>> you know, when our founding fathers wrote our founding st k documents, they never meant for -- to be making the decisions that affect us in our citizen legislature and i have found in meeting montanans that, you know, they're a little bit afraid of being part of the process, maybe they don't think they're quite smart enough to do it or don't have the right backgrounds and the reason that i stepped up to the plate is to prove that you don't have to be a silver spoon-fed politician, a career politician to represent working families and the best person to represent workers in the state is one of us. >> a follow-up to that just with amanda, i think we're getting to your experience, do you think you have the experiencing to represent the state and the u.s.

senate with one year in the house of representatives and your background as a high school teacher. >> absolutely, i'm sure by now, most folks have read in their local paper about my background growing up in poverty, right here in billings and the adversity that i experienced, most people know that i have dedicated my life to education because it's the pathway to major coming the adversity that i have experienced, the experience that i have had in a working class family in the state of montana absolutely make us the best person to be our voice in the united states senate. >> i do agree that we need to have more of a stenotype legislature serving us back in washington, men and women who have real world experience who can give back. growing up in boseman, my grandma still lives in the same

1,100 square feet home on avenue c until she passed away a few months ago. i started watching a man and woman start a construction business from nothing. we moved about every year and a half to stay a step ahead of the bank, i worked summerless in construction to put mice to montana state engineering. i think we need people growing jobs, i'm the only candidate on this stage who has actually been out there and created hundreds of good high paying jobs right here in montana. >> i just have to apologize to all of the teachers out there for what you have just heard, because we know that teachers are also very important job creators in our state and in our country. cspan's campaign 2014 is bringing you more than 100 debates, this election season. you can see three of them on

wednesday evening, at 8:00 p.m. eastern, the debate for new york's 11th congressional district. between republican incumbent representative michael grimm and his republican challenger. then at 9:00, another new york house debate, with democratic congress map shaun mallony -- achbl finally at 10:00, ill republican rodney davis and an callus debate for the senate seat. c span's 2015 student cam competition is under way, this nation wide competition for middle and high school students will award 150 prizes tote mg $100,000. create a 5 to 7 minute documentary on the topic, the three branches and you. videos need to include cspan programming, show various points

of view and be submitted by january 20, 2015. grab a camera and get started today. >> now a pajt discussion, you'll hear from authors, columnists and journalists, on the economy, health care, social policy, foreign policy and the partisan guide. from the manhattan institute in new york city, this is an hour 25 minutes. >> good evening, everyone. i'm president of the manhattan institute. and i want to thank you for joining us tonight for this discussion of conservatism. al what is the future of conservatism, which ideas should it champion? what policy should it embrace. but with the consequences of

today's policy making falling squarely on the shoulders of the next generation, we have assembled a number of younger leading edge journalists, scholars and authors to engage in a discussion about what the way forward could be. deeply versed in the nuances of policy, they will not always agree, but perhaps through a thoughtful discussion, we will illuminate the finer points of the debate, in a way, it reminds me of the early days of city journal when people like heather mcdonald and george callan and people who would be character e characterized as classic conservatives managed to get together and form a conservative policy that was both coherent and very successful. and i feel like in many ways, we are at the same kind of point in history. in any event, we're glad to bring together this group, despite their youth, as someone corrected me earlier, their resumes are very long, they're

very accomplished for their age. i won't through all of those resumes, but i'm happy to welcome our panelists. mega megan, from bloomberg view, ryan has. showed up. better late than never, a contributed editor of national review. and we're very grateful to our moderator, david brooks, columnist for the new york times, whose very successful career has been directed toward the world of very direct ideas. thank you for being here this evening and thanks to those who will be watching over the internet. we all look forward to -- thank you, larry, imafraid, to take

part in the it panel. i may be too old to be a panelist. i used to be one of these people. now i'm no longer on the leading edge, i'm just a dying ember, fading on the vine and so pleased to be joined by my first research assistant, i worked together, he's just waking up. and so it's good that he rolled out of bed for this. i'm just going to have a bunch of quick questions and hopefully not too long answers and hopefully you'll cut each other off and i'm going to start with you all. so what's the problem with conservatism, and i'm going to mangle conservatism and the republican party together. why are we here? what's the problem? >> i was going to say that we don't know how to make an entrance. i guess in the most general sense i would say that the key

problem at the moment is that conservatism and the republican party are not connecting to the problems of the day, they're not speaking to the american public in terms that make sense with people's experience. some people are finishing sentences that people started in the early 1980s and they have forgotten how those sentences started and how. the republican party is not doing the work of actually connecting their ideas to today's problems and voters know it. so voters consider it to be out of touch because in a lot of ways, it's out of touch. >> do you agree? and if so what are today's problems? >> i think there's a big problem with the coalition that came up in the 1960s and '70s and flowered in the 1980s, solved this specific set of problems that existed in 1979 and we have invol sovmed them and the republicans forgot to declare victory and go home.

so for a long time there was just tax cuts, tax ts, tax cuts, was the one that we could all agree on and that's not speaking to what-especially after the fjt crisis in 2008, people don't want to hear solutions for their parents generation, like long-term unemployment, like feeling like they where not going to move up, that they're not going to do as well, that mobility is contracting. and tax cuts is no longer the answer to that. >> long-term unemployment and mobi mobility are these all issues? >> the anti-seed definite problem are those who represent it the base of the conservative movement. not just in terms of race, but also in regional movement. it's not a southern party, it's an interior party, it's a

coastal party, it's a rural party not an urban party and i think the democratic party has a much more legitimate claim of being a national party than the republican party does and that's one of the reasons why the republican party does a better job to the issue of speak -- >> how much does the white party, i once heard a sentence that may have been forceful, that it's a party looking for white america that's never coming back. i think there is at least among some people, that you hear that among fox a lot. this is not the america i grew up in. so i think that is part of it. i think actually if we step back a minute from that. what we might understand is that conservatives have often prided themselves, longs prided themselves as thinking that we treat everyone as an individual, it's the other party that treats people as a coalition of race and special interests. i don't think that's true anymore. i think there's a degree to which people have become -- it's

