they pay a great wage, $120,000 if you are a software program. the problem list too many too many -- problem is americans do not have the skills to feel them. only 40,000 americans graduated in computer science to fill those 500,000 jobs. this is an opportunity for many of you in your states and constituents. i believe the solution -- >> the private sector before i ran for governor, i am thrilled and excited to introduce and hear from our next speaker. steve ballmer is best known for his incredibly successful career as at the leader of microsoft serving for 14 years as the company's chief executive officer. was steve started at microsoft, they had just 30 employees and a

few hundred thousand dollars in profit. when he left the company, they employed more than 100,000 people around the globe and were profit andbillion in had created a product that changed the world. he is a true american success story. to both of uson spending time in the private sector, steve and i have a few other things in common. we both started out careers at proctor and gamble. are both bigbt we sports fans but his antics are most famous and that is what you get when you are the owner of the los angeles clippers. many of you know i am an avid proponent of american civics. and arizona was the first state to pass the american civics asked and that is where all of

our high school seniors will have completed that test so they will be but to pass the same exam new citizens to our country pass so that they understand our system of government. i am thrilled when i see business leaders getting involved in public service. there are many people i grew up with in business of want to somehow be involved and i say there are other ways to affect change in this country other than running for office. that is why i am excited for all of us to hear about steve's new initiative called usa facts from the man himself. i was able to see him interviewed on nbc two mornings ago and we have him today in person. without further do, a warm welcome to steve balmer. [applause]

steve ballmer: thanks to the governor. she understated the amount that we have in common. yes, i started my career at procter & gamble but i am also almost a native of toledo, ohio and i grew up in north toledo, called detroit, michigan for some. and, i, too, am an ice cream guy. the governor may have started cold stone creamery but i am a good customer and i love ice cream. i am also a numbers guy. i would say when i retired from microsoft three years ago, one of the sources, what will i say, of energy that i missed was the numbers aspect. , myshortly after i retired wife, who has been running our

philanthropic activities for years, very focused in on child welfare issues and now more broadly we are focused in on opportunities for children born in the u.s. who may not have any other shot at the american dream. it is a real issue. after i retired, i couldn't get too focused on that. she said, come on, let's get your brain and engaged on some of the issues of children. i said, come on, the governor really does this. supports the old, the government supports the is it really a role for us other than paying our taxes? you can doh uh, better than that. ultimately, i believe she is right and that is why i am very involved in our philanthropic activities. 50 got me interested in government by the number.

i wanted to know where do taxes,, where do taxes go, how does the system work, what kind of outcomes does government really get for the dollars that go in. i wanted to the internet and started searching, searching, searching that it is a nightmare. try typing in "government expenditures by function." pretty reasonable query and you will get probably the toppling, when i was doing this -- the top link, when i was doing it, a top blogger, a british guy who happens to live in seattle, washington. i said, this cannot be good enough. how do we do better? as a former business person, i then said there must be something like the 10k report that all public companies are required to file with the securities and exchange commission. try typing in 10k for

government. , iturns out a year later found one and it is written up by the department of treasury. it is good, but it is not really all that you would want. we started on this project am a group of us, to create a 10k for government. and an annual report, which is easier to read than a 10k and a website. what are the principles that we were ground in? first, only government data. to be thes have businesses' data so we used 70 sources out of 120 databases. beber two, you have to factual and unbiased. no forecast. no projections. i think that is very important. there are plenty of people who do forecast and that is where there is some since a bias that

come into peoples' heads because nobody knows what it is. 10k has to be comprehensive and talk about the whole business in a reasonable and responsible way. 10k have to provide contests, historical and others. find in a things we lot of political debate is people will snatch one number out of the air and without context around at the number, it is hard to know if it is being or small. if you say to the average citizen, $5 million, that will say, whoa, huge number. if you say to the average governor, $5 million, they will say, well, important, but my budget is, blah, blah. it is important to provide the context. what would you want to talk about in a 10k for government? businesses are kind of simple, optimizing profits and they have to build good products to get

there. government is about optimizing outcomes for citizens under certain financial constraints. financials are not the optimization point, but particularly in state government, budgets do have to balance. federal government gets a little trickier about the that. as a business person, it is one bias i will admit to, i think over time, but have to balance and i do not understand anything goes. government is there to optimize for citizens. and our 10k for government, we have to say who are the citizens , who is paying for the government and how, what is the government spending the money on, and perhaps most importantly, what kind of outcomes our government to getting? what are the missions of government and the outcomes? to do that, you have to have some kind of comfortable

