samuelson. then we take a look at the debate strategies for both candidates. later, actress sally field joins chelsea clinton for a campaign event in ohio. ♪ >> this week on q&a, author and "washington post" volcker -- columnist robert samuelson. host: how would you describe what you do for a living? mr. samuelson: i've been reporting about the economy since the late 1960's. i write a column for the "washington post" writers group.

one of the columns appears mostly on the internet, the other appears in the newspaper and on the internet. host: what you want people to learn from your columns? mr. samuelson: my view is that i'm trying to learn something new in every column. , and i'mlways succeed trying to explain things the people, so that even if they disagree with me, which they often do, they will come away with more information. i think it would be failing if people do not learn something from most of my columns. host: do you have a political approach? do you come from a certain ideology? mr. samuelson: i wouldn't say i am particularly ideology. i am right of center. i am not pushing it partisan agenda. to the extent i push an agenda, it is mine and not a party

agenda. even any ofs, not the major senators or representatives, which makes , i don'tover the years detect that what i have written has influence people to do anything good or bad. host: is there a column that has gone more reaction over the years? mr. samuelson: i have to go back and think about that. when i write about social security and medicare, which is what the government provides older americans like me, i get a pretty large reaction. i've been writing about this for over 20-30 years. my basic theme has been, this is going to essentially squeeze out the spending on older people, which are now growing disproportionate to the total population. it is going to squeeze out spending on other groups or result in large tax increases.

that this is essentially a field to revise these programs. they are part of the social fabric and are important, the we need to have higher eligibility ages and introduce gradually and slowly, have yes -- less generous than if it's for the wealthy. we -- and we ought to modernize the programs and where we have not done. older americans are a very large group and they are politically acute. many of them feel, not without reason, but they've been promised benefits of the government has no right to reduce them even by a penny. host: we asked you to come , i have readolumn it for years, it always has good numbers in there so we can try to figure out what is going on. i have a ton of numbers. i've got a lot of your columns

from the year and i want you to explain this. first thing i want to put on the screen is the united states population for the last eight years. basically since barack obama has been present. there they are. with 307d in 2009 million and we have gained up to the present that we have at least 324 million people in the united states. we see that kind of growth rate, doesn't mean anything? mr. samuelson: to me, it is an optimistic thing. it means the united states is still growing as a body of people. we have room for a lot of people. if you look at some other advanced societies, they are not growing, they have birthrates two for each woman. pretty senior population goes down and he gets older. you have a problem, it seems to

me. you have a welfare state that eats it support, and a shrinking economic base because the number of new workers coming into the system is less than the number of older workers were exiting the system. so you have a system that is basically fixed to fail. that is not the case in the united states. we have the same problems that they are not as acute. if you look at italy or germany or japan, their birthrate is a little bit about one. in 40 or 50 years, they are essentially not going to have very many young people left in relationship to the older population. this is a huge political problem. i think it underlies some of the ,roblems we see in europe today slow economic growth. they have aging societies and basically cannot produce the kind of sustained economic growth that countries with a

growing populations have. to give the impression that this is the only thing that matters, it obviously is not. you can have large numbers of poor people. historically, as countries of got richer, their birthrate of gone down. so the population by itself is not a good thing, but in conjunction with economic growth is a sustainable model. foreign-born u.s. population, we only have it up to 2014. have 42.2 million foreign-born up to 2014, and that is when the population is -- 3900 and 19 have million million. don't really: i know the comparison with other countries. i think with this says about the united states is that having

immigrants has been a great thing, the country would not exist without them. on the other hand, absorbing the immigrants and assimilating them into american society is not an easy task. it has never been easy. it seems to me that is the fundamental reason why we need to curb illegal immigration and we need to be organized our immigration policies have more skilled immigrants coming in you will have an easier time assimilating and contribute into american growth and contributing to the american fabric. but i think in general, this is a healthy thing as long as we can, to some extent, control it. we cannot control entirely, but more than we have. the united states has a tradition as part of the political culture and economic culture, of absorbing immigrants. that bodes well in the long run. , or they don'tet

