 Greetings, everyone. Thanks for coming out today for the unveiling of the report by the Task Force on Job Creation, the New America Foundation. Introducing one of the lead authors of the report will be Congressman John Garamendi, just to my right, who was elected in 2008 to the House of Representatives. Serves on the House Armed Services and Natural Resources Committee. And in four decades of public service has served as a member of the California Legislature, as Lieutenant Governor of California, California Insurance Commissioner, Chair of the Commission for Economic Development, as well as having been a former Peace Corps volunteer, serving abroad, and indeed helping to negotiate a peace treaty during the Ethiopian Eritrean War in 1998, 2000. So a man of many talents. But today we're going to be focusing on jobs. Congressman Garamendi. Thank you. I think I'll take this standing up, at least for the initial session here. So thank you. Thank you very much for the introduction. It is wonderful to be here and to share with my colleagues here at the table an extraordinary important piece of work that they have done, and an issue that is of profound importance to this nation. As you were doing that introduction, I was thinking back on those years. And it was in the early 80s, about 1981, that California became very, very concerned about competition from Japan. And we set out, I was given a committee. We set out to look at what was going on and how we can be competitive, and issued a report, said there are five things that California needed to do to stay competitive. One, have the best education system in the world. Two, do the best research in the world. Make the things that come from the research. Pay attention to infrastructure. And don't forget about the international. Well, here we are. 1979, just as we were doing that, we had 19.4 manufacturing, 4 million manufacturing jobs in the United States. It was about 26.3% of the American economy. Fast forward, all those years in California where we neglected education, didn't pay much attention to research, never bothered to manufacture anything because we were going to be a service economy. Time runs on 2010, America, 11.5 million manufacturing jobs somewhere just over 10% of the economy. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Something's gone wrong here. And it's not getting any better. Yesterday, one of those groups that tend to want to see what Congress is up to stop by, this is Solar World's little pamphlet that they left with me yesterday. What they also left was something really scary. The president of it was there, and he said, energy security. We've been worried about energy security, oil security. We know that our future is in the hands of the petro dictators and very unstable places in the world, energy security. He said, do you know that the green technologies that we are so dependent upon for our energy in the future are going to be controlled by countries in Asia? What are you talking about? He said, you need to know that there is one company manufacturing solar cells in the United States. All of the other solar cells are manufactured in Asia. And he said, how about wind turbines? And on and on it goes. The report that you're going to see today is of utmost importance to this nation because it calls to our attention once again a profoundly important fact that we're losing it. We're losing our ability to make things in America. And as we lose that ability, we are going to lose our leadership in the world, our national security will be at risk. And we will not have the kind of wealth that we need to maintain the middle class in America. Now, fortunately, there are people that are thinking about this. And I have the great honor of introducing one of them. Leo Hendry, Jr. is the chairman of the Economic Growth and Smart Globalization Initiative at the New American Foundation. He's a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. And he's an investor in things that are supposed to make a lot of money and a lot of jobs, he hopes. And we hope he does, too. He's the former CEO of Telecommunications Inc. TCI, Liberty Media, and their successor AT&T Broadband. So he knows what it is to be in the business world. He's also a blogger for those of us that occasionally read blogs, Huffington Post Blogger. Let me introduce to you Leo Hendry, Jr. Leo. Well, this is going to be quicker than even that. Senator Tom Harkin, we just had a vote on the floor and turned down the deficit cap bill that came over from the House. And so Senator Tom Harkin, he tabled that sucker. So I'm actually going to quickly turn it over to Senator Harkin. Let me just say one of the reasons it's such a privilege for all of us that associated with this project, I had the privilege of most of my early career being in the state of California. Representative Garamendi was my legislator for me. He was my insurance commissioner. He obviously is now a congressman from a state that sort of defined my career. At no point did anybody in the state of California ever speak more eloquently about creating jobs, preserving jobs of quality for the American worker than John Garamendi. Later in life, I became a transplant to Iowa. I was part of the Harkin for President initiative when it was popular. And on the Senate side, it's Tom Harkin who has carried the mantle for so many years, so ably on this issue as well. So a privilege for all of us that had something to do with this commission task force to have Representative Garamendi and our dear friend Tom Harkin with us. So Tom, some comments from you. And then I'll be a little more precise about the task force report, Michael, if I can. Sure. Please. Well, Leo, thank you very much. And I apologize for being late, but we did have that vote. We're getting across town. How did you get here in such a good time here? I'm going to work on it quickly. Yeah, you don't do anything. Well, in the current situation, that's probably good. Right. That's probably good. That's probably to the best. Well, we did just turn down that cut cap and kill Medicare. I referred it the other day. It's not really a cut. It's an amputation. And it's not really a cap. It's a decapitation of our federal responsibilities. But let me, first of all, Leo, thank you for mentioning my presidential race. Some of you may have missed it, so I wanted to make sure. I appreciate him mentioning that. But let me just sum it up this way. The debate that's going on right now is like deciding which train to take, and