become a little bit more about the interest groups that have assembled in the republican coalition and we have to step outside of that and start to realize that some of these people that don't vote republican, they're individuals, too. and we don't treat them as individuals. >> gosh, we have got the policy problem, not addressing, i guess you call it the mobility agenda and then the demographic problem, is there both, is there a third, is one more important than the other? >> i think the core problem is the -- i think the identity problem is a real thing, but i think if you have the right policies, the problem is a lot easier to fix, democrats got through the civil war and c consolidated the vote because they made the correct appeals on policy. it's not just that the republicans are going after problems we can fix, we got -- a new set of problems as ariz ris

there's a been a coupling of ---one of the key proposit n propositions has been worry first about growth and it will raids all votes and so we shouldn't worry too much about retribution, but in fact when you have returns occurring, that proposition is no longer as appealing to the lower and mid classes. i think we thought to the extent that we have beatening the business cycle and we really haven't. we make the same economic policy restrictions in 010, or maybe nothing the government should do about recessions. there are two problems about that one is that it's wrong and the other is that it zunlt appeal to people that are facing very real economic pain in recessions. and again, another one of the sort of proposition that conservatism puts out is you don't want to give into the temptation to do too -- they

also slow economic growth. if we are in a riskier economic situation where we're going to have worse economic cycles that tradeoff of more security for les growth can look pretty appealing, especially live if with what growth we do get is disproportionately at the top. families are exposed to more risk and less reward fwra economic growth. i think it's a very difficult policy question but it's one that needs to be addressed. >> is capitalism broken then? instead of rising tide lifting all growth, and decoupling productivity from wages. >> i think our mental model is wrong. we gravitate towards the wrong solutions. when we think about globalization, we tend to think of a mental model. you see companies that are kind of competing in a more vigorous kind of way, when in fact it's

really the division of labor is now global in scale, yet you still have hierarchies, you still have the more privileged part of labor where value is -- what happened the big change that happened and you have less privileged parts. the change that happened after the late 1980's is that many countries became integrated and specialized in the division of labor. the most privileged and best places to be in that division of labor are still the united states and in places like it, but the people at the top of those hierarchies are not all americans. it's not the entire country. u.s. corporations manufacture 40% of what is made in the world, but the value is not flowing to the population. capitalism is working extraordinarily well. globalization has been miraculous in terms of raising living standards around the world. the question is where are you situated in those hierarchies. the problem in america right now is that a chunk of the population exactly where you want to be in terms of the way

the new capitalism works and the other chunk is not in a very good place. they are in and in between place where other people can do some of this work better than they can. that is a core challenge. i think conservatives have the right instinct about it but there has not been enough rigorous thinking about how to address that problem. >> does anybody disagree with this basic notion that capitalism is, somehow not functioning in the way the 1980's model assumed it would? >> i think in some ways that describes the model. mis-describes the model. the idea of what america is is shaped by a postwar america that

could not exist again and is never going to exist again anywhere else in the world. the country that won a war and strengthened its economy while all of its competitors burned each other to the ground and so for a decade could contain within itself the growth of capitalism. although boats all did rise in a way, to some extent, that model defines our expectations in a way that is going to be very difficult to change. i had the experience last year of reading charles murray's new book right after reading paul krugman's. they start in the same way, pure nostalgia for the 1960s, and almost in the same terms. and they are right. those are years we should miss. those are -- there is a lot about them to miss.

but our politics has been geared around how to bring them back as opposed to how do we deal with today. both parties are intellectually exhausted at the same time in a way that is very bad for the country. >> the government was big. big labor was big and there was a lot of economic dynamism at the same time. that's true, but it doesn't mean we could do it today. >> so what is the future? the 60s were pretty good to me. i know you guys don't remember it. >> we weren't born then. >> that's why i enjoyed them. [laughter] >> one way to think about that is that an important difference between the two parties now is that democrats tend to think about the future in terms of large institutions. republicans, when they think about it at all, which is not enough, tend to think about it

in more decentralized terms. in that sense, i think republicans might better be situated to have a vision of the future than the democrats. >> the information economy is a different type of economy than the industrial economy and i think the political class in general having been raised on the '50s nostalgia but the industrial idea is not equipped to think about how the information economy is different and that leads to different set of policy problems what you do with unskilled male workers who are left behind in the information economy the way the college educated worker is not

but it goes beyond that. it's about a pace of innovation and a type of innovation and a type of labor force that's very, very different from what, again, the political class -- political people and people who are intellectuals tend to be old school in the way they live their lives, they write, they read, that's not necessarily what the average person is doing today. people who are in that economy are much more attuned to that than those who comment on it. >> if you look at molecular -- >> and when you look at, first

of all older people tend to be -- i look down becoming one, older people tend to be more conservative but there's this thing if you're 57 and i come to you i want you to give me your savings and in 30 years you'll be a millionaire. literally, the calculus on risk taking an innovation changes as people age. >> you all made the point that a core distinction between left and right in the future is centralization versus decentralization. i want to get back to that point in a minute. let's go to megan's point, which reminds me of a book called the great stagnation from a couple of years ago which

argues that we are winding down productivity or at least we are in a time of slow technological innovation and rose. that ties into the idea that america is on a downward slope. do you buy into that? >> i am not sure there is much policy can do about that. i tend to think that the likely long-run pace of gdp growth is acceptable to the extent that it is distributed in a way that people feel they are getting standard of living growth. part of the reason i wonder about how much policy can do is because i think we have been in an environment for the last decade where we have had a de facto weakening of a lot of intellectual property protections such as copyright and patents. >> there has been a weakening.

>> there is rampant piracy and music. as far as i can tell music has not gotten any worse. the revenue model of television and movies has been disrupted but the quality seems to be improving. this is bad for producers but good for consumers. what it makes me wonder is for the quantity of innovation we get is the ip policy matter that much. i am skeptical of the ability of policymakers to influence it, so it's not where i would direct my energies. >> i have great respect for tyler but i completely disagree with his thesis about the idea that the low hanging fruit of innovation has declined. if you look at molecular biology and genetics, we are barely in the first inning if even in the first pitch of what will be an incredible revolution of our knowledge of how the cells works, how the brain works, how

the body works. i think the thing we're missing when we are too optimistic about that side is the risk of the potential for a catastrophic fiscal and financial crisis, which is what got me into this world out of the business world i was in before. we have more of a conception of what that could look like and we did in 2007, but we are so far removed from the depression that we really don't understand what a true catastrophic financial crisis could look like. >> didn't we just go through one? >> it was not as bad as the depression. i think something conservatives have not fully processed is how traumatic this has been for much of the country. >> i think it is nothing compared to what will come if we don't get our house in order fiscally. the past is not a predictor of the future.

