biography. >> he trusted the russian people, the soviet people. he trusted them to follow him wherever they had not gone before. he trusted them to follow him as he moved the country toward a market economy. he trusted him to follow him and trust him as he made peace in the cold war against the ancient enemy, the united states. he trusted them too much, it turned out. >> sunday night at 87 on c-span q&a. >> the book is called job creation, how it really works and why government doesn't understand it. the co-author is andy. mr. pozner, you talked about certainty factor.

>> of the time we wrote it back in 2009, there was a lot of uncertainty in the economy because of actions that president obama was taking and it went along progressive lines as opposed to conservative economic lines which i think the business community would've preferred. a respected tax and energy in regulation, there is great uncertainty in the business community about where the government was going and what kind of an obstacle it would become. we tried to convey the message that if the government would provide some positive certainty that we could rise out of the recession and at that point we were really still in the recession until june of 2009. we were out of it technically but i think people thought for years we were out of it in reality. if you want the kind of dynamic economic growth that you're expecting rising out of a recession, you have to do some positive things and give the business community some certainty that you're not going to hurt them.

>> what are some of the measurements. >> the ones that we focus on were tax reform, energy policy , regulatory reform and reduced government spending. this was the only trump agenda item we didn't hit was healthcare reform, but this was 2009 and ten. it was an issue but not as big of an issue as it was today. we didn't know what negative impact it would have on the economy. we covered the other four, spending, tax reform and energy policy. >> you talk about regulatory reform in the book, can you give an example of what you would like to see. >> you can take it to the state, local or federal levels. i was in california at the time so we could spend the entire segment talking about one tenth of the problems businesses have with regulation. on the federal side it was the constant influx of regulation such as out of the department of labor, putting in place new

requirements, making it easier to unionize. they had the blacklisting legislation or regulation, regulations that would require attorneys to disclose the discussions they were having with their employer clients during the course of attempts to unionize. it was called blacklisting. they had the joint employer standard where they try to make franchise jointly liable for the employees of their franchisee which would have completely destroyed the franchise business model. now efforts to increase to $48000, the salary level below which you had to pay overtime pay, even if you had someone who is managing a restaurant and got a bonus. the franchise restaurant business, retail restaurant business in general, economically, all of this was coming down and you anticipated that with the progressive secretary of labor

or secretary of the treasury or very progressive president that we would have some problems in the we were trying to stave those off to get americans working again. job creation isn't what the government envisioned it to be. it isn't something that inevitably occurs. there is a just a cycle that you can lock into and it will go up. that's quite honestly what a lot of the president's advisers thought at the time. they thought coming out of the recession would never get 4% gdp growth. second 2010 the white house projected 4% gdp growth for 2012 thinking they were on this coming out of the recession cycle. we were trying to say with policies you can hit those numbers. without them you can't. >> you write that the unfortunate reality is that federal spending initiatives are actually intended to expand the power and influence of government rather than improve the economy and create jobs. >> this is really the

progressive philosophy. i think probably the only president more progressive than barack obama but the idea has always been to expand government power and put the ability to control the economy in the hands of the elite group of people. clinical appointees, the bureaucracy, and academics, rather than having the direction of the economy. you don't want a crisis to go to waste. anytime there's been a crisis, whether was the early 1900s or the recession, there's always this expansion of government as the solution to our problem. all it really does is prolong those problems because the goal is actually to create economic growth. it's to expand government and empower this group who will then redistribute the benefits. the wealth of the nation, more

equally which instead of raising everybody up it lowers everybody down but they view that as being a more just society. we were trying to say you get a more just society by generating growth. we wanted to help create and make it easier for working-class people to get to the middle class and working class kids to find jobs. >> in your book job creation you focus more on employment rather than unemployment. >> i think that should be the focus. the focus should be how you get people back into work. if you take one of our restaurants that employ about 25 people, i think most people think about it that way.

