are even a little higher in the last two years of the follow-up period. a little more than $500 per participant. now if you think those estimates aren't all that great, on the order of $500 per quarter, it's important to know the cost here. relative terms, structured choice is highly cost effective compared with guided choice. the reason is, they were spending $1200 more per participant than being spent

under guided choice but they were generating those earnings over a long period. if you do a benefit cost calculation 1200 generates benefits of nearly $50,000 per person. fairly minor tweak the way the individual training accounts are ministered. important question how did this come about? we dug into that looking at training. folks assigned the structured choice approach largely received the same training at the same rate as those assigned to guided choice. received training in the same general occupations but they were more likely to choose a private provider, less likely to choose community college as their provider. more likely to finish training earn a degree and find a job directly related to their training. so this is a very apparent success story. despite that, it is worth noting that on a though the workforce investment act allows for the flexibility of switch over to structured choice and these, despite the appeal of these findings

the site so far rejected structured choice. so as an example all the sites that participated in the experiment, soon as the experiment were done reverted back to guided choice. it is not as if we had a groundswell of local areas asking about these findings and contemplating a change in which the way they go about administering itas. this gets to the implementation issue and challenges we face there. the third area, final area has to do with reemployment assistance. we haven't talked much about job search assistance. this is something we fully tested. job research assistance is effective generating short-term impacts on earnings. they don't persist over time but that's okay because these are relatively inexpensive interventions. so they tend to be cost effective based on those earnings impacts, despite the lack of persistence. also works for broad population. surprisingly we see it works for displaced workers.

works for general unemployed population. works for disadvantaged workers in a lot of cases. one thing about these services, job search assistance term can be relatively broad. it includes programs that also provide counseling. they work on the psychology that larry was talking about in his presentation. helps unemployed workers become more realistic what kind of wage they would be reemployed at so they don't run around with unreasonable reservation wage expectations. also counsels them to get that search started as quickly as possible. there is a lot of motivation encouragement aspect to these interventions. final area i want to talk about is reemployment wage supplements. this relates directly to the wage insurance that wade talked about in his presentation. i agree this is an area that is been understudied in the u.s., hasn't been rigorously tested in the u.s. of the has a number of positives going for it including that it's appropriate for older,

longer tenured workers that might not be appropriate for training or shorter horizon for return on that training and also displaced workers tended to find a lot of things that don't work for that population. so it is worth considering new strategies. there is a wage supplement aspect of the trade adjustment assistance program but again getting back to the implementation issues, that wage supplement's rarely been used. perhaps that program is too complicated or made inaccessible in ways that keep people out of it. again, getting back to this issue we have to figure out what are the barriers to implementation here. so in conclusion, for my opening remarks, we have seen promising approaches. we know they're successful models that exist out there that can help us reframe our thinking about reform. we need to continuously test these promised approaches. a lot of them, while they show promise haven't been rigorously tested. we need to rely not only on

studies that are initiated by the department of labor but he have arerage the research that is out there, the new research and evaluation clearinghouse at the department of labor which is modeled what works clearinghouse at the department of education, should it on able to help us do that by applying standards to the research and helping us interpret the research that's out there. we need to address the barriers to implementation and scale that we face and in taking these good ideas and bringing them to the field in an applied sense. and then, just agreeing with comments from jeff smith earlier, we need to improve the performance, program performance metrics if we had better metrics, that would create incentives for local areas to experiment on their own and they would know more about the success of various innovations and be able to adapt according to those results. thank you. >> thank you, paul. thanks. betsy?

>> so i correctly anticipated that all the previous speakers would talk a lot about the details of training programs and the evaluations that have been done. so i wanted to take a slightly different tack in my comments, turns out building what paul was just talking about to talk a little bit about some practical considerations and some of the barriers to implementation. i want to address three issues, the gap between training and the, there's a gap between evaluations and implementing reform. the connection between our unemployment insurance system and employment services and training or the lack thereof. and new needs and in coming out of the great recession. so when a lot of our conversations about training, sort of follow the way i thought about it as a grad student and as a economist before i went to work in the administration, which was, it's pretty simple. you evaluate a training

program and if the workers who get the training are better off than workers who didn't get the training, then it's a good program. if they're not better off, in terms of taking, you know, doing the cost benefit analysis, if the gains from the program don't exceed the cost, then it's not a good program but the reality is much more complicated and i think a lot of that is due that there are a lot of stakeholders unfortunately seem to matter more than the actual workers getting the training. and one thing to start picking on the politicians because they're usually the easiest group to start picking on but politicians typically fighting over how much to spend on job training rather than asking if the marginal dollar on job training provides greater benefit than cost. and as a result, what we often end up seeing is that the evaluations of training programs get used as a political weapon rather than,

or political ammunition rather than guidance for how to improve job training. so, you have some politicians worrying that the evaluation will end up getting their program, end up getting their program that their beloved program killed and also shrink the total pie available for training fund and coming back to something that was said earlier, people are concerned that if the data wasn't right, if the evaluations are more complicated, it is not straightforward, then such evaluations could be used inappropriately where a technocrat might take a deeper look and say, how could this program be improved or should it be scrapped? how should we collect better data to get a better understanding of it. the concern is that, you know, it will come under the line of political fire. so it would be better to do nothing at all rather than to have poorly,

poorly-fathered information. and the, not only do the studies become politicized but often their very design ends up answering the wrong question. how much it costs to government rather than the program has real benefits that exceed the total cost. i'll pick on one evaluation that, that i read right before i actually left the department of labor and it was a recent evaluation of reemployment eligibility assessment programs. so these incorporate jobs, search assistance and i very much had seen much of the evidence suggesting that the job search assistance can be very helpful getting people back to work faster. have been very much in support of these programs. when i looked at the evaluation i was extraordinarily disappointed because what the evaluation did was look to see whether or not the money spend on the reas reduced the amount

