gaming technology, those are really organic now as part of our neighborhoods, and very, very important for the future. >> miami, florida, gene, a parent there, hi, gene i.mpr: >> caller: good -- how are you? very good. this message is to dr. simpson, i met her in miami with john saxon from nyu and she gave a nu very good presentation while we were in miami. i am -- i'm very interested in michigan state and i know you a have an agricultural program. is there any support that your school will do with haiti or doo anything with haiti pertaining t

to that? >> we have a -- we have had a historic program with haiti in food and health, and we have also a number of our faculty from the medical schools who are working in haiti periodically as is permitted, given the current circumstances. curr but it's important for us to doo we also have included haitian students, interestingly as a h migrant program, because as you know, many students from haiti u migrated into florida. and we have a university of michigan migrant program for students from haiti. p >> president simon, i want to ask you about one thing you're involved in. the national security higher education advisory board. what is that? >> it was formed a while ago, ty be advisory to the director of

the cia and the fbi to try to better connect the voices of ivi universities with national security issues, that were all n need to be worried about. and it's a group of university o presidents, that talks about an everything from cyber security to how we can better understand intern the dynamics around our agl international programs, we need to be global, we need to be smart about national security as wellal. and those are tough issues to deal with. we need to talk about them in genuine way and share views about our programs and st activities so the group is just a way of having those conversations. >> you chair this advisory board.nk why was it formed? is it in response to a threat? >> well, if you think about post 911, it was easy for universities and the he intelligence communities, the

work of the fbi and the cia to o become on very different planets, so to speak, and our interests about the protection e of our campuses, how we deal with terrorism, the list that we have been talking about today have to be usual interests, but we come at them very th differently. and it's a way to understand iv, different perspectives, because if you understand different perspectives, you can finding io solutions to different problems. >> we'll go to harvey. ft. lee educator. >> good morning. i have a question, it's always been at the back of my mind, isi how the university handless the professional athletes on their campus? thle we have scholarship athletes, coming on board, how many of these scholarship students actually graduate after four years? >> well, we have scholarship student athletes who are both a men and women, whose graduation rates are as a whole, about the

same as our student body. obviously, there are a few individuals who come to the o university who leave a bit early to pursue their athletic interests, but we see all of our students, no matter their at athletic skills as students first and athletes second and l provide academic support for them to be successful. we have also had programs to ensure that students athletes return to graduate and stay connected with us. two examples currently might bet justin advocator who is playing hockey for the detroit red wing who keeps e-mailing me that he'c within six credits of getting hs his degree because we made that possible. you can look at a person like steve smith who is a commentator for -- on basketball, making a terrific income after his professional playing career, who

has finished his degree and stayed connect to michigan stat and is a role model for almost every student athlete we have. so the media tends to focus on l the 1% of students who are really the student athlete who a are not indicative of our of scholarships. student >> we'll hear from chris next who's a parent in providence, rhode island. >> it's clear that you are, butl are you aware that you are a puppet to the globalist agenda t taught out of the frankfurt school in nazi germany. i don't know where you're going with that, we're going to move on to norm in florida. educator. hi, norm. >> caller: okay. thank you for c-span, and i am p michigan state graduate. i have a bachelors, masters and ph.d. from michigan state, and i was on the faculty at michigan

state. i went up there last summer and got the shock of my life. i went in and talked to the min geology department and found out they have 14 faculty members, and i asked them how many students they graduated last year and if at the bachelor's y level and they told me eight.hem and then i asked them how many g graduate students they had and e they told me three. i was absolutely appalled at what i see in higher education, i have been essentially a dean of a largest probably oceanography ocean engineering group, teaching group in the world. and i always made sure my students got jobs. evidently, these people aren't getting jobs, and the universe needs, including the one that i left here many years ago have all turned into environmental science.ience.

the geology department, i figured out there were probablyt about four or five at the most out of that 14 who are actuallyg geologists. >> okay. president simon. toda well, if you look at the job students for students today ssiy including the number of what i would call classifying geology programs ash the country, we have been asked for support andc to be sure that all of our students are placed in the right kinds of jobs. and the placement rate across id all of our geology programs is very, very high. so we have kept a strand of the classic geology because we think that will come back. so we have not eliminated that

as part as many universities have. but we have kept that as part of the program. so that's how you try to balancg current job needs, current focus of employers, with keeping strength in place to build for h the future. to >> we want to thank you for allowing us to come to the the university today and talk to you about higher education. >> greta, thank you very much d and thanks to all of your people who both listen and called in, this is important dialogue about not simply michigan state, but the future of our country and we appreciate everyone's concern as we try to build great value and enhance both competitiveness that all of our students deserve. >> thank you very much. tonight, part our special series on universities in the big ten conference.

that will be followed by a portion of this year's net root nation conference and views on progressive politics for the campaign for america's future. that all starts tonight at 8:00 eastern here on c-span 3. and tonight on our companion network c-span 2, it's the second florida governor campaign between rick scott and former governor charlie crist. here's a look. >> are you saying there are so many racists in the republican party you couldn't remain a republican? >> no, i'm saying that element exists. my mother and father were republicans and they don't have a racist bone in their body. what is at work here is a very simple thing. if you regular back with me to 2008 and the e-mails districted about the president by some

members, not all, of the republican party, they were not exactly flattering. and i think you can research and find out what i'm talking about, but it wasn't right. and i can tell you the reaction i have gotten from some leadership in the republican party was not tolerable. it wasn't just because i was willing to work across the aisle with the democrats to get the recovery funds to come to florida. it was also pretty apparent because it was the first african-american president. listen, i don't enjoy saying that. it's not fun to say. but i'm going to tell the truth. and nose are the facts. >> charlie, you're a divider. you're a mud slinger. you're a divider. the entire time you've been in politics -- >> you have spent millions and millions. >> look at what we want to have. we live in a wonderful state. the best melting pot in the

world. we have so many wonderful people here that have come from all over the world. you want to try to divide people. i want everybody to have the the same shot i had to live the american dream. >> thank you, governor. governor crist? >> nothing could be further from the truth. i worked with the parking light to get the recovery funds. this governor, governor rick scott, won't work with the president, even to get high-speed rail, which is so important to central florida and eventually the whole state, would have been $2.4 billion to florida. some say 60,000 jobs. he will not lift a finger to get medicaid expansion done. as a result, a million floridians watching tonight are not getting health care again today as a result of the the inaction. >> first off, you left me with $3.6 billion budget deficit.

you borrowed everything you could. you left a project on the table to cost us billions of dollars. you want to talk about medicaid. you were governor when it passed. why didn't you expand it right then? i actually have worked with the federal government. worked as an example, something you wouldn't do, we sold a decades old lawsuit over the everglades. you wouldn't lift a finger. >> recent polls have listed the race a toss-up. you can see the full debate starting at 8:00 eastern on our companion network c-span 2. >> be part of c-span eels campaign 2014 coverage. follow us on twitter and like us on facebook to get debate schedules, video clips of key moments, debate previews from the politics team. c-span is bringing you over 100 senate, house and governor debates. you can instantly share your reactions to what the candidates are saying.ints

stay in touch and engaged by following us on twitter and ja c-span and liking us on facebook at facebook.com/c-span. now a panel discussion on the future of conservatism and the republican party. you'll hear from authors, from columnists and journalists, some who advise president george w. e bush and mitt romney on the the economy, health care, social policy, foreign policy and the partisan divide. insti from the manhattan institute in new york city, this is an hour and 25 minutes. i want to thank you for joining us tonight. there are a great many people well qualified to debate these u

questions, but with the consequences of today's policymaking falling squarely on the shoulders of the next generation, we have assembled a number of younger journalists, t scholars and author to talk o about what the way forward could be. they will not alwaysill agree,h perhaps through a thoughtful usn 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 characterized as al bea classic conservatives managed to get together and form a conservative policy that was h both coherent and very successful. d and i feel like in many ways, wm are at the same kind of point in history. in any event, we're very glad to bring together this group, despite their youth, or rrected youthish, as someone directed my earlier, their resumés are very

long. they're very accomplished for n, their age, a is what i'm gettin at. i won't go through all of those resumés, but i'm happy to welcome our panelists. josh with "the new york times." uval levin. megan from "bloomberg view." ryan has showed up. better late than never, a contributing editor of national view. and finally, we're grateful to r our moderator this evening, david brooks, columnist for "the new york times" whose very y successful career is always directed towards what's new andd interesting in the world of theo ideas. so again, thank you all for being here this evening and ks o thank to those of you who will be watching over the internet. and now here is david brooks. >> thank you, larry.

