according to this wireless report, -- at&t and verizon according to this wireless report control about 80% of the spectrum. is that something we should be concerned about? >> i would argue no, at this moment, although the commission is moving forward to try to bring more spectrum to market. if you define spectrum as just being the cellular spectrum, yes, but i also think the commission has attempted to bring other lines of spectrum to market and we have pushed specifically to have other bands below 1 gigahertz. .

>> if you think about it, almost all the vendors are not in the united states. they're outside the united states and they're building their infrastructure for an ecosystem that extends well outside our borders. so we push in this context to have a spectrum that is internationally harmonized so that when they build technology, whether it's for sprint or u.s. cellular or at&t

or verizon or t-mobile, they're also building that technology for some of the other foreign carriers and therefore driving the cost down. but to me, the solution is bring more spectrum. i think matt and i would agree on this pretty strongly. bring more spectrum to market. remove any of the potential barriers from that perspective. if you bring it below one gig hertz, then you're leveling the playing field. i think that's the right approach. >> i think it's an important thing. chris is right with the cellular licenses given to at&t or verizon as they consolidated over the years. the most recent auction of this beach front auction, at&t and verizon won at auction the largest portion of those prizes. other entities did get some of that spectrum, and yet at&t and

verizon have used their dominance to look at engineering ways around that competition. lack of interoperability, so that if i'm a smaller wireless provider and if i have a phone that works on my particular license, it might not work on verizon or at&t. they've not only won the largest percentage of licenses at auction in addition to having them given to them in the first place, but they've also found ways to keep people out of their space. so we see continued domination by the largest carriers in the auction space. when it comes to getting more tv band spectrum, it's something we certainly talked about as well. they made the case for unlicensed spectrum use in that same band, not necessarily only by the largest carriers, and frankly by the largest carriers, too. we see at&t up loading as much as 40% of iphone traffic on to

wi-fi networks. smarter ways to make it something that is shared and something that can be reused more frequently and more cheaply by ino'vay or thes -- innovators. >> paul kirby, final question. >> >> as we talk about spectrum allocations, is there a concern that the commerce department is looking right now at spectrum with a 1.7 gig hurts? how concerned are you that it will take too long to free that spectrum up? >> i think it's important to note that going forward, i don't think we'll ever find any green field spectrum, spectrum that is encumbered in some way. the way we look at it is if you can get the government focusing

on a significant amount of spectrum, 500 megahertz is what they're focusing on, and you can get them focusing on some of it in the commercial space and some in the government space. and you can try to move each of those forward. you have the likelihood that you will have sort of a rolling out of spectrum over time. some of it sooner, some of it later. we certainly have pushed hard for our desire for 1755 to 1780 megahertz to be made available. i know that the n.t.i. is looking all the way up to 1850. we believe the focus at least initially should be on that initial swath, and everything should be done that can be done short of causing harm to our national security, of course. but everything that can be done should be done to reallocate that spectrum. and then to matt's point earlier about verizon and at&t winning the lion's share of 700 megahertz, i don't want to be

the defender of those two, yet sprint and t-mobile didn't participate in the auction. what we're hoping is we can bring a very large swath of spectrum to market at one point in time and allow everyone who wants to participate the chance to come there and buy fungible assets. >> and that's "communicators" for this week on c-span. our guests, chris, matt, and paul. thank you. the report, if you're interested in reading the 15th annual wireless competition report of the f.c.c. is hyperlinked at c-span.org/ communicators. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> sunday on "washington journal," andrew bouman talks about debt and deaf sis

reduction. then bruce cook looks at a proposal to cut federal spending by a flat 1% by federal dollar until 2018. and after that, vicki needham on the u.s.-colombia trade agreement that was reauthorized in 2007, but not the u.s. with details of the pending agreement and the impact on the two countries. plus, your e-mails, phone calls, and tweets. "washington journal" live sunday at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. on "newsmakers," jim jordan, chairman of the republican study committee, talks about the budget and debt ceiling negotiations. the republican study committee is a group of more than 175 house republicans formed to advance a conservative social and economic agenda in the house of representatives. "newsmakers," sunday at 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. eastern on

c-span. >> this weekend on "book tv" on c-span 2, is everything you know about the o.k. corral wrong? jeff guinn tells a different story. on "after words," charles hale looks at the long war of islamism against the international state system. also, the former mexican prime minister. look for the schedule at booktv.org. >> earlier this week, former president bill clinton talked about the current federal deficit. he praised president obama for handling the u.s. economy while criticizing republicans in congress. held at the campus progress annual national conference, this is close to an hour.