of money paid out in unemployment insurance by a greater or lesser extent. now it reduced the amount, they definitely pay for themselves but there's something you have to know. one important aspect of the reemployment and eligibility assessment programs if you get called to come in and be assessed and get job search assistance and you don't show up, then you don't get your unemployment insurance. so what we couldn't tell from that evaluation whether we were simply selecting some people out, which is perhaps a less desirable way to cut spending because you're simply randomly making a barrier for some people that makes them not show up. whether it was successfully reducing fraud or payment errors, which would be a good thing i think. or whether it was actually helping people get jobs. the distinct shuns between these mechanisms for cost reduction are crucial to truly evaluate the policy but they were absent in the evaluation. and i, i think that this, again reflects the fact that some of these evaluations

are designed to answer the question, the political question, rather than perhaps evaluating the question from the perspective of the workers. there are other stakeholders, and jeff actually mentioned these and i think this comes back to what paul was saying and these stakeholders are people like state governors and state agencies and even the grantees. i will share another conversation that i had. i will not share who this conversation was with but one of the things i wanted to do was to encourage more training to be provided to the long-term unemployed and i was told no grantee wants to provide services to those people because they will make their numbers look so bad. the fact that we have a system where people are trying to cherry-pick the easiest to place workers is, or trying to find the workers who the data doesn't accurately identify them as

difficult to place is a problem with the way we're collecting data. and so, the, you know, jeff talked about he could only get two states to participate in evaluation of their wia programs. again this is out, some of this comes out of concern that they will simply look bad. the data collected for wea is not great to do in depth evaluation and comes back to this concern we might be better off knowing nothing at all rather than ending up with something that can be used against us in a way that would hurt our particular state. the so, one of the, i think we really need to think about a solution to this and i will just throw one out there and one idea would be to think about streamline service delivery and training programs a lot more than we currently do and not tie total funding for training to the success of an individual training

program or failure of an individual training program. if instead we had a pot of money for training and we had people like who decided which training programs should be expanded and which should be shrunk. and that was not having any impact on the total almost that was being spent i think we could end up with better programs that were more efficient and, didn't confuse these two particular issues. finally, one thing that just hasn't come up at all and i actually never hear this discussed until i feel i have to bring it up in terms of another important stakeholder that job training interacts with other programs so it is a mistake to overlook that fact when people don't, when we don't have adequate pathway to get people into jobs our disability insurance roles swell and so do our other social safety programs. so when we're doing cost benefit analysis, when we pretend there is not other avenues to government support for people who don't

get into jobs we are ignoring i think a very important aspect of our, of our government system and an important cost that we could be avoiding. certainly in all the discussion of expanding unemployment insurance i found it very remess that we do not have discussion whether that was keeping people off of applying for disability when giving them longer to find jobs, why they were being supported by temporary program like unemployment insurance instead of pushing them into a program that people almost never leave which is disability. so, let me turn into talking a little bit about the idea of unemployment insurance, employment services, and training and why i think they should be linked together. most ui recipients are required to receive employment assistance and more problemicly is not tied

to ui payouts. the despite the fact we spend so much money on employment service that funding per employment person hit all-time low recently, may still be there and fallen in real terms by over 50% since the 0 ace. so we're not, -- '80s. when i hear, let's apply private sector principles to running our government programs i think we've mistakenly taken that to mean let's have everyone of our state agencies operating independently, calling themselves different names so nobody knows how to find employment services from one state to the next and employers can't coordinate across ohio and iowa when instead it should mean what would a private sector company running an unemployment system insurance system do and what would it do to spend dollars to get people actively off unemployment insurance if it saved more money than it cost. we should think about whether job search assistance could actually get people back to work

faster in a way that would be good for the worker and good for our unemployment insurance system. we need to tie those things together. the problem with the reemployment and eligibility assessments there is very little connection between the ui office that's in most states operating those and actually the employment services folks who would actually be able to connect these people with the types of psychological counseling or types of training programs that might actually help them get back into work. not everyone needs all three parts of our employment support system but to divorce them is to lose important and necessary connections. we should think about trying to tie these systems together that is easy to move across states. now the reason i really wanted to come to ui because there have been a number of proposals to reform ui and some of this has recently passed. some of it hasn't and that, i think was able to be done because of the fact that we were outside of the state-based

ui system and in the federal extension of unemployment insurance. messing with the state ui system is very difficult because the states, despite the, the argument that the federal government fund all the administration, the states have most of the control. the federal government doesn't even have the data. not like they're sitting on data and not giving it away out of respect for the state. they're not collecting it from the states. there's very little that the federal government does that is, hamstringing what goes on at the state level and state unemployment insurance benefits are paid simply for a matter of being unemployed through no fault of your own and, meeting the requirements of being actively looking for work, and available for work. but we had, you have a lot more flexibility with a federal program because it's not, i don't know if this word is the right one to say but it is not an entitlement or not paid into the same way the state program is. . .

