donald trump in the district. right wing republicans, i am being kind here, you know, who, they don't want to do anything because unless it is perfect whatever perfectness, they are not for it. all of a sudden they're looking up, they got a bunch of these trump people in a majority of their district. so if donald trump is for it, they are going to have a hard time being against it. and we do not have a president that has any ideology. left wing, right wing, there is not. so when i tell you to get ready for a ride, this is going to be a ride. all of the rules we have seen, you know, ground rules that sweeney and i had for many years, those are all gone. so get ready. your seatbelt on, it is going to be a wild ride. [applause] >> that brings us to the end of today's forum. thank you mr. boehner, thank you ladies and gentlemen.

the forum is now adjourn. i am a democrat and i am going to do x, but then there are people who voted for donald trump in the district. right wing republicans, i am being kind here, you know, who, they don't want to do anything because unless it is perfect whatever perfectness, they are not for it. all of a sudden they're looking up, they got a bunch of these trump people in a majority of their district. so if donald trump is for it, they are going to have a hard time being against it. and we do not have a president that has any ideology. left wing, right wing, there is not. so when i tell you to get ready for a ride, this is going to be a ride. all of the rules we have seen, you know, ground rules that sweeney and i had for many years, those are all gone. so get ready. your seatbelt on, it is going to be a wild ride.

[applause] >> that brings us to the end of today's forum. thank you mr. boehner, thank you ladies and gentlemen. the forum is now adjourn. [bell rings] [applause] [crowd chattering] [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. 2017]

[crowd chattering] should -- >> we are live from the u.s. capitol starting at 7:00 a.m. eastern. representatives and hear from returning members.

the house gavels in at noon. it includes the election of the house speaker, his address, and later a debate and vote on rules for the new congress. one rule in particular is getting attention, a proposal to find members who live stream video from the house floor. it is in response to the democratic city and that was streamed by several democrats. on c-span2, our live coverage of the senate begins at noon eastern and includes the swearing-in of senators. opening day continues on c-span3 with a ceremonial swearing-in of members of congress at 1:00 p.m. eastern. vice president joe biden sweat -- presides over the swearing-in of individual senators. and speaker paul ryan swears in members of the house. we will have our replay of opening day on c-span and c-span2. as the 115th congress begins, we have been asking our facebook question. what message do you want to send to washington?

hundreds have weighed in with their responses. harry.ng and eddie. and now we want to hear from you. log on to join the conversation. >> earlier today, president obama and his family returned to washington, d.c., after spending the holidays in hawaii. the president has 18 days left in august -- office before president-elect trump will be sworn in. it looks to be a busy few remaining weeks for president obama. he plans to deliver a farewell speech next week in chicago. he will also meet with congressional democrats to discuss the nation's health care

law which mr. trump and republicans have promised to repeal. >> ♪ [applause] >> the presidential inauguration of donald is friday, january 20. c-span will have live coverage of all the days events ceremonies --and ceremonies. watch live on c-span, c-span.org

, and listen live on the free c-span radio app. next, a discussion on creating a universal basic income for american citizens. it would replace social welfare programs with an unconditional sum of money. andy stern and libertarian charles murray both outline their different proposals at this event held at the cato institute recently. it is about one hour. >> all right, i want to take an opportunity to welcome you all to the cato institute's hayek auditorium. my name is michael tanner, a senior fellow here at cato, and i generally work on issues that have to do with poverty and inequality and other areas of

domestic economic policy. today, we've got a rare occurrence here at cato, a double book form if you will. we do a lot of book forums, but rarely do we have two such distinguished authors dealing with books both released on the same topic at roughly the same time, so it's serendipity that we get you both here today. we're talking about the universal basic income. which is the idea that rather than the current multiplicity of social welfare programs that we currently have, that that somehow be supplemented or replaced with cash transfers that are not tied to specific requirements, that are simply, people get a check from the government rather than the traditional set of well, we have

healthcare benefits and housing benefits and cash benefits, food benefits, things of that nature. this is a growing topic of conversation on both the left and right and among libertarians as well. there is a general acknowledgment that the workforce is changing and work responsibilities are changing . and at the same time that the existing social welfare structure is struggling in many ways and the question is what innovative solutions can be found to deal with these issues? today we are lucky to have two extremely distinguished authors with these new books on the subject with us today. first, charles murray who almost certainly needs no introduction , though he is the brady scholar at the american enterprise institute. he is the author of so many hugely influential books.