register enough on both sides of we havement, assimilated millions of millions of immigrants in the past, so we should be optimistic about our capabilities doing now. on the other side, there is always in social tensions with immigrants. the notion that you have unlimited immigration seems to me a formula for failure and is bound to create the kind of reaction to the inflow of immigrants that we see today, which is in its worst forms quite ugly. in its mildest forms is understandable. host: how far you go back in your own family when family was immigrants? mr. samuelson: this is something i want to research more and i have not researched enough. on both my mothers and fathers

side, their fathers came in the 19th century. my wife's parents immigrated to theat is now latvia united states, so my wife is a first generation immigrant. host: how about your family, where they come from? mr. samuelson: germany and russia. host: where did you go to school? mr. samuelson: i grew up in white plains, new york. i went to public school through seventh grade and went to private school in massachusetts and went to harvard as an undergraduate. host: i've asked you this before, we might as well get it on the record, you are not related to paul samuelson. mr. samuelson: he was one of the most eminent economic -- economists. i'm not related to him. ashad a good sense of humor

well as being a brilliant economist. me -- "newsweek" hired me in the 1980's to write a column that he had previously written, and he sent me a nice note saying that someone named sanderson cannot be all bad. host: more numbers. we're talking about the time barack obama has been president mostly, from 2000 9-2016. this is average gas price per gallon. you see on the screen. 2012 to as high as $2.06 and is now down to nationwide.

mr. samuelson: i think with this table shows you is that we don't control oil or gasoline prices in any sort of obvious way or you would not have these huge fluctuations. you have gasoline at one dollar or two dollars forever. secondly, what you see in the trend is that in 2009, we were in the midst of the great recession, which was a consequence of the financial crisis. people were driving less. companies were producing less. this was a worldwide phenomenon. worldwideand oil are commodities, there were depressed prices. as we recovered from the great recession, prices when backup and they got up over $100 per barrel for crude oil. you have things happening, you have the introduction or expansion of oil shale

production in the united states in both the midwest and texas which increased our capacity dramatically, so supply was increased. and then you had the breakdown of opec and production, huge production of gasoline and oil by saudi arabia. prices went down again. farther, whate go is your reaction without getting into the individuals, of the election season? i am not sure i will share my observations, but i will share my opinions. i think america is a great country. proud ofen pretty much the united states most of my life. i am 70.

i not proud of the united states during this election. . feel it is gone to a level i think donald trump stirs animosities and that is the wrong kind of campaign to run. i'm also not crazy about the fact that the democratic party produced a candidate who is widely mistrusted, and she must have something to do with it. bothered bylarly the truck candidacy -- donald trump candidacy. business,the ideas hundreds and scholars, like to think we can resolve our problems if we simply have open and honest debate about them. that is a little bit naive. i discovered that early after a certain writing a column. it is not so naive to think that ideas would play some role in major elections, and yet in this campaign, a lot of it has boiled

down to personal attacks and counterattacks. it is pretty discouraging, frankly. host: i want to go back and pick up on some of your columns from earlier in the year and read a paragraph and get you to tell us what you think has happened since. this goes back to january 31. mr. samuelson: i hope i still believe. it says the deficits are candidates are not talking about , and you say, just how far have budget deficits drifted off the screen a presidential politics? last week, the nonpartisan congressional budget office issued its annual budget and economic outlook report and hardly anyone paid heed. you write, it is no secret why deficits are shunned. takeaway politics, raising subsidiesting popular

and handouts is unfriendly. people deplore deficits but they don't support the programs that create the deficits. mr. samuelson: angry with most of that. we basically have a system that is built on the presumption of economic growth, that the economy will throw off enough additional income every year so that people can satisfy both their personal wants and public wants through the government. one of the problems of a slowing economy over the last 15-20 years is that you do not have the flood of increased income every year that had been anticipated. son of the deficits are fundamentally a reflection of the fact that the public does not want to be taxed more but it wants to receive more benefits, and the system basically gets them what they want.