i was thrilled when they called to ask if i would take part in the panel of conservatism and then it became clear i'm i may actually too old tobe be a th panelist. i used to be one of these people. now i'm no longer on the leading edge, i'm just a dying ember, ed 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 rolledh r out of bed in time for this.. i'm going to start -- we're jusa going to have a bunch of quick y questions, and hopefully not too long answers and hopefully you'll cut each other off, and t i'm going to start with uval. so what's the problem with ervam conservatism? and i'moing going to mangle conservatism and the republican party together. ty we here? what's the problem? >> i was going to say that we don't know how to make an entrance until ryan proved me wrong. 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 er people's experience.ake a lot of people are finishing sentences that other people started in the early 1980s, andt they forgot how the sentences started and why. and so while i think that a lot of the problems we face are very much amenable to conservative ways of thinking and conservative solutions, the republican party is not doing dn the work og f actually connecti their ideas to today's problemsd and voters know it. so voters consider it to be out of touch because in a lot of ways, it's out of touch. ause >> megan, 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 s and flowered in the 1980s, solved this specific set of problems that existed in 1979 and we have solved them, and the republicans forgot to declare victory and go home. and so, there was this for a long time, just this insistence

of tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts that was the one thing we could all agree on, even though realready cut taxes a lot. and that's not speaking to the problems that people especially after the financial crisis of 2008, that isn't where the y american public wants to hear i solutionss for their parents' r generations, they want to hear solutions for problems they have. like long-term unemployment. like feeling they're not going to move up, that they're not n going to do as well, that ing. mobility is contracting. and tax cuts is no longer the answer to that. t.>> long- >> long-term unemployment and mobility are these all issues? >> i think these are certainly problems with conservatism.>> but there is a problem that is the lack of diversity in the people who vote republican and represent the base of the conservative movement. not just in terms of ethnicity and race, but also in terms of t regionalism. 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 ther republican party does and that's one of the reasons why the of te democratic party does a better e job of speaking to the issues that a lot of people face today. >> how much does the white whie party -- i once wrote a sentence thatnc would be forceful or unfortunate that it's a party o looking for a white america eri that's never coming back. >> i think there is, at least k among some people, you hear tha on fox a lot. this is not the america i grew up in. for which that is a proxy rhetorical statement. so i think that is part of it. i think actually if we step bacm a minute from that, what we d is might understand is that conser conservatives have oftenva prid themselves, long prided themselves on thinking, well, we treat everyone as an individual. it's the other party that treatl people as coalitions of race and ethnicities and special interests. i don't know if 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 aveo

coalition and we have to step ut 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.o s s soms ther >> gosh, we have got the policy problem, not addressing, i guess you call it the mobility agenda and then the demographic e - problem, is there both, is there a third, is one more important than the other?ng, >> 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 gotbu t through the civil war and consolidated the vote because they made the correct appeals on policy. it's not just that the e republicans are going after problems we can fix, we got -- a new set of problems as arisee that conservatism doesn't have ideas to address. there are two main ones. one is over the last 40 years

there's been a decoupling from wage groups. one of the key propositions has been worry first about growth and it will raise all votes, and so we shouldn't worry too much about distribution, 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 extene that we had beaten the business cycle, and we really haven't. and yet conservatives are making the same prescriptions in 2010 and 2012 that they were making y in 2007. that says maybe there is nothing they can do about the recessions. there arere i two problems with that. one is that it's wrong and the c other is p that it doesn't appe to people that are facing real economic pain in recessions. and again, another one of the so sort of proposition that conservatism puts out is you te don't want to give into the temptation to do too -- they no

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 th wa appealing, especially live if t with what growth we do get is disproportionately at the top. families are exposed to more risk and less reward fwra eward economic growth. i think it's a very difficult policy question but it's one that needs to be addressed. >> is capitalism broken then?of instead of rising tide lifting all growth, and decoupling productivity from wages. >> i think our mental model is wrong. we gravitate towards the wrong l solutions. g when we think about globalization, we tend to think of a mental model. okay, we see jobs sucked from the united states to china or something along those lines. you see companies that are kind of competing in a more vigorous ind of way, when in fact it's r really the division of labor isn

now global in scale, yet you still have hierarchies, you still have the more privileged l have part of labor where value is --t what happened the big change that happened after the, you know, really after the late '80s is that u you had many countrie that became integrated.parts. one of the propositions that 1 conservatism puts out is if you don't want to give into the temptation to do too many to bi transfer programs because while they create a safety net and reduce risk they also slow economic growth, that trade-off of more security for less growth can actually look pretty appealing, especially if the growth we do get is accruing nd. disproportionately at the top. a what can conservatives say about this economy. u.s. corporations manufacture oo 40% of the world. but the values are not flowing to the entire population. so capitalism is working exthe i records narly well. globalization has been miraculous in terms of raising living standards around the world. but the question is where are you situationed in the is hierarchies and when you think about it right now, the problem is that you have a chunk of thed

population that is t exactly wh you want to be in terms o f the way the new capitalism works an you have another chunk of the population that is just not in a very good place. they are kind of in this in between 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 gei rigorous thinking about how to d 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 i 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 e krugman's. they start in the same way, pur nostalgia for the 1960s, and almost in the same terms. and they are right. pitalism 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 aa opposed to how do we deal with e today. in a 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? ht our politics is far too oriented around how can we bring that

back rather than thinking aboutd e world look like d to h now and how can we make the most of america's strengths today? i think both parties are failinm that. that's not just a conservative problem. both parties are intellectually exhausted at the same time thars very bad for the country. >> there is nostalgia. >> yeah, the government was bigd biayg labor was big. 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. you guys were busy on the thing you call the internet.y thati thing. >> technically we weren't born then. >> not just technically. we really weren't. >> that's why i enjoyed them. [laughter] >> one way to think about that s is that an important differenceu between the two parties now is that democrats tend to think about the future in terms of uto large institutions. republicans, when they think

hat seit at all, which is not enough, tend to think about it in more decentralized terms. ta in that sense, i think republicans might better be cra. 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 a information economy the way theo college educated worker is not but it goes beyond that.inform it's about a pace of innovations and a type of innovation and a d type of labor force that's verye very different from what, againw the political class -- political

people and people who are s intellectuals tend to be old nd school in the way they live their lives, they write, they sh read, that's not necessarily what the average person is doing today.oing people who are in that economy are much more attuned to that than those who comment on it. >> you say what you want to say. >> i want to push back on that. i think they were phenomenal innovative. if you look at what's happening in people's lives, the lives are changing materially every single year with massive improvements and their standard of living. we're much less innovative now in a lot of ways than we were during the post-war period. and i think my worry is we're going to be less innovative because of the aging of the

