ue "room to go" as a pop-up book? >> slide show. >> anyone else have anything? >> i think it's a good question. it seems to me that there are a couple of questions it brings up. i think first of all, that the part of what we are trying to do is not so much to find a candidate who will be a champion for these ideas exactly as a whole but to enrich the policy conversation on the right in general. so different candidates can take different ideas from among these and can take this way of thinking and try to approach the public with it. i think that it's very strange that the model of paul ryan has not been followed by other members of the house. >> uh-huh. >> it's been successful for him. it got him on the presidential ticket. he did it basically by being a nerd. >> that's what he did. it's not actually that hard. he picked an issue, became an expert, you know, it took him awhile and he's very smart. but plenty of people are smart. he decided that tests going to

make a name for himself by offering concrete policy ideas. it got him very far very quickly. he is still quite young about to become the most important committee chairman in the house way out of seniority because members just think yeah, of course, he should be chairman of ways and means. it's strange to me there are not a lot of others who think that way. i could be an expert in this or that. it's clearly a way to shoot up the chain of command among house republicans. it's not happening a lot. i think it ought to. >> well, it's not entirely unprecedented, though, of course. you have those who offered tax reform from a back-bench not even on the relevant committee if i remember correctly. you've got jim talent who offered welfare reform, also, not even on ways and means or energy commerce. it's been done. it can be done. i disagree. i think it is hard. it is hard work. maybe not for yuval but for the rest of us it's hard work.

buff it is past power. >> i would say i have been personally impressed by his work on education and in particular, i think to make a broader plan i think april is right. there is understanding policy details and the nity gritty on the right that is sort of bizarre to me. it seems to me to be a critical ingredient of effort to rein in the federal role in a way that's productive and if you don't, you know, if all you want to make is blanket claims about doing away with things that never go anywhere, we are not going to get very far. >> you know the first two years of the obama presidency there was a lot of talk about should the republicans become the party of no. i was for republicans defining themselves as the party of no far superior of the party of need to but maybe a little bit less.

and i thought it became more important to develop an alternative agenda and present it in 2011 and 2012. but it was not crazy for other people to think, the incumbent president who is contemporary liberalism personified and a referendum we have to focus the case on him. i think that was a mistake. i think there is a lot of evidence that that was a mistake. but it would have been a natural tendency to turn towards the positive agenda as he got closer to the end of the two-term presidency. i think you will see that happen. i think you will see that happen, for example, with senator cruz who by the way is extraordinary in terms of shear brain power. you may disagree with him but listen, i have been arguing with him for 20 years. he is a smart guy. i expect he and other people are going to develop a positive agenda over the next couple of months. it will just be kind of bizarre

to run in 2016 without one. >> i think the last few months have been very different from the very last few years in my own sense. there is a lot of policy firment on the right. there are more politics getting to that point in their speech when they should offer something and thinking i should offer something. >> other questions? >> the jew inc. hawk, how much do i have to worry about rand paul's influence on rand paul. pew did a study that came out a few months ago on conservative, found it has never been less popular among young people than today. as a republican we can't stop talking about the '80s. you have mentioned younger republicans today. they are in photos of ronald reagan, in his desk his. it's all reagan. i don't know how you link younger votesers when you can't stop talking about days before they were born. when are we going to move on?

>> great in bedtime for wonzo. >> kids love that one. >> i think there is an enormous generational difference among conservatives now. it's becoming more apparent. in some cases, it's a real fill solvecal difference. republicans lawyers, people over 40 are very, very different from people under 40 in how they think about the constitution. it's an interesting thing. i think more than that there is a difference between people who will remember the reagan years and people who know stories about the reagan years. not in every way, i think that younger conservatives are more constructive and more inclined to think about policy in the ways we are talk about it here they are more inclined to think about the president and less inclined to want to repeat the endings of the sentences that people started in the '80s. the beginnings were great and we should start off sentence did that way, have the same

principles have the same commitment to the constitution the same belief in america, the same optimism. what it means now has to be a response to what is happening now. >> that's just -- that's the first order of business for anyone who wants to think about politics. i think that is changing some among younger conservatives. but it's going to take awhile. >> the only step is the principles. i don't see how we are going to be better with younger people. >> nature has a way of dealing with that. these are going somewhere. >> saying they are going to be cold? >> evolution. i think that a generational shift takes time. naturally. >> that's what it is. but the fact that it's the younger people who are thinking more creatively and the older people are not is a good thing because among the democrats, i think the opposite is happening. there are still a lot of people who remember why the new democrats were necessary and it