>> sure it is. >> ok, well. let's get to the core question of the future left-right divide of the country. you all have put something on the table. centralization, decentralization. does that strike everybody as true? >> i don't know. i think the core fight is the one we have been having politically about economic distribution and the role of the government as a redistribute or and protector of poor and middle-class interests. it is not a fight we are done having, but to put it bluntly, it bluntly, it's sort of the where's my growth, where's my piece of the economy. that's going to be the key question. >> you think wage amelioration is going to be decentralized. >> i think the two are closely connected. there is a real logic to the left and the rights ways of thinking about the role of government in our economy and there is a real difference in

where the left thinks in terms of managing large institutions. it sees society as a set of systems that are disordered and require better organization. it is a coherent argument. i don't agree with that but it's not a crazy argument. the right seems to feel that the role of government is not to manage the sides, but to create the space in which the sides can flourish. and that looks like chaos, and it is in many ways. that is how innovation happens. it's also how problem-solving happens. it happens in a local way, one-on-one, through local markets and institutions that bubble up, trial and error and pilot programs, not a centralized here's the technical answer. i think we are getting back to a place where things are apparent and there is something like political economy on the table rather than just technical economics, where economics is subsumed by argument about priorities which in turn is subsumed in an argument about what american life is really all about. that is why i think conservatives could be better positioned than they now seem to

be to address the public stories in a way that makes sense to voters. people have a sense that we are living in a society that is decentralized that offers them a huge range of options. younger people, in particular, like that and expect that and want that. you see that in the health-care debate. the sheer consolidation of large systems that is involved in the left way of thinking is not appealing to a lot of people. the right, i think, has not offered a coherent alternative. conservatives don't go around saying we have a view. allowing competition to happen. rhetorically, conservatism isn't that. it is solutions to problems that were prominent in the late

'70s. >> i have two stories in terms of how i think about the future of the left-right divide. one is that the left is a party of democracy and the other is a party of diversity. in the first story, the idea is that when you are contrasting a corporation and a republic, they are similar entities. their legal, institutional entities that own themselves and have their own cultures and codes. you have one that succeeds and other corporations mimic that corporation until a newer more successful model emerges. the appeal of democracy to the left is we have true egalitarian function making and organization that leads to a different type of decision making. that's an attractive story to

tell. the story you could tell going forward is how we make different decisions. it's actually a good thing to have the trial and error process. you cannot just say what works, determine what works through a randomized controlled trial and then distribute that to all of society. the question is what works where. the other story that i have become more and more concerned about is the idea that the left is very concerned about the distribution of resources. but there are growing populations that are marginalized from the pieces of our culture that are actually working very well. when you think about civil society, we tend to think about

formal institutions. also think formal networks. when you think about friendships, for example. when you think about how upper middle-class people think about friendships as vehicles of mobility, whereas working-class people tend not to be connected to the networks that give you access to upward mobility or opportunity. i actually think that when you think about inclusion and the goal of inclusion, it leads you to different policies. for example, minimum wage. if you care about inclusion, it's a big deal. it is locking out a swath of the population from mainstream institutions that allow people to accumulate resources, build social connections and break out of the isolation that is toxic. that suddenly becomes a very big

deal. that's not to say that inequality is not a problem at all. it's to say that maybe we ought to think more about inclusion and then we have to look differently at a whole host of questions including immigration, integration, housing markets, zoning laws, but i really think that is the debate that i would want to see. >> let's try to get a concrete view. i will introduce two characters. john is 42 years old. he used to work at the mill. he now works at a warehouse for nine dollars an hour. pretty much stagnant wages when he is employed. not going anywhere. sort of falling through the cracks. jane is a waitress making 27 $27,000, two kids. what are republicans offering these

people? >> that's the question. the problem is this nebulous idea of the decentralized system of networks that we are not telling you what to do, we are trying to build the environment. we have had this big increase in perceived and actual economic risk over the last few years. what the left has is a suite of centralized programs to offer that are designed to mitigate those risks, and the pitch we are proposing to offer from the right is basically we will have pilot programs and state governments will take approaches of their own and figured things out. we will have civil society and such. that creates a lot of risk which is compounded by the fact that when you look at actual republican politicians, they have not expressed a lot of interest in doing policy innovations. on these core economic issues, although i think they have been innovative on issues that are not core to the debate today. one problem is a credibility issue. also, it is not responsive to

this broad new problem of risk. i think the way conservatives can adjust to that to some extent is to move away from fiscal policy as an emphasis. there are areas -- there is still deregulatory opportunities at the local level, occupational licensing, planning and zoning. there are opportunities at the federal level in intellectual property were you could unleash market forces, create faster growth, beat down rents so that you improve returns to labor >> i think there is a way to talk about this that democrats also aren't, which is reciprocity. one way to view the world is to think about what happens economically either as a forger does where you have higher risk -- you know, you go out hunting, and maybe there is nothing there.

maybe you are a bad hunter or maybe there is no animal there. or you can look at it as a farmer. you put it in the ground, you do the work, you should get the crop, right? how we judge economic policy often very much boils down to is this outcome fundamentally about risk or fundamentally about effort. here is the thing though. forager societies still have very tightly linked networks. that is a position democrats are often in the place of advocating now, which is that the rich are taking too much. we need to take it from them. what obligation do these people have? none. we have been cheated. i think what republicans can do is look at a policy emphasis and say, if you do the right things, it should be possible for you to get ahead. it should be possible for you to stay connected to the labor

market. looking at policy through that lens, things like wage subsidies, trying to get long-term unemployed back to work through tax rebates or what have you, those are things that say you are doing the right stuff and therefore you have -- we have an obligation to you. if you're not doing the right stuff, we don't. if you're not trying to work, we don't have an obligation to support you. i don't think either party has captured that space yet and that would be a good space for republicans to go. >> tell me how wage subsidies would work. >> there is a problem right now which is that americans are not competitive with chinese workers or whatever. or they are not competitive at the level their parents worked at. so they are downwardly mobile because the work they do doesn't pay what it paid their dad. and a lot of them are saying no,