world. and older people, as i'm looking down and becoming one, older people tend to be more conservative just in sort of coa temperamentally. there's also a thing if you're 57 and i come to you and say i u want to give you half the savings. i have a great opportunity. in 30 years you're going to be a billionaire. what? are you going to have the lioni upholstereded nursing homere ro in america? the calculus really changes as people change. we're doing well compared to the rest of the world. that's a huge challenge no matter is speaking to at all.ncn >> you all made the point that a core distinction between left and right in the future is centralization versus buts dece 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 whict argues that we are winding downa productivity or at least we are

in a time of slow technological innovation and rose. that ties into the idea that ieo 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 reai about how much policy can do isv because i think we have been in an environment for the last fac decade where we have had a de facto weakening of a lot of tup 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 as a improving. this is bad for producers but nt good for consumers. een disr what it makes me wonder is for the quantity of innovation we g get is the ip policy matter that much. i am skeptical of the ability o 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. knowledg i think the thing we're missing

when we are too optimistic about that side is the risk of the t 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. 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 thae we really don't understand whatc a true catastrophic financial hh crisis could look like. >> didn't we just go through one? s the >> 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 le fiscally.ge the past is not a predictor of t the future. >> sure it is. >> ok, well. zation let's get to the core question of the future left-right divide of the country. distribu you all have put something on the table. centralization, t a i decentralization. gh does that strike everybody as true? s my g >> i don't know. ro i think the core fight is the one we have been having nomy. 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 th 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.o . d it sees society as a set of systems that are disordered ande require better organization. it is a coherent argument. i don't agree with that but it'p 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 cad flourish. and that looks like chaos, and it is in many ways. that is how innovation happens.a it's also how problem-solving happens. it happens in a local way, one-on-one, through local e is s markets and institutions that bubble up, trial and error andye pilot programs, not a centralized here's the technical answer. bhi i think we are getting back to l place where things are apparents and there is something like kess

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 al about. that is why i think conservatives could be better positioned than they now seem to be to address the public storiee 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 we 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. the t 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 onal 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 organizatio 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 differen

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 o randomized controlled trial and then distribute that to all of society.wh at the question is what works where. and that's actually going to change because the actual nature of the problem is going to change over time. and so, you know, what the right ought to be about is actually preserving the solutions. but the other story that i've become more and more interested and concerned about is the idea that the, so the left is very concerned about the distribution of f resources for the society. whereas another story is that the real problem is there are large populations, growing margn populations, i would sunlight, that are marginalized, from the pieces of our culture and our eu society that are t actually

working very well. when you think about civil society, we tend to think about formal institutions. but there also formal networks. when you think about alen y 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 connectedn to the networks that give you access to upward mobility or o opportunity. i actually think that when you think about inclusion and the ty goal of inclusion, it leads youo 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 e 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. to look it's to say that maybe we oughtw 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 characterso 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. yw 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. g you

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. o what the left has is a suite oft centralized programs to offer that are designed to mitigate those risks, and the pitch we e are proposing to offer from theb right is basically we will haves pilot programs and state governments will take approaches of their own and figured thingse out. thing 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 cht have not expressed a lot of l interest in doing policy innovations. xpress on these core economic issues, although i think they have beeni 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 i 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 unleashi

market forces, create fasters e growth, beat down rents so that you improve returns to labor. relative to returns to capital. in a decentralized manner. but i don't think there's a credible way to meet those needs in a decentralized way on fiscal policies. >> i think there is a way to talk about this that democrats also aren't, which is to talk about reciprocity. i think one way to view the world is to think about what happens economically as a

forager does, where you have a 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 di the work, you should get the crop, right? how we judge economic policy unt often very much boils down to is this outcome fundamentally aboua 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 advocatint 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 doe is look at a policy emphasis and say, if you do the right things, it should be possible for you t get ahead. it should be possible for you to stay connected to the labor ctet market.

looking at policy through that lens, things like wage subsidies, trying to get long-term unemployed back to ide work through tax rebates or what have you, those are things that say you are doing the right stuf stuff and therefore you have -- we have an obligation to you. if you're not doing the right stuff, we don't. e not do if you're not trying to work, w don't have an obligation to support you. ty has i don't think either party has captured that space yet and tha would be a good space for republicans to go. d work >> 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 ir because the work they do doesn't pay what it paid their dad. and a lot of them are saying not

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 truly 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. ole. what you can say is we are going to make up that difference. we are going to make it easier g 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. ma 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 that's going to give you a check. >> yeah, or tax rebates.

like the eitc is basically a sus wage subsidy.struct there are ways to structure r a there so that it very much is linked the to work. in some ways it's more strongly linked to work. right now you can work for a very small percentage of the su 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. which actually will reward the waitress. a starbucks barista today does better than her counterpart did years ago. the the mill worker on the other hand, that job is gone and not did 5 coming back. they're discreet problems. i don't think either party has a particularly good solution. e a other than eitc for the mill worker. there is one thing we have ignored. we have talked a lot about income inequality, but we don't talk about the importance of ly gne t cost of living living relative l to income inequality. ot because the fact is if you live in a low-cost part of the

country and your wages are relatively low, you're actually not that bad off. it's trying to live on that wage in new york city that's tough. has to do with the fact that both at the local level in the federal level we have done a lon to drive up the cost of housing stock, the the cost of food, the cost o uf all sorts of basic go and services that a low-income person will have.-market so actually a message that's very free-market oriented and that will help that person if you can believe the bring his job back is to say we're going to drive the cost of your healto insurance down. we're going to drive the cost of your housing, your mortgage, your rent down. we're going to do those things to make it easier to live your life. >> does everyone here agree it is a decent idea or? down. >> i think it's a decent idea with the caveat that there are s still a substantial -- a very large number of people looking r for work relative to the number of people -- firms interested i hiring. wagerthe subsidy is only going further imbalance that by drawing more people into the labor market. and that doesn't mean a wage use

subsidy is a bad idea, it just means it's ever more important to have policiestes that promo wage sub di higher incomes rather than 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 this labor market. one thing you could try doing is making that labour market ne. ec cheaper. on so say one says why don't we rebate the payroll tax, both ea. sides of it, one month for every month this person has been out of work. it's effectually a wage subsidyo it is obviously not going to take every long-term unemployed person and fix the problem, but there are ways we can redirect t this and say look, we know you want to work. we know that you're trying and that you been stuck in this terrible employment scarring situation. we're going to try to help that by making it easier and more

attractive to for employers to hire you rather than this other guy. i think it's fine. it's not ideal, but -- >> go ahead. ink >> go >> fine with the exception that we have this long-run trend that has been actually slightly worse in the last few years of slow ao rage growth relative to gdp growth and relative to productivity growth. part of that is due to health care cost and not all of it. i it is related to a cultural problem that conservatives talka about that there is a declining work ethic or less pride that people take in work. i would content that part of that has to do with the fact that you've had this anemic growth in wages relative to gdp. i think people would be -- >> i think you're agreeing with megan there. >> -- more jazzed about working if -- >> sort of.t ha right. >> i agree totally on the particular points with megan. i think also it points to the place of work in the the larger