you're on the wrong track. We're on the, we're deciding whether to take the train on the $4 trillion cut or the $2.5 trillion cut or this cut, which is the wrong track to be on. The right track to be on is, what should we be doing right now to stimulate job creation in our society? And that's why this task force is so important and so vital at this point in time. There's two ways of creating these jobs, it seems to me. The private sector could invest the $1 to $2 trillion it's sitting on right now to create those jobs, but it's obviously not doing it. Or the federal government needs to get the wheels going, to get the stimulate demand through, I hate to use the word a massive stimulus, but an infrastructure type of a program. So where's the federal government going to get that money? Until I got two plays to get you, either borrow it or you raise the revenues. Well, on my side I'd say let's raise the revenues. If the private sector is sitting out there on $1 to $2 trillion and they don't want to invest it, well then by God, we can invest it. And that's where we got to raise the revenues to do so and this task force has come up with ideas on that. I have ideas on my own, we all have, but there's plenty of revenues to be raised out there. You raise the revenues and then you turn around and you stimulate the economy by putting it into both human infrastructure and the physical infrastructure of our country. To me, if we did that in a very bold manner and a big manner, then you then start to create the demand. The demand comes up, you're putting people back to work. That seems that that would sort of tell the markets out there that we are moving ahead aggressively and boldly. We're not shrinking, we're not retracting, but we're going to expand and we're going to grow and that then would stimulate further private investment. So that's why I say we're on the wrong track when we're arguing about these things. And it's dismaying to me to see a president of the United States of my party who seems to accept the fact that we're on the wrong track. I was hoping that he might move and be a little bit more bold on the jobs creation effort. Ron Wyden gave a great speech on the Senate for yesterday and I kind of followed him up on it and just on talking about this very issue. And we need more people talking about it. That's why Leo, you and your task force and what you've been doing here, we've got to start focusing on the single most important thing, putting people back to work. It's not reducing the deficit. That can come later. But to cut spending now is like putting leeches on a sick person. You're just gonna bleed them more and make them more sick. We have 500,000 people, I closed 500,000 people in the public sector lost their jobs in the last two years. Are they, do they have demand out there for goods and services? No, and yet somehow we think we can continue to get rid of people and shed people that are working in the public sector. That's just a formula for a downward spiral. So again, Leo, thank you very much for your great leadership. I thank the task force on job creation. I've read it through, you are on the right track. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Let me, Michael, if I might, just add some quick historical perspective and then what'll be fun I think is Michael is such a friend of this initiative and we're gonna sort of go after this as a panel and then we're gonna ask for your support and questions as well. This actually began in 2006 and it began with Tom Harkin. We were running up to the Iowa caucuses of January of 08 and we saw in 2006 that the uncounted unemployed women and men in this country for the first time were breaching a 30% cap that had been on every prior recession. In the worst of recessions, the nine prior recessions as we were running up to them, the uncounted unemployed was never more than a third of the counted and we breached that early in 2006 so that we knew by Iowa that something dramatic was happening and that dramatic outcome is we now have one woman or man uncounted who's unemployed for every man or woman who is counted. So we have 18.5% real unemployment. We have 29.5 million women and men who aspire to full employment at fair wages, not the 13 or 14 million that the government uses officially and with Tom's guidance as the senior senator from the state of Iowa in the run-up, we established the first of these tasks for us. It was called the Horizon Project. The women and men who are named in the press release who are on this task force, many of them were involved in that initial effort and it was Tom and other suggestion that we have legislative prescriptions that were quite precise to create jobs and as a principal matter, we knew that we were committed as a party and as progressives to pay go. We knew that we couldn't always impose on the government to cause these initiatives to be undertaken and so there's always been in the back of our mind for the senator and for the congressman ways that we would pay for all of these initiatives but let me just follow up on one comment that the senator just made. If, hypothetically, the Senate and the House tomorrow were to pass $3.2 trillion of cuts, we have now, we can prove that 1.8 million additional jobs would be lost almost instantly. So we would be digging the hole just infinitely deeper. Those 29 and a half million women and men that we're concerned about would immediately jump to 31.3 million that fast. So what the senator and the congressman are saying to us is sure, we as a party are committed to thoughtful cuts. We're also committed to responsible revenue raising and so we have worked with our leaders on that aspect as well. When the task force was coming together, it almost instantly migrated and many of my colleagues and Sheryls and Pat are here, it instantly migrated to the reality as Tom has commented and Representative Guillermendi, we have to have at least 20 to 25% of women and men in this country making something. We can only survive from bubble to bubble otherwise and the bubbles kill us, we know that. We know that we cannot persist with this unfair trade balance that we have with China. 