and if you don't, you get penalized. and that brings me to the expert issue. one of the reasons we need to do a better job of our training programs is so we can get more workers into the tradable sector of the economy. one of the reasons we need more trade agreements is, you know, we take forever and a day to decide to approve one of these trade agreements, and meanwhile the people we're trying to make a deal with have made five other deals. and there's only so slow you can go until you make the perfect the enemy of the good. that bothers me. look what happened with this korea deal. i applaud the approval of that and the colombian trade agreement and the panamanian one, but it took us five years to get this free-trade agreement passed with korea, during which

time this rapidly growing country sbrpd into agreements with the eu, latin-american countries and others with a whole network of trading agreements that we then entered into. so we were following instead of leading. so i think that we have to see this xm issue in the context of this. if you want to be competitive, you have to be. it's just as simple as that. you have to do what it takes to make sure that americans who are able to sell goods and services around the world have the chance to do so. i do not agree with those who say that our country is in permanent decline. it's still a highly entrepreneurial place, one of the easiest places to start a small business. we still have these hotbeds of

innovati innovation. silicon valley is booming again. high-tech in massachusetts is booming again. san diego has the largest number of nobel prize-winning scientists in america, and it's the center of our human genome research. orlando, thanks to disney world, universal's theme park, global entertainment arts video game division, the pentagon and nasa has 100 computer simulation companies. cleveland clinic and the cuyahoga community college are helping to train the toughest of our long-term unemployed, middle-aged, noncollege-educated people, to work in emerging health care jobs that they never would have even entertained a few years ago. we have these innovation centers. they're important. not only that, present company excluded, we're young compared to our long-established competitors. our workforce is younger than europe's. it's younger than japan's.

within 20 years, unless they change both their world one child policy and their immigration policy, we will be a younger workforce than china. and we could accelerate it if we'd stop some of our nutty immigration practices and let people who can create jobs for others come into this country. that's worth something. for those of us who no longer have it, we know youth is worth something. [ laughter ] and having the average age of the workforce be young, if they're well educated, if they're prepared, if they're well supported in a business environment that works, is a very, very big deal. so we're still the largest exporters of goods and services and capital, but china and germany do export more merchandise than we do now. in germany, particularly, has a much higher percentage of its gdp in exports partly because it

is probably the most successful country in the world in involving small and medium-sized businesses in exporting. which is another reason that we should support fred and the xm bank, because of what they do there. now, there are places where we've fallen behind. the quality of our infrastructure is no longer competitive. we rank 24th in the world in the computer down load speeds off the internet. 24th. south korea ranks first. their download speeds are four times america. we rank 15th or 16th in the world now in the percentage of our young adults getting university degrees partly because of the way it's been priced out of the market. i do believe that the student loan reform, which the congress passed and the president signed, when fully implemented will

remedy part of that because it will allow all graduates to pay their loans back as a percentage of their income for up to 20 years so that people can stop dropping out of college because they're afraid they can't pay the loan, and then they can pick jobs based on what they want to do and need to do, not based on the salary they have to have just to pay their loans back. but we have challenges, but we have advantages. meanwhile, we got all these companies, from big to small in america, who are doing great things and have become far, far more productive as a result of the agonizing years we have all just endured. there was never a more important time for us to be competitive in the export markets. and while you can say all you want about in theory,

subsidizing the financing of exports distorts the free market, as a practical matter, when you get on a field in a competition, you either meet the competition or you get beat. i have never been big on unilateral disarmament. i love mutual agreement. and i'd love it if we'd all get rid of our nuclear weapons. i'd love it if a lot of wonderful, good things that happened could happen by mutual and verifiable agreement. but unilateral disarmament is not a very good recipe for success in athletic or economic composition. so i hope in the end this question of the xm bank's reauthorization will not be a political football. it was one thing even the harshest times of partisan