economic debate that's been emerging in the last few years, and it's been especially prominent the last few months. i think there is a lot of room for conservatives to highlight the ways in which there ways ofc thinking about helping the poor and helping the lower middle ti class are centered around work p and have tooo be centered aroun work. and some people have been doing this. senator rubio, for example, has an idea out there now that would try to distinguish in a very sharm way betweenth benefits to people that go to a job and ending benefits that 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 u to people who are employed would be cash benefits. work would always be more attractive than nonwork. sing te >> using the same amount of y, money. >> yeah, 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. rise to make work more appealing and to make work the center of what we think it takes to rise in america. ely i think that is extremely important. the we think it takes to rise in america. i think that is extremely important. ie 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. that i and that is healthy. t our that is what our politics shoulc 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 s care debate, the labor debate, the debate on welfare, and it is a big part of our politics goin forward. staffer >> you have worked as a hill staffer and a white house staffer. affer. you spent a lot of time with yo members of congress. how big a gap is it between this

type of conversation and the kind of conversation elected ari officials are having? >> how big have you got? e are i think there are a few membersd of congress who are in this kine of conversation, and i think its is probably unreasonable to expect there will ever be more than a few of them. think the question is how influential they can be. and at this point, i don't thinr 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 kinds of issues. he is not in the leadership. he is at the back of the list of the minority party at the he senate. i at this point they're not movino the party in quite this s a lot of nd there' room to go. in a way, though, the debate e that's happening about that, et about what theth agenda ought t be is still the debate of da, no

whether to have ap agenda and not what it should be. they are filling in a vacuum and the vacuum is important becausea of the inertia and because of a political arguments that don't make sense to me but make sense to a lot of people, that we shouldn't put out an agenda. it's basically the logic of theh romney campaign and i don't k iu think it worked very well. and i never think it could've worked very well. so i think there is debate going on about whether to approach the public with a policy agenda. for me, that's a reason to hope. that's a debate we've got to be able to win. >> a lot of this is about to be shaped by a primary season. does anybody have a favorite candidate? that's not the right -- a good question. let me ask how one looks at the

nominal candidates and how one sees the divides that will be emerging. what are the debates that seem obvious that we're 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 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 would be 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 over time, that got democrats the allegiance of black voters. perhaps republicans need to do something similar with the s tob 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 about unless immigration reform comes first? >> i don't know if i would put immigration reform at the top of the list. i would put universal coverage at the top of the list. until conservatives can de articulate their side, they don't deserve to have a broader base for their support. >> can i ask you about the primary that needs to come? >> well, i think we are now at a the point where it should be more a matter of us being health outraged that candidates don't have a serious health reform agenda, don't have a serious labor market agenda. those are two particularly at i crucial pieces. ive to o 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 ea seriously.st the last time around, that was not the case. you had a couple of candidates who had exotic tax reform o hadx proposals that were exotic, by t which i mean laughable. but i think that, you know, this time around, i think we have enough of an infrastructure. we have enough of a body of ideas where i think that at a bare minimum the candidates should have some kind of seriou agenda around health form, labor market and taxes. so i think that, you know, the truth is that i have found certain developments in the republican presidential field ee 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 ld not useful.yone who

>> don't be coy. ntial >> it should not be about character or personality. y 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. ere are i to think that something weird has happened. i do think there are easy ways to become a conservative celebrity, by saying outrageous things, etc. but some people are realizing ne that saying new things about is 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. e a >> i would say it's a return. 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 th and gave a speech attacking grover norquist, which i loved.e he gave that kind of speech. the last couple of cycles, they have not been giving those thati speeches. >> o

my impression, correct me if i'm wrong, is marco rubio right now. >> of the imaginable candidatesa that is probably true. part of it is there are more ideas out there. in a sense, the policy vacuum oi the right itself has been the f fault for a long time of people like us. i think that is less true now because some of the das the work has been done and somen of thed, 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. if there's this pile of papers in front of me, that helps. we cannot think of ourselves as being on the cutting-edge of bu anything. th i mean, look at us. that is a way in which we can with useful. well, some of us. look at me. look

i think the ways in which people who think about policy can be helpful, 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. they prepare the political , thr process so that when it's time for a politician to think about 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 h 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. there's still a lot of work to do. >> it seemed for a little while that there was a rising libertarian wave. let's get government off or backs. and rand paul certainly exemplifies that. is that still true? >> i think there is on some ve. issues. sort of gay marriage is coming forward as an issue. 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. he par you certainly sea informed policy, a lot less enthusiasm et for invading middle eastern countries and so forth than we had in 2003. in that sense, i think it is in 201tr it's just kind of hard to say, h in 2012, and the election was interesting because both abou candidates seemed desperate to say 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 would disagree with that. >> i wish mitt romney had gener, noticed. noticed. >> but in general people --

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 an year. you ca they want all the social n spending we are doing and everything else and they also want a balanced budget. you can point out things that e are mathematically impossible. and they are like, no, i want a balanced budget but only raise taxes on four people and don't cut out any foreign aid. what i fear is that will be 201h as well. what is hope is because that's the way to win, right? obama won by not saying n by n anything. ot 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 prob be addressed. it's no longer possible to sit o on the sidelines. he sidel >> i agree on that.an, an i think the one exception that is not the rule is mitt 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 t e 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 welln to be even vaguer. have >> i think the romney campaign e wentr. through a real process i true mitt romney style, thinking whether they should have a policy agenda and concluded that they should not have one. it left us with a headache. t th they thought it through. it was not that they had no ide how it would work. they thought the politics of that would be a bad idea.. that has to change. that calculation has got to change. >> i want to build on somethinge that megan. was talking about, that we haven't talked about this evening, and that is, cultural conservatism is fragile intellectually and also in terms of what appeals to a broad cross-section of america.

there are a lot of reasons for that. we all like to talk about cy. economic policy. we like to wonk out. but younger people today grew up well after the 1960's. they grew up in this era where they put last night's data on twitter, instagram or maybe som sites i've never heard of, snap chat or whatever. 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 that americans engage in premarital sex? s en 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 good pro-life party that will accept liberal hegemony on other social issues. fe par but that is not where the con serve tiff movement is today. >> i think gay marriage is an

issue where republicans will lose, but if you look at marriage as a whole, it is in disastrous shape.erent marriage makes peoplepa happy, it's good for people and it's collapsed. you have serial parenting, stabe multiple people have multiple children with different parents. the father tends to invest in a 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 to make a more robust claim for, okay, we have marriage equality. now everyone get married. >> what's the public policy that makes that happen? >> i think actually having people voice cultural policy also matters, right? like look at how influential

hollywood was on gay marriage and how much that changed -- hollywood and the tv stations, look up how muchwe that changed public opinion. >> that we should take over hollywood. let m >> let me try to answer that mpo 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 collusion -- conclusion is that parenting skill coaching does work. so don't focus on marriage, focus on parenting skills, some particularly for single moms. some of that includes nurse family partnerships that fa government could fund and othert things. as a matter of curiosity, would people on this panel support those sorts of policies, government-funded, maybe if not government delivered, policies like nurse-family partnerships or early childhood education? ve >> i think when you're looking t

at parenting skills -- so basically, what you see is that everyone is delaying marriage k and society, and one swath of -v the society is delaying children until after marriage and another chunk of the society that is wig not. i like to o this is a more attractable problem because of that. butonse with regard to that kinf investment, i think -- i call lf myself conservative despite the fact that i am influenced by a lot of libertarian thinking. part of that is because i think i'm more comfortable with the public paternalism. this is a good example of that o and this goes back to the issue of inclusion more broadly. when you are looking at how eo 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. a hi they are parenting in a new wayy a high investment style that happens to be very well-suited to a society with rapid change.