comprehensive organizing structure, businesses in their team case have to break the business down into segments. if you are general electric for microsoft a you have a sentiment for office soft does you have a segment for office software and have to describe the dynamics. how do you divide government into a set of manageable chunks? very kind of difficult to do. 14ad a list of 50 and then and i thought i was doing great in making this stuff comprehensible. somebody came and said, one of the guys of the project, the segments of government were given to us by the founders in the preamble to the constitution. government's mission is establishing justice and ensuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare and securing these blessings for us and it to

ourselves and our posterity. those are the segments of government. you can ask, how are we doing in each case? in some sense, you might think they are too broad. in each category, we broke them down one step further. disaster, consumer safeguards, child safety, that is what justice is about, physical protection and special case of child protection where in a sense you are protecting a child almost from its guardian. you can see these are the segments that we chose to focus then and what i might call lines of business underneath them. we did write a 10k. they are kind to dry and hard to read. hours -- before i say u.s. government our 10k is for government in aggregate in the

u.s. we combine state, local and federal. why? if you look at the average road in the state of washington, i cannot tell you who paid for it, partly paid by for the state and partly by the fed. if you visit schools, partly local, partly paid by the state, partly by the federal government, title i dollars. if you look at outcomes, the combined spent against the outcome. we did that in our 10k, and our more simplified annual report as well as on our website. maybe i will get you the briefest kind of view of what our website looks like. we will go from our homepage to some of the reports and give you a sense. here is our homepage. into the big picture, first revenue is in bloom. you can look at where the money comes from down to who pays for it.

corporate income tax, how much state, how much local. you fan over to expenses and you see the segments, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty. certain education, investment in human capital is about securing the blessings of liberty. of $185see total spend billion split state and local. we want to know more about this part of government. we give you breakouts, more on the spending, but the most interesting is what kind of outcomes do we get. our public school teachers salaries, charter, school enrollment, dropout rates. there was just for the first time a standardization of the definition of dropout rate across states. these kinds of things are very important. the list goes on and we will

show you the average reading proficiency for kids in schools and a variety of other things. that is kind of the framework of what we do. we have launched. we have had 750,000 visitors from literally every state and all but 4 countries and the world, south sudan, north korea, we are missing one other. there is a global interest in this kind of thing although our data is focused in the united states. the interest has dropped off from our initial launch. we get about 4000 visitors a day. some of that has to do with us in making the website easier, more navigable, more relevant, day-to-day. probably has to do with marketing, kind of crazy you market a public service, but dormant, we will do -- darn

it, we will do optimization. that is the problem with government websites, they are hard to find. understand what citizens want in terms of the fact. we ran a poll recently, the harris poll people and asks a bunch of questions about what citizens are interested in. , 88% saytizens said edit thoset faxed to in a lot of what we read in the paper is an adult -- say they say theyhat -- 80% prefer facts in relation to anecdotes. most people say most of the information they receive about finances is biased and the number one, search query on our website is expenditures.

people want to know where the money is going to. 77% of people in the united states across democrats and republicans, urban and rural, people from all states participate, 77% say civic education in the country is poor. a guide is more interested in seeing if we could work with educators to take the stuff we've created and let them create civics classes for the left great level were most kids -- the 11th grade level where most kids get this in school. only 38% of people agreed with the idea that people generally agree on the fact they even if they have different beliefs. the general notion is people who do not agree basically are not looking at the same underlying data. people will say that they will change their belief in evidence

of information. , poor, high rich school graduates, none high say we 88% of people needed to use the same data to have an informed debate about what goes into the country. what i found when i was at microsoft was quite remarkable. i spent a lot of time getting data consistent for decision-making. we get in meetings and people would say, we cannot do this to our customers. somebody else would say we must, we have to invest in this. somebody would say, no, we cannot afford it. what a guy was recommended an investment of 22 million dollars and another an investment of $25 million. the amount the shouting before people stood and looked at the same facts in the old, old days of microsoft, we use multiple

accounting systems and we cannot get people to agree on how much microsoft word we sold. getting things understandable helps bring people to common ground. the guy who had to take care of the customer and the woman who had more interest in a preserving finances, they may never have changed their believes but today korea more reasonable -- but they could reach more reasonable outcomes. you will be excited to know while the numbers are small, local and state data is more trusted than federal. i do not know if you are proud of 54% but it is better than 44%. for the elected officials in the room, 70% of americans believe if they were relying on government data, it would improve their trust in elected officials.