the restaurant has 25 people. if you go to the circles around us, we hire people to build those restaurants, people to design them. you've got the farmers who attend to the herds and grow the crops, the process is to take the cattle in the crops and turn it into food. the guys who drive the trucks and deliver the food. you've got the circles of restaurants and all of those people by closing go to the movies and send their kids to school and generate economic growth. it can focus on these core businesses and find a way to cause them to grow, you will see real economic growth and then these all overlap. america went from 13 backwoods colonies to a nation that's almost devastated and destroyed in the civil war were hundreds of thousands of americans die to about 1885 the largest economy in the

world and the highest standard of living in the world. this is because of an economic system relied on individuals and consumers and encourage them to not only create economic growth and benefits but to keep that benefit to themselves what which automatically benefits everyone else. inadvertently, it's really a system that works well and we saw someone putting a cork in the hourglass. we want them to take the cork out. >> what is the ke and what's been your role. >> carl started with the hot dog cart in 1941. he's a quintessential example of job creation. by the time i met them in the 1980s he had a half billion dollar public company called

ckg restaurants. carl's jr. in the late '80s, carl's jr. bought hardys, he got in financial trouble in the '90s and into thousand i was the general counsel for the company and they appointed me as ceo, chief executive officer to take the company, to sell it or take it into bankruptcy. i realize very quickly that would've been a mistake. we had 75000 people working for the company would've lost their jobs. we needed to try and fix it. we did fix it and i retired april 2 we had about 3800 restaurants and 44 states in 41 foreign countries. it was a lot of fun.

with president trump being elected, maybe with the proper support in congress, it could really bring back the american dream spirit. however real potential. they said we should leave us alone, they're not can

constructive and then they talked about government and relying on government and maybe it expanded too much. that's not say government doesn't have a role, it does have a role. if i had enough votes to get confirmed i would've stuck it out to the end instead of having this very pleasant conversation and beautiful terrorists hotel. there was such an adverse reaction to betsy devos being approved as secretary of education. i was then identified as the target they were going to go after. it was merciless, dishonest,

some other interview we can talk about the fake news during this confirmation conference but i got beat up pretty bad and it made some of the more liberal republicans a little nervous. once you lose three people and you start out losing two, the people who voted for betsy weren't going to lose for me. you lose one more, the longer this went on, the more the press could focus on these distorted stories and the more nervous it made people. the press reported that i hadn't filed my papers and there must be something wrong. i filed january 1. the office of government ethics which was headed by an obama appointee wouldn't react to my papers. they sat on them for six or seven weeks. in the meantime, the press keeps beating me up, humor makes me the target, some republicans got nervous, and i didn't want the president to

suffer a defeat on the senate floor that had my name attached to it. discretion being the better part, i withdrew. >> you are portrayed or are portrayed as being antiunion. is that a fair assessment. >> it's not. i'm actually very supportive of selective bargaining. look back to the late 1800s and the unions had great victories with respect too, eventually workers compensation. i do think that unions are currently struggling. in the private sector there down to about 6.4%. for the government combined it's only 10.7 and not the 100 year low. it hasn't been that low for a while. the really struggling to be relevant. they're not focusing on what

would create jobs or economic growth. they're trying to focus on things, they're trying to use government to bring them into the union and i think that can get overdone. for example, this big fight for 15. it says it hurts low skilled workers. in san francisco, they're going to 13 and are going to 15. the harvard business school says it causes restaurant closures for every dollar it went up. in seattle the university of washington, a liberal base school came out and set a minimum wage impact had already taken down low skilled workers and deprive them

$125. these people can afford that. this hurts low skilled workers. i started out at baskin-robbins ram glad i had that job. i learned about inventory, showing up on time, working on a team, the things you learn when you have an entry-level job. he gives them something to talk about and draw members in and look like they're helping workers when the really not. i'm not at all posed and i think workers should absolutely have the right to do it. >> does carls or hardys have restaurants in san francisco and how would that affect it this is something that

franchisees employ the employees and they have to pay these wages. they adjust prices, but to the extent it makes it harder to hire people so your labor costs go up because you gotta pay these increased wages. the tendency is to reduce the number of your employees or to reduce their hours which is, or to close restaurants which is exactly what the harvard business school and the university of washington study shows happen. i didn't need studies to show that happen. i did it in the wall street journal, our beds and in forbes and real clear politics and got ridiculed for and characterized as antiunion, although i'm not. i've been trying to convince the restaurant industry to go for an increase in minimum wage. it could go to nine dollars. there is a level at which you can increase the minimum wage where would not kill entry-level jobs. i'm for raising it to that

level. fifteen dollars. hour, it kills jobs, it kills businesses, it hurts low skilled workers, it is bad for the american worker and it's apparently good for union membership but is not good for much else. >> you quote milton freedman in your book, one of the great mistakes is to judge government policies and programs by their intentions rather than the results. >> that's such a good quote. that's exactly how every program should be judged. look at the war on poverty. it hasn't reduce poverty. if we were losing a real war, we would change our tactics. not only did we go with the same tactics that had failed but we put more money into them. this is not a good plan. we have a president who is willing to change that. if we can get some momentum or some energy going i think we can solve a lot of these problems and make a lot of improvements but boy we sure need the senate to get on