there is, the other programs that were proposed was wage insurance which larry has already talked about to create a path to retire. in increasing unemployment insurance to cover firms that reduce hours instead of workers and to cover people who want to pursue self-employment or entrepreneurship as well. and support for additional innovative state programs. so while i think it would be great or greater coordination across the states, the same time it's useful to states flexibility to try experiment programs. that's what will give as evaluations, and i think we need to do more of that. and, in fact, that is something, there's a small amount of money that's provided for the in the bill that was passed just in 2012. so i've exceeded my time so i will, i will stop here but let

me make one just last comment on what i think is different in our new system because it hasn't been said, and our current unemployment climate, which is that there's a lot of people who need help getting back into the labor markets that are actually highly skilled. and our system does not have really any space to support them, and losing them is were bad for the economy. it's bad for them. it's just over all bad and we have to find a way to have a system that is going to be able to help those folks as well. >> thanks, betsey. >> when the advantages of going last is i get to sort of build on what everyone has said already, and i think you don't need me to repeat it. i'll highlight a few of the things that i think i had in my notes and want to read the size. one of the things it's important recognize is what we've led off with, particularly some of the stuff there he said this morning is we're at a point right now where we have enormous supply of

long-term unemployed workers, workers who have seen a significant degradation in the skills, given the labor market -- being out of the labor market for so long and in a big increase in productivity of the workers who have remained in the employment market. it would be one of the great and long lasting legacies of both the recent financial crisis and recession, one will begin with for years to come. so i think it's imperative to figure out how we're going to provide him with the skills necessary to get them back in the labor market. in addition to common -- in addition, there's a call particularly and house of representatives that we need that would kill of our job training programs because they aren't particularly effective. differences black long-term workers in this call to give a jobs program is something i certainly don't agree with, i find it surprising that we've had so when public debate about

how, what we need to do with the system to see if we can get it to become more effective. i want to focus on a couple of things today in my comments. one of which is i think the structural or the lack of coherent structure in a federal chopping program, and going to focus on the federal jobs training program. again, i think the lack of rigorous evaluation through this programs, and i will also say the lack of, from a practitioner's standpoint, useful evaluations in the programs. many of the evaluations focus on average impact of the treatment which is appropriate for measuring cost-benefit analysis but not necessary all that appropriate for telling okay, we know it's not working, what parts of it are working how do we improve it. i think so for both historical,

-- imac i do think it's important to recognize that the employment security program and the unemployed interest program, this is a program called, you know, part of the great depression. the management of this program is divided equally between the states and the federal government where at the time constitutional reasons at that point they didn't realize the congress clause to the constitution was not very relevant. they still worried about that, and that's why the program was designed that way and that's why so difficult to get into cooperate with the federal government. there was a gao study that found in fiscal year 2009, nine different federal agencies didn't $18 billion to administer 47 different training programs. the report points out almost all federal employment training programs including those with broader mission such as multipurpose block grants overlap with at least one of the program in that they provide similar services to similar

populations. so they're simply a lot to do with services being provided, and oftentimes not provided any very coherent fashion. at least from my standpoint as someone, and i should make clear there's a lot of people in the room have worked actively in the department of labor. i'm not one of them so i defer to them. they have a lot more information about the structure of these programs and i think betsey made a very important point. but from looking from a standpoint of looking out it doesn't seem that we have a very compared program. for example, the employment security and, tal provides basic job search assistance to unemployed researchers. we provide more extensive long-term employment training programs, and often where i workers are going to get the train programs is more of an accident, who they talk to first, who has money left dinner bucket. as opposed to comprehensive assessment of where they could

receive the most benefit, given the situation that they are in. we in some sense are supposed to fix progress by greenwood said one stop centers were unemployed workers can go and we refer them to the appropriate agency. i think it help but the structure of this one stops is very silent. there's no single agency in charge of a one stops, and in many states. and so the agencies that are in the one stops every different missions. the ds folks are very concerned by getting people on unemployment insurance right administering unemployment administration component. and making, not all the focus on providing job assistance for workers who may have received training in other programs. so there's this disconnect and it's difficult for workers to float in between, providing these different services. some states are notably better than others but i think the gao report points to texas and florida.

they operate a little more efficiently. the basic problem of course is that when you're spending a lot of money on administration you're not spending a lot of money on training, and that's a problem. as has been pointed out, previously it's important recognize at this point most long-term training goes on a community colleges for profit and public, and endless the director of a local web and ahead of the community college are fairly enlightened they operate very much separately, in a vacuum. and that's a problem. it is often the committee colleges there's a disconnect between the community colleges and the jobs training agencies about what skills they think workers taken off a disconnect the community colleges and local important we need to bring everybody in to a conversation

and we need to structure the system in a way that would allow that. i'm not letting anyone. i want to make clear i don't blame anyone for the way the system has evolved. there are a lot of historical reasons, but i think it's imperative that we make redesign the system a focus moving forward so we can fix some of these problems. i'm not saying it's easy because it's going to involve cooperation between states, federal government and congress. but i think one possible solution would be let's take all the training dollars that are currently allocated, and i mean all of them. we at taa, adult education and literacy to run the ged program, job core, the train that goes under tanf, let's bring them all together in a single entity, and one thing we can do with it is provide block grants to states. that takes offense at some of the flexibility across states to be great in these jobs programs

or maybe even better let's get the states out of the way and give it directly, with federal government oversight at the same time requirement whomever is getting these dollars to conduct ongoing rigorous evaluations in a manner that is appropriate. i think with a little bit about the new, the efforts going on to determine what appropriate validation methods but let's continue those efforts, push that on to the states, push the dollars down and ensure that those dollars are spent in a way that continue to be effective here alternatively you want to keep it at the federal level. i'm a little less fond of that idea but that's fine. let's combine all the training programs so it's more seamless so we can move through the. so that somebody is actually answerable to the results of the training program. let me talk a little bit about the evaluation and the lack