>> thank you very much. first i want to thank emily for sticking up for the progressive causes in our native state, which probably went further from democrat to republican in the 2010 election than any other state in america. i'm very grateful for her commitment. i want to thank the wonderful head of the senator for american prork my former chief of staff john pedesta, and the director of campus progress who was audio very able speech writer for me on foreign policy when i was president. i sort of have to show up when they ask. [laughter] i want to begin with something that was emphasized in the

brief film. most of the time when i was in politics, people debated what are you going to do, how much money are you going to spend on it? and there wasn't enough attention given to how are you going to do it so your good intentions actually turn into real changes. and if you don't think about that, you get in trouble. for example, and i'll come back to this in a minute, but i just want to mention it. in the current budget debate, there's all this discussion about how much will come from spending cuts, how much will come from tax increases. and almost nobody's talking about one of the central points that everyone who's analyzed this situation makes, including the bipartisan commission, which said you shouldn't do any of this until the economy is clearly recovering.

because if you do things that dampen economic growth and the u.k. is finding this out now, they adopted this big austerity budget, and there's a good chance that economic activity will go down so much that tack revenues will be reduced even more than spending is cut, and their deficit will increase. so why are we talking more about the economy and less about this? partly because the republicans who control the house and have a lot of votes in the senate have now decided having quadrupled the debt in the 12 years before i took office and doubled it after i left that it's all of a sudden the biggest problem in the world. [laughter] i'll come back to that. but i want you to think about it. because i hate these deficits. and i was appalled that the debt was doubled in the eight years after i left office. and i think the fiscal condition of the country did make us weaker in dealing with

the financial crash. i'll say more about that in a minute. but you have to know about what works. there's almost no discussion in this debate. i read the articles every day about the timing of whatever it is they do and whether it will work or not. whine left the white house and i started this foundation a decade ago, i decided to focus on that. i wanted to work on things i cared about when i was president so i could still have an impact. and it seemed to me that i was in a position of trying to involve people in answering these how questions. the first thing i did at the

university of arkansas a school, a graduate school, which would offer america's first degree not in public policy, but in public service. students there spend half their time in the field, in america and all over the world, trying to actually figure out how to solve a particular problem or seize a particular opportunity. and then i got involved in this age work because when i left office, there was relatively small amount of money being spent in the global fight against aids. the united states, the last budget i left was for $300 million a year, and that was 25% of everything in the world. but we organized the fund and it was established, and president bush came in and passed the program which i

think was his finest achievement, which allocated billions of dollars to the fight against aids and later malaria. anyway, we didn't have a lot of money. when i started, there were only 200,000 people in poor countries getting medicine necessary to live, something that we had come to take for granted in america. and 2/3 of those people were in brazil, which was a rising economy where the government basically paid for the medicine and they had their own pharmaceutical industry. we were paying and do pay today about $10,000 a year for standard aids treatment to keep people alive. that's the medicine given out at my neighborhood clinic costs. the generic medicine was about $500 a year. sounds cheap. but in countries where the per capita income of less than $1 a day and an infection rate of

10% or higher, it was prohibitively expensive. so basically, when i looked at it and i got some good people in to help me, the aids medicine business, and this reflects -- i want you to think about this when you think about all the things you're concerned about today, was even at $500 a per a year was a high profit margin, low volume, uncertain payment business. so i went to canada, ireland, and then a number of other donors and i said i want you to promise to fund these programs. i don't want you to give me the money. i just want you to give me the right to green light the money if i can get a lot of this medicine discounted. and then we went to the producers of the medicine, we said, ok, we want you to change your business model from a low volume to a high volume, from a high margin to a low margin,

from an uncertain payment to a certain payment business. we'll help you reveal the manufacturing processes, we'll work on your supply chain and give you your money promptly. how much will you sell me the medicine for? we cut it from 500 to $140. [applause] then, children's medicine we cut from $600 to $190. then when we got some serious money in there, we cut the price down to -- the old regime, which some people still use, we can buy for $90 now and the children's medicine for $60. now, there's one pill which is much easier to use, which we now have down under $200 from about $700. the point i want to make is this wasn't a republican or a democratic deal. there was an x amount of money and number of people who need