260 billion dollars consistently year after year after year in manufactured goods. They have roughly two and a half trillion dollars accumulated in China, we know what they're doing with it and with some work we've done for the congress and on both the House and the Senate, we now know that 90% of the cost differential between a manufactured good from China in its counterpart here in the United States is accomplished through subsidy. We have pointed way too many fingers at the workers of America and said it's your fault. You're uneducated sufficiently, you are, it is your wages that is causing these problems and we know that's not the case. It's unfair trade that is destroying this country. We also know that the business community is sitting on its hands. So what the senator was describing in the congressman is they need a framework. They need a framework of policies that induce the behaviors and the outcomes that will restore this economy. We are genuinely at a tipping point here. We're right on the edge of no senator, no member of congress being able to fix the problems on our behalf soon, if something along these lines. And there are 15 prescriptions in the task force report. We're not naive in thinking they're gonna be instantly enacted. They were written by our colleagues in a way that they could be if we had enough wherewithal in the Senate and the House together, but they are gonna now be out there. The one that is a most moment to me and we'll spend Michael quite a bit of time on it, nobody speaks to it more ably than our two members here is the National Infrastructure Bank. It needs to be a levered institution. It needs to have what I call leverage. It needs to attack the roughly $3 trillion of decrepit infrastructure we have that not only has forestalled us from full employment, but is making us increasingly uncompetitive in the global economy. We're fully prepared, anxious to see credits come that are thoughtful and responsible to the business community to bring manufacturing back where it belongs. We are partners in the Green Economy Initiative as you'll read in the report. We're particularly sensitive to the women and men who are 50 and older, who are part of that 29 and a half million. I think something on the order of 13 million women and men now have been unemployed for more than a year. Again, these numbers you don't see publicly. We think there are at least 8 million, 9 million of them, 50 years and older. 5 million of the 29 and a half million are young people, half of whom have a BA or a BS, can't find the first job. The other half have a diploma, can't find the first job. You'll see quite a bit of attention paid in both of our initiatives to both, in our initiatives to both. A manufacturing renaissance would be the best thing that could happen to the older worker and youth employment initiatives for the younger worker. And finally, it's China. China is the dragon in the room. It's not the gorilla. As I said, it cheats and it cheats every day. We have to have the backbone that we thought we had heard about in the Iowa caucuses of 08, that Representative Ghiramendi and Senator Harkin speak to more ably than I. To my immediate left is Pat Malloy, one of the genuine experts in this country on China trade policies. Owen Hernstadt, from the machinist, was supposed to be up here when we ran out of chair space. And Owen speaks more ably than I do and anybody else to manufacturing. And then there's Sheryl Sweninger, who sort of ties it all together from an economist point of view. Pat is on the China Commission. Owen, as I said, is with machinists. And Sheryl is right here at our home, the New America Foundation. So a privilege for all of us, the 20 women and men who put this together, thank you for listening to it, Michael. We thank you for your courtesy in introducing it. And certainly it's a privilege, John and Tom, for having you here. And thank God you got out of that floor, Tom. Thanks, Leo. Well, this does have the feel, has already been alluded to, of being in an alternative reality here in this room, discussing what, as far as I know, as a journalist, most economists consider to be the critical problems of the American economy while on Capitol Hill. They're discussing how to further hurt the jobs picture. And there is no real vibrant discussion, as far as I can tell, of these issues. And I guess all that you can do, even the New America Foundation, some of these gentlemen here, is to try to inject this into the conversation. We have now had a generation, I would say, a more generation and a half, perhaps since the Reagan years, of a set of policies that has pretended in effect to support the American middle class, the working class, indeed to rely on it and to allow the rest of the world to rely on it as a kind of consumer of last resort for the world economy, including China. While at the same time a whole series of policies were in sort of termite fashion when not being seen undermining the middle class in so many ways. And of course, the real lesson of the giant crisis of 2008 and its aftermath was that it was all an illusion. The American middle class was sustained by enormous amounts of debt, debt that was promoted and encouraged in many ways by government policies as well as by Wall Street. What we're seeing now in this long aftermath, two years after the recession supposedly ended, but it still feels like one is basically an introversion of that giant credit bubble that was going on in the 2000s. And we're in the middle of what some economists are saying is perhaps the worst recovery ever on record. Leo alluded to this earlier, but one of the, an even scarier figure in some way than the official unemployment rate, which is 9.2%, although the actual unemployment rate much higher, is the numbers of Americans who have entered the ranks of the long-term unemployed or the permanent unemployed. If you look at Bureau of Labor Statistics data, it's really scary. I mean, going back to 1948, even in some of the worst recessionary periods in the 1980s, the stagflation 70s, 92, you don't see anything like the figures we're seeing now, something like 43% of the unemployed in 2010 were unemployed for more than 27 weeks and many of them are for more than a year now. And we don't have policies in place to try to bring them back, to give them the training, to give them the skills, to give them the work. So this jobs report, this task force report on job creation could not come at a more important time as it notes that probably has not been since the Great Depression, that so many Americans have been unemployed for so long in a supposed recovery period, more than 20 months, I think it says. So with that, let's begin the discussion, not only of the specific proposals that are laid out here, but of their political viability, because I think that's very much a question at