thereof. as has been mentioned previous as far as i know the only rigorous evaluation that has been completed it was the one i worked on with caroline peter. we got 12 states to agree. we asked 50. we got 12 to participate. i would give even if they can't release the results on a state-by-state basis, so i can tell you what 12 agree. i think probably the 12 adequate for the ones that were most competent in handling -- handling the data but i don't know that for certain. there's only one rigorous evaluation of taa that i know the false back in 1995, mathematica is undertaking an ongoing one but it's been 20 years since we've looked at it. a variety of other programs, we've heard about rigorous evaluation of job core, so there has been some but we're not doing it on a regular basis. we've heard about the ongoing experiment evaluation. i think external evaluations are

important but i think it's important to recognize, it's very expensive, it takes a long time to complete them. they do an outstanding question of answering, outstanding job of answering the questions they are trying to address that it's often hard to push them a little harder in ancillary and supplemental questions but i think the research suggests not excremental rigorous evaluations are, when done properly, can also provide and supplement the experimental evaluations. and actually answer questions that have been raised in the last experimental evaluation which would push been would feed into the next and they should reach in concert and complement with each other. and i was in much of evaluation done so far is, doesn't often answer the question that would be used for a practitioner. for example, i could do that for dislocated workers it seem as if the training doesn't provide advantages that exceed, that are beneficial. we just don't see wage increases

or employment outcomes that are enormous for dislocated workers. but what i can tell you is why. and i can't say whether it differs among the character richard we might care about. bigger benefits, the longer and were intensive training is? i do know. a bigger benefits based on who's providing the training? to benefits differ between for-profit vocational colleges and public community colleges? i don't know the answer to that either. those are interesting things we should know about, as jeff pointed out the data don't support it. that's probably not surprising because nobody has ever been, nobody seems particularly interested at least at the federal level or in the programs in answering those questions immediately started telling them these are the questions we need to answer a might fill the data out appropriately. so that perhaps we can get a more accurate id. i don't think we know much more about the redistribution ethics. or the marginal effect. what's the impact of the last person in the door, the first

person will be out of the door if we cut the program. again with the average treatment effect tells us what happened if we kill the entire program but that's often what we now think about doing. and we talked about what's known as generally equilibrium effect or factor our which is shifting the chairs around. there has been a little bit of work on that, some of it done in france, a little bit done in candidate not much of it done here. one would think would like to know that, in particular know how those general equilibrium effects vary across the business cycle. as an example i've looked at community colleges in the return to certificates and diplomas and degrees at committee cost of an they feel they're very positive. there has been a study by jacobsen a number of years ago looking for dislocated workers and the benefits they receive from going to community colleges. there has never been a study looking at federally funded workers to attend community

college, and what benefits they get from it when we think that would be an important question to ask. i would argue one of the things that i've seen is that some of the workforce investment force are actually hiring consultants to try to justify their existence because the poor performance measures that are using and so they're meshing the return on investment of the economic impact of providing job training in an area, basically how much additional employment to the benefit i spending tax dollars to hire people. the study i seen provide and almost no information that is useful in evaluating the causal effect of the program nor do they provide an accurate assessment of return on investment or any economic impact. site gives some suggestions would be i would be more modest in suggesting that they stand somewhere between one and a half or 1% of the budget for evaluation. i think the data suggests one-tenth of 1%.

programs conduct periodic evaluations, average treatment effects but also should examine other important measures of program effectiveness. they should require researchers and practitioners to work together to come up with useful evaluations that would help practitioners in designing programs. and steve is asking me to wrap up. and again some of the efforts i think that we have seen, including dol's africa element a clearinghouse, i can would be very valuable and go along with. i think it's imperative that we do this, and less we take seriously trying to reform the workforce development system, i think eventually what will happen is the republicans in the house will succeed and we won't have job training programs. at least federally funded job training programs going forward and i think that would be a bad outcome. thank you. >> thanks, ken. we have time for questions.

i guess i would like to post the first one. one thing that strikes me and listen to all of the presentations today, there's a great deal we don't know from a narrow economic perspectives about what works and what doesn't. we've heard different programming evaluation results, using ferries methodologies. there's issues about how to randomize and so one. but there's also a set of issues, and this came up from the very beginning in areas remarks about even if we can suppose whenever second exactly what worked and what didn't. how we structure the existing system in such a way that those who are operating the programs, those are making decisions about resource allocations have the proper incentives or we, how would we design the incentives in order to make best use of what we have learned. i just want to see, ken hinted at that a little bit. he suggested a couple of alternative strategies but it would mind hearing from the other panelists and maybe ken as

well about that part of the equation. >> okay, so i, i actually, i tried to mention this a little bit that i do think that it would be helpful, first of all, to separate the issue of how much we're going to spend on training with which programs were going to find and not fun. so i think that that's, ken and i are in agreement making a more centralized, more central sort of clearinghouse programs would be a way to do that. and i think making it more, having more of a technocrat but someone, you know, procedure where we to evaluations and we sort of constantly change which training programs working or how we are adjusting it. there's something that's got to happen. so you said as we know what

works, i mean, i can't -- some things have to happen with the performance standards data because that's so bad that it's really high in the sky to say we simply know what works. i guess you also have to assume they have solved that major problem of what's the right data to collect and that they're collecting it. and i think once you've done that and people are going, if you solve the problem i think a lot of the incentives that very stakeholders like like the state agencies and the grantees and all the people running these programs have will become less problematic because they will say oh, you can look at clearly our program. and let me just give you a concrete example of why this performance standards is causing so many problems. the department of labor, there's lots of money put in when i was there for everything we're doing for evaluations of the problem was we were not collecting always very good data. one of the most highly