disagreements when i was president that i don't believe we ever had a fight over. no matter what else we were fighting about, i don't think there was ever any disagreement about it. and i think it's important. i also remember that we made an extraordinary effort, partly through fred's leadership at the sba, to harmonize the sba program with the bank program so we could get more small business people in it. when we reauthorize the sba, we said the export loan program would mark like that at the xm bank, so we, in effect, made the xm bank financing bigger. by mid-1997, we had a national export strategy that was focused on medium-sized and smaller companies. and we yankeesed the limiting for them through the worker capital guarantee program with

the xm bank. we created an export assistance system that was nationwide. and between '93 and '97, we more than doubled the export sales that it facilitated. we had an exporter database, direct marketing by 2000 we had 127,000 companies which were used to sign up almost 30,000 new customers. we did a lot of this kind of wo work, and i was thrilled when president obama president obama nominated fred because he'd been at the sba, so i knew that we would try to help the big companies, but they would come to us with what the deal was and it would be fairly straightforwa straightforward. we'd either do it or not, but we didn't have to do a lot of work. what we had to do is to make sure that the medium and smaller companies that could and should be in exporting would be involved in that.

so, yes, 80% of the xm bank's financing by dollar volume goes to larger enterprises like boeing or caterpillar or ge, but the financing for smaller exporters has nearly dwu lly do over the last three years. more than 85% of the transactions are done by the xm bank. and that's very important, because one of the reasons that this kind of work is not so attractive to private banks are the transaction costs involved in the smaller operations. this can make a huge difference. we had a 300% increase in the dollar value of exports by the small business in the '90s. we can do that again on a bigger base if we reauthorize the xm bank. and so i just want to emphasize,

this is not just about big companies with well-known addresses. wichita and toledo have more than 15% of their annual gdp tied to exports. and there are a lot of other towns doing so as well. increasingly, state economic development programs are trying to get into this. north carolina has a particularly aggressive effort through its department of commerce to organize and involve their small businesses and exporting. but there's no mechanism through which what they do can be readily spread to other states unless you have the infrastructure, the xm bank out there, working state after state after state after state, trying to make sure that everybody knows how to do this and what the consequences are. so, again, i would say we live

in a world where everybody's looking for an advantage and yet everybody knows we need rules to keep the advantages from running into excess. so we have the world trade organization and we have a heck of a lot of fights over whether this or that or the other practice violates the wto rules. and this is the world we live in, a dynamic, vibrant world. all i know is this -- although successful countries around the world as defined by growing economies, creating jobs, rising incomes have different political systems and a variety of different economic and social systems, every successful country, every single one, has both a strong economy and an effective government. and they work out some deal appropriate to the circumstances that exist. to make themselves as

competitive as they can possibly be. you cannot cite a single country on the planet that has both the growing economy -- that has a growing economy, rising incomes, and a robust sense of the future that does not have both a vibrant private sector and an effective government. they may have radically different tax structures. they may have radically different social programs. but they don't say the government is intrinsically evil to be as weak as possible, everything they do is wrong, they would always mess up a two-karpa raid, let's just get out of here. there is not a single example. so the president says we're going to double exports. i think that collectively, as a people, we could help him meet that goal and do better. but it's hard for me to see how

it would be done without the xm bank. when so many of our competitors aggressively use subsidized capital to promote their exports and offer export financing on rates and terms that are better than those that appear -- appear to be better than those allowed under international disciplines. so that's really what i want to say. it's not eloquent. it's not philosophical. it's practical. we're in a world where what works best is coordinated competition, because we live in an interdependent world. we can't escape each other. i would not like it, for example, if the water problems now being experienced in china, which are quite severe in a way. part of the yellow river is dry

during part of the year. they've built these two great canals that run from the yangtze to the yellow, and some chinese engineers, not greenpeace, some chinese engineer, fear that the solution to the problem will actually ultimately cause both rivers to be dry parts of the year with calamitous consequences to china and perhaps to its neighbors in southeast asia, because it will press the chinese to consider taking out more of the macon than it should, given the needs of laos and others in the macon river system. you shouldn't want that to happen. we need to live in a world where every year, step by step, there is more shared prosperity and more shared responsibility for our common problems. but we cannot help to create

