the fact that we have been spending the accumulated surpluses and running them down you know medicare medicaid is going to be actually functionally insolvent with the next three or four years social security runs out of money in the mid two thousand and thirty's but in fact if you look at what the expected insolvency date was ten years ago it was four or five years longer so it's been shortening and shortening and shortening as well that is true what do we do well there are a couple of things first of all there are the financial solutions number one but i think that the reason i wrote this book is i think this is really both a political and emotional problem and the problem politically is you have a very large aging population demographically there are forty million seniors now in twenty years they're going to be eighty that's going to be almost twenty five percent of the going to take away their social a very very difficult to take that away they have an amazingly powerful voices you know and my first point and what i'd like to see is to motivate the younger people this country to realize that that if they really want to start to address this

problem they have to do it by by by becoming more focused and representing themselves with a powerful voice to offset that politicians will listen to what vocal and large voting block when they don't think about tomorrow do they have the twenty five year old who is not signing up for the fordable care act is not thinking that when i'm sixty five i'm not going to get my social security check probably not enough yet but so you know if he's not signing up for it he actually may be doing a financial analysis that says it's not my benefit the shop to sign up for obamacare i mean again keep in mind that's that's sort of representative of the problem obamacare is something which says to a group of the population we're going to give you and we're going to find another group to pay for it i mean the young people are paying for that many things that they don't need and on top of that they're paying a very large price when they're really the the they should be paying the least amount of let's say someone struggling three just graduated from college you know what is he going to expect or she's going to expect from medicare medicaid.

affordable care social security well generically most of the politicians talk about the fact to lower your expectations significantly you really won't know what they are until you get you know into far enough into the future to see what the financial position the united states is but to give you an idea of how bad the numbers are we look at things like the outstanding debt which is now pushing seventeen trillion dollars or almost one hundred percent of g.d.p. however if you actually measure the problem actuarially the problem depending on your sumption is varies between my numbers one hundred trillion dollars in the hole doctor call a cough was very very well known at boston university's numbers close to two hundred trillion but what people don't realize is even the g.a.o. the government you know office has a number that is around seventy trillion right now so to put it in perspective the numbers buried between four and probably close to ten times the size of the actually actual measured problem so what can change that. well you've got to sleep and eliminate the you know that well you can't and by the way i'm not advocating

eliminating i would advocate a couple of things i mean again one of the things about what i've said is this is a very emotional problem i might buy so young people is to sort of take a step back and try and put this on a principle basis right so nobody argues that there isn't a basic need to provide services to to a fairly large body of the population but that has to be put into the perspective of what you can afford number one number two who should pay for it how you measured payments like so for example i mean you can't hear a politician in washington talk about wealth without meaning in comp. well i think income and wealth are very very separate measures just because you have a high income doesn't mean you're wealthy and vice versa i would argue in a constitutional format that income should be used to pay for the country it's current operations where is because we've accumulated these massive liabilities we should be thinking of wealth now means testing as

a way of doing that and that's sort of i think used as a target you're saying through people if you have a little money don't get social security won't get made don't well or contribute and pay part part of that is part of the process of measuring you know when you go to the doctor is that they sold in hours i have a little money i would have no objection to not receiving my social security check i don't have i don't need that check right and you know neither do i and i think there's a there's a range of the population can probably say that but i think number one there's a very scared portion of the population that's not sure where they stand you know once politicians start going down a road you don't know where it's going to end but again when i started this i mean this is something i've been arguing as you know for thirty some odd years sort of my family. when i have a child and if you look at your child and realize what you're leaving them as a problem it should make the problem a lot easier to solve you know we now spend almost eleven dollars in social transfer payments for the elderly about a dollar for every child a good

a good number over the next ten years just in growth terms the amount of incremental dollars we're going to be giving in transfer payments to the elderly is eight hundred almost eight hundred billion but to the children is twenty billion and you know you're asking things about what happens. you know if we're not spending money on infrastructure on education and other things of that ilk basically the united states will become less competitive less efficient which means even the assessment assumptions about how bad the problem are growth so you really need to put this into perspective. we want to make this economy operate at its best capacity that requires a better allocation of resources number one number two just general fairness issues i just don't think it's fair we've been promised you know that use the word in parliament we've been making promises to ourselves at forty or fifty years and the promise of been it's somebody else's expense i don't think that's appropriate you