if we have faster economic growth, we can pay for some of these programs without cutting other programs or raising taxes, but because we don't have faster economic growth, we have to accept the large deficits, which we have done so far because it's the most ingenious and expedient thing to do. or we have to do the unpopular thing of raising taxes or cutting other programs. i think we need to do all of those things. , we hardly done any of them. we don't know what the long-term consequences are of running up the national debt. it may be that the consequences are pretty mild or nonexistent. host: let me put on the screen what you're talking about this, we have three figures from the debt from 1789 until the present. until 2001. 1789

you can see that our debt was $5.720. and then during the george bush years, the debt increased $4.9 .rillion more and then in the barack obama years, it has increased $8.8 trillion, which at the to $19.5 trillion. what happened to us after 2001, where we would spend an incredible amount of money for the debt? happened,son: what let me give you context. 1950's orhe late early 1960's, there was a tradition in this country that you basically try to balance the budget in your goodyear speared war ormiddle of a economic slump, you do not try to balance the budget, but the other times you try to balance

the budget. what happened in the 1960's is that we had economists who said we can manipulate the budget in a way that will spur economic growth and we do not need to run surpluses all of the time. so the framework for running deficits was established in the 1960's, and between the 1960 -- between 1961 and i think 1998, surplus, 1969. , wee changed our habits changed our national framework for discussing these things in a way that i think was undesirable. george w. bushe or barack obama for the problem, it was there when they arrived. however, having said that, bush adopted tax cuts that he did not financed by cutting spending. by havinged medicare

an active drug benefit without paying for it. he had military operations abroad against saddam hussein the cost fair amount of money. he did not pay for that. george w. bush basically embraced the existing status quo of when you want something .xtra, just do it and borrow it is fairly easy for the united states to borrow. people around the world want to hold something they trust, and for all the problems we have, we are more trustworthy than most other governments the world. obama, who ran up the deficit much more than george w. bush. a lot of that you cannot blame on obama. financial crisis and great recession. we've had a recession, spending goes up, unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare, medicaid.

the government also increases spending to try and revive the , -- tax cuts are part of the stimulus program. it was the worst recession since world war ii. were prisoners of the situation they did not create. on the other hand, they were willing participants in the existing budget game. obama failed in coming away with any sort of a major budget agreement which would curb future deficits. eagerly proposed and enacted tax cuts and spending programs he did not financed. ont: here is another chart

the federal budget. it just how much the budget spent during the obama years and how much the deficit has been. 2009, and it was $3.5 trillion. it looks like, and i know the numbers have gone up and down during the process, instead even on the budget side. to $4 trillionp in the budget. started, thebama deficit was 1.4 join dollars. you can see it kept going down slightly, and then this year the production is $616 billion deficit. what is the difference between the budget and the deficit, and does it matter? budget, toon: the make this turned clear, you might've just put spending up there. that is the spending part.

you don't have a column for revenues, but if you have called for revenues, you would basically take revenues away from spending and that gives you the deficit. the first three or four years of obama's administration, much of that deficit, they were very years, much of that reflects the stimulus billion, andt $800 automatic stabilizers which i mentioned earlier. that is the tendency to spend more in a recession. giving tax breaks or taxing less because people are making less. the stimulus disappeared essentially for declined to very small terms.

the reviving economy provided more revenue for the government and less of the automatic stabilizers. still, the 16 $16 billion was revived. we are near full employment, to have such a big deficit is a lot. does it make any difference? problemsne of the real of the politics of debating deficits, we really don't know what the dangers of long-term deficits are. 3-4 dangers that are typically repeated when people are debating this. weakening may be finance that we have today. people are willing to lend to the government because they trust the government, but if we have some huge new national need, a major pandemic or war, as social collapse that requires

untold billions or trillions of dollars, we may not find it so easy to borrow when we are starting with a large debt. the second major complaint against large deficits is that people squeeze out private .nvestment as the government goes to borrow more, interest rates will rise and crowd out private investment. it is supposedly good for the economy to have private investment. this will be a negative force and higher living standards. those are two of the main arguments used against. at what pointnow this becomes a danger. the fact that there are no adverse immediate consequences to having high budget deficits ,akes it difficult to argue raise my taxes or cut my