politicized things that came out of the -- i thinking out of the steam this was green jobs funny to everyone as being a lot of attention to whether this green jobs training was actually working. and i took a look at that data and it looked like it was the worst thing in the world. nobody was getting a job. it took me and my office a long time to get one of the problems was the grantees were only reporting people as employed if they had a new employer. but a large chunk had an employer before the start of the program. so those people being reported as unemployed when you're going back to their employer. so that makes it impossible to judge. we also figured out that they're being asked to report quarterly but it wasn't, they worked being clear about whether the person actually finished the program so they might have finished one aspect of the program but still be entering so we couldn't tell who was finished for the program should be looking for job and he

wasn't. moreover, we couldn't tell when the program if they had completed -- since they couldn't tell whether they complete the program we certainly couldn't tell when they had completed it, so if it had been a quarter, three months since they completed the training and, therefore, hadn't found a job? or had it been two days and it just so happened that they completed the program right at the end of the quarter when they had to report the data? and as a result you had people who really want to continue funding, training for green jobs that are doing everything they can to protect it, and then you people who want to kill it who are trying to use whatever reason they can to kill it and i'm just try to figure out does this thing do anything or not, and they couldn't. i just couldn't. >> so i agree with all that, particularly in terms of performance standards and making sure they provide the right data. i also wanted to touch on more generally the issue about communication and credibility regarding research and training policy.

and mention in the research and evaluation clearinghouse because this is something we have seen change greatly for the department of education, where the department of education generated a lot of research but it wasn't known about out in a school districts and the states, and states and school districts didn't understand how that research could relate to the day-to-day experience and that was a major objective of the clearinghouse. was to provide a venue to communicate out to the states and school districts regarding research. now, it wasn't only about communicate should but it was also about credibility so one of the key aspects of the clearinghouse is standards to the education research that's conducted the way jeff described. it might have an area of study where they find 200 studies and three of them past their standards. and that's good because a local school district had to deal with

a couple new studies and didn't understand research standards, they probably throw up their hands and give up. so it's created credibility for the communicate should to be conducted and i'm glad to see the department of labor is headed in the same direction by piloting similar kind of concept. a couple of other things, too, we have to be realistic about some of the constraints we face out in the field. i talked about before about the ita spirit and the structured choice alternative to the traditional approach, was clearly rejected by local operators. and we have to think carefully about what's the psychology that leads to that kind of decision. so being realistic where to realize we're dealing with human nature. administrators who want to be helpful to people who come in the office, moving a structured

choice direction is likely if they don't have more funding. is likely to be they will concentrate the funding more among a smaller number of participants. it means early in the year they will have to tell people to walk in the door that they don't have any funding to support them. so we need to be cognizant of that and think about how we frame the psychology in order to change the kind of response to it. performance centers would be an easy way to do that. through the performance standards but we know the challenges there so we have to think about other ways. one caveat, or one note that i bought, or warning, that it want to strike with respect to consolidation, i'm all about consolidation, and as we've seen from the numbers, there's a lot of consolidation to be done here in this world. because consolidation isn't

necessarily synonymous with either simplicity or success. so we are dealing with a lot of different cell populations, have different needs, different services. and that's likely to exist regardless how we consolidate. so we send the money out to the states through block grants. my fear is fear which is re-create the same thing, re-create 50 versions of it. and so we have to worry about that, and aspect of worrying about the conflict between consolidation and customization where i think we've shown customization is pretty important in fashioning services are effective for different populations. and if you going to consolidate, where would it be consolidated? we know if we're going to consolidate, the local areas, a light touch, yeah, there's a lot of choice but they can strain it by controlling the dollars that

are available to any participant. so go out and find anything you want but we're only going to give you so many dollars. so even though there's theoretically choices, constraints on choice there. ever going to consolidate services for all populations, that might not be a general strategy. so even if we consolidate we still have to find a way to customize services in a way that matches the different populations. >> just one thing to emphasize the policy of the ministers but it's a real barrier to ask, putting people through a lottery and that something we're getting people used to it, but you hear that a lot that it seems unfair, they don't like the unfairness of it. there's another thing besides just psychology which is their technology. and that's a real barrier for them making changes. because they are often dealing with very, very old technology where they see administrative costs of making changes that are

just enormous because they're dealing with some 1980 computer. >> i certainly agree with the comments paul made about some across the consolidation. i would argue that it's one of the benefits of consolidation, it allows you to be more flexible and allows you to address changes in the labor market, that you might want to take advantage of and allows you to restructure the program in a way towards things that seem to work. it of course there's costs and benefits do everything we do and we have to think about those carefully. i do think, i would argue that right now i think there are to me stakeholders in the room, and consolidation helps focus amongst a few, and allow sort of more somewhat, more identification of who is responsible for providing these services in a clear fashion so that ultimately they are the

ones to get it right. i think now the process is designed in a way that the responsibilities diffuse over so many different individuals that no one really takes ownership and no one has a great deal of responsibility if things are not working. >> thank you. let me open it up to the floor for comments. >> fred with regional economic model, and the question i have is going back what the professor was talking about, general equilibrium for macroeconomic effects of the program. and he commented there wasn't much research. i wanted to know if the others were for my with any research, and also if there is an overall macroeconomic effect of the program, exactly how does it work? you know of companies that are