hand here because of what's going on, because of the kind of the debate and discussion going on in Capitol Hill seemingly divorced from the reality of the economic crisis we're facing. What can the President do? What can the Congress do in terms of these kinds of proposals? So you've already had partial introductions. Leo, Senator Harkin, as well as the congressman. Cheryl Schweninger, another key author of this report is the director of the New America Foundation's Economic Growth and American Strategy Programs. He's also one of the founders of the group and he was a founding editor of the World Policy Journal from 1983 to 92. Patrick Malloy has served four two-year terms on the US-China Economic and Security Commission. He's a former Foreign Service Officer and he has observed the evolution of the US-China relationship from close up and we'll want to hear from him a lot about the China trade issue. So with that, why don't we start up the discussion? And I think I'd first like to start off by saying what do you think, perhaps we can start with Senator Harkin and Congressman Garmendi, of these kinds of proposals being laid out in this report or politically feasible at this point? I'd rather turn to the experts. Okay, well, I'll just throw that out there. What do you think is politically feasible at this point in this kind of environment? What's politically feasible? Okay, next question. Well, I kind of alluded to it in my opening statement. Political feasibility depends upon political leadership. Political leadership comes about from individuals who I think have a deep feeling for an intellectual concept of what is happening to our society at large. If a political leader says to you that our unemployment is 9% and doesn't mention the 18%, they don't have a firm grasp of what's happening in our society. If a political leader says, gee, we gotta have more of these so-called free trade agreements because it will help our country and help employment and they don't have a firm grasp of what's happened in the past with these free trade agreements. So what's politically feasible depends upon political leadership. And I'm not in the mode of bashing President Obama or anything like that, but I think the times call for bold, innovative leadership on the part of the President of the United States. If we don't have that, then it sort of comes back down on our side and in the Congress and we take our cues from our constituents in many ways and then we lack that kind of cohesiveness that we need for political leadership. I think we need a strict examination. This is getting a little bit off. We need a really good examination of how we went in the short span of a little over two years from a president elected with a huge mandate, huge mandate, with a progressive mandate and a Congress that was run by good progressives in the House and in the Senate where we had 60 at 1.59, 58 votes now to a Congress yanked around by the Tea Party on the House side and where we have 53 votes on the Democratic side in the Senate and out of that you got four or five that sort of have gone wobbly in the knees on a lot of issues. How did that happen in two and a half years? I think we needed to look at that and examine that and find out why we have gone this far in the other direction in just two and a half years. I believe, and I will shut up on this, I believe it's because we haven't paid attention to the underlying real problems in America which is Leo and this task, worse to point it out, is the jobs issue and especially among young people. Read the part in this report where it talks about when young people can't find a job, they've been educated, they can't find a job. That kind of hangs around them not just for a couple of years, but the rest of their lives. And that's one of the most debilitating things that's happening in our society today is the lack of jobs for young people. Well, I'll get off my thing. Go ahead, Cheryl. I think it's important to understand that politics is not static and that the economic realities will reshape the politics in the next six months. Those economic realities are pushing us closer and closer to an echo recession. A major, an additional major downdraft in the economy that we see showing up in all the data currently and all the underlying factors are moving us towards retesting and potentially pushing us towards a new financial crisis as well. Given the ongoing exposure of both the government and the banks to a double dip in the housing crisis is now caused as much by unemployment as the original bubble. So I think it would be a mistake to assume that the static picture we're seeing in the lead up to the debt ceiling is gonna be the politics that dominates the discussion six to nine months. Now, of course, we have to play a role in redefining that. But when after the initial euphoria may take place of the market if we get some sort of interim, the realities of the debt deflation that is taking place throughout the American economy that is gonna grip large parts of Europe, the slowdown that is taking place in Asian and emerging economy will be the dominant reality. You can't disinvent the economic realities but you can interpret them in a way that I think will give us another opportunity. And I think what's important and what Leo has done with his leadership is to give us a platform when that opening reemerges in the next six to nine months. So let's not assume we're in a static political environment. We'll be in a dynamic political environment because we're in a very serious economic situation that is going to impose realities on the political leadership in a new way that you haven't seen in the last six months. Congressman? The American public wants a job. That's what this is about, they want a job. They wanna go back to work, they wanna support their family, they want a job. And it's incumbent upon all of us who think we're in politics and wanna be political leaders to develop a jobs agenda, a program that will create the jobs that are necessary in America. I agree entirely about Mr. Swaranger when you talk about it's gonna switch. It's gonna switch from this deficit which is really important but is not the central issue. The central issue is the putting people to work. We've tried to develop in the house, make it an America agenda and it's a piece of the puzzle. There are many different bills involved in it. Some of them are part of what's in this proposal but what we need is an overarching program which is in this at least partly. Wouldn't