that world if we continue to allow too much of america's human capital to stagnate because we don't have enough people in the tradable sector, we don't have enough throw, it's not broadly enough shared because they're not working in areas with good wages and growing income. this is a huge issue. so to me, reauthorizing the xm bank will not only create a stronger american economy and help them send a clear signal that we are back in the future business, will help us to do things that will help our neighbors. i'll just give you one example of that. our neighbors in the caribbean have the highest electric rates in the world. in the world. haiti, where i spend a lot of my

life, and the dominican republic, where i've done a lot of work for more than a decade, have probably the highest rates. haiti has the highest electric rates in the caribbean, the poorest country. virtually every caribbean country could be completely energy dependent with solar, wind, geothermal, and west to energy facilities. they could run all their cars on biofuels made in the brazilian system, where you get with sugarcane 9.3 gallons of fuel for every gallon of oil required to produce it. it would change the future of the caribbean, our neighbors, our friends, our partners, and it could be led by american technology and american companies if we could work the financing out. one of the things i plan to spend a lot of time on in the next ten years. but it's just one example.

if we want to do this, given their economic circumstances, even the american jurisdictions in puerto rico and the virgin islands, if we're going to do this, we've got to work the financing. and i could give you 50 other examples. so for those of you who are here from america, whether you're republicans, democrats, or independents, i urge you to ask the congress to reauthorize this at the higher level. for those of you from other countries, i urge you to continue to work to build the kind of trading and investing relationships with us that will give us a chance to do things that every good market does, that benefit our people but also benefit yours, and help you to build modern diverse economies, where we share the prosperity and the responsibility of a 21st century world so full of

opportunities and challenges. i do not think you should be pessimistic, but i do think we should say, let's just get off the dime. let's quick majoring in the minors. let's quit fighting about things that are self-evident. and let's decide that our goal is to create opportunity societies for people and to take those steps which will do it and do it most quickly, most effectively, and most broadly. there will still be plenty of room for honest argument about how to do that, but a lot of very simple decisions will be resolved in a rapid way beginning with reauthorizing the xm bank. thank you very much. [ applause ]

we'll have a break and be back at 12:30 with lunch. see you then.

we have more live events coming up. an aviation conference from the u.s. chamber of commerce. we'll hear from executives with boeing, delta airline, and other representatives of the aviation industry. also coming up live at 2:30 this afternoon on c-span, afghanistan's defense and interior ministers speak at the center for strategic and international studies. they'll talk about their countries' partnership with the u.s. and later tonight here on c-span3, american history tv looks at the battle of hampton

roads at civil war naval flick, also known as the battle of the monitor and merrimac, the first-time combat between ironclad warships. american history tv, tonight at 8:00 eastern here on c-span3. i walked out after the iowa caucus victory and said, game on. i know a lot of folks are going to write, maybe even those at the white house, game over. but this game is a long, long, long, long way from over. we'll continue to fight and make sure we defeat president barack obama, that we win the house back, and that we take the united states senate, and we stand for the values that make us americans, that make us the greatest country in the history of the world, that shining city on the hill, to be a beacon for everybody for freedom around the world. >> with that announcement, rick santorum ended his 2012 presidential bid, a process the former pennsylvania senator

began in 2009. follow the steps he took along the road to the white house online at the c-span video library. with every c-span program since 1987. the carnegie endowment for international peace hosted a conference last week here in washington on islamic political parties and tunisia, morocco, jordan, and libya. in this two-hour discussion, we'll hear from politicians and cabinet members from several arab countries. good morning, ladies and gentlemen. i'm jessica matthews. i'm president of the carnegie endowment for international peace. and it's my very great pleasure to welcome you all to what i think is going to be a really important and wonderful day.

we have the great, good fortune to bring together a dozen islamist leaders from five countries along with, as you can see, hundreds of members of the washington policy community, for some sharing of understanding and questions that really haven't happened before. 16 months ago, a gathering of this sort would have been unthinkable. ben alid, mubarak were all still in power and islamist parties in many cases were banned. today, many arab countries are in transition, and islamist parties are an important part of this historic process of change. in tunisia, morocco, and egypt, islamist parties have won substantial victories at the ballot box, and now or will soon occupy key government