expanding? is a question of international competition? so, what would the rationale be behind getting changes in either total employment for total gdp? >> let me qualify what i meant by general people are the effects. i'm referring to exit others referred to before, if he trained his work and go out and get a job, they simply are, there's another worker would've gotten that job anyway and that worker is unemployed and to all the advantage of taking a train workers and substituted an untrained worker. you haven't had any overall impact of the labor market. you have redistributed jobs among individuals. when i said general equilibrium that's what i had in mind. but i will do the others kind of address. >> still playing off that definition and general equilibrium, i'm always of two minds on this. one mind that understands the logic of worker displacement,

that could occur by being crowded out by maybe people who jumped further up in the queue, and so as a researcher i understand that a lot appeals, i see in the journal articles, but they think about it as ceo and i think, well, when i read a journal article, agency says there's a fixed number of vacancies and i say, do i have a fixed number of vacancies in my company? now i don't i couldn't say what our number of vacancies are. it's just like kerry described earlier about this margin or you can imagine creating jobs depending on what's in front of you. so the number of vacancies we have in our obsession is pretty fluid. and we would be responsive in different ways to different contents. and so it is important to think about particular how that relates to the interventions that are being contemplated. if you have an intervention that advancing skills, this crowd at

or displacement effect is less likely to occur. if you have something that is just a simple bonus, whoever gets the job first gets an extra check, then you have to be a little more skeptical and think harder about this displacement affects. without further evidence of what larry describing done overseas, i can enter an address you think there's a lot of flexibility in the margin. >> so i will give an answer that is similar but a little bit nerdier wishes, i mean, i think about if we have more productive workers, then we will produce more so that's good for the economy, that will boost overall gdp. but in the question is why, why don't these workers get this training on their own, what's the role for government to participate at all? and so then you have to ask, is

there somebody that we're preventing these people to go to training programs from developing skills on their own. and that barrier, might be credit constraints, they may be that, that they're making mistakes like, so that they are naïve and not investing in the. so i think, you know, program, some aspect of training programs is a transfer or getting to like the worst off workers to try to better their lot. and some of it is that, some of it is we think they would underinvest into skills the skills because of things like credit constraints, or myopia. >> and i just want to make clear, i agree exactly what paul and betsey said. i think those are very, all possible explanation. i just really would like to know what's going on and i don't agree have a lot of evidence. i believe what paul said is true but i don't have a lot of evidence showing it. more important that's kind of what i would like to i would

like evidence so i can make better decisions. >> yes. >> my name is -- my name is nick butterfield and i work for senator portman from ohio, neighboring state to kenneth and betsey. i just wanted to circle back to the consolidation peace on the hill, the 2009 gao report cited frequently the overlap in the current system, and my question for you, is there room for bipartisan consensus on sort of creating more cohesive system, consolidation or whatever you think it may be? i know that in my experience the house approach for sort of more aggressive consolidation of block granting doesn't get it sort of a nonstarter for the democratic side of the eye. so the question is, is there consensus on that? or first step moving forward for consolidation.

>> i guess i would argue you can answer that question better than i can. because i don't spend a lot of time on the hill. my own interactions, i will say my interactions have been in the past trying to convince some republican staffers on the committee that appropriate money for job training not to use our study as a reason to simply kill all job training programs because i don't think that's the appropriate interpretation of our results. what is somewhat ironic is i spent two weeks doing us a couple years ago and then got back at which point i was informed by the state that i no longer had access to the data to continue the work i was doing a gathering the programs from is a legal way which is kind of frustrating. and betsey was very helpful in trying to convince this state that maybe we should continue to give access to these data. she didn't. she wasn't able to succeed since i still don't have them.

so, i might get them again, but after jumping through 4000, 10-foot hurdles as jeff describe it. but i will say i would hope that there's consensus in trying to figure out how to better run and organize these programs. i do think that, i mean i do think again given the problems that we see in long-term unemployment, we've got two choices. we can try to provide skills to these workers who've been out of the labor market for a long time, or we can continue to support them on other types of government support programs, or we could just cut them off and let them drift off on their own but i don't think we do that as a country. so i would think that given the large supply of workers that we see, that are going to need something, this seems like we did think about going. >> so i don't think that block grants is a consolidation.

and that's because i worry about what paul said, now we are defense holiday them to 50 states all running independent things. i worry that in the united states mobility is declining, and we often need to encourage mobility, not discourage it so i would rather have people be able to get the information they need and not have, and have it help them find employment in the united states, not in the state only of ohio. so i think those are separate questions about can we come together and think about a way to consolidate the many federal training programs? and then does the consolidation of all locked grants to states? i think those are two very different policy issues, and i don't, i think on the first one you're going to be able to get a lot of the bipartisan consensus. i think the second one will be harder. >> i would say that i think the consensus can go beyond consolidation. i was interested in this

question, too, preparing for the session, and collected senator coburn's office report from 2011 here and the key recommendations were consolidation, improved performance metrics, conduct mormon records testing and target they need. does seem, those all seem like recommendations for the consensus on how to move ahead. >> we will take two more comments. take your comment and then we're going to go to larry, if we get a microphone. >> i have a question about, well, just to build on dr. stevenson staceyann chin prevent block grant and consolidation, just focusing en bloc grants, block granting coverage want to look at, consolidation that has been pushed down a level. in terms of control. can you point to any examples

where following that, following block granting, all the consolidation, whatever program area where there's actually better data, better quality data coming up, more consistent, more high quality evaluation? my sense is the evidence points in the other direction, there's actually less focus, less commitment, less even interest and less ability to identify outcome data, and certainly systematize it and report on a. but i would be interested to know if there are examples where there's actually a higher quality research and data enterprising merging after block granting, or devolution. >> well, it's not quite the experiment you post, but you can think about the system of education. and the data that was available