in fact, if you are looking to libertarianism and public policy, it's hard to find anybody who's had as much influence over the last 40 or 50 years as charles. he of course is the author of "losing ground" which is the end intellectual foundation of welfare form. he's the author of other books as well, including "what it means to be a libertarian," "real education," coming apart which is another very influential book on the question of poverty in society and his most recent is a real issue of in our hands : a plan to replace the welfare state where he rolls out his proposal for a universal healthcare system so we are thrilled to have him talk about that and he will be followed by andy stern who is the former head of the 2.2 million member service employees international

union. he's now at columbia university. he is a frequent author, a frequent lecturer and he is the author of "raising the floor: how a universal basic income can add to our economy and fulfill -- rebuild the american dream." this might be called the strange bedfellows book forum. at any rate, we will hear from both of them. then we will have a little conversation and try to include you in that conversation as well so i look forward to , participation little bit later on. let's start with charles. charles: that was a wonderful introduction. it was generous and what are you, 50 years i've been influential? i'm not that old. we come from somewhat different perspectives as i'm sure we will make clear. i'm going to give you the libertarian case for basic income. i should also take a minute to

sketch out the specifics of the system i propose in the book. essentially it says that we replace the entire welfare state with universal income and that's one of the things andy and i will be going back and forth on. we replace everything. i'm not just talking about welfare. i'm talking about all transfers and that includes social security, medicaid, medicare, subsidies, and all the rest. a transfer payment for some americans have money taken from them by the government and it is given to other individuals and groups. all that goes. in its place is a monthly check deposited electronically to a known bank account. an important feature of it. in this amounts as updated this

, year, to $10,000 of disposable income and also $3000 a year that is used for medical care. we can get into that but i think i'm going to put that aside in my opening remarks because let's just talk about disposable income and it's in medical care of one way or another. the libertarian case for this can be made on purely the grounds of the lesser of two evils, that's what friedman used for his negative income tax proposal. i would put this part of the case saying look, there is no way that an advanced democracy of the west is going to get rid of massive amounts of transfer payments, it's not going to happen. a libertarian dream of dismantling the welfare state is not in the cards. let's strike a grand bargain with the left. the grand bargain is that we will let you spend an awful lot of money on transfer payments to to help the disadvantaged and

your part is that you give up your goal of the state and trying to stage manage people's lives. that's why the book is called in our hands. there are a couple of other things that are really paramount in what i am trying to get at this plan. as i was saying to andy before we came up here, there's not a snowballs chance in hell that the plan i propose is going to get enacted the way i want it to be enacted. so why am i so describing it? because there are a couple i think it accomplishes that are hugely important. one of them has to do with what i am increasingly convinced is the reality that faces us within a matter of decades, maybe not that many decades, maybe 10 or 15 years, in which the number of jobs that disappear is so great that we have to start thinking in terms of the economy in which people can live satisfying lives with a combination of paid work

but not necessarily 40 hours a week as in the old-fashioned sense of that word. the response that i get especially from libertarians is that you guys have been saying this since the luddites, that every single technological advances going to take jobs and every time you've been wrong, more jobs have been created. and to argue this time it's different is a fool's game. this time is different. i think andy and i agree on this. it's not just that we are going to have driverless cars probably in 10 years and it's not just this by itself, there's what, 4 million jobs that disappear, good paying jobs that disappear. we are going to be carving out millions of white color the white-collar jobs because artificial intelligence after years of being overhyped has finally come of age and is now

able to do all sorts of things that formerly were done by people usually with college education, smart people, that had to make decisions that a computer couldn't make and now the computer can do that. we can talk about those more specifically but i think unless we look ahead to that, we are going to be going down the wrong road. retraining, all these things that are provided by typical solutions to our workforce problem just aren't going to work for reasons that are historically unprecedented. the second thing and probably the main reason i think and them -- enacting this would be not just necessary because of a variety of contingencies that are forcing themselves upon us , but a good thing in terms of the way the country functions is

it has a sense of revitalizing american civil society. first, think of those people who have serious problems. you have somebody who is on the basic universal income and gets his check every month but he drinks it up so it's 10 days to the end of the month, he's out of money. he can't go to the government for help. he has to go to his girlfriend, his parents, his children, his neighbors, the salvation army. he has to go somewhere and ask for help. there is however a major difference in the way that that person can both interact with the people he asks for help. he is no longer a helpless victim who can't do anything and that's what he's going to be told. we are not going to let you starve in the street but it's time for you to get your act together because we know you've got a check coming in in just 10

days. and let's start to take steps to make sure this doesn't happen again. one such interaction doesn't make much difference necessarily. imagine a country in which millions of such interactions are taking place constantly. that's one aspect. let me just say quickly, dealing with human needs is really tough, whether we're trying to do it through social agencies now or whether we're trying to do it philanthropic lee now, it's very tough. my proposition is the only consistently effective way and even then it's tough is by people who are very close to the person in need. and right now, we have shifted these responsibilities downtown in ways which undercuts one of the great strengths of american traditional society. the other thing that will happen, however, in revitalizing america's traditional society is historically as observers from