board. >> what would have been your first action is labor secretary. >> number one i wanted to implement policies that would help create jobs in the inner-city. adding the policies that have been implement it over the past eight years have actually hurt job growth in the inner-city. i want to see those entry-level jobs back in the city. i want to see people get prepared for the jobs that exist so we would have a apprenticeship and internship. it would've correlated with the private sector. the government spends about 300 million a year jobs trainin training, 30 billion in the private sector spends more. let's coordinate so were not running around doing crazy things when the people that have the jobs and are willing to train people for those jobs

, there's many jobs like computer programmers where they can't even find people. we have 6 million job openings in the country. that's a historic high. there have never been 6 million job openings. we need to train people to fill them, we need to give people in the inner cities into the american dream. they need to get in the process, in the system. i remember when i worked at baskin-robbins when that franchisee manager handed me the key and said you're the assistant general manager, you can open in the morning but i open that store the next morning i bet it was the cleanest restaurant in america. there was such pride and accomplishment, it's the kind of thing that keeps you out of the gang, that keeps you and your family and keeps you in school, the pride that leads you to a better life and a more profitable existence. it keeps you away from the drugs and out of gangs. it does things that are so meaningful to people that are underestimated.

those jobs don't exist in the inner-city because people are afraid to go in. we are not creating the kind of jobs or seeing the growth in inner cities that we should see. i think i would've done everything i could to try to increase that. i also would've attacked the regulatory jungle, i think most people have seen secretary perez as chairman of the democratic party and i think you can probably get a pretty good idea what he was doing for the six years when he was secretary of labor. i think a lot needed to be undone. the department really overreached in a number of areas but we needed to take it down. also, there's a woman's bureau and the department of labor, i would've worked with ivanka trump, i think she has some very good policies with respect to women, particularly family leave. by the time i graduated from law school and i worked my way through law school, my family couldn't help and there wasn't a government program that worked, but i graduated, i remember what it was like getting to the end of the

month and the money didn't make it all the way to the end of the month. there are things i think government can do to help if we relieve the burdens on this, better tax rates, better regulatory policy and get rid of this burdensome healthcare policy that we currently have, we might be able to do some things that really could genuinely help people. i think i would've been very happy in the administration trying to do those things. mick mulvaney has started this project, make america great again, it's tax reform. it's regulatory reform, it's health care reform. it's smarter immigration policy. it's martyr trade policy. it's reduce spending. there is a great article in the wall street journal on exactly that. i wish i were there helping. this is a nice place to be in my wife and i are going to

white next week, she keeps telling me how much better a time or havin having, but i would still love to be in the fight in d.c. and i'm helping the president everywhere i can. >> you talked about health reform or healthcare reform, how did the affordable care act affect one of your franchisees? >> it significantly increased healthcare, health insurance cost for everybody. it not only increased the cost of labor, labor cost have been going up very dramatically, but it also had a dramatic impact on the dollars that people had available to spend because over the past, healthcare costs went up seven or 8% last year and they're projected to go up 16% this year or 25% this year, this is money that people would spend an retail. i wrote an article in the wall street journal last fall about

the restaurant recession. restaurants have really gone into a recession. the research shows if your healthcare insurance premiums went up so that you are 30% more likely not to visit a restaurant as much as you did previously. it isn't just restaurants. it's people were looking to buy clothes. maybe you wear your shirt a year longer than you might otherwise have or getting a new car, anything in retail. people come if you take money out of the system, you are going to hurt retail businesses. across the board, the current system has had a very devastating impact on businesses but it's nowhere near as devastating as it's been on the individuals having to pay these premiums or these incredibly high deductibles. we don't know where it will go next year. we should be very concerned about where the system is taking the cost of healthcare and health insurance. the senate bill is a good solution. i hope the senate does get behind it.