not understand how any organization things as they will survive using other people's information. ey and i were talking about this backstage. i asked, do you have a computer where you can go and pull up these kinds of statistics? outcome data on education, prisons i was shocked by some things you learn in the process. the average sentence for a first-time violent offender, average time served, murder, assault, it is only about 15 months. that kind of blew my mind, -- 50 months, that kind of blew my mind, about four years. that would be important data to have. it would be important to have in these kinds of discussions.

the next frontier for us is now to move to be state level. we have a lot of things we want to do at the national level. what would a 10k for government and an annual report and a website look like for the state of california, the state of , southo, north dakota dakota, what would that look like? it is important because you want to add state, federal, and local dollars together but to see the overall impact in the state or a school district or a county, what is the money translating to in terms of outcome? there is a good infrastructure across states in something i learned to call the -- this one reports produced at the state level, that's a problem, they do not focus as much on outcomes than expenditures. whatdo not match up with the states report which is the

source of data we already used something not quite right in the way this works. but, we believe least delve into it and investigate the challenges. this is a small example we threw together of some of our early work. we sat how does taxable income and the taxpayers flow between state? if you are yellow on this chart or dark yellow, tax fowlers, we get this data from the irs, tax filers are moving out of your state. areou are blue, tax filers moving in. not only filers but adjustable gross income. in rhode island, there was a net outflow of tax filers and 2000 andefore the year in flow, i don't know what happened in rhode island, and now there is a net outflow again

. i will pick a second estate. texas has been the state in which there is been the most inflow. by the time where gone, we will tell you people 65 plus versus people younger, that kind of data not just on the average bus specific citizens we think is important. peopleas been a boom, moving in. one more to give you a sense. here is louisiana. there was each for will people and money moving out of the state. what you think happened with the spike? that is katrina. and then a surge of some people moving back and now it has leveled off at a pretty flat to level. i looked at a few states and they all have some interesting story. you can sometimes see were tax rates went up or down. they actually show in the government to data that you can look at.

, a number ofard things, we have to keep the data up to speed. i am committed on this project, not just a one time, this was fun. we think it is important effort we are committed to for the long run. since i am a tech guy, we have to enhance our tech platform and that will be important particularly for making it easier and easier for people to access this data. my great dream is one day you can type in the search engine, show makes vintage or's on education and the state of oklahoma and the data comes to expenditurese the on education in the state of oklahoma and the data comes to you. one thing that is important is there be more data collection and usage especially state data, i think it would be great if there was some level of standardization and how people take a look at these things.

i have been learning about the center for best practices as part of the national governors association.it sounds like a very interesting organization that receives private funding. believe me, we will dig into these things. when we look at what our visitors are interested in, you see a set of things at the national level. wethe local level, i'm sure will surprise you, housing and homelessness is the top people looking for information, education, infrastructure, roads, bridges, jobs and wages. i thoughtised me, people would associate this issue at the national level, but people are interested at the local level at this topic. toily composition surprise me. people want to know what percentage of single mothers do we have, how aged is our population.

we will try to build it is out. we will take one state to started out. i have not decided yet. using publicly available data and build a 10k. this is tough stuff. we have interns from stanford working with us. they are eager beavers, young people. we have them in the state of washington. one of them in our first check-in said, well, it is a really exciting project, but there is some data i had to go to the state capital in olympia to get. i said, what do you mean? they said the data is public, but you have to go in the building to get it for privacy purposes. how can it enhance privacy that you have to walk in the door? i think there is work to do even at the state level to improve the acceptability of data. i appreciate your time today. we are very interested as we

like to say in our nation in numbers broadband out to the state level. i think the notion of informed debate is one of the things that frankly will do the most to help curb the rancorous discussion we hear today in politics. i can particularly at the state level, governors have to be more practical, more action oriented it is an executive function. and the notion of really having the same kind of tools you have, instruments and how to understand your business, i think every state governor, legislator deserves. thank you very much for you s.org or follow us on twitter. -- thank you very much. four follow us on twitter.

>> national governors association taking a break from its summer meeting. you will be able to find all the speakers www.c-span.org online at. many of the sessions will air tonight starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern. hear from one last speaker and that is tesla and

will beceo elon musk talking about emerging technologies and their impact on the energy and transportation sectors. data should get underway at 1:45 p.m. eastern and we will have it live on c-span. >> we will show you vice president pence who a dress of ngan -- who addressed the yesterday. he is introduced by terry mcauliffe. this is about 40 minutes. that we have today. i am under to introduce the vice presen