why should i do this. this is demeaning but i have to go work for a pittance for the rest of my life and it's all downhill from here. so they go on disability, which is a terrible program in many ways, not for people who are truly disabled, but it is becoming like a backdoor trap unemployment insurance. and it was not meant to have that role. what you can say is we are going to make up that difference. we are going to make it easier for you to support a family at the basic level your dad did it, at least, on the same kind of work. and maybe you are 55 years old and you're not going to go back to college and become an electrical engineer. that ship has sailed. but we are going to make it possible to maintain a minimum provided you are doing 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. >> we being the federal

government. >> its tax rebates and subsidies. there are ways to structure this so that it works. right now, you can work for a very small percentage of the year and get quite large subsidies for that. >> i want to raise a couple of points related to your original question. an increasingly wealthy society can have more expensive restaurants. a starbucks barista does better than her counterpart did 50 years ago. the millworker though, that job is gone and not coming back. i don't think either party has a particularly good solution. there is one thing we have ignored. we have talked a lot about income inequality, but we don't talk about the importance of

cost of living living relative to income inequality. if you live in a low-cost part of the country and your wages are low, you're not that bad off. it's trying to live on that wage in new york city that stuff. has to do with the fact that both at the local level in the federal level we have done a lot to drive up housing, food, basic goods and services that a low income person will have. so a message that is very free-market oriented that will help that person is to say we are going to drive the cost of your health insurance down. we are going to drive the cost of your housing, your mortgage, rent down. those things make it easier to live your life. >> does everyone here agree it is a decent idea or? >> i think it's a decent idea with the caveat that there are still a large number of people looking for work relative to the number of people hiring. a wage subsidy is only going to further imbalance that by drawing more people into the labor market. it doesn't mean it's a bad idea,

it just means it's ever more important to have policies to promote full employment so that the wage subsidy translates into higher incomes rather than just allowing firms to pay lower wages. >> i actually fundamentally disagree with that. this labor market looks great. leave it alone. it's fine. it's recovering. it's back where you want it. it's of this labor market. one thing you could try doing is making that labour market cheaper. why don't we rebate the payroll tax one month for every month someone has been out of work. it is obviously not going to take every long-term unemployed person and fix the problem, but there are ways we can redirect this and say look, we know you want to work. we know you have been trying. we are going to try to make it more attractive for employers to

hire you rather than another guy. i think it's basically -- >> go ahead. >> we have this long-run trend that has actually been getting worse in the last few years of slow wage rose relative to gdp growth and productivity growth. part of that is due to health care cost and not all of it. it is related to a cultural problem that conservatives talk about that there is a declining people take in work. >> i think part of that has to do with the fact that you have

this anemic growth in wages. > i think you are agreeing on that. >> i agree totally on the particular point. it points to the larger economic debate that has been emerging in the last two years, especially in the last few months. i think there is a lot of room for conservatives to highlight the ways in which there ways of thinking about helping the poor and middle class are centered around work. it has to be centered around work. some people have been doing this. senator rubio has an idea out there now that would distinguish in a sharp way between benefits they go to people who have a job and benefits that go to people who don't have a job. he is not ending benefits for people who are not working, but benefits for them would be in kind, housing, food, medical coverage, whereas all benefits to people who are employed would be cash benefits. work would always be more attractive than nonwork. >> using the same amount of money, even using the same amount of money, cash benefit is more appealing than a kind benefit the tells you what to do with it.

to make work more appealing and to make work the center of what we think it takes to rise in america. i think that is extremely important. the debates we are seeing now are political economy debates. they are about priorities more than they are about technical questions about how to get the economy growing at this rate or that rate. and that is healthy. that is what our politics should be about and what our economic debate should be about. i think neither side has worked out there argument very well, but it is shaping up to be a genuine difference. it shows itself in the health care debate, the labor debate, the debate on welfare, and it is a big part of our politics going forward. >> you have worked as a hill staffer and a white house staffer. you spent a lot of time with members of congress. how big a gap is it between this conversation and the kind of conversation elected officials

are having? >> how big have you got? i think there are a few members of congress who are in this kind of conversation, and i think it is probably unreasonable to expect there will ever be more than a few of them. the question is how influential they can be, and at this point, i don't think they are influential enough. i think paul ryan thinks about some of these questions. i think dave camp thinks about some of these questions, and their committee chairman. mike lee is talking in ways that are very interesting and constructive about these kind of issues. he is not in the leadership. he is at the back of the list of the minority party at the senate. there is a lot of room to go. the debate that is happening about that, about what the agenda should be, in my mind, there is still a debate about whether there should be an

agenda, not what the agenda should be. they are filling in a vacuum and the vacuum is important because of the inertia and because of a lot of arguments that don't make sense to me but that makes sense to people during political seasons. it's basically the logic of the romney campaign and i don't think it worked very well. and i never think it could've worked very well. >> a lot of this is about to be shaped by a primary season.

what are the debates that seem obvious that we are about to have? >> just to build on that question and also what you have all just said, this is why i think the demography of the the reason the policy makers and the republican party can't get anywhere and don't have any influence is because the people who vote republican aren't especially interested in that aspect of the republican policy agenda. the key thing i think about when i think about who would be a favorite in 2016 is who can expand who votes republican the most, because that is what presidents do. josh mentioned civil rights and the democrats. a lot of democrats were opposed to it. what happened? the iron will and incredible finesse of lbj who rammed through civil rights despite the opposition of democrats, and in time, that got democrats the allegiance of black voters. perhaps republicans need to do something similar with the conservative message that appeals to a broader slice.