may be are, themselves kind of in that mold still. younger liberal did tend not to be that way. they are a lot less realistic and constructive. i would rather be in the situation of conservatives at this point. >> i was going to add to that. i think that there is a dimension to this sort of crony capitalist corporate welfare side of this debate that i think could appeal to people who would normally maybe shade to the left and say, hey, wait. this has been a big talking point. >> i wanted to get to that. >> yeah. our colleague, that is this natural issue for people who have sort of suspicious by nature of big business. right? to line up behind some of that stuff. so i don't, you know, i am not as pessimistic, i would say. >> i am unapologeticic.

the most successful president of the last century, politically successful than any president since then look our last three presidents have taken office with congress in control. and left office completely out of control of congress. and the white house flipping as well. sot we should learn from them. we should learn from the real reagan not the mythological reagan. steve hayward has written a two volume history of reagan and his time is that reagan rarely made it a big selling point with the public, at large, that he had a program that con formed to conservative philosophy even though it largely did. he had a program that developed some conservative philosophy but he advertised it to the public on the basis of its practical add vantedage. lower crime rates, lower inflation, not face things. i think a lot of today's reagan

invokers don't follow his example. >> they are concerned with ideological purity and sort of i think, maintaining, you know, this standard. i mean he was an innovator? >> right. it goes to what ramesh was talking about where there is this difference between the tea party and the establishment. i mean so much of this is tactical and, you know, and a. . i. udinal. unfortunately, we have gotten to this place where a lot of our conservative standard bearers are the ones that came up with the ideas we ran on are much more concerned with these tactical fights than they are with, you know developing policy anymore. so it's, you know, an interesting thing. >> that's how you end up with the best season we had last time was where a lot of the time, it's a competition. who can say it louder? >> uh-huh. >> you can call it the party of

goldwater versus the party of reagan liberty versus the party of actually talking about people and how all of this affected them individually. >> it was really uninteresting, i think, you know, for people who have interested in politics it wasn't creative. >> when 9-9-9 is the biggest policy proposal. >> not a good sign. >> other questions? i will keep asking. we have plenty over here thank you. the book mentions tax cuts for families where they need them most. what would that look like in practice? do you think there is any room for maybe incentives for mothers who want to stay at home to raids their children incentives for families to operate economically in the way that they see fit instead of punishing them if they want to stay home women or men who want to stay home and have a single income family? >> well, the cost of raising families has increased.

and the tax code does i think, a very poor job of recognizing the extent to which raising children is an investment in the future. we say that as a it kind of rote sentiment but it is financially in part an investment in the country, future taxpayers. >> i think the tax code recognizes that fact. i don't believe that we should be providing incentives for mothers or fathers to stay home with the kids. i do think we should be enabling families to make the decisions they want to make whether that is -- you know a lot of -- a lot of government subsidies in child care areas flow toward commercial day care. >> that's something that a lot of families like to use. however, it is in general the least favorite form of child care for american families, and i would say if you expand the child credit, which is a very popular proposal with almost

every group in the american public, you are allowing people to make these decisions. does one parent want to scale back to part-time work and spend more time with the family? do they want to use it to purchase child care? do they want to use it to purchase supplementary educational services? you leave those choices up to the families. >> that's, i think, in a certain sense a very traditional conservative answer and it ought to be provided in this form now. >> as an example to where a traditional conservative answer is not being directed to the right question. the problem that exists now is different from the problem that existed 35 years ago and when you think about how to provide people with tax relief today, what does middle class tax relief look like? not just lower marginal tax rates, certainly not just like lower top marginal. for most, the payroll tax is a huge tax burden.

for many americans, it is the only tax burden they have at a federal level. they don't have an income tax liability but conservatives do not talk about the payroll tax as a target for tax relief and try to kind of shield it off from conversations about tax cuts and tax reform. it should be right at the center of those discussions, and the fact -- >> to be clear, the child credit would apply to the payroll tax a form of payroll tax relief. >> exactly. it's important in that sense because you have to talk to people about problems they face not just about an abstract economy out there that if it's doing better, by some magic they will do better. >> if you get red lips. >> but the incentive to get rich. there is a tendency in general to talk about the economy in very abstract terms. it's not crazy. it doesn't matter. economic growth has to be there as a foundation for everything else to work out. if we don't have economic growth, a lot of the other problems we have become much worse and a lot of the solutions we offer are not sufficient.