know going to another point i think it's almost like taxation without representation gets right the monarchy the british monarchy taxed its. you know unrepresented tax payers you know centuries ago that led to this country and they did it across the ocean of space we're doing across an ocean of time how come the socialist countries make it work. well you can ask how they do that well i think the socialist countries in various ways have much lower trajectories of income and growth and are far less vibrant you know they probably do the same out of asia we do some of them live long longer than we do but his age the only measure of you know how you know life expectancy be only measure you know look i'm not saying we don't put enough money into medical research for example probably it gets diverted a lot of the a lot of the infrastructure for the last forty years more or less thirty percent of federal revenue streams went to pay for so sick for social programs and thirty percent on average went to pay for infrastructure at this point it's almost seventy

percent going to pay for social transfer programs and we're down to fifteen percent on infrastructure is there any political figure talking this political figure not even representative ryan basically comes out and by the way as a as does the president we were not going to touch the promises and i got i use that in quotations to people over fifty five that's the class that has to be part of the solution if you don't solve the problem with them participating in finding ways to both reduce the programs and make them more efficient then there really is going to be a headache of such massive proportions that there really is so you know have to appeal to those over fifty five on the fairness question iraq i think most people would accept fairness don't you i think i think most of us would accept fairness and i think most of us when you couch this in in an intergenerational format not only looking at yourself but looking at others listen this country is. you know

generous to a fault in many ways you can put it if you put it in the right way you'll get at the bulk of another interesting number almost twenty five percent of young people of young people in this country are children living below the poverty line of the thirty five largest industrial countries were like second or third worst i mean we don't look at our children we're telling them we want you to help pay for us to help ease our retirement but we don't understand that our retirements will be a lot better the more we help our children evolve in time space education and everything else in the interest of time going affordable care work i think affordable care can work it done correctly but again i wouldn't i would not carve affordable care out it belongs is part and parcel of of the benefit and social structure we want to deliver you know children are going to help protect their with us but you know nobody wants to look at times at how our paying for leaving leaving

the obligations again and letting them build up for the future to solve is a real problem you make a lot of sense nailed thank you very much are you optimistic person you should be pessimistic. i would say i'm hopeful but i think we have a lot of problems and i think the longer we waste on the let me put my financial hat on when you when you value an asset or a liability use present value the the change in the value of these liabilities stream just going forward from year to year is growing at almost three or four trillion dollars a year and it could be hard to pending on on on on on certain assumptions right the longer we wait the more the problem grows the heart of the solution to the problem becomes and the more painful becomes we have a very vibrant country where creative. we attract people i mean i mean in a funny story i used to work for the central bank of norway. they used to say we wanted to come to norway it were rich country they're very wealthy by the way you

know deficit to have a great time i always ask every one of them where do you want to live and not one of them never said nor they always want to live in the united states this country attracts people because we encourage success we were awarded success we were encouraged dreams we were war dreams we have to get this right if we don't get it right look we've been saying when you do hear this in public we're going to be the first generation to leave our children worse off than we would been then we were and that's again i think that's a very very sad statement we should be shooting to make sure our children. are far better off in every way than we are is there any place your country is going to point to is that right well norway's a good start norway is a country with no deficit it's free. well you know the kinds of weather you want to go down the global warming argument but you know that. actually warmer than new york city it's actually still moderated by the by the goal a dream so when the conference call but you know it's really hard to get up at ten

in the morning and have it still dark and then when you walk out for coffee at two thirty in the afternoon it's it's dark and when one is on the all the time in the summer time. you've been there i've been there a few times yeah it's a beautiful country and i'm so anxious to read this new you make too much sense it scares me thank you very much for an e-mail grossman and the book is generation w t f how will anyone else can stop the mushrooming costs in social security medicaid and medicare and upon might it's on it's on imus on it will be on our on the i store so ok amazon on the i stores when we go back to dream of and the man who will stephen cohen and we'll talk about russia and the united states don't go away. i've got a quote for you. it's pretty tough. to stay with that story. if this guy like you would smear that guy stead of working for the people in the mainstream media working for each other bribes do you know.