>> are you saying they won't hear policy proposals like the ones we have just been hearing? >> i don't know if i would put immigration reform at the cost of the list. i would put universal coverage at the top of the list. until conservatives can articulate their side they don't deserve to have a broader base of support. >> i think we are now at the point where it should be more a matter of us being outraged that candidates don't have a serious health reform agenda, labor market agenda. those are two particularly crucial pieces. but if you don't have something to say about wage stagnation and what is an actual, viable alternative to obamacare, then i think you shouldn't be taken

seriously. the last time around, that was not the case. you had a couple of candidates who had exotic tax reform proposals that were exotic, by which i mean laughable. this time around, i think we have enough of an infrastructure. we have enough of a body of ideas where i think it is at a bare minimum the candidates should have some kind of serious agenda around health form, labor market and taxes. the truth is that i have found certain developments in the republican presidential field moderately dispiriting. maybe there were some people i was excited about in the recent past and that is less the case now, but that is actually >> don't be coy. >> it should not be about character or personality.

we should have a situation where everyone who wants to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate understands that they need to have a serious agenda. they need to actually engage in these arguments. something weird happens. there are easy ways to become a conservative celebrity, by saying outrageous things, etc. but some people are realizing that saying new things about real problems that exist is not necessarily the number one way to get attention but it actually is becoming a way to get attention, and i think that's really new and very exciting. >> it used to be in the early part of every presidential season, candidates would give a series of worthy speeches. george bush came here in 1999 and gave a speech attacking grover norquist, which i loved. he gave that kind of speech. the last couple of cycles, they have not been giving those speeches. my impression is the only person doing that is marco rubio right

now. >> of the imaginable candidates, that is probably true. part of it is there are more ideas out there. in a sense, the policy vacuum on the right itself has been the fault for a long time of people like us. i think that is less true now because some of the some of the thinking has been done, and the working out of what it looks like as a political agenda has been done. the idea that if those things exist, they are on the ground, a politician should think at this point of speech i should say something about what i am going to do. we cannot think of ourselves as being on the cutting-edge of anything. i mean, look at us. but that is a way we can be useful. well, some of us.

look at me. i think the ways in which people who think about policy can be helpful is by preparing the ground, making sure those ideas are out there and that these conversations are happening. there are not separate from the political process. when it is time for a politician to think how do i speak to the party in the country about the issues people face, there are actual ideas out there rather than thinking the only way i can do it is to get this amount of face time on fox and that means i have to say this, that and the other, 9-9-9. >> it seemed for a little while that there was a rising libertarian wave. rand paul certainly exemplifies that. is that still true? >> i think there is on some

issues. gay marriage is an issue that i think the republicans have lost on and i think that is going to be the future of the party. that is going to collapse on both sides. you see a lot less enthusiasm for invading middle eastern countries and so forth then we had in 2003. in that sense, i think it is true. it's just kind of hard to say, in 2012, and the election was interesting because both candidates seemed interested in saying as little as possible about what they would do. can anyone name a policy agenda either obama or romney had other than other than repealing obamacare? >> i wish mitt romney had noticed. >> and in general, there was a reason for that. we are out of money. when you poll people, they want to cut the huge foreign aid budget and raise taxes but only on people who make $2 billion a

year. they want all the social spending we are doing and everything else and they also want a balanced budget. you can point out things that are mathematically impossible. i want to balance the budget but only raise taxes on four people and don't cut any foreign aid. what i fear is that will be 2016 as well. what i hope is that that will be the way to win. obama won by not saying anything. romney could've won by not saying anything. but i hope we are going to talk about these problems because they are huge and they need to be addressed. it's no longer possible to sit on the sidelines. >> romney tried not to have a tax plan, and then and i think february of 2012 he felt like he was backed into a corner by rick santorum, and then like everybody else he felt like he needed a tax plan, and it came back to bite him in the fall because the numbers added up to

you either had to raise taxes on the middle class or it had to be a net revenue loss. i think the lesson people take away from that is that mitt romney got too specific on policy and would have done well to be even vaguer. >> they thought through whether they should have a policy agenda and concluded that they should not have one. it left us with a headache. they thought it through. it was not that they had no idea how it would work. they thought the politics of that would be a bad idea. that has to change. the politics of that has to change. >> one thing we have not really talk about this evening is that cultural conservatism is fragile intellectually and also in terms of what appeals to a broad section of america. there are a lot of reasons for

that. we always talk about economic policy. we like to wonk out. but young people today grew up well after the 1960's. they put last night's date on instagram or snap chat. that is a large part of what is going on in america that we as conservatives have still not moved past the battles of the 1960s. are we comfortable with the fact that the vast majority of americans engage in premarital sex? i don't say that to be ironic. i think that is something conservatives really have wrestled with and don't have a good solution to. i think we will end up a pro-life party that will accept liberal hegemony on other social issues. >> i think a marriage is an issue where republicans will lose, but if you look at marriage as a whole, it is in

disastrous shape, and that will hurt the economy. on a personal level, marriage makes people happier and healthier. it's actually good for people. if you have serial parenting where people have multiple children by different parents, the father tends to invest in the mother with whom he gets along the best, that is not a stable model for the 21st century. i actually think there is a way in which the gay marriage issue could be used to make a more robust plan. ok, we have marriage equality, now everyone get married. >> you can make that policy. >> i think actually having people voice cultural policy also matters, right? i mean, look how influential hollywood was on gay marriage.

the positions tv shows took on it, how much that changed public opinion. >> that we should take over hollywood. >> let me try to answer that question if i can jump out of my moderator role. like most of us here, i looked at pro-marriage policies and my conclusion was that none of them worked. my second solution is that parenting skill coaching actually does work. so don't focus on marriage, focus on parenting skills, particularly for single moms. some of that includes nurse family partnerships that government could fund and other things. as a matter of curiosity, would people on this panel support those sorts of policies, government-funded, maybe if not government delivered, like nurse-family partnerships or

early childhood education? >> i think when you're looking at parenting skills -- basically, what you see is that everyone is delaying marriage and society, and one swath of the society is delaying children until after marriage and another swath is not. with regard to that kind of investment, i think -- i call myself conservative despite the fact that i am influenced by a lot of libertarian thinking. this goes back to the issue of inclusion more broadly. when you are looking at how parenting has evolved, when you look at upper middle income people, college-educated people, they are parenting not in the way that people parented in the 1950s and 1960s. they are parenting in a new way, a high investment style that happens to be very well suited to a society with rapid change. is high investment parenting something only this narrow group of people can do or isn't

something a large swath of the population can do? if you need public policy, as i suspect you do, i think that is something we need to think hard about and feel that it is appropriate for conservatives to embrace, but i think that is going to introduce an interesting new tension. there is a lot of exhaustion and faith in failed public institutions, but i think you're seeing a whole series of issues, for example, marijuana regulation, where you're seeing the conflict between chaos and order. even subsidies. some libertarians say the labor market is not inclusive enough. minimum wage might not be the way to do it but wage subsidies might make it more inclusive. i think conservatives need to feel more comfortable acknowledging that they are not

libertarians and i think investing in parenting skills is one part of that puzzle. >> i want to hit on the theme of paternalism. welfare reform is paternalistic. schools are paternalistic. nurse-family partnerships are paternalistic. as conservatives, are we comfortable with a certain level of public paternalism? >> part of what has happened in the last few years is a change in our own understanding of our fairly recent history has been. you say welfare reform, which is what everybody talks about first when they talk about conservative public policy should look like. it was very paternalistic. it was also very decentralized. conservatives are comfortable with paternalism when it is relatively local and can be defined differently in different places.