programs because i know these deficits pose some sort of problem in the future and i don't want to put down my children. that is another argument against you are basically putting the consequences of today spending on your children and grandchildren, who will have to pay the interest on the debt used. used,is another argument again, this is theoretical and has not come to pass. that is that we will create some sort of a financial crisis. sort, we are borrowing so much the people will not want to lend to the united states anymore, and will either don't dollars or-- dump treasury securities. they will cost more than when interest rates were low, and if you don't pay, are defaulting and i will create a crisis,

because there is so much in you went -- u.s. debt out there. host: this is what you wrote in march. is the u.s. economy stronger than we think? perhaps. a persisting puzzle about its recent performance is a stark jobs,st between growth of which is then unexpectedly robust, and the growth of the economy's output, which has been unexpectedly weak. the puzzle would disappear if the economy's output is consistently undercounted. i want to put on the screen, you talked about this earlier, the u.s. unemployment rate and the 6 rate. rate -- u- today, the unemployment is in the area of 4.9%. 6 rate hase the u-

come down to 9.7%. can you explain the difference? mr. samuelson: the standard unemployment rate, it is now 4.9% and has been in that vicinity for many months, it essentially takes the number of people who want a job and are looking for a job and they are the unemployed. you have to be looking for a job, you cannot just want a job, you have to be looking for a job. for the u-6 rate, first it starts off with the standard unemployment rate, so 4.9%, and the addition includes people who have part time who would like a full-time job, people who say they want a job but have not looked for a job in the past year, discouraged workers, essentially.

those are the two main categories added in there. host: let me put up another chart. mr. samuelson: can i just say one thing. 9.7 looks pretty high, but even if the best of times, the rate past 8% or 9%. conservatives often point to people who are not in the labor force. i want to show the average number of people who are not working. it was 81.6 million. what is going on there, in the first place, we don't quite understand what is going on there. a big chunk of that, probably the largest chunk, is baby boomers like me who have reached

the age for social security and have retired. your huge number of people retiring every day who are baby boomers who are entitled to retire and have reached the eligibility for social security 62,are able to retire at which entails a cut of their benefits, or they can go to 66, which is think is the official rate for full benefits. that is a chunk of it. interest by the great recession and financial theis, is when people saw cannot get jobs, they went back to school. you have some people going back-to-school. on top of that, you have a trend that seems to have begun in the 2000's, youor early had a huge increase in the previous 20-30 years of women in the paid labor force, and that seems to have stabilized and , there are more

spouses staying at home the berries to be. he put those things together, and according to the studies, maybe you explain two thirds or three quarters of the increase of which we don't understand as to what happened. the argument is made that some of these people are dropping out because they are taking disability insurance and some people are dropping out. we don't know what is happening. mr. lamb: i want to show some video of an interview that steve scully had with president obama assumes getting his administration started. this is 16 seconds. this is the start of his presidency. >> you know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt. national deficit of $11 trillion. at what point do we run out of money? >> we are out of money out. we are operating into deficit.

mr. lamb: that was when we had $11 billion -- $11 trillion in deficit. mr. samuelson: i'm guessing as to what the president met by we are running out of money, i think he meant that we are spending all the taxes we bring in and we are not taxing to cover the difference. i think that is what he meant. otherwise, it would not make sense. when you say we are running out of money, that it's actually not true in the sense that the federal reserve can create money by its operations. it goes out and buys treasury securities and paste the people that bought from an dollars -- pays the people that it bought from dollars that it creates out of thin air. the government can pay its bills

by borrowing from itself. what he said, i'm sure he would not say that again today. he would say something more sophisticated and i'm sure he knows better today. mr. lamb: how would you characterize his approach to the economy during his presidential term? mr. samuelson: i would give the president either a d-or c++ -- c+.r he took over during the midst of a financial crisis and the great recession. i think he operated during the 6-8 months, he conceivably could have done better but i don't know how. he acted with a great deal of inf-confidence and eloquence explaining things to people. i think he generated competence. , he let them do

it he thought needed to be done. he took some decisions which at the time were considered to be courageous like saving the auto industry which i think was the right thing to do. it is worth for melbourne that a lot of the things that obama did, george w. bush had laid the foundation for because he had followed the same path. obama could have screwed it up. he could have spent all his time blaming bush. he acted with a great deal of self-restraint and maturity. i think the historians will judge what he did favorably. opinion is not so high after that. policies that essentially were aimed at buttressing his reputation and legacy and it seemed to me undermined general confidence in the economy.