tocqueville on down have said over and over, there's nothing -- america has been extraordinary in the way it which it responds to problems by creating association through private nongovernmental needs. when the government got deeply involved in social welfare and the association continued, the philanthropy continued but it was diverted to other kinds of arenas in which the government was not so active. i think the best thing we can do is to get that kind of energy back into civil society, traditionally defined. and i think that it's also a way -- people talk about infrastructure and why are we not building more infrastructure when obviously libertarians and liberals alike can agree you need bridges that don't fall down. there's a parallel in civil society and that is that there are all sorts of needs that need to be tended to that don't

necessarily qualify for paid work. the murray family has a classic example of that. my wife, who has a phd, she could get a job. if she wanted to. she is really busy and she doesn't get paid a cent for any of the things she does but her day is busy all day long with useful organizations in which she's contributing her time and also her quite considerable talent. multiply that by some millions of people who maybe now are in paid jobs but they're not going to be sitting around the house watching tv or playing video games in the presence of a universal basic income. they're going to be busy just as they are now but we are making it a lot easier for them to make that choice because of the universal basic income that is in effect subsidizing that kind of work.

i promised i would try to stay within 10 minutes because there is a lot of back-and-forth we are going to do. so i will leave it there and we can pick it up later. >> just before that real quick, folks following on the live stream or via c-span who want to get involved, you can go to twitter and the hashtag is #catoubi. andy? >> you may be wondering how did the former president of america's largest union who helped elect barack obama and helped successfully organize obamacare end up here with a wi-fi password of "give me liberty." [laughter] that's a subject with the world's first scholar in recent history, charles murray, who is

now my fellow luddite apparently about a subject i know nothing about three years ago. i wouldn't have known so let me explain how i got here. i spent 38 years working for the same organization, i'm a one job in a lifetime person like my father and grandfather. by employer managed my career, my healthcare, my job, my pension. and in 2010, probably at the point that many people say i was at the most successful period in my life, i quit. i retired. because despite all the work i had done for the union and all the wonderful things i had done with janitors, child care, home care, nursing home work that i was privileged to work with and all the good things that had happened, equality was at higher than any time in history. good jobs were disappearing. the future seemed to be very murky in terms of what it looked like for the american dream and i had no answer as to what to do.

i could have worked harder i , could have wrote more but the theory seems to be the thing to do was lead an organization and i didn't know what direction to go. i spent a number of years and i want to thank michael tanner specifically because at a meeting i spent here at cato because i interviewed lots of book, like michael for my he explained libertarian philosophy in general and more specifically about work, welfare and universal basic income and i began this journey. and i want to give you my big conclusion after years of listening to people. one is if you wanted to rename this country appropriately, economically you would name it the united states of anxiety. 21% of people, only 21% despite the statistics to the contrary , think the economy is good or very good. 47% of all people don't have $400 in case of emergency and

58% of people say their kids will not do better than they did, that the american dream is no longer alive and statistically, they are absolutely correct. that's not the america i love. it's not the america any of us want and it made me think about therefore what to do and what was happening. i learned that in the market economy of the 20th century when you said economic growth it really was a shorthand for four different things occurring at the same time. gdp growth, productivity group, wages grew and jobs grew. we know in the end of the 20th century, wages fell off instead train. you could have productivity growth, gdp and job growth but for 20 years american wages did not rise. and now we do not want to recognize that you could have economic growth and productivity growth not only without wage growth but without job growth. we have had not one new net

sinceional full-time job all the growth in the economy 2005. has been in contingent, part-time, other forms of alternative work arrangements. we have the largest number of children living in their homes which has turned the american dream for parents into the american nightmare. we have the lowest laborforce participation in history. we now have not employer managed work lives where it's one job in a lifetime economy but people like my son are expected to have nine or 12 jobs by the time they are 35. jobs now are complicated in terms of the economy and trying to figure out how you get the basic benefits like social security or disability insurance . and my summary of today's economy is not the gm auto worker, steel economy of my generation. but really it's facebook who is the largest content provider in the world and it has no writers.