if they did rather. i. love them to politicking with larry king

catarina vended who voted the editor and publisher of the nation and stephen cohen russian studies professor emeritus at n.y.u. they are by the way celebrating their twenty fifth wedding anniversary congratulations thank you catarina you don't use the name cohen. you know our daughter is cohen i just think i had a life before steve though i can't remember it sometimes and i thought i'd keep the name that i've made my own and i was getting some big current guys to reno one of the what do you make of obama's sinking ratings what do i make of that for the long trajectory of the perspective of a you know nation which is not about so much the war room day to day but about trying to think through the big ideas of our time and infuse contemporary politics a little history larry i think you know these presidents go up and down and obama's

ratings not in great form of course but i think some of the punditry is a little overwrought a little hysterical about how he's thinking stephen though there is a second term curse there's a new stephen. you've got to understand what we have this rule at home that i'm not allowed to say a word about american politics for fear of violating the wifely line but you know it's interesting about president obama i grew up in the segregated south. and when i voted for obama the first time to me it felt like such an act of historical justice. but i have to go on to say that as a professor of politics and history i see president obama as one of the great presidential candidates but i don't yet see him as a leader as you and i would remember some of the american presidents who clearly

were of the leaders are i think the second term though it is sometimes a curse as you say larry offers him a second opportunity and oddly enough though he was elected to be a domestic affairs president his great opportunity at the moment seemed to be abroad and reaching a nonmilitary settlement in syria and possibly finding a solution to this vexing problem of iran's desire to build nuclear weapons so it's going to be a fascinating remainder of his second term and i think what historians are asking themselves is will he leave office as a leader or just as the first african-american president of the united states i think that's what historians are asking themselves catarina he has not and i'll get stephen's viewpoint obviously on this because that's his expertise with your thoughts on his relationship with mr putin. i think it's

a very difficult one because us russian relations are at a difficult point i do think that what we saw in august larry was an extraordinary moment when we saw the possibility of a renewed u.s. russian relationship because of finding of nonmilitary alternative to syria the the military the chemical weapons issue in syria and we still don't know the full story but there's no question that whether it was putin or a foreign minister sergei lavrov that the russians played a critical role in extricating the united states from what i believe could have been a terribly damaging military strike policy in syria what strikes me larry in the nation has been for one hundred forty eight years for seeking nonmilitary alternatives to conflict and it strikes me that we should be making more of how we can dismantle and destroy weapons of mass destruction chemical weapons without war

because one of the great debacle is in my mind larry in the nation was one of the few media outlets to oppose the iraq war in two thousand and three is that we need in this current time to find nonmilitary alternative so the us russian relationship is going through difficult times steve will say more but as you look at nato expansion which is so off the radar in this country's discussion from the russian perspective they ask after the end of the cold war why do we need this nato expansion why can't we find new ways of relating and respecting the dignity of each country obviously russia has internal problems personally as someone who spent many years in the ninety's working eighty's and ninety's working on russian women's feminist movements u.s. ties to those to see russia regress in terms of women's rights bt rights has been painful to watch but you know each country finds its own way larry and we found our

own way in our own rights through social movements stephen was your view of the relationship. well i hope you don't mind the reference point there already but you and i have been through decades of this when i was on your broadcast many many years ago when it was still the cold war. we were discussing similar issues so we have to ask ourselves in what sense did the cold war really end with the soviet union and i have a very harsh opinion of the way the american mainstream media particularly the print media has reacted to russia since the end of the soviet union i think it's been in some ways less subject even less balanced than the media was the american media was during the cold war one of the aspects of that has been this utter demonization of russian president putin now he is not

a democrat ears authoritarian but this presentation of am as some kind of stalin or saddam as a as a as a bloodthirsty imperialist man simply doesn't match his record and thirteen years. when obama came to power. he wanted what he called a reset with russia and maybe it failed maybe it succeeded but it ended and there is a debate who caused this reset or what you and i larry used to call detente they got all these new words but it's the same thing who caused it and moscow blames washington washington blames moscow but here's what's interesting katrina made the point and the point was made to us to katrina and i me when we were in moscow last week by some of our friends that were before putin came forward with this plan that syria would turn its chemical weapons over to the

united nations for total destruction. and that was putin's doing he compelled syria is partial ally to do this at that moment we were on the verge of a i have a reward against syria or as you remember obama was begging congress to authorize a military strike and it looked like congress even the democratic party was not going to give it to him which would have been the collapse of obama's presidency i mean it would have been a total humiliation for obama at home and abroad so in that sense putin kind of saved obama politically an army when we were in moscow a guy we know who works for putin said you haven't find me and i said what for and he said for saving your president i mean he was joking but there's some truth in it so where are we now yeah now these two leaders obama and putin have a chance to build on that they're building on two blocks they're building on syria