even if there is centralized funding behind it. there's certainly room for that to help people with family formation and with other concerns, but they are always going to work at the margins. it's true, there is some evidence that helping people with parenting skills works. it helps a little. it works better than marriage promotion, which does not really seem to do anything, but it only helps very little. if we talk about the ways in which capitalism does not seem to be working right now, capitalism requires a kind of citizen that it does not produce. i think we are seeing now what it looks like when we fail at least in some portions of society to produce that citizen. and you can't blame the people in these situations. you can't blame the larger society, at least not in the simple sense. this is the greatest of it all is the problem we have. i am very much an optimist about america but on the matter of how to help people in those situations, i don't think anyone

has any idea. >> capitalism requires a kind of citizen it does not produce. very well put. >> libertarians are pretty comfortable with paternalism aimed at children. treat kids like kids. i'm good with that. i will also say that there is public policy and wages -- when you talk to people who study marriage, a lot of them talk about the fact that the wage situation is such right now that men cannot get steady work for 50 weeks out of the year that pays anything and therefore they are not any use around the house. does marriage promotion work? no, but there are broader public policies where you can try to do things that make it easier to form an intact family. things like early childhood education, i don't know if you can actually scale it.

i think preschools do a good job. i am not convinced you can reproduce perry preschools for 4 million kids a year. a partnership, even if it does a little, is better than nothing for kids who have very little. >> i think it's right that you want to try these things on a decentralized basis. things that involve complex delivery are better off being done by local governments. i think doing this with a decentralized model depends on having a centralized fiscal policy layer on top of it. it's one thing to say we're going to do parenting classes and various other things to try to improve outcomes for kids and families. it's another to say we are to do this and then we can cut the food stamp program. to develop trust among voters

this will to be done in some way and there are separate approaches with their own merits that can to be done together, it's really important to pair those two things. >> question. right over here. microphone coming and a bunch over here. >> thank you. if you don't mind, i'd like to bring the discussion from 30,000 feet down to ground level. you have mentioned that it is important to create the citizen for the appropriate scales for the new age. i would put to you that any candidate, democrat or republican, who can address the problem of having the right worker, the right employee, would get everyone's vote. let me give you an example. the president of the national association of manufacturers said that at any one time there

are 2 million manufacturing jobs openings that are going unfilled because of a skills gap. why is that? certainly throwing more money at the education system is not going to close that. so we need a set of policies that closes that skills gap and cements the workers' stake in the system by giving him and her those skills that are marketable and are sought after. right now manufacturing is 12% of the economy. if it can be raised to 15% of the economy, we would have the same level of employment in the manufacturing sector as we had in 1980. now, will we go back to 1946, hell no, that will never happen. but there are -- so the question is, who can help create the kind of policies that will create a

closure of the skills gap, to create the employee that is sought after by the new capitalist economy? >> there are a couple of questions in that. and all of them are framed from the point of view of an employer in a way that's interesting. that's useful but i think is also probably too often the way conservatives think about questions like this. i would say it's certainly true that our education system -- the education system of any republic that takes it seriously is always going to face the challenge of balancing its self-understanding. is your role to create a citizen that is capable of self-government or the worker your economy needs? the answer is both but the way to balance those, the way to distinguish between what is universal education and what is specialized education for what's needed here and now is a challenge for our education

system. we at this point are probably not doing either of those things very well and our education system is not great. for many people it's fine. for some people it's absolutely dreadful. from the point of view of employers, it seems to have all the wrong priorities. i think that requires some changes in the way we think about the distinction between higher ed and secondary education. the distinction between worker training and education. those things have got to be -- have got to answer needs that bubble up from the bottom, as you're suggesting. so they've got to be a little more flexible, they've got to be capable of offering people more options, i think there's a lot of room for improvements in the way that our public education system works and the education in general works. i think it's a low-ranging fruit for public policy. there are a lot of low hanging fruits for public policy. there are a lot of places where the inefficiency of the systems that we have is so great and their inability to deal with problems that are perfectly

obvious is so great that you can really improve things quite a bit in a lot of areas. education certainly is one of them. i think thinking about it in terms of worker training is one obvious way to do it. we do have to be careful it's not the only way to do it, because it's not the only problem with our education system. >> i want to jump on this just briefly. my personal view is that the real problem is that you have corporations that have very high profits right now, you have corporations sitting on enormous reserves of cash and why is that? that's because they're not afraid. i think when you look at economic sectors in which firms are afraid that their advantage is going to evaporate, that some new startup is going to come and destroy them, those are the firms that are hiring. facebook started out as a relatively small company. they're hiring quite a lot. they're never going to become as big as g.m. but they're hiring a lot. they're paying higher and higher wages to the people who have skills and that in itself is creating a dynamic in which people are seeking to build

those skills. when you look at the corporate tax code, the way it rewards large incumbents, if you look at all kinds of aspects that we treat business enterprises, we are not creating an environment in which these firms are afraid. it's perfect to have a safety net for citizens. it's not appropriate to have a safety net for corporations. i think an environment in which more corporations are afraid of i think that would actually be very good and would be particularly good for workers. >> i almost never disagree with reihan but i have to here. corporations are sitting on cash because of political and economic uncertainty. they're concerned about higher taxes, regulations can drive up the cost of their business, cost of capital. >> let's get some more questions here. >> mike with the manhattan institute. we talked about cities, we talked about conservatives