the medicine stay alive. now in 70 countries there are four million people, about half of all the people in poor countries, which is a long way from 200,000. about half of all the people in poor countries on earth getting medicine off these contracts, including about 75% of the kirn. the money made a big difference. one or two euros funds the children's medicine part. but i give you this only as an example. we applied the same theory to try and lower the costs of new technologies when we got in the climate change business and we're helping 40 cities around the world to try to reduce their greenhouse gas submissions by not only retro fitting buildings but changing the street lights and wherever possible in megacities and developing worlds, closing landfills, which are huge

emitters of meth they know gas, and which really are gold mines. recyclable gold, plastic, metal, and all the rest, the organic material can be turned into fertilizer and the rest can be turned into electricity. we're trying to do the same thing. we have doubled, tripled, sometimes quadrupled the income of african farmers by lowering the cost of fertilizer and seed and work out a distribution network and saving them half their income by taking their products to market. the point is i live in a world now which is very different from the world that i found in washington, which was very different than the world i lived in when i was a governor. i remember one day i had a young man working for me in the white house who had been with me for 10 years before in my

governorship. and i mentioned some piece in the paper that was highly critical of me and i asked this guy if he read it. i said yeah. i said what did you think of this piece? he said they're talking about somebody i'm not familiar with. and the problem with a national political environment is it's so far removed from real people physically, and both, all the players are trying to get their bite on the evening news or their headline, that you tend to lose what really matters, which is how it's going to affect us. and your future. and people all around the world. so i think first i want to say whether you like or dislike what's going on in the government, it's really

important that you spend a lot of your time and attention trying to change the reality on the ground within whatever constraints public policy. that's what we do with the clinton global initiative every year. we bring in business people, philanthropists, government leaders, and n.g.o.'s. we fly people in from the poorest countries in the world who are active on the ground doing things and who don't have their own money, and we all get together, and instead of giving speeches, everybody just has a conversation and makes a commitment. and the last six years, those commitments have already measurably improved the lives of 300 million people in 180 countries. just by asking people to do it. we have one for university students every year. and the university students, as you know, don't have a lot of money. but very often, they have the best ideas. last year, two students at

baria college. -- it was established before the civil war in kentucky, 1855, a university then open to women, which was a radical idea. and also available to african-americans. and they have very low twig, all the students work on campus, but two students decided they would go out into their neighborhood in eastern kentucky, which is hilly and it's part of appalachia, and do free energy audits. so they're doing it. and we found out that they can actually save these poor people a lot of money for almost no investment. another student at the university of california in san diego realized that there were

huge numbers of students who weren't even aware of all the tax credits they were entitled to. some of which were passed when i was president. so he calculated that if there was 100% knowledge -- now, i'm going to come back to this in a minute. there was 100% knowledge of all the students at the university of california of san diego of every form of student aid they could access, they would save $2.5 million a year just on that campus. so i believe in all this. and i think you have to have -- you can't get discouraged when the politics are going in a direction you don't like. you have to keep fighting against the things you don't like, but also find something to do that you do like. it's very important in life not

just to be against a tide that you oppose, but also to make something good happen. because every time you make something good happen, it gives weight to your position on these political issues. that's why i think one of the most important bills i ever signed was the bill creating -- 700-plus young people have done work all over america. [applause] and they have made a big difference. so that brings me down to this current moment. and your topic. this is a neat twist on the old speak truth. you cannot turn truth into power, unless you have it in the first place. beginning with basic facts.

for example, we have this current political drama playing out in washington over the budget. what do you want america to look like in the 21st century anyway? the decisions you make on the budget should be informed by the life you want to live. when you're 30, when you're 40, when you're 50. what do you want america to be like? when you have children in these chairs, what do you want it to be like? president obama has a vision of an economy that works for everybody. that is modern and sustainable and offered shared opportunities. a vision of government and society that involves shared responsibilities.

not specific benefits nearly as much as everybody pitching in and doing what they're supposed to do to create the government we need to have for empowerment to take hold in america. and it has a vision of community that makes the most of america's greatest asset, our diversity. that's why he and i passionately believe in the dream act. [cheers and applause] i think we're better off with more immigrants, not fewer. so i don't understand all that. [applause] the main thing i want to say is why he believes in gay rights. that's why i was proud of my -- [cheers and applause] i was immensely proud of another of my former administration members, my

former house secretary, now the governor of new york, professing the gay marriage bill. [cheers and applause] just because i think if you look at the story of america, we had a lot of speeches on fourth of july that politics has already taken hold, that what america means and all that. the declaration of independence gave america a permanent mission. in 21st century slang, what thans is hey, we're not perfect but we can always do better. our job is to keep doing better, to keep stumbling in the right direction.