my little book go here? Here it is. It's this kind of thing. It's that we need a comprehensive jobs agenda. Something that speaks to all of the pieces of the puzzle and then for us, the Senate and the House is to put together the pieces of legislation that cause it to happen. And Senator Harkin, you couldn't be more correct. There's something about this that is missing which is the leadership. There has to be a voice that makes this a reality. And so as we go through the rest of this we can talk about the individual pieces here as we should because in this report are the elements of a successful program. There are some that could be added and some maybe would be subtracted along the way but we have to have that overarching message to the American public and program beneath it that can actually create the opportunity for this economy to turn. I like this. I really like what you guys have done here and hopefully we can grasp it and say let's run with this. I'd love to put this in the President's hand. He was over in Maryland talking to a bunch of students and it was here and there and everywhere but it was not one mention about a job. How are we gonna do that? Leo, you've given us an answer. Michael, can I just throw one out and not more for you to guide us through it if I might? From what we can tell, Tom and John, from what we can tell within your Congress, John and Tom, your Senate, three places where there seem to be just inordinate sentiment to do something are the National Infrastructure Bank, a bi-domestic which the congressman just referred to by American, we call it sometimes, and there's certainly, and Pat, you would have an insight to this as well, but the currency bill aimed at China, it's certainly the biggest of the several subsidies that are killing us. The 90% subsidy world that I described, 30%, roughly a third of the 90 is currency, the rest we know to be taxes, environmental, siting, financing and things, but Tom and John, I certainly detect within your members almost in a bipartisan fashion, a lot of support for China currency, National Infrastructure Bank, and boy, I don't know, it seems to me hard to go home to Iowa and California and say that bi-American doesn't make sense. We already did it in the defense bill. You bet, and you did it well. Well, we also did a piece of it in the stimulus bill with the high-speed rail and the international rail companies, none of, not one company in America, but when that bill was passed and $12 billion put up there, they all rushed to establish manufacturing facilities in the United States. It can work. I'm carrying two pieces of legislation that say that if you're going to use our tax dollars to go green to put up the solar or the wind, then you're gonna buy America. Why should we allow our tax dollars to be used to buy Chinese solar panels? Makes no sense to me. How about your Bay Bridge? Oh, oh. Don't get you started, right? It does seem as if anything, the politics, as dynamic as they might be, and I certainly agree on that, I might be going in the opposite direction. And I'm talking about presidential politics, judging from what David Plouffe said at that Bloomberg breakfast the other day, in which it seems as if the political strategy of the administration is to avoid discussion of jobs or the unemployment rate at all. But let's talk about some of the specifics if we can. Maybe, Patrick, you can talk a little bit about, in more detail, about the China trade issue, the environment for getting tougher with China. Right, I'm a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. This is like a bipartisan congressional think tank on China. We've issued a number of reports. Almost all of them have been unanimous. 12 to zero Republicans and Democrats seeing it exactly right. I wanna make clear, I'm a member of the Commission, I'm not speaking for the Commission at this meeting. Our website is www.uscc.gov. Everything we do is up there. Let me just quickly go through this. In the last 10 years, the United States has run $6 trillion worth of trade deficits. We've run $2 trillion of trade deficits with China. When you are running these kinds of trade deficits, it means you're outsourcing your manufacturing and you're bringing it back. Most of our imports from China are manufactured goods. 60% of China's exports are made by Ford-invested companies. Now when you are shipping your manufacturing abroad, that's tied to your budget deficit because revenue that used to be produced here, goods here that produced wealth are now being produced abroad and imported into the country. People who used to have good jobs in this country and paid taxes are now no longer paying taxes. We're putting money into keeping them going through unemployment and other things. But I've watched this debate going on in the Congress and I have not heard anyone tying the budget deficit to the trade deficit. The American people know something bad is happening. They always talk about the fact that you go to a store and you can't even buy anything made in America. Now, what China? China was a great civilization. They fell apart. The communists took control. They tried to build a centralized economy under Mao Zedong. The real gene has come along in Deng Xiaoping in 1979. He said, we need foreign investment, foreign technology, foreign markets. And that's the way we're gonna build what he calls China's comprehensive national power. They don't just talk about their economic power. They use a term called comprehensive national power, meaning political, military, and economic. And it's all based on the economic. And if you watch, their military is growing pretty rapidly. So I don't mean to be a China basher and I'm not. I first went to China in 1981. I saw a very poor country. You go to China now, you see a very prosperous and booming country, at least for three or 400 million of the 1.2 billion people. But they have a strategy. They're incentivizing our companies to outsource production to China. Instead of contributing the job growth in this country, our companies are contributing the job growth in China. Now, there are various things that we could do. And we talk about that in the report. Our guys get a tax break for building jobs abroad. They don't have to pay taxes on that money that they earn. Now, is that a crazy policy or what? We talk about that in the report. China underprices its currency. And the IMF just yesterday said that the Chinese currency is substantially undervalued. What does that mean? It means when