we do need it. but we also need to help people with the problems they face and to help them understand what we are offering in terms of the problems. >> yg met york commissioned polling on many of the ideas found in the book. it was remarkable on the expanding the child credit. not only was it so overwhelming overwhelmingly popular with the public but with so many of those demographic groups people wring their hands about, strat cysts in washington wring their hands about. it did really really well. for example, you might not intuitively thing single women would care that much about expanding the child credit forwhich we have described as being for families but would certainly be applicable to women who have children without a spouse at home. wildly popular with single women. very popular with mineority groups. you know, it's one of those questions that gets to the

economic concerns that underlie a lot of the insecurities that are felt most acutely by democratic groups that we are worry about, you know, in electoral politics. >> another concern, two in the background, the one on the right first. >> this is about conservatives, anti-intellectualism you were talking about earlier. excuse my interpretation of what you were saying, but what i heard was that the sort of market encourages students to go off to colleges dominated by liberal thinkers geand getting degrees in things that aren't very important. so what would you say the correction for that is whether or not that's an accurate depiction of what's actually happening? >> so there is a pine paraphrase of what i said. i would tell the only add to that that i think part of the problem is that people can't tell what the value of a particular degree is and whether

it's going to pay off in the long run down the line partly because we don't have that information readily available to them. so, you know, markets are such that they are always going to be people who want to buy that who want to buy that silly major. people are going to just do it. i think that republicans, republican governs, for instance one in florida comes to mind, have sort of made a mistake about making this we want more stem majors and let's anthropologists. >> sounds like, you know central planning in bucares. than a market-based response. but i say, so what i would say is that what i think the federal government should aim to do is to inform consumers in a way that allows them to make judgments about the product that they are investing in and simultaneously, to lower

barriers to let in new providers who are offering a different product. right now, the accreditation system the acreditors who come to acreddic chicago probably acreddic chicago state. it's probably the same group and both probably bear the same field approval. at the same time, it keeps chicago state in business. not a very good college. at the same time it keeps out somebody who would want to compete with you chicago, or with chicago state. they may be offering something different. they may not be staffed by traditional faculty. these are the examples of the policies that have been in place for a long time that are actually preventing consumers from making informed choices and from competition and preventing competition from taking root in this market in a way that drives costs down and drives quality up. so... >> in the back there is another

gentleman. >> this question is somewhat related to that one. you said earlier he stud tents are forced to study nonsense, i think you said. nonsense. i guess part of my question is how is this that students starting out distinguish between things that are nonsense and ideas that really matter? particularly in liberal arts or certain areas of social sciences where part of the purpose of education is to be able to make those kind of distinctions to begin with? so i guess my worry is that conservatives take the market-driven approach, you talk about making investments in majors to see how they pay off. i was wondering if there was anything within reform conservative that recognizes the intrinsic value of knowledge and

the non-market values much knowledge and having market driven could devalue the market driven. >> speaking as a english major i want to hear the answer to that? >> i should have prefaced my comment about nonsense by saying that i was a history major and took plenty of classes that didn't really equip me to be a think tank wonk like i am now. so, i am not one who chose super rationally what they were going to do with their time in college. i think there is a distinction. so where i draw the line is there is a distinction between what the government is going to subsidize and spend money on an especially in the case of student loans. right? as a lender the federal government wants to ensure that the money that they are lending out gets paid back. right? >> the fiduciary responsibility of the taxpayers. i think above and beyond that a

market would reward a lot of the non-me coonary benefits of higher ed that you are describing because people have a taste for that. i think those would still exist but as a taxpayer the question that i have is whether i am subsidizing, you know, and lending money to people to study things that i am going to wind up being on the hook for when they default. so that's where i would draw the line. i think taxpayers have a slightly different interest than students themselves. i think you raise an excellent point, and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that education is about more than just earning power. it's about creating an educated citizenry. it's about creating art and music and all sorts of other wonderful things. i just get concerned when the federal policies that we have currently encourage eninvestment in any program at any price and

don't, you know, and don't distinguish between things that have value in the labor market and don't. >> i have a different perspective but one that's complimentary. i think maybe the biggest problem with the way our society and our government approaches higher education is that we essentially tell people that if they don't go to a traditional four-year institution, they are losers especially economically. they are not going to be successful. and i think that is misguided, inefficient and just plain cruel approach and one of the secondary problems that have arisen from it i don't think it -- it has done no favors for a liberal arts education. and so i think not only do we need to keep in mind that knowledge and reflexion are intrinsic good i think actually, in a way do decoupling