or in the words of martin luther king, the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. our job is to make sure the arc bends in the right direction. when i was president, i used to tell people all the time, to me, former a more perfect union means widening the circle of opportunity. deepening the meaning of freedom and strengthening the bonds of community. and it requires all of us to keep growing and learning and embracing. several years ago, a man named robert wright wrote a book called non-zero that had a big influence on me. also wrote a book called the moral animal. what he meant by that was not moral in a traditional sense. he meant socially ethical, that people wanted to be cooperative and needed to work together. ever since the first people rose up on the african

savannah, approximately 150,000 years ago, there has been a constant need to redefine who is us and who is them. and the definition of us has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. that's the only thing that has kept humanity from destroying itself. the only way you can make a bigger definition of us is to have comp tig and cooperation in a way that -- competition and cooperation in a way that allows non-zero sum games. the zero sum game is what we americans love. there has to be a winner, there has to be a loser. so i love march madness every year. and i love the big east basketball tournament. a couple years ago, two of our teams played six overtimes. they were so exhausted, they weren't very competitive in the

ncaa. but we insisted that they play until they dropped. my native state, the yuste of arkansas was involved with kentucky a few years ago in a football game that went to six overtimes and the score was 71-63, it sounded like basketball. it's fun to watch, but it's not a good model for the way society has to work. woe don't require there to be a lot of losers. now, what does it mean for where we are now? in contrast to the vision the president has laid out of shared prosperity and shared responsibilities and a deeply widening community, the current

govepbing philosophy of the republicans in congress is that america would be just fine if we can weaken the government more. the government is the source of all our problems. there is no such thing as a good tax, no such good thing as a regular laying, no such thing as a bad deregulation. all these programs are a waste of money and time, beginning with the stimulus. this idea that the government is the source of all america's problems would strike the founding fathers as passing strange. but it has had a great hold on america since the election in 1980.

let's take a little walk down memory lane. and realize you can't turn truth to power unless people know. let's begin with something recent. in the 2010 election, the democrats took a terrible whipping. we were always going to lose a number of seats for two reasons. first, people only hire the democrats in the last 30 years when things are messed up. so they hired me in 1992. [laughter] and they hired president obama in 2008. and so they want us to fix them. in 1994 and 2010, things didn't feel fixed. hard to fix things that were messed up over a longer period

of time, but people didn't feel fixed and we had a lot of what you might call soft seats. that is seats we had picked up because of bad economic conditions in 2006 and 2008. but the election results were more adverse to the democrats than they would have been, i believe. if voters had known basic facts. and so before we blame them, those of us who did know have to blame ourselves. because the american people make rational decisions based on what they know. if they don't know, you can't turn truth into power if the ultimate holders of power, the citizens themselves, don't know the facts. so, for example, everybody knows the stimulus was a

failure. except it wasn't. the whole blown on the -- even albert einsteinen couldn't fill a three trillion dollars hole with $800 billion. first. second, the stimulus was designed to put a floor in that hole. and it works. 36% of the stimulus money went to a tax cut to 95% of the american people. most americans voted on election day not knowing they had received that tax cut. why? because it was given out in the most economically effective way by cutting the payroll tax. and the republicans didn't consider it a tax cut since the top 5% didn't get theirs. [laughter] no, wait a minute. i want you to laugh, but it's serious. the most important thing in the world for me is someone who now

makes money that i never dreamed i'd make, was i got my five tax cuts or whatever under president bush. i made out like a bandit. i should have changed parties. [laughter] but it didn't seem to me to work. but the american people didn't know that. they didn't know that the other 30% of the money went to state and local governments to try to keep them from having to lay off a million teachers and police officers and health care workers. now that the stimulus has played out, you might be interested to know since the economy is not fully recovered that one of the things keeping unemployment high in america today is declining payrolls this year at the state and local government level of about a million. which will have quite adverse impacts on our schools. so only about a third of that money, even less, was spent to

create jobs. a lot of it in green energy and manufacturing. then there was the automobile restructuring, which was not a bailout. it says we'll give you aid in return for restructuring. so let's just look at what happened that people didn't know. as of last november, america's automobile industry was coming back and we had 70,000 more people working in the automobile industry, and if they had all been allowed to fail, there'd be at least another million people out of work when you think of the parts suppliers and the people running the dealerships and all those things. more important, listen to this. when barack obama took office as president, the united states had exactly 2% of the market. for these high-powered