there, in a decentralized system before and after federal government stepped in and funded the creation and data systems to the tune of many hundreds of millions of dollars. the data were in pretty rough shape prior to that investment and they are improving now. so that's kind of a reverse experiment. >> yeah, i don't, i don't really know what, about grace examples but i think the only thing i would say is that, i mean, a nice place maybe might even think of in the middle is giving states freedom to run their own experiments, but having those experiments somewhat overseen by the federal government that collects the data, and it's comparing experiment run by different states. once you leave it all up to the states anything it's hard to get that communication which makes it hard for us to actually pull all those evaluations together. >> i certainly would agree with

betsey. that's one of the suggested block grants but in the federal government role in that would be to ensure that states continue to do a rigorous evaluation and would continue to provide guidance on the proper way the evaluations, and require them as part of a continuing receipt of money. that's just one alternative. >> okay. larry katz gets the final question. >> thanks very much. this has been a very helpful panel, and i had, you know, a question about some of the issues in doing evaluations and the data, which is, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about the difficulty in getting stuff from the states. ui records and all the performance issues, but i understand, i can be corrected, there's also a lot of barriers within the federal government and that, in fact, a lot of this

could be done, you know, example the state ui records i would have to all go to hhs as part of the system looking over dead beat dads paying child support and move across state lines. but the legislation that is set up having the ui data at hhs barda from being used how that is interpreted. so that's a real problem with sort of legislation. social security data can be used for evaluating all sorts of programs without having to deal with all the issues. the irs data, so what come it seems me we really need the states to provide, have better templates for the performance data, and to send broke ram and stuff. but it may be that many of the outcomes like whether you're on disability, you know, what you earnings could actually be much more done at the federal level and researchers can access there. so i've just like to hear some response of what we need done by the states and what by the federal government to allow

exactly to be evaluated. >> i mean, i guess i will comment. there certainly are alternative data sources that one could imagine. i guess getting back to jeff's comments, there's not an evaluation culture. having spent a number of years working in the census bureau i can assure you of that. and so it does take a change of mindset that we are collecting the state and we should be using them to help guide policy. i do think there are some alternatives. it is difficult often times for research, you know, in some sense the state told we can't give we can't give you these data data because of rule changes that occurred in the department of labor. i look at the rule change on on the rule changes explicitly said well, if you got some of his interest in this and is hiring a researcher in the state can give them the data. i go back to the state, and apparently their state laws have been changed that says they

can't give me -- you get -- doesn't seem to be an emphasis and a focus on this is an important thing to do. and i think more than anything else that's really what needs to change but if we changed it, maybe we'd start seeing alternative data sources such as social security data, tax data being available to use for their evaluation purposes. >> so there's lots of problems with data sharing within the federal government, and i think that might be actually one of the issues for years census and versus physical agencies have been trying to push legislation forward that would improve data sharing among them. so, you know, if you talk about we need to do better data sharing with researchers were actually need to be sharing across the federal government and that's going to be a first step i think to share with people of the government i think

they that what the department of labor collects in terms of the ui records from the state is very minimal. i was are disappointed to learn i couldn't figure out things like how long was someone's unemployment spell off of information that was collected by the ui office. and when did they, you know, where were they when they stopped, or how many weeks had they been receiving ui when they stopped giving ui. you know who gets a final check and exhaust their benefits but anybody who's not exhausting you don't know much about them. so i think, and i think the excuse was always we couldn't handle the kind of data are questions you want from the state. this technological limitations. i don't know how much hhs is getting, but i certainly never heard of any sharing between hhs and dol on unemployment data.

>> there is something of a data revolution going on in the federal agencies, and it's a different stage, different agencies. it's not being driven by a culture of evaluation or focus on evaluation. it's being driven more by a focus on analytics. but to some extent the private sector is still very much in a development mode analytics, notwithstanding jeff's ice cream shop which apparently was there in 1979. but, you know, that's a whole revolution going on in terms of how do you collect data and use it more effectively and have it more accessible anyway to drive business decisions are that's a lot of what people are facing in the federal agency. they need to make basic kind of basic decisions based on relatively simple data. but because of these strengths they can't get there and it's been a lot of discussion about, for example, how to link cms and soquel security data to link

these issues are so that's how i think is going to look very different in a few years. so stay tuned for that. >> okay. that wraps up the program. i'd like to thank the speakers for excellent set of presentations. thank all of you for coming, and it also like to thank three aei staffers are making sure this event ran smoothly. you might want to stand up, veronica, brittney, and emma bennett. thanks very much and thanks to everybody. [applause] >> president obama will be campaigning in nevada and colorado this week. tonight the president holds a rally in las vegas. you can watch our live road to the white house coverage beginning at 8:25 p.m. eastern here on c-span2, and that c-span.org.