airbnb is the largest accommodation provider in the world, it owns no hotel rooms. transportation company in the world. it has no cars. and you have ali baba and amazon the largest retailer in the world that have no inventory. that is the 21st century economy. these are the icons of today's economy. so my first thing was, this is not your fathers or grandfathers or 20th century economy. the second thing i understand is now there is so much reputable reason, this is not my research, this is kinsey who says 45% of all tasks in america can be automated right now 13% more , with auto artificial intelligence. oxford university, 46% of all jobs, deloitte 46% of all jobs , in europe. pew did a study of half predicted not only will there be automation be taking away jobs but it has the potential of

creating a new amount of social unrest in our country. so all of a sudden everywhere you look, larry summers says one quarter of american men will not be employed at any particular time in the next generation. we now see driverless cars but think about driverless trucks. the largest job in 29 states, second or third largest job is in 15 more is driving a truck. driverless trucks are on the road right now at mining camps. trucks actually towed behind one truck driver, following behind on truck driver just drove all the way across europe from one end to the other. the private equity person who owns a significant amount of retail establishments was yelling to me the other day about, doesn't your union message, representing every worker at every union, while

they are fighting about their pensions, in five years i will not have a person in a truck taking goods from the warehouse to retail. the largest job in 29 states will be people who support truck drivers and parts, that's a decade away at most. d.o.t. has just introduced the legislation. so now we have all this reputable research. as a country we have some choices. you can say what do those guys know, it's never happened before ? and that's true. you could say, maybe this time is different or maybe it if it isn't different we should remember the transition from the agricultural to industrial economy was brutal. charles dickens, it was a terrible time for a lot of people until we got to the other side. so first of all, we have a transition problem that has huge potential of hurting lots of our kids and grandkids in the country. and secondly, we understand that business and the military who

are thoughtful people, in the face of reputable research , create the narrative. and why in the world do we have to have this intellectual argument that we can never prove is right or wrong about are there or are there going to be jobs in the future. why can we not make a plan in case there is not? we don't if it's not, we don't use the plan just like the military doesn't have to use a plan about chemical warfare or anything else that god for bid doesn't happen in our country but they are prepared. all this reputable research all through the years, there was a study at washington dc and it was going to flood the entire system, i don't think any of us would come down to cato and have a debate about whether that has happened before. we would get out of town or make plans to get through it. i think that is what the country needs to do. my plan is very simple as is charles, not funded the same way , but it's universal basic income. it would do two things at the

same time. number one, and poverty. we still have 15% of the population living in poverty with all the money we are spending? poverty line is $7940 for an individual. charles says give people $10,000 plus $3000 in health care. statistically, we will end poverty for the first time in the united states. that is good. ourselvesll prepare technological change. we will probably feel a lot of entrepreneurial activity, reward caregivers who have been home taking care of children. we will help prisoners who are leaving incarceration get their start. we will solve potentially a lot of different problems. by a simple policy. i will end by saying what winston churchill once said. universal basic income, you can ask me a lot of questions. it is a terrible policy when you

think about it. like democracy, until you try everything else. because when you try to figure out what to do in the united states to end poverty, to prepare yourself for a technological revolution which is not anymore a blue-collar revolution, not anything like the iraq war when the sons and daughters were in the war, it's more like the vietnam war when everybody got drafted. no one is going to avoid the technological revolution. the highs jobs targeted to be eliminated are accountants, insurance adjusters and insurance agents, it's all math and now that's the subject of algorithms everywhere you go . we are at a very important time. there's a very big potential change coming. there's a series of problems we can solve by a single policy, it's a policy that has lots of different issues and different ways to fund. but if universal basic income is not your best idea i want to , know what it is because i'd like to propose something better

than hoping this time. is different. >> thank you very much and let's continue the conversation a little bit. for folks following along on the livestream or on c-span, they can get involved in this by using twitter and #catoubi. >> let me suggest that maybe this meeting of left and right is tapering over some of the serious differences that exist between the two groups. on the right and among libertarians, you hear a lot of what charles talks about of replacing the social welfare system with his new approach which certainly from an economic point makes sense. it has a host of problems,

doesn't really profit, people are similarly situated differently compared to the system. it's inefficient, and people have to jump through hoops to get benefits. on the other side i often hear there's sort of an add-on. let's add to the social welfare programs and raise taxes on the rich and we will distribute that money. maybe not $10,000 a month, but we will give people more money than they have today. able set ofridge wil differences? >> my first reaction is that i andy's planer have than no plan at all? [laughter] look. at the very center of what i want to do is restore moral

agency that has been deeply undercut. let's think in terms of the example of the kid in the inner-city who has never held a job, doesn't have a father in the house and he's not employable by any ordinary standard. and if a youngster in that situation, coming into his late teens, sees himself as a pawn or sees his only route to dignity being gaming the system or going into the underground economy or whatever, this is something my plan really does something for. because his future is in his hands in an important way. he is given options he doesn't have before and he is also in a nexus where if he doesn't take advantage of those options that he is told about that in no uncertain terms by the people right around him. and what scares me about an add-on plan is that all the bad

things that we have now about removing moral agency remain in place. and here's where i'm true to my libertarian beliefs, i think government is deeply implicated in destroying a lot of personal responsibility. so i will just say if we ever get to the floor of the senate debating competing plans, i will be testifying before a house committee saying don't do what andy says, replace everything. as far as saying that it's better than nothing, it's sort of like the difference between trump and clinton. [laughter] >> i just want to take away my extremist view and be a little more nuanced. one is, i was a welfare worker. that's how i started my career, working for the state of pennsylvania.