we ship a good to China, it's more expensive than it should be. The goods from China coming here get an export subsidy from that underpriced currency further and incentivize those American companies instead of building production here to build it in China and ship it back here. And that's all part and parcel of what is happening here. One last thing if I could speak to, there's something called indigenous innovation. When China joined the WTO, they used to say to American companies, if you want access to the China market, you have to make stuff in China. So when they joined the WTO, we said no more of that forced technology transfer. And that's in their WTO agreement. They won't do that. But they do it, here's the way they do it. They sell it, they tell an American company, if you want to sell to the Chinese government, you got to be on this list of companies. Or if you want access to our market, you got to be a friend of China and you got to do R&D in China. China sees so our technology, our brain power and what we did well is now, their Chinese are getting that technology and know how in China. Through that, what they call indigenous innovation. That's contrary to their WTO obligations. Now what do they say to defend it? They say, well, we're not really forcing the companies. It's not forced technology. We're just telling the companies that they want to be a friend of China and make money in China. They got to transfer their R&D in their technology. So they say, we're not violating our WTO obligations at all. But we can re-incentivize this game. We've got to get our house in order and re-incentivize our guys. Maybe they should, we should have lower taxes on companies that produce GDP in this country and higher taxes on companies that produce GDP in China. I mean, there are all kinds of things we can do. We should not let this go on because our children's future is really being sacrificed. The challenge does seem to be to try to package this as a national competitiveness strategy that doesn't run afoul of biases, views, if you will, on pre-trade. Certainly, a lot of proposals like this run aground because they're perceived as protectionist. The key seems to be to be selling it, going and getting back to your point, Senator, about the right kind of leadership. I mean, what do you think about that? Is it possible? Are we able to move beyond some of these sort of this adoration of the free trade gods, if you will, that's persisted really for the last couple of decades? Well, I hope so. I hope that a number of us for years have been saying fair trade, not free trade, fair trade. I mean, this goes back to NAFTA and everything else. I remember the debates I had with Bill Clinton on NAFTA. Don't get me started on that. But it is timed in some sense, replay those debates. Excuse me, but when did it become wrong to protect America? What's wrong with protecting America? I don't get it. I really don't, particularly when the policies that have been in place for the last, I don't know, 20 to 30 years are exactly the opposite. They don't protect America. In fact, they harm America. You look at the tax policies discussed here, at least in part, why do we reward American companies with a lower tax if they off shore jobs? Not one Republican voted to repeal that tax. It did pass. We thank the Senate. We thank the House for doing it last December. But there's still more that's in the tax policy that literally rewards the offshoring of American jobs. What's wrong with a little bit of protecting American jobs? We ought to adopt the policies the Chinese have adopted. What's wrong with that? If it's good for the Chinese and they're able to get away with it under the WTO, then we ought to be able to adopt the similar policies and get away with it here. Use our tax dollars to buy American made equipment. 18 and a half cents, every gallon of gas, 25 and a half cents, 26 cents. For diesel, out of every gallon you buy, goes out there to buy what? Yes, I had nothing to do with the Bay Bridge. It was a horrible mistake. To save 10%, they went off and bought Chinese steel and thousands of jobs. Thousands of jobs are in China and they're not in California. They're not in America. And at the end of the day, turned out to be more expensive. One of the things, Michael, that the Congressman is driving to and again, more ably than I, if you take the 15 proposals we have, within the G20, you can find counterparts in 19 of the G20. What the Senator and the Congressman are saying, and we're trying to say, is we're not being protectionist, we're being reciprocal. 19 nations have domestic policies, bi-domestic policies that are multiples of what we have today. And what little we have today is only because of people like John Giramendi and Tom Harkin. So we're saying, if they can do it, let us do it. Tom Harkin was the architect of the phrase, fair not free on trade. It's just fair. And these trade agreements, we've had 11 of them. These two gentlemen, these two members know that 11 of them have failed to deliver their promises by large amounts. They've not created jobs, they have not improved our trade balance, they've spent the other way. At the same time, we look ahead to the three that are on the table and we find them similarly faulty. It's not fair trade, I'm sorry, it's not free trade, Michael, it's simply fair trade. Yeah, no question about it. And as a journalist, I've been covering this for the better part of the last couple of decades and have watched these proposals, these ideas, founder. Again, getting back to this idea that the sort of gods of free trade. And I guess my question is, isn't it about time, I mean, isn't this really the moment when four ideas like this, we have seen a near disastrous failure of this sort of absolutist idea of free trade and how it was supposed to raise all boats, and particularly American boats. I mean, it was supposed to be good for America. Well, the results are kind of in. And I guess I'm just wondering why the political environment hasn't changed more than it has. Even accounting for the distractions caused by the rise of the Tea Party and the all embracing focus we're seeing now on cutting the budget. I'm not sure why sort of some of the underlying economic thinking hasn't changed more. I mean, these proposals, versions of them, of course, have been out there for a while. It just seems like now more than ever is their moment. Michael, there's one sector of the American economy that has not suffered because of this so-called free