and the question is, is high investment parenting something only this narrow group of people can do or isn't something a is larger 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 it's something that we need to feel that it is appropriate for conservatives to embrace, but i think that is going to introduce an interesting new tension. re there is a lot of exhaustion of faith in failed public whole institutions, but i think you'r seeing a whole series of issues, for example, marijuana or regulation, where you're seeing the conflict between chaos and order. you're seeing the need for a neo public paternalism. or even wage subsidies. some libertarians say the labore market is not inclusive enough. minimum wage might not be the way to do it but wage subsidies might make it more inclusive. a i think conservatives need to id

feel more comfortable acknowledging that they are not libertarians and i think investing in parenting skills is one part of that puzzle. >> i'm going to go to the floorn in one minute, but i want to hit on that team of paternalism. welfare reform is paternalistici schools are paternalistic.comf nurse-family partnerships are paternalistic. as conservatives, are we comfortable with a certain level of public paternalism? >> part of what has happened in somewhat libertarian turn 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 some degree of government f paternalism when it is relatively local and can be defined differently in differenn places. dif even if there is centralized funding behind it.

the itch mentation of it is going to be different based on people's understanding of how different communities function.r in that sense there's certainly room to help people with familt formation and other concerns. but they are always going to work at the margins. it's true, there is some evidence that helping people se with parenting skills works. em it helps a little. it works better than marriage promotion, which does not reallt seem to do anything, but it onl helps very little. the problem here is very great. 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. ink we a the question of what does produce it has always been a centralized question. i think we are seeing now what it looks like when we fail at least in some portions of society to produce that citizenh and you can't blame the people e in these situations. you can't blame the larger society, at least not in the simple sense. this is the greatest public policy problem that 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. >> i'm going to underline that, capitalism requires a kind of citizen it does not produce. very well put. >> libertarians are pretty comfortable with paternalism aimed at children. mfor right, like? that's okay. treat kids like kids. icy i'm good with that. ht but i will also say that there is public policy and wages -- when you talk to people who study marriage, a lot of them k 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 thf that pays anything and therefore they are not any use around the house. like that sort of thing, yes. does marriage prohibition work? no. no, but there are broader public policies where you can try to dm things that make it easier to form an intact family. but 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 . million kids a year. but with things like childhood intervention, try the nurse partnerships, if it works, even if it does a little, that's ry t better than nothing for low on income kids who have very little. >> i think it's right that you d ba want to try these things on a oe decentralized basis. partly because things that involve complex delivery are better off being done by local z governments. i think doing this with a decentralized model depends on having a centralized fiscal hin policy layer on top of it. it's one thing to say we're ve o going to do parenting classes and various other things to try to improve outcomes for kids and low income families. it's another to say we are to ds this and then we can cut the food stamp program. so i think both, in order to develop trust among voters that this is something that will be done in a way that doesn't in m

the meantime e his rate them.est and also, because there are certain approaches that can be done rather than substitutes, 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 n 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 t tu candidate, democrat or e republican, who can address the problem of having the right vo worker, the right employee, would get everyone's vote. let me give you an example. the president of the national t association of manufacturers

said that at any one time there are 2 million manufacturing job 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 ke 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. the eco 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? hem are >> well, there are a couple of questions in that. er and all of them are framed from the point of view of an employeh in a way that's interesting. at that's useful, but i think is also probably too often the way conservatives think about questions like this. true i would say it's certainly true that our education system -- the education system of any republic that takes itself 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 en your economy needs? the answer is both, but the wayy to balance those, the way to d t distinguish between what is universal education and what is

specialized education for what' 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. o it se from the point of view of employers, it seems to have allm the wrong priorities. i think that requires some riti changes in the way we think chae about the distinction between higher ed and secondary education.e gh the distinction between worker training and education. trai those things have got to be --nn 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 moret options that have more to do with where they are. i think there's a lot of room for improvements in the way thas our public education system works and the education in general works. i think it's a low-ranging fruit for public policy. or publi there are a lot of low hanging h 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 lyp

problems that are perfectly obvious is so great that you can really improve things quite a ec bit in a lot of areas. education certainly is one of them. inking i think thinking about it in terms of worker training is one obvious way to do it. e only w we do have to be careful it's not the only way to do it, tti 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 b corporations that have very high profits right now, you have corporations sitting on enormous reserves of cash and why is that? ting o that's because they're not afraid. i think when you look at ause te economic sectors in which firms are afraid that their advantage is going to evaporate, that som new startup is going to come and destroy them, those are the firms that are hiring. econom facebook started out as a relatively small company. icar they're hiring quite a lot. em,s they're never going to become as big as g.m. but they're hiring a lot. rted out they're paying higher and higher wages to the people who have skills and that in itself is creating a dynamic in which nd people are seeking to build those skills. skills

i think the problem is,. when you look at the corporate tax code, the way it rewards large incumbents, if you look a all kinds of aspects that we tf treat business enterprises, we are not creating an environment in which these firms are afraido it's perfect to have a safety net for citizens. it's not appropriate to have a e safety net for corporations. co i think an environment in which more corporations are afraid of business model innovation i think that would actually be very good and would be particularly good for workers. o >> i almost never disagree witha reihan but i have to here. corporations are sitting on cash because of political and inty. economic uncertainty. taxes, they're concerned about higher taxes, regulations can drive upt the cost of their business, cost of capital. >> let's get some more questions here. right here on the second row. >> mike with the manhattan >> m institute. we question about the cities. we talked about conservatives needing a national movement. in order to be a national movement we need to compete in cities, right? tional

that's how we move senate raceso 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. ties. the blaz yo election is the best example. so my question is why? is it messaging? do we need a new agenda? many of you would say that we qu are are kind of solving the problemd of a decade or two decades ago. but i think in cities we're >> in 2008 when obama was n 2008 we are not getting credit. what do we need to do? >> in 2008 when obama was elected, i actually looked at this problem and thought, ok, is this true in other advanced economies? ece where the cities always vote left and the rural areas always vote right? vote rig and it turns out in europe there isn't a clear pattern. i in some european countries the cities are actually more ci politically conservative than r the rural areas.nt -- and there are maybe a lot of fea different reasons for that. th but that gives me hope that

there isn't any inherent -- anything inherent about urban life that necessarily means thk people must vote more left thann rural people. ad but i do think it's a huge problem and something we need t address.ardest and we have to be willing to t compete in areas where there isn't a short-term payoff. that's the hardest thing about r the political cycle. is the short-term payoff leads r us to cultivate the voters that we can win in the near term and that leads people away from cities. >> right here. >> thank you for being here today. a this has been a very interesting panel discussion. i was going to ask about out foe education, but you've already touched on that a little bit. i want to ask about foreign of v policy. it doesn't translate into a lots of votes but it's something that's obviously very important. the bush years could be described briefly as perhaps overreach. of oba and now you can say that a ma wd conservative critique of obama might be that we've withdrawn eo too muchur and it allows for a vacuum for strong men like putin. what would be the conservative

response, what would be your response, your policy particul prescriptions for what's going on in the world right now, particularly in ukraine and syria and how you guys would t i think about handling that? >> i doubt we can touch on all e of those things. but this is an area where the panel is pretty divided. ve that 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. person i personally think that u.s. global leadership, whatever you want to call it, i think it's ec extremely important in undergirding much of the rice o 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 hr that we invest and i think the problem is that the investing in our capabilities, the benefits . of that are not always clearly r visible. ob i also think it's true that the problem is that there are big swaths at the national securityv state that are ok.