a white, suburban person telling women of color about regulations and rules and morality is was ridiculous. it was demeaning to them and silly for me. so i believe what martin luther king said in his last look. we didn't ask for housing vouchers and food stamps. we asked the civil rights , movement that is, to end poverty. and if you want to end poverty, give people money. so i don't believe in keeping all this categorical welfare system. i don't agree also with getting rid of everything so we can talk about where i draw lines. but i do believe that it is better off to give people a choice, to give people personal responsibility and accept they will do what they want to and that's what life is somewhat about, not suburban welfare kids

enforcing regulations that some congress passed in washington 30 years ago about what your life was going to be like and how it was going to be controlled by an outside entity. first of all, i don't believe in changes in social security for the people who have put money into it. i appreciate its unfunded nature but the point is that workers have been paying into social security for their lifetime and , they should get money out of it. if you want to make a transition sometime in the future who never paid in, we can start that conversation. but i'm not interested in taking away what people have counted on their whole lives. health care is a whole different discussion. we could actually fund all of get ourwe could healthcare spending anywhere down near what other countries around the world, whether you like canada or switzerland. one is private and one is more public, we pay way to much for healthcare, that's a different

discussion. i don't think people manage it well on their own but i don't like the health care system we have. i think it needs a lot of improvement. after that, everything is up for grabs. i don't see why food stamps or housing vouchers, it's amount of universal basic income is sufficient. i think you can't have both at the same time. in goodht not get me stead with my progressive friends who wonder what i'm doing here in the first place. but i don't believe there's enough money taxing the rich, that's not where the money's going to come from. you want to tax assets, now we are taxin talking something different. you want tax income, we can make some improvements if that's what people want to do. that's totally not going to work in this particular situation. i have funding plan, we can talk about it later but it doesn't presume we are building on top. it's more of a full smorgasbord where limiting what is a fixed price like social security and medicare that stay on the table

and everything else, we can rearrange the menu. >> i have bad news for you because now i prefer andy's plan to the current system. i absolutely agree about the medical care. i have got a way of dealing with it in my plan but the main thing i say in the book is if we only had a sensible regulatory system, healthcare costs should have been going down the way costs from many other services have been going down. routine health care that we spend 90% of our doctors visits on, those costs should have been going down as fast as computer costs are going down but is not for artificial reasons and there's got to be a better way so i will go with a better way. in terms of transition, the way i think of it is, you say to someone you have a choice. you can stay in the current

system we can go to the new system your choice. , it's interesting to do a calculation. at what age, let's say at 45 after you have been contributing to social security for a lot of time but you have a choice between getting disposable income or staying on social security without getting that. when does it make a better bet to switch out of the current system even though you pay into the current system? . transitions need to be taken care of. i agree with the medical options available for medicare. >> let me raise another contingency on this and that is the question of work. i think in general we prefer people to work rather than not work for a variety of reasons, one is the dignity in work itself. the second is to contribute to economic growth overall and the third is if we are

redistributing, we want people to be contributing to their own well-being as part of that bargain. there are very few studies on this. what little evidence you get suggests that if you do some sort of negative income tax in the marginal phaseout range, even to discourage work. the alternative is either to have such a broad phaseout or you begin to make it an expensive and have a high clip so people go through a traditional welfare program and get the high tax rate. do either of you in your plan wrestle with this problem and how do you get people to continue to work? >> the way i do it in my plan is to have a high point at which you start to pay back any not of the grant. until you make $30,000 in personal income, my

cell phone isn't turned off. until you make $30,000 in personal income, you keep the entire $10,000. and once you get beyond that you start to pay a clawback modestly. but when you get to $30,000, with the $10,000, that gives you an income of $40,000. the number of people who say i will drop out at that point is very small. i would argue that the costs are manageable and i can go through the numbers in the book. that is the way i would deal with it. think there are a lot of different moral and philosophy questions attached to this. the one job we could use more of in america is philosophers. now we have the potential to actually get closer to that because of technology and all the things that are becoming cheap. and yet i don't think work was at the top of his hierarchy.