batteries. because the democratic congress had previously provided a tax credit after they had won in 2007, when they took office in 2007, for a new green manufacturing jobs, and in 2009 it was turned into, for start-ups, the cash equivalent of a tax credit. that is you don't need a tax credit. if you just started your business, you have no income which to claim a credit. they wanted to accelerate the growth of this new manufacturing so they said ok you can get the cash equivalent of it. on election day, america had 20% of the world market from two to 20 in less than two years. with 30 new factories built or under construction, 18 in michigan with the second highest unemployment rate in the country. but it was a secret to most

voters. if you knew it and you didn't tell people, you were part of the problem. would it have reversed the aggregate results? no. but it would change the particular elections? absolutely. now let's go to something -- the tea party said they hated the bailouts. they all say we got a bailout, waste of government money. there's a reason that john mccain and barack obama then both senators voted for the bailout, which was widely unpopular and they didn't want to do it. it is not because of wall street, it was because of main street, the biggest car dealership in the country stopped financing cars. was about to get to the point where you couldn't go to sears and buy any kind of appliance on credit. the financial system had to be saved. but we don't want to go there again. so most people didn't know

this. they said we hate these bailouts. the democrats passed a financial reform bill which gave the government power that over some transactions it did not have to stop excessive leverage, that is to stop companies from making too many investments if they didn't have the cash to cover. traditional banks, for example, would own $10 for every dollar in cash they had. when bear stearns failed, it was leveraged at 34-1. lehman brothers, about 30-1. now the government can stop that and is instructed to stop that. that's what's really in the financial reform bill. and it says, by the way, if somehow they get around us and they fail again, no more bailouts, here's an orderly procedure for bankruptcy so the management and the shareholders have to eat the loss. in other words, the democrats passed the bill, which was designed to stop future

meltdowns and future bailouts and people were voting against them thinking they were the bailout parties. then they cut medicare. that's the most interesting thing of all. the republicans ran to the left of the democrats on medicare until they got in. they reduced the amount of increase given to certain medicare services, particularly the medicare advantage program, which is a private company insurance managed program, and use the money to close the doughnut hole in the senior citizens drug program, and to add years to the life of the medicare trust fund. but nobody knew it. and now, one of the most important bills signed was a big that radically reformed the student loan program. by making a national system out

of what iffings able only to make voluntary for schools when i was president, and then the bush administration didn't like it, so nothing happened to it. the student loan program used to work like this. students would qualify for loans, get the loans from banks. the government would guarantee 90% of the loan. the new program works like this. the government sets away the reserves to the interest rates are lower first. secondly, every student in america will now have the option of repaying their student loan as a small fixed percentage of their income for up to 20 years. this is huge. this means nobody ever has to drop out of college again because of the cost. nobody ever has to be afraid to

take out another loan. and when you get out of school, if you want to take a couple of years to do a public service related job, if you want to be a teacher or go into some other kind of community service, your loan obligation will be determined by your job, not the other way around. this is a massive thick. thing. and to boot, it saved $60 billion in government sub sidis to banks, 40 which are put into guaranteing the pell grants and work study programs and everything else. the other 20 reduced the deficit by $20 billion. the republicans propose to re peel that. they were really honest about it. you know, bankers wanted their money back. but at a time when america already first the first time dropped from first to ninth and the percentage of young adults with four-year college degrees,

a calamitous development. even though we are first in the percentage of young people going to college, what does that tell you about the impact of costs? they actually want seats in congress saying hey, vote for us, i'm going to make the student loans more expense i and harder to pay, and by the way, i'm going to increase the deficit. why? because nobody knew. you cannot turn truth into power. if you do not know. so you've got to do more to connect the dots. i remember in the election all the things we said about the health care reform. they called it obama care. they said oh, this is terrible. it's going to cause private employers to drop coverage, even though most private employers would be much better off under this law and small businesses could get substantial subsidies to offer

coverage. in 2010, they raised the private insurance companies, raised the premiums through the roof and they said oh, we hate to do this, we're so sorry. we know their economy is in bad shape. but this obama caring it's so uncertain, we have to build up a big reserve here. and no one pointed out even though it came out at the end of the election finally they failed the financials for 2009, when there was no obama care, when the reception was at its depths. you know what happened? the four profit health insurance companies' profits increased in that horrible year 26%. they raiseed rates through the roof, causing five million americans under the old system to lose their health care, three million of whom went on the state medicaid program, which ballooned the deficits of