trade and the huge trade imbalances we have. What sector am I talking about? The financial sector. The financial sector has not suffered a bit. In fact, they have made quite a bit on this. And so you have to look at that and you say, why do we still genuinely reflect that this ultra free trade, when the data and the facts are in over the past? Well, you've got a huge sector that has a lot of influence in Congress that like things just like they are. They're doing quite well, thank you, in the financial sector. And that's what's happened, I think, in our society, on a broader perspective. We have moved from manufacturing, Leo, to being a financial-based economy. Read Kevin Phillips' book, Wealth and Democracy. It's an old book. It came out, Cheryl, about 10 years ago or so. Read Wealth and Democracy, you lays it all out and how we have moved from making things in this country to just spending a lot of money around and being a financial basis. Indeed, and the underlying balance of power, if you will, between sort of labor and capital, which was sort of at equilibrium for a long time has changed dramatically, which is one of the reasons why the American labor movement is just a shadow of its former self. Capital goes anywhere it pleases, labor can't. In fact, labor is probably more stricter than it was during the period of globalization from a century ago when migration was freer than it was. So now you have a very, very unequal situation in a fundamental sense. If I might just take some of the recommendations that are in this report and apply them to this thing I handed out a show a while ago, which was in a Sun World. Sun World manufactures solar panels. It's the only domestic manufacturer of solar panels. The president comes in and wants to talk to me. He said, we got some problems. We got about 18 months and we're gonna have to make a decision to go out of business in America. Okay, why? I asked and he says, well, a couple of things. A, China currency. It happens in your report here, you speak to China currency. You speak to that issue. And you've talked about it a little bit. We can come back to it. He said, B, you need to understand the way in which China is financing the businesses in China. It's the Chinese government that finances their business with loans that are not available anywhere else, or at least in America. Super cheap loans, loan rates and obligations that are unavailable. Literally free money available to those companies. And he said, and then you've got the issue of make it in China policy. He said, we can't compete with that. And we're going to have to make a decision to shut down our manufacturing in America. So what does that mean? Let's see, California, 86.8 million dollars. Let's see, are we on this list? I don't see it, Tom, so hang on. Massachusetts, Arizona, Texas, Oregon, on and on and on, gone. Job's gone because of the international, or the lack of American policies. You speak to each of these things in this report. So apply this, how would we apply it? What would we do? John, I think there's only, if I'm not mistaken, someone correct me if I'm wrong, I think there are really only two, maybe three manufacturers of solar panels left in America. One. Or just one. That's the last one? The last one. And yet we are the ones that developed Silicon Chips. We are the ones that did all the research. I was on the Science and Tech Committee back in the 70s and 80s when we were putting a lot of your money, taxpayers' money, into the development of this technology, the basic research and getting it developed, and yet it's all gone offshore now. Tom, let me be more specific. This is the only company that does all of it in America. Other companies may assemble pieces in America, but this is the only company that does all of it from making the crystal to the wafer to the cell and then the panel and the whole thing. Leo? Michael, I think it starts and stops with do we want to have a national manufacturing policy or not? The other 19 members of the G20 have such a policy. It's very specific. China's is the most specific by far, but it would not tolerate a circumstance where only eight or 9% of American workers are then in the sector. It would not tolerate a world where small and medium-sized enterprises can't get loans. It would not tolerate a world where China on that plant that the congressman referred to, it got its sites, it gets its sites for free, it gets its construction loans for free, it gets a tax holiday and it dumps effluent into the Yangtze and emissions into the air and that's the competitor for the plant that the congressman is describing. It starts and stops with can we as a nation survive much longer with only eight or 9% of women and men making something because if you think you can, you can't. Then you have to go to where would we most immediately see a manufacturing renaissance and that is in that $3 trillion of decrepit infrastructure if it had a bi-domestic aspect to it. It would be, you would have the policy first, Michael, and then you'd have the kick in the pants, the opportunity would be in our own infrastructure until we got this thing balanced. Which is your number one recommendation in the task force report. I wonder whether you would talk a little bit about that and some of the other recommendations. Are these actually in order of importance or feasibility? No, they're not, but I do think the group felt very, very strongly about two issues. One is the bank, I'm sorry, it's free bank coupled with bi-domestic and a more harsher perspective on China trade. Let me digress a minute, Tom, if I can, on the bank. The bank must be a bank. It must have an equity capitalization accompanied by a debt capitalization. Yet when you go to the White House and talk about the bank, they talk about a de minimis amount of money that would come out and dribble out in block grants. Yet we know from the senator's work and the congressman's, we know, and CalPERS congressman is a superb example, we know from the wonderful treasure of the state of California that CalPERS, the largest pension fund in the world, would love to have an investment opportunity in a national infrastructure bank to be the leverage for that bank. It's a superb idea, the members of the Senate and the House that are focused on this issue appreciate the opportunity, Michael, yet we can't get past a fellow named Tim Geithner who wants no banks except his banks. And the wonderful congressman, Leonard Boswell, just walked in. I can't find for a small or