needing a national movement. in order to be a national movement we need to compete in cities. that's how we move senate races and certainly eventually presidential races. and we have the examples. we have right here in new york, indianapolis, reforms on public labor and certainly most recently public safety. but we lose cities. so my question is why? is it messaging? do we need a new agenda? many of you would say that we are kind of solving the problems of a decade or two decades ago. but i think in cities we're solving today's problems but >> in 2008 when obama was elected, i actually looked at this problem and thought, ok, is this true in other advanced economies? where the cities always vote left and the rural areas always vote right? and it turns out in europe there isn't a clear pattern. in some european countries the cities are actually more politically conservative than the rural areas and there are maybe a lot of different reasons for that. but that gives me hope that there isn't any inherent -- anything inherent about urban life that necessarily means people must vote more left than

rural people. but i do think it's a huge problem and something we need to address and we have to be willing to compete in areas where there isn't a short-term payoff. that's the hardest thing about the political cycle. is the short-term payoff leads us to cultivate the voters that we can win in the near term and that leads people away from cities. >> thank you for being here today. this has been a very interesting panel discussion. i wanted to ask about education but you touched on that. i want to ask about foreign policy. it doesn't translate into a lot of votes but it's something that's obviously very important. the bush years could be described briefly as perhaps overreach. and now you can say that a conservative critique of obama might be that we withdraw too much and it allows a vacuum for strong men like putin. what would be the conservative response, what would be your response, your policy prescriptions for what's going on in the world right now,

particularly in ukraine and syria and how you guys would think about handling that? >> i doubt we can touch on all of those things. but this is an area where the panel is pretty divided. i personally believe that joe has this -- he said in the 1990s i think it was, securities like oxygen, you only notice when it's vanished. i personally think that u.s. global leadership, i think it's extremely important in undergirding much of the rice of global prosperity we've seen. i do think it's fair to say there was overreach during the bush years but it's very important that we invest and i think the problem is that the investing in our capabilities, the benefits of that are not always clearly visible. i also think it's true that the problem is that there are big swaps at the national security state that are ok. it's hard to tell. it's hard to have a coherent

cost-benefit analysis. there are real structural problems and we might want to shift resources. but do i think there's a dangerous tendency on the right to give short drift to the importance of american power undergirding global stability but this is not a popular view. least of all among younger conservatives. >> foreign policy is important but it's not going to be important in the political debates of the next decade or decade and a half. i think -- we've had very little recent time where we've sort of had a normal political environment on foreign policy because we had the cold war and then september 11th. but i think the best we got for where foreign policy is going to sit in american politics was the period from 1990 to 2001 where it was not salient. you can see that in the way conservatives talk now about the obama foreign policies. they try to find points to sort of harp on where the president is seen as weak. i think that's behind the obsession with the benghazi

attack. i think there was also a very telling statement from marco rubio about syria, when we were -- when the president was waffling about whether we were going to intervene there and rubio took up a position where he wasn't sure if he was for or against an attack in syria but he was against whatever the president was for. and so i think i don't know what kind of foreign policy a republican president will enact if elected. george w. bush ran things that he was going to have a humbler foreign policy and then september 11th happened and directions changed. i don't think that's going to be a key driver of elections. >> hi. first, thank you, everyone and moderator, for hosting a really interesting discussion. i have a question about health care. i'm directing it toward josh. toward the end of the discussion you suggested the

decentralization of service delivery as superior. there is a segment of the health care complex called home health agencies and they take patients in a recouperative and rehabilitative phase and bring them home and it suggests much higher outcome, much cheaper delivery. the affordable care act has almost destroyed the industry. it's led to major reimbursement cuts over a multiple last two, three, four years. do you see this vis-a-vis the left-right divide, given there's a superior outcome with it, as something conservatives can reintroduce, repackage, rebrand and sell in the health care complex for superior outcomes? >> i think the interesting thing that we've seen or an interesting thing we've seen with the implementation of obamacare is i think to an extent it's been a driver of innovation among providers because they're faced with these reimbursement rate cuts. there's been a real drive in the industry to find ways to contain

costs. we've seen i think a slowing in health care expenditure over the last couple of years. and so actually the government turning off those taps to an extent -- and remember, it's not like we had a private health t. it's not like we had a private healthcare system before obamacare. the government is an enormous payer through medicare. by paying less i think that can be a driver of decentralized innovation where the government is basically saying we're going to pay less, you figure out how to do it with less money. although, i would note that among the somewhat disappointing findings from the oregon health study, we did find people seemed to be consuming more healthcare which suggests that barriers were not as large a problem as people on the right sometimes say. you don't want the federal

government telling healthcare providers exactly how to do their problems, but i do think that centralized fiscal policies can be a driver of decentralized outcomes about service delivery. >> it's very simple. give consumers control of their own health dollars. then all of these things, whether it's home healthcare, retainer-based primary care, a lot of the innovations and delivery will automatically happen. why? because in the consumer is controlling the dollars, the industry works for who pays them. today it's the government and third parties that pays the deliverer of healthcare services, so the person who is important is the payer, not the patient. if the patient is controlling the dollars, the system works to control the patient. i resist this because i think the opposite is what we need. we need to actually restrict the amount the government is doing but actually get people the money.

if we're concerned that people don't have the means to support themselves in certain ways, that doesn't mean have some complex government program that tells them what to do. give them the economic resources to pursue the people who can deliver those services directly. >> the point that josh finished which i very much agree with, in a certain way the home healthcare question is the one that shows the problem with the system we had before obamacare and the system we have now. in the bush years there was huge pressure to increase investment in all forms of home-based healthcare which was a centralized decision about how the system should work. it didn't work very well. it was probably an enormous waste of money. and now we're doing the reverse. either of these is the right approach. and so the medicare system we have and really that larger healthcare system we have had before was not a

consumer-centered, market ori t oriented system. well to the right of the system we've had for decades. that's the direction that conservatives need to move. >> paul ruben from emory university. some of this sounds very familiar to me. the pessimism i'm hearing is very similar to the pessimism of the late carter years. i was in the reagan administration and it was amazing how quickly things turned around. i think some of the '80s solutions are still there. i think obamacare has messed up the medical markets but it's also messed up the labor markets tremendously, financial regulation. just today there was a very large number of new species being declared endangered. everywhere we look in the economy is increased regulation, and i think that's a lot of the unemployment we're seeing goes back to your him worker, why

