ken, who's deeply involved in the issues of social security, and also tracy gordon, who may be here today. explores public finance and management at the state level. of course no one is more engaged in issues of fiscal policy than maryland's own majority leader steny hoyer, who is in his 15th term representing maryland's fifth congressional district. as an alumnus and long-time supporter of the school, the university of maryland in general and higher education in maryland and throughout the nation, we are fortunate to have the majority leader hoyer in such a prominent position of national leadership. his dedication to the university and fiscal responsibility are his hall marks and for that we all have a great debt to him. we thank him for coming today and we wish this whole conference a very interesting and fruitful discussion on this most important topic. thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much, mr. president. i'm pleased to be here always on the campus and college park, where i spent such a long period of time getting out of here. but it was one of the highlights of my life. i tell

tracy gordon who may be here today, explores public finance and management at the state level. and no one is more engaged in issues of fiscal policy than maryland's own majority leader, steny hoyer, who is in his 15th term. as a long time supporter of the school of the university of maryland and hashe education and throughout the nation, we are fortunate to have the majority leader hoyer in such a prominent position of national leadership. his dedication to the university and fiscal responsibility really are his hallmarks and for that, we all have a great debt to him. thank him for coming todd and wish this conference a fruitful discussion on this very important topic. [applause] ne of the highlights of my life. i tell people that marrying my life was the only thing that surpassed my going to the university of maryland in terms of making an impact on my life. i'm always pleased to be here, pleased to be here with dan mote and with all of you and i'm certainly pleased to be here with steven and margaret. saul stern came into my life 46 years ago. i was 4. [laughter] ok, i'm a po

. >> hi, i'm tracy gordon school of public policy. so since this is a fiscal solutions forum, i thought i would ask about one particular solution which is a value-added tax or a vat. and as you all know, sales taxes have traditionally been the domain of state and local governments. and some very nice work that mr. biggs did recently that was reported on the "new york times" shows that state governments when you look at their explicit or implicit liabilities are in a world of hurt right now. the work that mr. walker pioneered at the gao. i just wondered given the situation that states are in, does it really make sense to ask them to bail out the federal government? by raising their tax base basically. >> well, i think a value-added tax is a form of sales tax that if you're going to have a sales tax an value added tax it's self-enforcing so you have less problems with evasion. it would not be my choice. my choice would be scaled down programs. try to minimize the increase in taxes. at the end of the day, though, if you're going to have