they're building in iran but you know better than i know that there's enormous opposition to that collaboration here in the united states partly by the congenitally and the russian lobby partly by the pro israeli as they call themselves a lot so this struggle now is under way there but i did three of them day dream of seeing yeah katrina obama has to worry but mr putin can do things by edict. president obama and his secretary of state john kerry have turned to congress at this critical moment larry and said please don't start imposing more sanctions on iran it will undermine it will sabotage the potential of a historic diplomatic agreement that will make the world more secure that is in the end if we verify and monitor it carefully in the united states as national security

interest you know it always pains me larry is that you see hardliners on both sides uniting and the people's voices don't get heard peace doesn't get achieved and i'm not talking just you know touchy feely i'm talking about the real possibilities of a resurgence of tough minded real in our national security diplomacy and i have found that very encouraging in these last months especially post syria so of course obama has to work with congress but i wish we could have and there are some good people but too often the special interests whether it's on cuba or whether it's on russia or whether it's on the middle east special interest in congress don't represent the majority views of people in this country and that disconnect is a much longer tail which is another program i hope larry when we when we have a lot more time in the future on a do a little more and is stephen what is the what are the people over

a rush of global bomb. you know there are a lot of people in russia one hundred forty five million and turkey the majority of russians. i actually don't know there are a i think there they were puzzled to begin with russians are a little bit racist they have not had much experience with black people. and so they were puzzled that americans would elect a black person as president at the same time many of them saw this as a confirmation of american democracy that it was really possible for america to overcome its history of slavery and segregation as a president they are puzzled because they don't understand what we call the separation and division of power you mentioned earlier that putin can do things by

edict that's a little bit of an exaggeration but not much of one and often they don't understand why obama wants something whether it's this kind of health care or a treaty with russia and he can't get it because they think of congress as something it can do their parliament which they see as a kind of puppet institution manipulated but i think generally that they are interested in obama. in a very serious way but they don't have very firm views and in the end don't forget this larry overwhelmingly russians are patriots so they will judge obama in the end about. as to whether they've been fair and decent and just was russia or not as we would judge oh and we are stephen could dream we're out of time but i want to do a lot more on this i'm going to call on both of you next couple weeks thank you both very much a good dream of enter the bible and stephen cohen thanks for being with us on

politicking with larry king. live. technology innovations all these developments from around russia. the future of coverage. well it. took.

wealthy british. market. find out what's really happening to the global economy. there are no holds the global financial headlines kaiser report. will implement. technology innovation all the list of around russia. the future covered. i think it's. over. did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioned in

the constitution and. that's because a free and open prize is critical to our democracy albus. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of our government and across several we've been hijacked why a handful of transnational corporations will profit by destroying what our founding fathers once built up my job market and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's actually going on in the world we go beyond identifying the problem trying to fix rational debate and a real discussion critical issues facing america to find the book ready to join the movement then walk a little bit weird. place

. little. cross talk rules in effect going to and you can jump in anytime you want. hello people of earth i'm happy martin this is breaking the set well after publicly opposing government surveillance last week internet search giant google has enjoyed

a wave of good press before we all decide to instill our full faith and trust the benevolent and almighty google we might just want to use their search bar to google boston dynamics he said yesterday brings little company purchased boston dynamics an engineering firm with strong ties the military's defense advanced research projects agency or darpa so what is boston dynamics all about this terrifying and shah dropping robot such as big dog four legged robot that can climb hills or cheetah a robot that can run at twenty nine miles an hour and most life like that man humanoid robot that can move around like a human and detect chemical leaks so what the hell is one of the biggest internet companies in the world doing purchasing these spooky cyborgs all telling me in google's keeping tight lipped about its intentions but keep in mind the corporation has a newly created secretive robot division and it's the bible on other contracts that boston and previously had with the u.s. military great so i guess the real question here is why should we trust

a corporation that holds so much of our personal information to develop absurd war machines for ethical purposes after all we really want private companies and you know up with robots that can do this. i don't know if i'm ready for google to have a private army of iron man and let's break the sub. it was terrible they were very hard to take a. chance again to put their plans out that he ever had sex with her rick perry none. of. them were.