does he have trouble finding a job? maybe because the employees won't commit to hiring him because they don't know what healthcare expenses he's going to generate in the future. if we can deregulate some of these things, we might be able to move away from some of these problems. >> but the policy challenges are very different than the challenges of 1970. look at the tax rates versus today. regulation is a much, much bigger problem today than it was there. fiscal imbalances are a much bigger problem, healthcare entitlements, a much bigger problem. we have to have an agenda that's tailored to the challenges today. >> hello. thank you. you guys talked about how there's no republican plan to deal with decentralization in civil society, but i'd argue that the ryan plan was conceptually about that,

privatization, voucherization and a large amount of spending cuts which will allow civil society to flourish, yet that program seemed unpopular with. s and very, very unpopular with the public. i'm curious if you think they sound like good concepts but if in practice they're far too volatile and unpopular to base a coherent public policy around. >> first of all, almost no voters care about decentralization as sup. so you can't build the message around that. nobody goes to the voting booth and says do i want a government that is more or less central. they care about pocketbook issues. but the ryan plan thing goes to a distinction that i mentioned earlier that you want to decentralize certainly kienlds of delivery because of the value of local knowledge, b.

but that doesn't mean you have to decentralize the actual fiscal flows where the federal government has a significant advantage in its ability to tax and borrow. in fact, if you commit to those becoming decentralized, it says really, we are decentralizing to harness local innovation. this is not just a way to reduce incomes for people with low and moderate incomes. >> i think there's a real problem that democrats and republicans are going to have to deal with. obamacare wasn't popular. most things that are fiscally feasible are wildly unpopular. this is the fundamentals of politics and it's never been more true than it is today because we have an aging population that's concerned with keeping what it has gotten. with lower growth is face harder

fiscal tradeoffs. you can't take it out of the surplus. i think this is going to be a big challenge for republicans as they frame an agenda which is that if you're going to be honest about what it's going to cost and how you're going to do this and who the losers are going to be because there's no such thing as a policy in which someone is not worse off, then you're going to have to go out and say that and to be credible that's going to make those people very upset. >> democrats didn't do that. >> no, they didn't. >> i think the problem is that it takes us 40 minutes and a future of conservatism talk to even mention anything about social issues. we lose people flat out because we have this continuing blood letting of state by state gay

marriage, yes or no, so is there some kind of way that we can avoid a possible schism of northeast republicans who frankly, this issues settled. all of us have gay friends, we are fine with it. but for southern republicans, how do we keep them from going off and causing a schism and running away with todd aiken and pat robinson? >> i think there's a -- even in the south young republicans have your views on the social issues. i think this is a generational transition that's going on on both the right and the left that perhaps won't be as substantial in the future. that's the political element of it. i actually wish and hope that conservatives would have a coherent political philosophy around what they think culture and society should look like that would accept the post '60s

reality. >> a couple questions from social media, well, i'm going to jump in. the republican party is a pro life party. it will never not be a pro life party. it would die without being a pro life party. i'm not a pro life person. >> but there's no generational shift on abortion. >> this is a question from one of our twitter followers who is watching via live stream. why not define debt ceiling to be the ratio of debt to gdp? >> the fundamental problem, this is just a general political thing. people believe if they can only come up with some great rule, they could stop people from doing stuff they don't like. first of all, you can never get the rule because the other side understands what you're doing so

they're just like, no, you can't have the rule. but the second problem is that there's always going to be an out for an emergency. so we declare war on iceland once a year and give them a marshall plan and we've gone right back. there's always ways to gimmick these budget rules. the hard job is to tell politicians, don't borrow anymore money. by the way, this is something the republican party needs to do is say when you spend money, that's borrowing it. the decision to spend is the decision ultimately to borrow and then the decision to tax. george bush totally lied the fact that when he spent money he was ultimately going to pay for that through taxation. obama hasn't even been interested in that distinction but on both sides we need to understand that they're all the the same thing and trying to focus on the debt ceiling as a way to control that is not

focusing on the fundamental problem which is the stuff we bought. >> that's not the biggest problem with that. the biggest problem is that the economic crises in this country is massive unemployment and the fact that wage growth is anemic because the labor market is slack. conservatives have become a movement of people who think that is a less important issue than government debt even though interest rates are extremely low and capital is flowing into u.s. treasuries because the market is strongly accepting of the fact that the u.s. government will pay those debts. if we continue to prioritize this debt issue over issues that are actually of economic importance to 85% of americans, we won't be able to appeal to them. >> i disagree on two levels. yes, interest rates are low now. that's not a fixed law of the universe. but more broadly, politically, people hate the debt. this polls incredibly well, democrats, and republicans. do they act on that, no. are they totally hypocritical,

yes. is this a political problem for republicans, no. when they go out and talk about it, this polls extremely well and does good at the ballot box. >> it's a profound economic problem. >> a conservative is somebody who thinks every market is efficient except the treasury bond market. >> there are a lot of reasons -- if we have a debate about monetary policy and why bond prices are what they're that's fine. but in 204 2040 which china has better gdp than we do, you'll be very concerned about those treasuries. >> we have one minute left. i'm going to ask you one informational question. since you're all young hipsters, name a politician or a writer who will have a profound impact

on conservatism, slash, the republican party. >> i'm willing to say i'm probably the least influential writer on the republican party. david brooks. >> credibility shot. >> one person who gives me hope at this point is mike leak, who is first of all a senator who doesn't think he's running for president which is a wonderful thing in american life, very rare. but he's also a person who is shaping a conservative vision that's a kind of rugged commune therrienism that markes a lot o sense to me. >> i think the most important policy right now is actually on criminal justice and revisiting the idea that it's a good idea to massively incars rate people, especially for nonviolent crime and a number of southern

governors have been doing good things on that including mississippi and louisiana and north carolina and so i think that's unheralded. >> the most influential writer will be the one who makes conservatism accepting of modern society and modern social issues, leaving abortion aside. maybe that's a politician or a writer, we'll see. >> i hate to cater to our hosts but jim manzen is a niche product. he's not going to capture the hearts of the massives but he gets that markets are about a decentralized process. they're actually really important and that the right really ought to be the party of experimentation and i encourage everyone in this room and everyone watching to read him and follow him. >> he's so