>> former republican senator tom coburn yesterday predicted a downgrade of the u.s. credit rating. a former member of the simpson-bowles fiscal commission, senator coburn also said he's not worried about the so-called fiscal cliff, the series of tax increases and budget cuts scheduled to take effect in january. he focused instead on the financial health of medicare, saying the only way to save the program is to change it. he made his remarks at an event hosted by the ripon society, a group named after the town of ripon, wisconsin, the birthplace of the republican party. >> good morning, all. good morning and thank you all so much for coming out this

morning. for those of you who i've not met, i'm jim conzelman and i'm president of this great organization called the ripon society. as you know we are a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 by congressman's own tom petri. we take our name from a town in wisconsin was the republican party was born over 100 years ago in ripon. we are greeted on the valleys of abraham lincoln and teddy roosevelt, the society was the first major republican organization to support the civil rights act of 1960s, and while in the early '70s the group made its mark by calling for trade with china before nixon made his famous trip. today one of the main goals of our organization is to promote the ideas and principles that we believe made our party and our nation great. these ideas of course are keeping america secure, taxes low and the federal, and having a federal government that is not

only smaller but smarter and more accountable to its people. we did a number of ways and this breakfast is one of those. but before i begin i'd like to take a moment to reflect upon the events of 11 years ago today that changed all of our lives as we know it. would you please join me in a moment of silence to remember those who lost their lives on 9/11 and to those who have sacrificed and continued to risk their lives in defense of our nation today. [silence] >> thank you very much. you all happened have an opportunity to go to new york and you decide to go to ground zero, make sure you do one thing. you have to have tickets so you can go online to do that and it's all about crowd control, the number of folks around the country to go to new york and decide that they want to, you

have to have tickets so please make sure that you do that. it's a great, great opportunity and is one of the most moving things that i've done of late. as for this when there are a number of individuals that i would like to recognize before we start a program. former secretary of transportation the audible jim hurley. jim? [applause] the former under secretary of the department of energy, but albright. [applause] >> and from the office of congressman tom clapp, scott miller. thank you all so much for being with us. finally, i'd like to call your attention to our next upcoming event on thursday september 20 will be hosting a breakfast with senator bob corker of tennessee who will be discussing finance reform legislation and other items being considered before the senate banking, housing and urban affairs committee. please note that i will be on the other side of the capitol so i hope you can join us for that

and as for this once breakfast, we were fortunate enough to be joined by physician, and author, and most importantly a fiscal conservative in the senate who is leading the effort to fight our nation's mounting debt. to introduce him it's my pleasure to bring to the point the president of the health care leadership council, mary greeley. please welcome mary greeley. [applause] >> well, good morning. it is my absolute pleasure to introduce senator tom coburn, the two-term senator from oklahoma. in an era today of what seems an ocular culture of spin in washington, few have done more to restore fiscal restraint and senator coburn. from an early age he understood the value of the dollar, and was able to help grow his small family owned business into one of national prominence. before eventually entering

medical school. upon coming to washington, this businessman turned physician, successfully used his time in office to provide fiscally responsible solutions in an era lacking, i would say such commonsense, accountability. in fact during his first term in the senate, no other senator introduced more amendments to bills to fight wasteful spending, earning him the reputation of an ardent government watchdog, and a crusader or spending transparency. now, his self-imposed term limits in office reinforced his commitment to private sector solutions. this is becoming a valuable symbol against career politicians, and to that end he continues to practice medicine today on a pro bono basis. this morning, senator coburn will be discussing his recent book, the debt bomb, a bold plan to stop washington are bankrupting america.

and his outlook for long-term fiscal solutions. i should add that senator coburn has met with the members of my organization, represent a broad spectrum of health care, health care leadership council, and he's offered to us very innovative, health policy solutions that were not only improve the quality of health care but also help contain costs are so senator is going member of the senate finance committee and comes before us today really integrate unique position to discuss a looming fiscal cliff. so although the congressional quarterly says he wears the epitaph of structures like a badge of honor, i view after coburn as a legislator that is working and fighting hard to find solutions for the important challenges they're facing us us in america today. so please join me in welcoming dr. tom coburn. [applause]

>> well, good morning. you know, the ripon society and oklahoma, we call it the ripon society. it's great to be with you. i think i've had this pleasure before. i want to spend some time, had a discussion with dan cohen at my table about the fiscal cliff, and hope somebody will ask questions about that as we get into it. but i wanted to remind you what admiral mike mullen said about six months before he left us chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. he said the greatest threat to our country is no outside force. it's not china. it's not russia. it is our debt. and at face value that doesn't seem like much, but to think, here is the leader of the strongest military force the world has ever known telling

america that the number one threat to its existence is its debt. that is profound for a military leader to say that. the president didn't say that. the head of the joint chiefs of staff said that. which to me makes it all the more powerful coming from the source of our defense posture. history has shown time and again that debt can bring down republicans. matter of fact, i'll be publics die. if you look at history. name one that hasn't. so the question is, is can america cheat history? can we cheat history and not fall? let me give you some reminders what john adams warned. he said democracy never lasts long.

it soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. there was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. we are on the cusp of being the first generation of americans to break a moral bond that has continued in our country since its founding. and that moral bond is to create a situation and leave the situation for those who follow us, that enhances their opportunity, enhances their liberty, and enhances their freedom so that if they combine personal response good and hard work, those opportunities can bloom into a flower of abundance for them and their generation that follows. this is the first time in history we have ever been where we are. couple of points.

the size of the federal government is twice the size it was 11 years ago. clinton's last budget was $1,636,000,000,000. we were at 3,850,000,000,000 this last year. matter of fact, our deficit last year was bigger than the government was in total 15 years ago. consider lincoln's morning before becoming president that kind of sounds -- warning before becoming president. lincoln said this, at what point shall we expect the approach of danger? by what means shall we fortify against it works shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? never. all the armies of europe, asia

and africa combined with all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, and their military chest with a bonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the ohio are make a crack on the blue ridge mountains. in the thousand years this could not occur. at what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? i answered it come if it is ever to reach us it must spring up amongst us. it cannot come from abroad. if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. as a nation of freemen we must live through all the time, or die by suicide. it's a long winded way of saying exactly the same thing john adams said. and so the question for us as a nation is what we going to do about it? are we going to cheat history? are we going to play the political game? are we gon