i think a lot of other kinds of values but i think it is a discussion about how much choice libertarians want to give people, about what you make them or don't make them do. if someone wants to live on what i am saying is a very minuscule amount of money, $12,000 a year, i don't know, play video games, i think everyone's worst fear is they do drugs. but if they take care of a child, take care of their mother, they coach little league, there's a lot of things people can do when they're not working full-time. i tend to think of this more as a supplement to work, not a substitute for work. i still think there will be work. a lot less hours potentially a , lot more that we might defined differently. i happen to maybe have gotten bit by the bug of believing that you give people the money and let people make choices of what

they do in their life and why do we have to make this work of everybody asace on one of their responsibilities. >> here is my guess. with women, there will be very little problem. there are lots of women who have gone into the labor force some of them enthusiastically because they wanted to and that's great. lots of women would rather be doing full-time work at home, taking care of kids and also be engaged in the community. and they can't afford to do it . and this will make it possible for them to do things that women historically have done extremely effectively. and i think it is more males than females who have been socialized into thinking that the dignity of a job, and there is dignity associated with a job, is defined in terms of going to work for 40 hours a week.

>> i think that is a generational thing. clearly donald trump would agree with you about women but i would say you know, work has become very different for my half s in their 30s, now 40s. i think they grew up expecting to work. have families, work at the same time so i don't know how that's all going to work. i do think people will make different choices. and again, take advantage of being advantage in the libertarian place, choice is what people say. you cannot say give people choice and then tell them they have to work. >> let me pick up on that with the last question here where we go to the audience. something in the area we can

agree on is autonomy. the welfare system seems to be paternalistic. it has all sorts of regulations that if you want this, you have to do that. we push both in terms of the left and right on this. you get more benefits if your kid goes to school or we will pay you more for this. but i've also seen it on the left talking about there are people who cannot handle things so we need to see how much they pay for housing as opposed to education and so on. this would move it in a different direction. but do you see pushback from all both sides on this? the idea that there are basically people who can't or should not run their own lives and therefore it's the , government's job to run it for them? >> i've already heard that kind of argument made by people on both sides of the fence. one response to that is, we are not talking about a future that is worse than this one. right this minute, we have the

numbers on young males that are out of the labor force altogether are really scary and the increases are scary. women's labor force produce vision has also been falling. we have a variety of people who are living lives right now of the kind that people on both sides would say, look at these people throwing away their lives. my own view is pretty much what he just said. people make choices. and the downside of trying to stage manage those choices have been made clear by a lot of public policies over the last 30 or 40 years. >> there are people who don't do well managing their own affairs. people have dementia, mental health issues, drug problems. and i assume we will always have agencies and communities, churches and families who will try to intervene in those

situations. and we make sure we have the resources available because you when you have a mental health problem, having money is not want to solve your problems. prescriptions and counseling are necessary. there could be people who make bad decisions. and after we take care of the people who have physical, emotional or other needs that need to be met, i think we have to accept that's what happens in the world and we do the best we can. friends,hat your family, and community try to do. tell you to stop drinking, tell you to stop fooling around, doing whatever else you are doing with money or gambling or whatever. just going to have to let it be. >> that's great and i think ultimately you can't expect people to be moral agents if you do not give them any responsibility. they become puppets. that's not what people are all about. we will move to the audience now and see if you have questions.

i see hands shooting up. i would ask that you wait until you get to the microphone and identify yourself and any organization you represent and please ask questions. i will cut you off if you start to give a speech. for folks following along, the hashtag on twitter is #catoubi. let's go to the audience. i'm going to start in the middle and move left and right. so gentleman in the blue shirt and then you are next. >> good afternoon. dan o'sullivan from the basic income action. we spent the last year pushing the presidential candidates to support basic income. in we will have a new president january, and congress. what do you think the chances are of getting some kind of basic income legislation introduced? >> i think the chance of getting something introduced are easy.

the chances of it being a serious discussion right now are pretty complicated. i happen to believe that the most influential person on the next united states president if it is hillary clinton is justin trudeau. he is seen as a new thinker about new problems. he has done a children's basic income. he has talked about doing experiments in ontario and québec on basic income. what we need is experimentation. i don't think anybody knows the consequences or unintended consequences. we did five in the united states when milton friedman was around, we never did the analysis of exactly what happened. so we are seeing a lot of activity up in canada. i think that will have a lot of influence on american policymakers. there may not be a bill but we will see a discussion begin i about could we do experiments. >> i think it would be premature for legislation at this there's

point. a lot of research that remains to be done before we decide whether or not this is a good idea. this is still basic ideas being discussed. details really matter. there are already some disagreements. i think it's a long way from legislation. we have seen too often the consequences of legislation rushed through and designed to get 51% of votes rather than be actually workable. >> this is going to be a big deal if it is done right. do it piecemeal, it is going to be a mess. someone.hone for thank you very much, i'm with the naval postgraduate school. i did not go to postgraduate school myself. i've been thinking about this whole question of dignity and work and supporting oneself and what i'm aware of, my question

is if you give people money, do you give them a sense of responsibility to community at the same time? and i bring this up because any egyptian friend of mine who works on terrorism said you don't understand about terrorism. if you have young men that have no prospects and someone gives them $2000 a month, a truck and a gun and a purpose in life of course they're going to become terrorists. my question is while you do this, how do you give them a sense of their importance? they are respected. they are making a contribution. not just giving them money. and i have a lot of other things i'd like to ask. >> we will give you a chance to ask those privately. this is a good question. >> my hypothetical is not an terrorist.