both the federal and state governments. but nobody knew. you cannot turn truth into power if you don't have the facts. and people don't connect the dots. now, i didn't think that health care reform bill was perfect and some changes needed to be made. already bipartisan votes have cleaned up some of the small business reporting requirements. but the real reason that there was such a passionate desire to repeal that 11 hundred-page bill is one line. which said that from now on, if you're in a big insurance company plan, 85 cents of every dollar you pay has to go to health care, not profits or promotion. if you're in a small pool, give them a better margin, 80%. now, ask yourself whether you saw this. about three weeks ago, i saw a small article in the paper, which said america's largest insurance company, and one of

its best, etna, had filed a petition in connecticut where it's health cared with the commissioner of insurance to lower health insurance rates 10% across the board because of the 85% requirement. in other words, it is going to work and still nobody knows it. we spent too much time majors in the minors. i want you to serve, i want you to answer the how questions, i want you to lobby for the things you clap for like the dream act. this economy is fragile. we cannot go another decade continuing to fall and the percentage our young people with college degrees. we have to implement this student loan program and 100% of the people have to know about it. you have the know. and here's what i want to say about this whole budge et debate and the government would

mess up and all taxes are bad. there is not a single example today of a really successful wealthy country that does not have both a vibrant economy and a strong, effective government. not one. not anywhere. this political and economic theory, i saw one congress called it faith-based. that the republicans have, because it means i just believe this way and the evidence is irrelevant, it must be wrong. [laughter] [applause] let's just look at the evidence. in 1980, we embraced this theory, the government would mess up a two-car parade. president reagan was good at --

you know, he could make you laugh. he also was more idaho logical -- idiological rhetorically than practically. otherwise the debt would be even bigger than it is. he signed bills restoring about 40% of the money that was given out in tax cuts in 1981. but we began to do something we had never done before as a country ever. we began to run large structural deficits in good times and bad. and you can say oh, well, president reagan had a democratic congress, that's true. and there were democrats who voted for all the spending and the tax cuts. but it's also true that the congress actually apropose -- appropriated slightly less than the congress asked for in those years. it worked pretty well to generate a lot of jobs in the beginning because it was unlike

president obama's program, it was an eight-yearlong stipluss. but it started to play out, and then it produced almost no new jobs in president bush's term, which is how i got elected. and i don't mean that funny. i like, admire, and love him. he's a good man. and when he said it was voodoo economics in 1980, he was right and he had to pay the price. you can't run a structural deficit without paying the price. eventually, interest rates got to high, it traded the economy. and i could come in and begin to balance the budget right away and cut that deficit because i knew we'd be off to the races. and one of the things that was really helpful in all this was a rule called pay as you go, which the democratic congress adopted and president bush

signed to his credit right before i got elected, which said if you want to start a new program, you've got to stop something you're doing or come up with the money to pay for it. so after i left aufs, a lot of these same people who don't want to raise the debt zealing, what's the first thing they did? they let the pay as you go rule expire. and they voted for eight years to raise the debt ceiling and double the debt of the country. so how's it working? there were 12 years before and eight years after the time i served, how are they working? more jobs in those eight years than in the 20 years combined. 100 times as many people moved out of poverty in those eight years than in the 20 years combined. more new business formation, every other indicator. the other surpluses we had, the first time we had four in a row in more than 70 years. so this is not about whether

you're fiscally conservative or not, this is about what works. this theory won't work. that's why the president has been resisting it. from world war 2 to 1980, constantly the bottom of us took home 69% of income. the top 10 of us took home 39%. that was enough inequality to reward hard work, creativity and good ideas. look how it's changed since 19 0, under the alternative theory. the bottom share has dropped from 65 to 52%. the top 10% has gone from 35% to 48%. the top 1% has gone to 22%.

that happened for two reasons. one is the government is the problem reason. the other is something happened outside government. i'm so old, i can't believe it. i get my medicare card this year. [laughter] i'm about the last generation of people that could have gotten an m.b.a. i saw you were discussing the citizens united case before. when i was in law school, and if i had been in business school, we were taught that corporations were creations of the state. and that they had certain responsibilities to all their stake holders, their shareholders, their employees, their customers and the communities of which they were a part. if for about 30 years, we've been told that corporations' only responsibilities are to their shareholders.