it's hard to tell. it's hard to have a coherent cost-benefit analysis. there are real structural e righ problems and we might want to t shift resources. but do i think there's a dangerous tendency on the right to give short drift to the le importance of american power undergirding global stability t but i know that this is not a at popular view. r least of all among younger conservatives. >> foreign policy is important but it's not going to be very i important in the political debates of the next decade or decade and a half. ad the 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 ands then september 11th. but i think the best guide for where foreign policy is going to sit in american politics was the period from 1990 to 2001 where w 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 n going to intervene there, and hs 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 oe republican president will enacta if elected. george w. bush ran saying 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. k yo, >> hi. first, thank you, everyone and moderator, for hosting a reallya interesting discussion. i have a question about health care.

i'm directing it toward josh, because toward the end of the p 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 recoup ra tif and rehabilitative phase and bring them home. and it suggests much higher outcome, much cheaper delivery.c the affordable care act has t it almost destroyed the industry. e it's led to major reimbursement cuts over a multiple last two, i three, four years. do you see this, vis-a-vis the left-right divide, given there's a superior outcome with it, as d something conservatives can th r reintroduce, repackage, rebrand and sell in the health care complex for superior outcomes? >> well, so i think the interesting thing that we've seen or an interesting thing of we've seen with the implementation of obamacare is i think to an extent it's actually been a driver of innovation among providers because they are faced with reimbursement rate tr cuts.cost

there has been a drive in the industry to find ways to contair costs. we've seen, i think in part driven by the law, a slowing of healthcare expenses spent tour over the last couple of years. actually the government turningn off those taps to an extent. it's not like we had a private healthcare system before obamacare.i thin the government is an enormous payer through medicare.k by paying less i think that cann be a driver of a kind 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 not among the somewhat disappointing findings from the oregon health study, we did find people seemed to be consuming more healthcare if they had medicaid, which suggests that barriers to accese were not as large a problem as t people on the right sometimes

say.hcare you don't want the federal government telling healthcare xt providers exactly how to do their jobs, but i do think that centralized fiscal policies can be a driver of decentralized outcomes about service delivery. >> it's very simple.ve give consumers control of theirw own health dollars. these 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 if the consumer is controlling the dollars, the industry works for who pays them.g the today it's the government and r third parties that pays the deliverers of healthcare h services.on who i so the person who is important is the payer, not the patient.te if the patient is controlling the dollars, the system works to serve the patient.th i resist the call for ly paternalism because i think the opposite is what we need. we need to actually restrict the amount the government is doing s but actually get people the money. if we're concerned that people

don't have the means to supportt themselves in certain ways, that doesn't mean have some complex government program that tells them what to do.e some give them the economic resourcee to pursue the people who will deliver those services directly. >> the point that josh finished which i very much agree with, ii a certain way the home althcare healthcare question is one that shows the problem with the system we had before obamacare and the system we have now.now. because in the bush years there was huge pressure to increase investment in all forms of home-based healthcare which was sort of a centralized decision about how the system should work.uld it didn't work very well.n't wok it was probably an enormous p waste of money. and now we're doing the reverse. saying, let's have a centralized decision saying, anno, we don'to that. either of these is the right approach.dica and so the medicare system we have and really that larger healthcare system we have had before was not a consumer-centered, market oriented system. the system we need is not only r

to the right of obama care. it's 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 some of this sounds very familiar to me. the pessimism i'm hearing was h very similar to the pessimism oo the late carter years. i was in the reagan administration and it was i was amazing how quickly things ad turned around. i think some of the '80s solutions are still there.here. u i think problems of regulation, obama care hasla messed up the medical markets but it's also messed up the f labor markets tremendously, financial regulation. just today there was a very ever large number of new species being declared endangered.tion, everywhere we look in the economy is increased regulationn and i think that's a lot of the unemployment we're seeing goes

back to your mill worker, why does he have trouble finding a job?it maybe because the employees won't commit to hiring him because they don't know what heh healthcare expenses he's going to generate in the future.'s gog if we can deregulate some of these things, we might be able to move away from many of thesem problems. >> but the policy challenges arb very different than the challenges of 1970. look at the tax rates versus today. versu regulation is a much, much bigger problem today than it was there. fiscal imbalances are a much bigger problem, healthcare mbale entitlements, a much bigger problem. the diversity of global power, a much more complex problem than e it was there. we have to have an agenda that's tailored to the challenges htht today. >> let's go other here. >> hello. gu sorry. thank you.th 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, vou

about privatization, chf voucherization and a large amount of spending cuts which will allow civil society to flourish, yet that program seemed unpopular with republicans and very, very up popular with the public. i'm curious if you think they fk sound like good concepts but ifo in practice they're far too nd volatile and too far unpopular a to base a coherent public police around. irst o >> first of all, almost no f voters care about can decentralization as such. so you can't build the message around that. nobody goes to the voting boothb and says, do i want a government that is more or less central. they care about more fundamental pocketbook issues. but the ryan plan thing goes toi a distinction that i mentioned earlier that you want to decentralize certainly kind of delivery because of the value of local knowledge,. be you have different preferences in different areas. burr cats are more likely to ber

in touch with local people than people who work for the central government. but that doesn't mean you have to decentralize the actual a fiscal flows where the federal government has a significant sl advantage in its ability to tax and borrow. in fact, if you commit to having 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. to >> i think there's a real problem that democrats and republicans are going to have to deal with. obamacare wasn't popular.repu stillbl isn't, right? in fact, most things that are fiscally feasible are wildly unpopular. people like free stuff that is paid for by some other person they've never met. this is the fundamentals of politics and it's never been more true than it is today because we have an aging population that is very ng conservative about keeping what' it hass gotten.en and because, there's less money.

with lower growth is face harder fiscal tradeoffs.fiscal you can't take it out of the surplus. you have to take it off of something that people already have. i think this is going to be a big challenge for republicans ag they frame an agenda which is that if you're going to be oing honest about what it's going tot cost and how you're going to do this and who the losers are suct going to be, because there's no such thing as a policy in which someone is not worse off, then t you're going to have to go out v 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.no, >> let me headache sure i get to this gentleman over here. >> i think the problem is that 0 it takes us 40 minutes and a future of conservatism talk to o even mention anything about peoal issues. we lose people flat out becauseo we have this continuing blood letting of state by state gay t

marriage, yes or no. so is there some kind of way m that we can avoid a possible of schism of northeast republicans who, frankly, this issues settled. all of us have gay friends, we are fine with it.hern but for southern republicans, how do we keep them from going f off and causing a schism and running away with todd aiken ani pat robinson?sm a >> 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 ai both the right and the left that perhaps won't be as substantial of a skiz mattic issue in the future. that's the political element of. it. an i actually wish and hope that conservatives would have a d haa coherent political philosophy hy around what they think culture and society should look like ike that would accept the post '60s reality.