whatever you to be affordable care act, he was -- it was predictable it would be unbelievably contentious. he tooka column before office and said, please don't do health reform or global warming right away. the economy is too weak. theneed to buttress -- social competence of society, wait until things are better before you go into this. it was ahat he lost -- deliberate decision he took and he thought it would buttress his reputation and will be historiansd when begin writing about -- i will incrediblyama is an lucid, eloquent leader. no matter who is elected, particularly trump, even truck -- hillary, it will be a step

down. with trump, it will be a couple of floors down. chartmb: let me show the of the membership of u.s. rep incentives and senate. with the house, you go back to when barack obama was elected, there were 257 democrats and 178 republicans. down through the years, up until 2015, it slipped. -- slipped. other than the first two years, if you go to the senate, you can see what has happened over there. when he came in there were 57 democrats and 41 republicans. you go to where it is now, 54 republicans and 44 democrats. any reaction to that? mr. samuelson: i'm not a political stage for sure -- sae for sure. -- sage for sure.

my philosophy is simple, when people don't like what is in power, they vote for the other guy. sometimes that is unfair. the other guys are doing their best as anybody could do. i think that is what happened. with not really doing is to help the democratic party and concentrating mainly on his own reelection. i don't report in this area. i don't know if that is true. it is certainly what has happened in determining the house and senate. informed aboute the political landscape will have to settle this issue. mr. lamb: march 27, you wrote that we are a very wealthy society and we should not forget it. donald trump along with many other people have. visiting recently with the post editorial board, here is how

donald trump explained his suggested that the united states limit its overseas military commitments including nato. position that we used to be, i think we were very powerful and very wealthy and now we are pull country -- poor country. mr. samuelson: he's getting at that lack of self-confidence used to have. the idea that we are a poor country is absurd. it is a foolish statement. if you were to become president and say things like that, he would be miss educating the american public. of $18 a national income trillion. we spent less than 3% on national defense. at the height of the cold war we spent nine or 10% on national defense.

we are so much richer. if you think about 1945 or 1950, the start of the postwar era and think what people had, most people do not have cars, most people did not have televisions were air-conditioners or microwave ovens. not only did most people not have personal computers or smartphones, they had never imagined them. most people had not been in an penicillin received and other antibiotics. you can go down a long list of things that we have now that have raised our living standards. the idea that we are a poor society is just absurd. mr. lamb: the budget of the department of defense since barack obama became president. 2009, 600 $66 billion. -- 66 $6 billion. then it went up and it has come down. to $585 billion as

the years went on, inflation rate --what is the average inflation rate? mr. samuelson: if you don't count oil and food, it is about 2%. if you include food and oil, it is about 1%. mr. lamb: what do you think of those numbers on defense? mr. samuelson: i am of the view that we are not spending enough. we are reducing the size of the army substantially. little bit less than 500,000 down to 350,000. i would have to check those numbers. it is a substantial reduction. we're reducing the size of the navy. we face all these conceivable threats, not just terrorism, cyber warfare. in a and russia have armed way that was not anticipated 15 years ago. we want to deter military conflict, it seems to me that we

have to have a force that is countriesat other will think that we do not want to do this because if the united states mobilizes, they will close out of the water. i don't think we're spending enough good as you point out, not only his defense spending , inflation would have eroded some of the spending power of those numbers. it is fair to add that some of the decline reflects the disengagement from afghanistan and iraq which were expensive commitments. historians will have to decide whether or not we should have as well aser in iraq afghanistan. thatamb: may 8, you wrote american consumers are not what they used to be. that explains the plotting economic recovery and it gets no respect despite crating 40 million jobs and lasting almost seven years. economicgripe is that

growth has been held to about 2% a year, well below historical standards. the sluggishness reflects a profound psychological transformation of american shoppers, who have dampened the consumption spending, affecting about two thirds of the economy. to be blunt: we have sobered up. viewsmuelson: one of my is that the great recession and financial crisis were social and economic traumas to the american people. something happened that they have been led to believe could never happen again, and almost uncontrollable economic crisis, not just a mild recession, it was something that almost spun out of control. the people have become a lot more per functionaries. it does not need to have gone to their cells come the extra dollar they save instead of spending. i think it is also true of businesses. weakis why we have business investment in this