i'm thinking more ordinary guys living in a low income city, yes. i guess i will not specify my spiel again. i think the people around him are going to be giving him cues about what is and is not the kind of thing that constitutes appropriate behavior. think of it this way. in 1960, if you were a guy of working age who is not completely disabled and you were not even looking for work, you were considered a bum. that is the word that was used. participation in 1950 was close to 100% among working age males. i think with the universal basic income, it's my argument, i can't prove it. i think you reintroduce the freedom of people to make those

kinds of moral comparisons again. it has been out of fashion to call guys who are out of the labor force bums in many circles in this country. when you have universal basic income, all at once it becomes easier. you know what? you ought to be taking care of your children. you ought to be taking care of other people close to you. these will be moral signals that flourish again, which i am in favor of. up in the back, dark blue shirt. >> good afternoon. spend a little time talking about how you would finance this program given three things. charles, if you get rid of social security and medicare, presumably, you get rid of payroll tax. that is revenue you have to make up.

if you add on, you still have to fund social security and medicaid. both programs underfunded and going insolvent in 10 years and how do you make that up? both of you, if you are right and we see a big decline that up how do we make and still afford the universal basic income? assumes the tax code is revenue neutral. i don't know what happens to the payroll tax. but i'm assuming the revenue from the payroll tax continues. that may mean it has to be transferred to another kind of tax. i'm assuming the revenues that we have now. we've crossed over the line. we did in about 2010, 2009, crossed the line between the cost of the present system and the cost of the system as i worked it out. right now, we are several hundred billion dollars less expensive than the system and by

the early 2000's we are $1 trillion less expensive. i grant you the problems that you mentioned in the questions, if jobs are disappearing, what are the implications for revenue? i guess the short answer is replacing the current system is a lot more economically realistic in terms of costs projected into the future than the current entitlement situation where we are looking at horrific rising deficits in the indefinite future. >> in my book i spent a lot of time trying to answer this question. it needs more research on how much it costs because there are so many factors about what it does. the cost of $1.75 trillion.

do 18-64. i don't do kids. i don't do people on social security. i don't do undocumented workers, only citizens. that is how i get to my cost. i say there is $600 billion out of the current welfare system that we should allocate. i say there's $500-$600 billion out of the $1.3 trillion tax expenditures which are tax breaks paid for. instead of paying taxes, we are paying people back. orhink there's another $500 $600 billion. that is my simple way of doing it. the financial transaction tax, we had one for 50 years. we got rid of it. the rest of europe is reestablishing it. there probably a few hundred billion dollars there. we don't have a carbon or asset tax. there are plenty of other ones that could do it.

i am not an income tax person. >> sure, right there. we will get you next, sir. >> i'm phil harvey, co-author of "the human cost of welfare." delighted to be here. we have a population now that charles has described very well that is very much it seems to me like the population of disaffected males that could very well expand expand under ubi and i would like both of you to ask comment on that. we have about 7 million prime working age males and i agree with charles that it's a more male problem than female who are not seeking work, are not disabled, are not engaged in educational pursuits, are not in jail and they are not all poor.

a great many of them are living in households that reflect economic conditions of the fourth rather than the fifth economic quintile. and they are not, charles, contributing as you yourself have described to community , improvement, engagement. i'm wondering how giving those same people and others like them, $10,000 a year is going to get them to stop watching television and go to church because it seems to me like -- highly unlikely. >> here i'm in the position of giving scenarios, i'm going to give you a couple scenarios. but youhat these guys describe are also fathering a lot of children they are not carrying four. and under ubi, guess what? all

establishhas to do is paternity which is very simple these days given technology. and you don't have any place to hide if you're a male because the judge grants child support and that money is taken out of that deposit before you ever get your hands on it. you think it might have an effect on males when they see their older brothers who sired children are having to pay for them? i think it is going to have a big effect. right now you have all sorts of cohabitation going on. a lot of times living off the income streams the woman has. and the guys are playing video games, doing all the things you are talking about. right now, the woman can't do much to get the guy to support, can't make him get a job, this that and the other thing. all of a sudden, he has a deposit every month.