the economic imperatives from these institutions actually ends up helping. >> let me speak to it. i entirely agree with that. i think that the -- it's important to see that people who want to defend the liberal arts -- and i would say i studied political philosophy and to become more practical went to the university of social thought in chicago. i have experience with people calling things nonsense. i don't think academics who worry about liberal education think enough about the fact that the insanity of the business model of the university is a huge problem for them that the fact that we now have a system that is economically unsustainable and so under constant economic pressure means they are the first to go because the fact is, liberal arts education is understood by our society as something like a luxury term. that's a mistake to some extent.

it's not entirely a mistake. i think even if you think properly about the plates of a true liberal education in the life of a democracy, i am in agreement it is something that will interest a few and it is important that a few have access to great education. it is not what everybody will be interested in and that's okay. the question is: how are those few going to have access to great liberal education? i don't think it's going to be in a system that is under the kind of pressure that our higher education is under now and part of what we are talking about when it comes to reforming higher ed is take make the system sustainable answering people's needs and wants better than now. some are going to involve higher education and liberal education. and the kind of liberal education that you would get here and other places is very important to some people. and that means that it is a market that will be served. and we shouldn't simply think of it is as a market in economic terms but i don't think of markets in general in purely

economic sense. they are ways of allocating resources and allowing people to find what they want and some of what people want is this kind of, a an educated citizenry, and, b access to truth and to beauty and to the sorts of things that a lot of people in this university seek. i think that today's higher education system is the enemy of those people. they need to see that. they are going to be the ones who have to go first and the kind of solutions that andrew offers, i think, could be very good for liberal education. they don't involve rejecting that as an option. they involve allowing people to seek what they want and to make it sustainable economically. there is no getting away from economics when we talk about higher education. >> a last question since we haven't -- sir? >> in cooke county the last election, we had the lowtest voter turnout in about 70 years. this was echoed other places in

country, especially if you are talking about a market approach. how do we know what citizens want if so few of them are participating in the process? how can we really make accurate statements about what we are going to do in the future or where we are going to go if so few people are interested in participating? >> would we know even if they did part is nature would anyone? >> that's a great question. i think our democratic system is a way of legitimating government power. it's central, necessary, why our government is a legitimate government. it's not a way of figuring out what everybody wants. there are one of the ways one of the ways we have of figuring out what everybody wants. other ways include markets. other ways include everything we do in society. they are always pursuing what we are after. obviously, our political system -- well maybe it's not obvious but to my mind our political system would work better if more people participated. higher voter participation should be a goal. i think republicans have been very bad about this and have at

least allowed a lot of the public to believe they want fewer people to vote. >> that's nuts. >> that's not to say if everybody voted, we would know what everybody wants. two options, neither is what anybody wants. our system is never going to be a way of answering that question. but it is a way of answering some very important questions about what our government should look like. i think more people should be involved in offering those answers and, you know, people in public life should want that, should want more people to be involved and more people could be voting and that should be everybody's goal in democracy. >> i would add to that, i think this is partly why it's critical why some of the market-based ideas are critical for people being able to express their preferences because if you are -- you knowhave low voter turnout and one party ones and they happen to be a party that wants to impose one-size-fits-all across the population you have a huge segment of the population that

we didn't come out and vote but they are stuck with something that doesn't necessarily match their preferences. i think it's another avenue market-based policies another avenue for people to vote with their feet and have their preferences met by the government. >> obama care is a great example. it's never had majority support in the country. never has. right? >> and to close what we were talking about earlier, the extent washington and the political class in general is talking about things that are of interest to the political it class but not as much to the public at large i think it becomes less of a reason for people to get interested and vote because they are not being offered anything that makes them want to get up. >> none of the above is not a crazy decision. >> right. >> our goal i think, should be growing our total numbers. right? when you hear a lot about, you know, that we need to win more women, wore we need to win you know whatever segment of the

population. my response to this is always, you know, we just need more. like we just need more votes. it doesn't really matter where they come from. and one of the most obviously to do that is to grow the pie. and i think there is a lot of votes out there that we are not asking for. >> on that note this has been a great panel. thanks to all of you guys for talking with us for an hour and 15 minutes [applause.] next your calls and comments live at 7:00 a.m. on "washington

journal." a discussion about the government's role in regulating the internet. after that representatives from uber trip advisor and e. sy talk about internet startups. ...