he gets rid of government compulsion, it reinvigorate competition into the system, and is hoping senators can figure that out and get behind it. >> is it fair in the reading of job creation to say you are suspicious of bureaucrats. >> absolutely. again, going back to woodrow wilson, he wrote about this, he believed the way the government should be run wasn't by elected officials, it was by a bureaucracy and by these professionals in the bureaucracy who would execute the function of of government controlled by the political system. i think were seeing a lot of that. there's a lot going on in this branch of government that is beyond the control of the president and congress and certainly beyond the control of congress and somewhat present. look at the problems that president trump has had trying to get the regulatory state,

this bureaucracy under control. you have all of these leaks. you have things coming out that nobody wants to come out. your policy going forward that really shouldn't be going forward. it's become. [inaudible] congress needs to get it under control. i don't trust it. i think it needs to be reduced so that the people that we elect, the people that are responsive to the american people, the people who answer to them are in charge of what's happening since the beginning of the year we have had meaningful regulatory reform under president trump, and even since the election, we've had very meaningful business optimism. there are 624,000 more people working from february to june of this year, according to the

bureau of labor statistics. last year was 47000. of those, there are almost a million more people working full-time jobs. fewer people working part-time jobs. more people working in the jobs are better. we are seeing claims for unemployment insurance at 44 year lows going back to the 70s when there were fewer people in the population. we've seen median household income increase more since january, january just through the first few months of the year it had increased $1300 during the entire seven and a half years of the obama recovery it increased $1000. we've seen more of an increase in median household incomes to the beginning of this year than we saw through seven and half years of the supposed recovery. we have seen household wealth

and net worth hit historic highs. it's never been this high. it's $27 billion higher than it was before the recession. we seen job openings had a record high at 6 million. you've seen how many, i can't remember the number, but maybe 20 or 30 record highs in the new york stock exchange, in the stock market. the stock market prices go up when businesses and investors are enthusiastic about the future. they don't invest on the past, they don't even invest on the present. they invest on where they think, where they believe things are going to go. we are hitting historic highs almost every week. i think we had another one the day before yesterday, maybe even yesterday. i was busy speaking. we are seeing real dynamic economic improvement since president obama, since president trump was inaugurated and that's just with regulatory can you

imagine the kind of growth we will see if we can do tax reform, if we can do healthcare reform, if we can do infrastructure spending, if he can implement the policies that he said he wants to implement, that his entire cabinet, and particularly director mulvaney are advocating that we implement. i think we will easily see 3%. businessmen over perform. i think that was an under promise. we have to wait and see but if you can execute these policies, if congress will work and we can get them in place we will see very dynamic economic growth and gosh, i hope the senate wakes up and sees and smells of roses. politics is a team sport. they have to realize that. they don't seem to be aware that the team sport. we need that kind of commitment to policy and commitment to our objectives and to fulfill the promises we made as republicans. we need the kind of commitment the democrats had in 2008. so far i'm not seeing it. >> who's your co-author. >> is an economist with westmont college at the time he wrote the book. he's now teaching in san

diego. he's a good guy, number of books out there we had a lot of fun writing the book. >> the book came out and thousand nine. >> december 2010. >> is it still relevant today. >> yes. as a matter of fact, it's very relevant. it really talks a lot about how businesses grow and develop. it isn't so much a book for 2010. it's a book for people who wonder how government views, particularly progressives and government view jobs and how they can help the economy and how conservatives and economic principles really work much better to generate growth and help the economy and not just how but why. it explains a great deal of why that's true. i think that's important for people to understand. recently don't learn it in school. it's not something they will teach in an economic class. >> final question, how do you get your message out beyond

the opinion page of the wall street journal and the libertarian convention. >> personally, i'm writing a book and it really is a lot of fun to write. it can be frustrating at times but i wake up in the first thing i want to do is run to the computer. the other way as i go on television regularly, i'm on fox business, cnbc, i've gone on nbc a few times since the election, which i enjoy. i get to reach an audience that's different than the audience i reach on fox or foxbusiness or cnbc. when people asked me to come talk, if i am able to, i go and do it. it's an important message. america has given a lot to me. i really wanted to get back to the country which is why i was willing to serve as secretary of labor, it's not an easy thing to do, it would've been much easier to retire and spend time with my wife and kids which is what i'm ending

up doing, but the reason i wanted to serve, look, there wasn't a country in the history of the world where working-class kid like me could aspire to the level of success i've achieved with any rational chance of achieving it. my grandfather grew up in a country where there wasn't even a path that you could get on that could lead you to this kind of success and personal fulfillment. i think that's a word that needs to get out there and get spread and i'll do everything i can. i'm doing the interview with you and i hope that reaches people as well. >> job creation is the name of the book. it's available online. the subtitle, how it really works and why government doesn't understand it, andy is the co-author. this is the tv on c-span two. >> on wednesday october 25, the personal attorney for president trump, michael cohen will testify before the senate intelligence committee as part of the panels investigation into russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. live coverage on wednesday october