the pressure is on him to start out.ng up or get that can have a positive effect on expectations. i'm just going to repeat myself and i'm not presenting any of this as evidence. i have grappled with this problem of what do you do with the population in my own mind , and i'm saying what i want to do is put that young man back in a position where things are expected of him and where he has to acknowledge that things can be expected of him. and in my view, this is a lot better than the current system. >> i just wanted to, maybe you can follow up on this as well, there does seem to be a blame the poor attitude here. there are a lot of social path ologies among the poor, but you also have to take into account

the fact that you have school system that does not educate. system that justice makes people not able to be hired. all of this has to be included in that model as well so you have to deal with the social pathologies that are out there. think you also have to be careful when assigning the blame. >> i'm assigning no blame to anybody. there is not enough work for people who want to work to making of money to live the kind of life my father, my grandfather, the autoworkers and everybody lived. it is going to get worse. whatever the situation is now, it is going to get worse. the answer to all of this obviously is to make people work. and i keep saying if libertarians want to have a forced work program bring it on,

because that's the answer to the work situation. if there are not enough jobs in the private market creating then the public market has to create it. i'm not trying to do with moral problems. i'm trying to deal with this very practically. workforce participation is not down because people are sitting home playing video games. there are less decent jobs available. people are living at home more even in middle-class families because there are not decent jobs available. and the last thing i'll say to any of you who are middle-class, i want to know how many of you are doing basic parental income? how many of you are taking them on vacation? helping to stabilize their lives? lots of my friends are doing things to help their kids get by who are working, doing the best they can and not making enough to live the life their parents did and that's what we do because we have the ability to

do it. i'm saying could we create a floor for everybody besides the fact that you would increase entrepreneurship and do other things. and i'm not trying to make moral judgments. but there is an economic question and a values question . and we don't have the answer to the values question of what are people going to do when there is far less labor needed to produce to meet the needs that maslow talked about and we should start thinking about that because money is one thing. work is another. someone got the third and fourth and fifth and i'm all for it because it is a complicated question. the last thing i want to say is a question for people under 30 two answer. because people who grew up and loved their work, love their job, cannot really make judgments for people who haven't opportunity kind of because those jobs are not there. all you had to do when i grow up to get a union job is to get

that job in america, either one is not true right now. >> i'm going to take one last question and we are out of time. terrific say it is a book. imply that phil is blaming the poor, it's just a general kind of thought process last one. >> my main question and concern cato does onehen of these you're saying someone who's taking a knob is position in saying here is what is wrong with these proposals. for each of you to anticipate what some of the unintended consequences are of the others plan. i will tell you, i can see a

whole lot of them. i'm not on the stage to talk about them but please tease those things out because i am sure that there will be a whole new raft of problems that will come along, not not just the obvious ones that you are thinking of. >> let me play the role of a skeptic here. i describe myself as sympathetic to the idea, but skeptical of it. let me throw out one of my skepticism switches the clinical economy or moral hazard of once we establish the idea people have a right to a certain level of income as a basic guaranteed right, the competition begins where on more compassionate and you want $10,000, $12,000, $13,000. i'm a lot more compassionate and i think it should be $15,000. and trump says 25 the bidding war goes up and before we know it, were broke. >> that's what i'm confident i

have the answer to. famous last words. right now, we can have creep in all kind of these programs because none of the programs, it's such a political issue that you mobilize a lot of attention on it and things happen. if we have a basic income, changes in that number are going to be a huge deal politically. it's not the case that you can get away with saying let's just jack it up $1000. you are going to have well-funded vocal people saying that's crazy, you can't do it. i think keeping the cost and check with a consolidated system like that would be a whole lot than trying to get the umpteenth new job program enacted that nobody knows it's happening. >> let's take a shot at a critique of yourself. what is the most valid criticism of your proposal. >> the most valid criticism is it's not that basic income would be increased radically but even

if you replace the system, as i want to do, i want to have a constitutional amendment saying no other transfer payment, but that's not realistic so the welfare system would crash and it would be rebuilt. politically speaking, that's a very real danger. >> i totally would worry about the issue of work and what happens as a society when there isn't enough work. i don't think we know how to live a life where there isn't work attached to it whether it's working on a farm or on a factory. i think we have to confront that problem regardless of my plan. one way is to give people work and we should decide about that. i don't really understand what life is going to be like when there's not enough work for people to do and there are lots of people who don't seem to be

worried about it in their 20s, right now, who seem to do just fine in a way that is different than what i would've chosen. i'm also worried about having a generation like mine place moral values on another generation about what they do with their time and their money. >> we thank you once again for coming out. we do have lunch for you in the new york conference center upstairs. we have books from both gentlemen on sale outside and maybe we could talk them into signing them for you. we appreciate you coming out very much. once again, this is the cato institute, thank you all. [applause] >>