recovery and one of the reasons for the sluggish recovery. we don't really know the -- there are lots of positive recent for the whole recovery. lagging,technology is did a column last week about the possibility that just because we are an aging society, we may have slower growth and people as they get older and assume positions of responsibility and corporations, they are more risk-averse than the used to be. people don't change jobs as much because they are afraid that if they leave one job the next i will not be as good and if they go back they will not get the job. there were cautious to all sorts of reasons you can advance for the fact that the recovery has been slow. appear afterh will column which --

will appear after this program repeats the problem. there is a discrepancy between the increase in number of jobs which has been strong and increase in gdp which has been weak. it is hard to reconcile those things. mr. lamb: another charge. this is cheap the -- gdp. gross domestic product, he can see in 2009, our gdp was working .4 trillion and today -- 14.4 trillion and today it is 16.4 trillion. what is gdp? >> gross domestic product. total output or production. before the 1930's, we did not have a statistic that was gross domestic product. this is a great advance in economic statistics. if you think about it, it is incredibly complicated the economy. you need to have surveys of lots

of things to count what we produce. surveys of health care and automobiles and lotteries in college tuition, you name it. somehow they have to measure it. they also have -- a lot of distances intermediate goods, you do not want to cap it twice. a chunk of still into a car, you don't want to count the steel and the car because the car's value also reflects the value of this deal. el. want to -- the ste you want to count value added. that is a complicated process. count -- yout to want to just cap the final product that people are paying for. thatunt the final product people are paying for like going to a movie or flying in a plane

or a tangible product like an automobile or dishwasher or microwave, or whatever. wrote,b: may 29, you maybe the middle class is not so stressed anymore. we in the media are riley criticized for a pessimistic bias. recover the unfortunate, the groom and the tragic. know,s what people don't and often as not, is sad and shocking our prism in the world distorts reality because reality is often predictable and reassuring, what we aim to be surprising and upsetting. is the weekly average earnings of the american people. it goes back to 2009. weekly earnings were $810 a week. today, $852 a week. that is average. as a statistic, we are not sure what it all means. tell us about this.

mr. samuelson: if you look at this, 2016, it is adjusted for inflation. this should be the actual purchasing power of the average weekly earnings. number two, i think that that column concerned a study that i theacross that showed that small increase year-to-year in average and median wages were displayed by shifting demographics. people in my generation, baby boomers who are well played -- well-paid and leaving the workplace and substituted with younger workers entering the labor force and they were lower pay. when you substitute lower paid younger workers with older workers, that tended to drag down the median.

the point i was making is that conventional-- wisdom is that wages are going up slowly and that is true. the point i was making is if you look at the wages of any particular worker, they may be anng up more because this is arithmetic effect. retiring workers with higher wages, that drags down the average wage when you substitute who you replace them with younger workers with lower earnings. process thatraphic does not reflect the reality. chart,b: here's the social security cost. you go back to 2009, the adjustment that year was 5.8%. if you are on social security,

he got a bump of 5.8%. there are three years of the last eight where you got no increase. and 1.7,1 and then 3.6 one .5, one .7, and 2016, people no increase. you don't hear any talk about that today at all. mr. samuelson: they don't get increase because inflation has been zero. in each of these years, inflation was positive. i forgot what the threshold is, one or 2%, there is some feeling among economists that are price index overstate the price increase. they don't count improved quality in the undercount -- they undercount new goods, again, for technical reasons.

i'm not all that sympathetic to the fact that every once in a while if inflation is low, the of one don't get a boost or 1.5%. seniors are essentially living off the incomes of younger workers which is being transferred to them through social security. to liken that burden, it would -- increase do that the burden on seniors that can afford it and don't increase the seniors who can't afford that. aside from that, having a zero cpi adjustment for all seniors is not the most desirable way for anybody. you wrote on june 22,

you can add health care to the cause of growing wage inequality in america. paradoxa large on loan at work. companies that try to provide roughly equal health insurance plans for their workers come as many do, and that making wage and salary inequality worse. a new economic study shows how this perverse parking perks. if a company: offers generous health insurance plan, the plan is basically the same for executives as it is for lower paid workers. if you are making $50,000 and getting insurance policy of $10,000 or $20,000, with the you are single or have a family, that is a larger part of your compensation and for a top executive who is making $200,000. gross --gap just grows.