>> a couple questions from blicn social media -- well, i'm going to jump in. the republican party is a pro life party.li it will never not be a pro life party. it would die without being a pro life party. i just had to say that. i'm not a pro life person. i'm just pointing out reality. >> but there's no generational shift on abortion. ion >> this is a question from one of our twitter followers who is watching via live stream. i comes from marvin gardner and he would like to know, why not define debt ceiling to be the o 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'n have the rule.

but the second problem with this specific thing is, look, there's always going to be an out for ar emergency. so we declare war on iceland yer once a year and give them a marshall plan and we've gone m right back. there's always ways to gimmick these budget rules. the hard job is to tell politicians, no, don't borrow anymore money. cut spending. by the way, this is something c the republican party needs to ds is say, when you spend money, th that's borrowing it.at spen okay? the decision to spend is the aty decision ultimately to borrow and then the decision to tax. georgeth bush fully e lighted te the fact that when he spent money he was ultimately going to pay for it through taxation. neea 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 fundamentalas problem which is the stuff we ht bought. focusi

>> that's not the biggest proble problem with that.with the biggest problem is that the economic crises in this countryu is massive unemployment and thed fact that wage growth is anemic because the labor market is wag slack. conservatives have become a ople movement of people who think thg that that is a less important e issue than government debt even though interest rates are extremely low and capital is flowing into u.s. treasuries because the market is strongly e accepting of the fact that the u.s. government will pay those f debts. if we continue to prioritize this debt issue over issues tha are actually of economic to importance to 85% of americans, we won't be able to appeal to >i them. >> i disagree on two levels. yes, interest rates are low now. that's not a fixed law of the universe.br that is what your interest rates are right now. but more broadly, politically, , people hate the debt. this polls incredibly well, ibly democrats, and republicans.crata everyone hates borrowing money. cothey act on it?

no. do they act on that, no.ll thisa are they totally hypocritical, l yes.when is this a political problem for republicans, no. when they go out and talk aboutl it, this polls extremely well ao and does good at the ballot box. >> it's a profound economic d s problem. and the most profound economic problem that we face. >> a conservative is somebody who thinks every market is rket efficient except the treasury bond market. a >> there are a lot of reasons -- if we have a debate about monetary policy and why bond prices are what they are, that's fine. but in 2040 which china has a 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 quick informational question. since you're all young hipsters, i want you each to name either a politician or a writer who, if you had to pick someone, who will have a profound impact on the future of

conservatism/republican party, pick a person, presumably not yourself. who wants to go first? >> i'm willing to say i'm 'm probably the least influential writer on the republican party. like ever. since all of my yds are electoral death. david brooks.. >> credibility shot. >> one person who gives me hope at this point is mike leak, whot is, first of all, a senator who doesn't think he's running for president which is a wonderful thing in american life, very life, rare. but he's also a person who is shaping a conservative vision that's a kind of rugged communitarianism that makes a lot of sense to me. i think it would make a lot of sense to a lot of people. >> anybody else? >> i think the most important y policy right now is actually on criminal justice and revisitingd the idea that it's a good idea to massively incarcerate people, especially for nonviolent crime, and i think there are a number r of southern governors have been

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

and follow him. in >> he's had some major pieces. >> he's got the lead piece in ia the next national affairs. >> i agree. >> the masses love regression analysis. >> charts, charts. >> thank you very much. guys. rter [ applause ] tonight on c-span 3, washington jernl's university with university of minnesota president. it it's part of our series of universities in the big ten conference. that will be followed by a portion of this year's net roots

korns, selections of the usa convention and views on the progressive politics. that all starts tonight at 8:00 eastern here on c-span 3. >> c-span's 2015 student cam competition is underway. this nationwide competition will award 150 prizes totally $100,000. create a five to seven minute documentary on the topic "the three bramplg and you." the videos need to include c-span programming and be submitted by january 30th, 2015. go to stunt cam.org for more information. grab a camera and get started today. with live coverage of the u.s. house on c-span and the senate on c-span 2, here on c-span3 we kochment that coverage by showing you the most

relevant hearings and public affairs events. on the weekend we're moment to american history tv including six sere res. civil war's, american art facts, touring museums and sites, history book shelf with the best known american history writers, the presidency, looking at the policies and legacies of our commanders in chief, lectures and history, what top college professors delving into america's fast and real america, films from the 1930s through the '70s. c-span 3 created by the cable tv industry. wap us in hd, like us with on facebook and follow us on twitter. coming up, part of colorado christian university's western conservative sum it. first, republican senator tim scott talks about school choice

and the economy. then in 30 minutes, conservative media figures debate the influence of the tea party on the republican party. the group includes rush limbaugh, radio producer, james golden who goes by the name bo snerdley on the air. >> thank you. it's so good to be with my fellow conservatives today. as many of you know, i'm the number one target for the democratic campaign ta congressional committee going nationally, and they're going to find out that taking on a united states marine corps combat veteran is going to be a lot tougher than they ever thought.

it's an honor for me to introduce a former colleague ofe mine. senator tim scott is the epitome of conservative values and principles.nd he grew up poor in a single parent household in north charleston, south carolina. he learned the importance of faith, hard work, and family. he started from humble beginnings to build one of the most successful all state agencies in south carolina. prior to being sworn in to the u.s. senate in january 2013, tit scott served in the united states house of representatives from 2011 to 2013. he was a member of the house a leadership and sat on the influential house rules committee. he also served in the charleston city council for 13 years,

including four terms as the council chair.ms he was a member of south f carolina house of of representatives and was electedd chairman of the freshman caucuse and house whip.nator today senator scott works to promote conservative causes in e congress where he has worked with senate colleagues to introduce a balanced budget amendment to strip the power away from congress to spend money that we do not have. he also was an original co-sponsor of the bill that d would permanently ban the wasteful earmark process.pr tim scott's agenda will empower america through economic freedom and education.da he is dedicated to working with anyone committed to building a better future to develop bold

ideas that break away from thise country's past failures. please join me in welcoming and giving a warm colorado welcome to senator tim scott, a true conservative american hero. ♪ [ applause ] ♪ >> thank you. thank you very much. i'm sure that those of you who live in the sixth district will be sending mike kaufmann back to congress. to and i'm looking forward to y'all sending the great corey gardener to join me in the united states senate. corey is a good man. we need some help in the united states senate. anybody realize that?

everybody realizes that. i want to just spend a few nutes minutes talking about how we can make sure that in 2014 we take back the majority in the senate and in 2016 we have an opportunity to make sure that there is a republican in the s white house. we need a republican in the ne white house. when i think about the challenges that we face as a a nation, i always go back to the song "amazing grace." anyone know the song "amazing "z grace"?w i like that song a lot. i once was lost but now i'm i oe found. i was blind, but now i see. i thank the lord he saved my soul.han yes, he saved a soul like me. and that's my story. i'm not sure if it's your storyy but it certainly is my story.i i think about how amazing the

good lord is and how amazing s america is and how the combination of a strong god and an amazing nation makes a guy po like me even possible. and that's the story of the grad grand old party. it's the story of the great opportunity party.ory let me share my story with you and explain how the conservativc principles have made me possible. growing up in a single parent household, my parents got divorced when i was about 7 en years old. par i started drifting.out anybody ever drifted? all drifting seems to head in t. the wrong direction. by the time i was 14 years old i was flunking out of high school. as a matter of fact, i flunked o out of high school. i saw some kids over there. please don't do what i did, okay? i failed as a freshman, world geography. i may be the only senator to ever fail civics. but then when i got to the

the senate i felt like i was very comfortable because lots of vey those guys on the other side have failed civics.tabl the amazing. just amazing. i also failed spanish and english. now, when you fail spanish and english, they don't call you dot bilingual. no.hey they call you bi-ignorant call because you can't speak any language. that's where i found my unhappy self. but i had two major blessings. one was a strong mama.one wa i got to tell you, i'm a mama's boy. i thank god more strong mamas.s. give all mamas a hand, especially if you're sitting next to the one you're married to.arriease g please give her a hand. i saw a man up the front and he's like, praise the lord. smart man, he wants to go home r tonight.