those ideas together have produced a combustible and unsustainable amount of inequality in america. if you want to live in a country where people like emily, middle class kids and people like you have a fair shot at the american dream, we have to re-examine them both. professor michael porter at harvard business school, the distinguished republican, and i've known him for many years. he's done great work from royal development and the inner cities. has a cover story. you can pull it up on the internet in two additions back i think of the harvard business journal, saying we have to change our notion of corporations exists for shareholders values to corporations exist for advance shared value. there has to be a mission which involved sharing. another non-zero sum game. so that's what i want to say. it's not true that government

will mess up a two-car parade. i'll give you just one example. medicare is the biggest driver of the federal deficit. medicare and medicaid. but that's because health care costs tripled in the 12 years from 1981 to 1993. when we tripled over the rate of inflation. we kept them more or less in line with inflation. then they tripled again. in that context, here's the problem with just cutting medicare and giving everybody a voucher. medicare is actually a better value than the rest of health care. since 1970, medicare costs per recipient have gone up 400%. private insurance premiums have gone up 700%. the health care system is not competitive. we spent 17.2% of our income on health care. no other wealthy country spends more than 10 1/2 of any size,

that's canada. everybody else is between nine and 10 1/2. and it's because of the way we deliver and pay for health care, paying for procedure instead of care, and because of the way we administer it through our health insurance system, which means 30 cents on the dollar goes to paper work. that's 11 cents more than any other system in the world. it's a trillion dollars a year that could be invested in education, in green technology, in paying down the debt, in all this other stuff. we cannot continue this. but i'll just give you an example of why the government has to play a role in this and why medicare costs can be brought in line with inflation, only as health care costs are. we have known for a few years that thousands of people die every year at the cost of tens of billions of dollars from hospital acquired infections and many thousands of others have to come back to the

hospital to get fixed again. and the primary purpose is -- the primary cause of this is the lack of adequate, rigorous sterilization procedures at every step along the hospital stay. a white house fellow under me, and literally a brain surgeon who writes a lot on health care, has written a book on this called a checklist manifesto. you ought to read it. he points out if you put a nurse in charge of the doctors and everybody else, it's four or five critical junctures in the journey through a hospital. you can take this infection, the death rate and the tens of billions of dollars out of the system. guess which hospital network was the very first in america to rig -- rigorously implement this? the v.a. health care system. that's not true. the government will mess up a two-car parade, but nobody knows it.

so i say this to encourage your activism, but to say your activism has to include sharing what you know with your generation. i can't help thinking since we just celebrated the fourth of july and we're supposed to be a country dedicated to liberty that one of the most pervasive political movements going on outside washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time. there has never been in my lifetime since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other jim crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.

getting rid on same-day registration. some states getting rid of all advanced voting. governor of florida proposed to reverse his republican predecessors signing of a bill that gave people the right to vote when they got out of prison and they finished their probation period, even if they didn't have a pardon. that's one of the most important things we should do. why should we disenfranchise people forever once they pay their price? because most of them in florida were african-americans and hispanics and would tend to vote for democrats, that's why. why do we want to get rid of same-day registration? why has new hampshire made it almost impossible for college students who live in other states, come from other states, but live in new hampshire most of the year to vote there? why is all this going on? this is not rocket science. they are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like

the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate. the constitutional right to vote, the need to empower, the need to widen the circle of opportunity sounds good, but if you lose your right to vote, it doesn't amount to much. are you fighting it? you should be fighting it. i think there's a good chance the new hampshire deal is unconstitutional because of the case in the 1970's involving vanderbilt which students the constitutional right to vote where they reside the rest of the year. but the larger point i want to make is this. most of my life has nothing to do with any of this. my life is my foundation and the global initiative and trying to get people involved in doing affirmative things. but in every place i work, and i don't go in any country unless the government welcomes our foundation, i see what a

difference a government makes. a good one or a bad one. a confident one or one lacking in capacity. and our country -- in our country, you have to both serve and be a good citizen. in fact, i think being a good citizen requires service. but it also requires knowledge. if you're serious about turning truth to power, remember this. it begins with knowing. it begins with knowing. there is too much we don't know. and too much we know we don't share. you cannot blame citizens for mistakes they make for what they don't know. most people do not have the time or the space, the emotional or financial or practical space that you have at this moment in your lives to know. know. so make sure you know and make