you are substituting health insurance for take-home pay. health insurance looms larger for lower paid workers that higher paid workers. mr. lamb: a chart showing health and human services budget since 2009. the started out with $737 billion and $412 billion a was medicare. you can see what happens. 2016, $1.1 trillion for health and human services budget and $583 billion from medicare. if you drop back from all of budget isof the hhs medicare and medicaid. shows thison: it away fromriorities military spending. if you go back to the 1950's, no terrorist many was roughly half

of the budget. come for today, it is less than 20%, around 15%. if you look at the medicare billion, that is roughly the same size as the defense department budget. securityd in social number that is almost $900 billion. a good chunk of medicaid goes to older people. you're talking about numbers approaching $2 trillion. that is for social security and medicare and medicaid for the elderly or the defense budget is around $600 billion. there has been a dramatic change in the priorities of the national government. i'm not saying we should not have had a major shift, but i think we have gone too far. mr. lamb: homeownership rates. people who own or are buying 7.4%.homes, 2009, 60 69.4% -- 67.4%.

mr. samuelson: at its high point it was almost 69%. there was a bipartisan consensus on both republicans and democrats. society ought to promote it. were,ition to which there in the boom of the early 2000, there was a lot of cheap money around and people were offering mortgages to people who should not have had them. a blip in homeownership well above what it should be. when you look at that come he think two thirds of americans are buying homes. it is a little bit misleading. you are also cutting people in their early 20's who are too young to buy homes who should not buy home and are not married. also looking at people who are

late in life who may no longer want to live in a home or may no longer be capable. areou take people who 70-80, their homeownership rates are high. above 80%. see in that table is the government's ill-advised and ill-fated efforts to promote homeownership and the cultural believe in that you had to own a home to be part of the middle class. mr. lamb: the three year fixed mortgage rate, another chart. 4% when he came into office. 4.6, 4.45, 2015, 3.85%. still very low. what you make of this? this?t do you make of mr. samuelson: with a rate this

low, he would think everybody in this country would want to own a home or take out a mortgage. tighters tight or -- than these numbers indicate. in the wake of the housing crisis, regulators got tougher and angst got tougher and inrtgage lenders got tougher approving new loans. this is not quite the boost to homeownership that it would appear to be. nor is it a boost to residential construction in the recovery that it would appear to be. there's a sort of a decision being made at the lender level. we don't want to lead to joke because he is a credit risk. they may or may not be right about joe but there is a tightness mr. lamb:. you have -- tightness. mr. lamb: you have how many kids and a trade -- age range?

mr. samuelson: three kids and 25-31 years of age. i've written a couple books and none of them have read my books. at some point, i will have them read the books. they are quite independent. tell, theynt i can consider me old-fashioned. they're all reasonably optimistic. they are all self sufficient. i'm proud of how independent they are. mr. lamb: if somebody wants to read your columns, where do they find them? mr. samuelson: the washington post website and look under opinions and if they scroll all name, theyn to my will have a long list of opinion writers with posts.

my name is there. they can click on that and read as much as they want. mr. lamb: you write to a week. how money words can you write? mr. samuelson: 800, that is it. i cut it. i agreed with the editor that it would be a hundred. i don't go to 801. mr. lamb: robert c wilson, coldness -- robert samuelson, washington post. thank you. mr. samuelson: a pleasure. which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> for free transcript or to

give us your comments, visit us at q and a.org. q and a programs are also available as c-span podcast. >> if you enjoyed this week's q&a interview, here are some other programs you might like. robert gordon talks about his book, the rise and fall of american growth. the american standard of living. stockman, his book, the v formation. and then douglas, the state of the federal budget and economy. you can watch these anytime or search our entire video library at c-span.org.