anyways, you have to have fun at wheno you're on stage. i have to go back to washington d.c. so this is all the fun i tv get to have. so you might as well join in with me. my mama is and was an amazing er woman. she would work 16-hour days as d nurse's aid making sure we stayed off of welfare. she believed she needed to set the example for her boys to r hr follow.she work she worked hard at it. when i flunked out of high o school as a freshman, she was none too happy with me.ve has my mama believes that sometimest love has to come at the end of switch. i know this is the west, but a switch, for those of you who don't understand what a switch is, a switch is a southern apparatus of encouragement, yor typically applied from your belr line to your ankles, and my mama encouraged me a lot that freshman year.essing and the second blessing that came my way was a small business owner, a conservative owne republican.

i didn't know it at the time that the chick-fil-a operator was a conservative republican. all i knew was that john showed up at the right time. he started telling me some veryd important lessons. he started saying that, tim, yor don't have to play football or be an entertainer in order to be successful in america. you can think your way out of poverty. i had never heard this before.i i thought the only way out was y playing for the dallas cowboys.e i know this is denver territory, i understand that. let me just say, my chief of staff is from colorado.do. my deputy chief of staff, colorado. my legislative director, from colorado. it pains me to see all the orange in my office. this is not a part of the

speech, and i apologize for interrupting the presentation to have a commercial break. i decided during the football season last year to make one l bet. not a bet that puts you in jail because betting is illegal. i understand that. this is not a bet.this is this is simply, i made a statement that, in fact, if the denver broncos can beat the fa dallas cowboys in the cowboys stadium, i would wear a denver broncos tie.ti when tony romo threw that interception and we lost 51-48, i called my pastor.called i wanted to know if it was okay. for me to violate my statement. and he said, son, i know you're a politician so you guys do thao all the time. however, as a man who believes in the lord, you got to honor your word. hon so i said, sir, i'm cheap -- i mean, i'm frugal, sir, would you please buy me a tie, so he bought me this beautiful denveru broncos tie.tie he, too, is from colorado. beaut god bless his soul.

so i had to wear the tie, unfortunately. the cowboys did not win that game, so now the commercial ial break is over.the pr back to the presentation. that message is brought to you s by the western conservative summit, sponsored by john andrews. god bless you, john andrews. let's give john a hand. [ applause ] john, my mentor, chick-fil-a operator, he was teaching me sov some very valuable lessons.tartd he started teaching me that if a you have a job, you've done well. but if you create jobs, you've done extraordinarily well.. if you have an income, you can support yourself. but if you make a profit, you can change the life of your fitu family and your community. and this became the very fabric of my journey towards conservatism.jo as a 15-year-old kid learning le these very basic business

principles that the free market -- four letter word word coming, please close your ears -- making a profit is an amazing journey and experience in america.in am i will tell you i bought it full. it took me four years to get it. and then when i was 19 years 38, old, john was 38, he died, and it changed the course of my life.ement i set my mission statement to h positively impact the lives of n billion people with a message of hope, being my faith in christ jesus, and opportunity, being john's lessons of financial ccef literacy.ul i had a great successful can business.grandp he was right. it can change your life.foot we grew up living with my grandparents in a 1,000 square foot house. me, my mother and my brother shared a bedroom.

i don't like neither one of them today. my grandparents had the other room.d yoough bus john said you can change all of that through business ownership, and he was so right.you one of the reasons why, as you y uncover my opportunity agenda in washington d.c., that i focus so much on the entrepreneur is reni because i've experienced first r hand that when the government nd steps back and entrepreneurs step in, all things change. that a good economy makes all s things possible. the question is, what makes a a good company. do so my opportunity agenda focuses on how do we create a good knoh economy. we all know that tax reform and regulatory reform are necessary, key ingredients to that good economy. i can't hire more people and pay higher taxes and have higher regulations at the same time. i can do two out of the three. if you want me as an entrepreneur hiring more people, we have to reduce the cost of doing business.

i know you guys in this room arm fans of obamacare.re. good, good, good. obamacare spends too much, taxes too much, and it destroys the best healthcare system in the world. i like my friends who say, what about the balanced approach. if you're looking for the king balanced approach, just look no further than obamacare. over $800 billion of new ew revenues, higher taxes, the destruction of the relationship between a doctor and a patient, look no further than obamacare e for all the challenges that we t face because in obamacare we sec a couple things. not only do we see higher taxesw not only do bewe see higher

regulations, but we also see this march towardspr centralizing the control of all the major decisions, taking over another sense of the economy ann presenting to the america people in my opinion a clear decision, do you believe in redistribution or do you believe in the private sector? do you believe in entrepreneurship? do you believe in the power of 300 million americans. or do you believe in the intellect of 535?us let me just tell you if you're looking for the answer, it ain' the 535. move as we move forward, we're going to have to have something to be for as we face the fact that there are some things that we are clearly going to have to f stand against. let me do a survey. how many of y'all -- you can say yes or no. do you think obamacare is a good idea?

no! handl >> how many of y'all -- do you think the president is handling the border situation with the how abouan kids in a good way? >> no! >> how many of y'all think he's handling the syrian situation in a good way? >> no! >> how about the irs scandal? >> no! >> the economy? >> no! >> the v.a.? all the things that are going wrong, we should be winning every single election.no wi we should. someone asked this simple question.ti why are we not then winning the elections? i think this is an important point. people do not care how much you know until they know how much you care. this is a very important key tom our success in 2014 and 2016.exi and one of the reasons why i'm so excited about y'all bringing corey gardener to the ballot is that you can't see corey and noy

smile. he's always smiling. corey says, hi, obamacare stinks. yes, it does. he has a permagrin.wh one of the keys to success is b making sure that our candidates are likable, that our candidatet are armed with the right oney y message, that, yes, we know whay we're standing against. when we have a $17 trillion debt it's clear, we're standing against spending money you do not have, buying things you to cannot afford and impressing a world that seems to be . completely unimpressed. this is easy. when you have a $600 billion annual deficit, it makes it easc for us to stand strong againsti the challenges that the left are bringing to our country. that's the easy part. we have to answer the question,, what are we for?e as we answer that question, wha

are we for, i believe we'll 'll start winning elections everywhere.good because standing up and saying no is good. throu it takes us through october. unfortunately, the election is in november. so for us to get through ve to november, we have to have a positive policy agenda that attracts a diverse group of voters to take a second look atk the grand old party and start thinking of it as a great opportunity party. my opportunity agenda, in my ppu opinion, does just that.ni there are two pillars to the opportunity agenda. the first pillar is education.bu the second pillar is how do we build a good economy. about let's talk about the first ucat. pillar, education. one of my first bills in the cec senate is a choice act, creating hope and opportunities for individuals and communities through education. as a guy who did poorly as a ote

freshman, my mother beat me -- i mean, she encouraged me into summer school, which helped me e catch up with my class, finishen on time, earned a football scholarship, went off to ff to college, finished five years and have done pretty well since dor then. the foundation of which is education.ion if we look at the centralization of education, we come to one very simple conclusion. it's not working.working. a classic example embedded in ma opportunity agenda in the choice act is this notion of school th choice. i'm a big believer that parents deserve more choices so that kids have a better chance. the fact is that the choice actt helps us get there. here's a classic example. in d.c., the cost per student for a public education is around $21,000.$2 i know that sounds like a very a low number to some of y'all. this side of the room said wow.

this side of the room said hmmmm. i'm going to talk to the hmmmm for just a few seconds here. for $21,000, 56% of the student graduate. very few of those students go ou to get a two-year or four-year degree. opportu the choice act embedded in the choice act is a d.c. opportunity scholarship.ool it allows for school choice in d.c.ts here are the results of school choice. i'll be right back. for the wow factor over here, the d.c. opportunity scholarship costs $8500 per student. $21,000 typical public education, $8,500 for school choice.