medium-sized manufacturer in Iowa a $50 million loan today if my life depended on it, but I just watched J.P. Morgan give $20 billion loan commitment to AT&T to buy T-Mobile, which is a problematic deal. But what the congressman is trying to do in Iowa and the senators trying to do in Iowa, it's been diminished by an insensitivity to small and medium-sized manufacturers, and frankly, Michael, to the absence of a fundamental manufacturing and an industrial policy for this nation. One of the things that this report recommends on page 33 is that we move to balance our trade in five years. Now maybe the five years is, but we need to balance our trade. Let me just help you. The administration has set a goal of doubling exports, but if you look at what's happening, imports are increasing faster than exports. So when you have a negative net export figure, meaning your imports are less than your exports, that's a drag on your economy. And we have massive net export figures year after year. Warren Buffett, in a famous article in Fortune magazine in October, 2003, advocated that the United States needs to adopt policies to balance its trade. Now, people always hear, you hear in the debate now, China owns so much of our treasuries. We're dependent on them. Where did China get the money to own so much of our treasuries? We gave it to them by running these massive trade deficits year after year. So here's the way the Chinese do it. When the dollars come into China, the Chinese government buys those dollars from the people who bring them in and they give those people yuan. Then the Chinese government issues bonds to suck up those you've won so that they don't get inflation in their economy. The Chinese government ends up with the dollars. They don't want to just put them in a mattress so they buy our treasuries. Therefore, they get income from the treasuries. They also get leverage over us. Now, is this a crazy thing for this country to be let going on and the whole is getting deeper? As Tennessee Ernie Ford used to say, we're another day older and deeper in debt. We gotta change the trends here. And this is very important, this recommendation, to move to balance our trade. When Kennedy said we're gonna get to the moon in this decade, nobody knew how to get to the moon, but he set the goal and we figured it out. We can figure these things out if we set some goals for ourselves and we ought to, not just doubling our exports, balancing trade. Thank you, Carol. Yeah, I wanted to expand a little bit on Leo's comments about infrastructure and the Infrastructure Bank investment because I think this is really the linchpin between the micro-go of rebuilding our manufacturing sector and the macro-economic goals related to jobs capital and insufficient demand. And it's just not CalPERS that is looking. There is, paradoxically, as we're debating, reducing and doing a deficit deal, which will actually cut the amount of fixed income debt available. There's a shortage of fixed income debt that is occurring because of the collapse of the mortgage market. One, two, as baby boomers approach retirement, fixed income investments become much more important to them. And three, as emerging markets population enter their prime savings period, there's gonna be an additional flood of capital. We actually need to generate attractive fixed income investments that a national infrastructure bank would incur in order to have a workable banking and financial system in the world. That's one thing. So you put together what the infrastructure and the infrastructure bank does. It leverages and puts to work all this idle capital. It's just not one to two trillion. It's three to four trillion when you add in all the excess liquidity that is floating out in the global economy. You crowd in a like-minded amount of not just putting private capital work in the debt markets but you put a crowd in private investment into because of the multiplier effect that infrastructure investment has. Moreover, then you also facilitate not just directly the manufacturing sector, but more importantly some other key sectors of the economy upon which America's future rests and in particular the energy and transportation systems. We have an enormous abundance. Representative Garamendi talks about solar. Let me talk about natural gas. We have an enormous abundance of natural gas and shale oil located in all parts of the country. We don't have the infrastructure to move that or to put it into use. We have a, there'll be a trillion dollars of investment in enormous amount of jobs that are needed over the next five to 10 years to build out that infrastructure to make us to actually balance our energy picture. We have an enormous potential if we rebuild the manufacturing base to move goods and services around the countries. One of the principal ways of doing that is our enormous inland waterways, not just the Mississippi, but the Great Lakes. We've allowed them to deteriorate so enormously that they're not as energy efficient. These are the most energy efficient ways of moving goods and services around the world. We need five to 10 billion dollars of investment over the next five to 10 years to be able to move the goods and services in a much more efficient and attractive way which makes it very attractive to manufacture things in the center of the country and actually move them around new population centers that are located in whether it's in the Great Lakes or Texas. So infrastructure investment in a bank in particular where you could leverage a small amount of public capital as Leo has described, into a much larger take one to two trillion dollars off the sidelines, put it to work, both in the debt and equity markets has an enormous appeal as the centerpiece of an economic recovery and jobs program. Before we turn it over to the audience for questions, I was, I don't wanna know if any of the panelists have any other thoughts on the specific proposals here and Professor Owen Hernstadt, who is supposed to be a member of the panel, whether it is. He's here. Yeah. I just wanted to know whether you, you know, had any thoughts of your own. Professor Hernstadt is the director of the Department of International Affairs at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the AFL-CIO, as well as an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown. Any thoughts, Bruce? I'm gonna hide back in the corner here. Thank you. I must confess when you said Professor Hernstadt, I was looking around the room for my father knowing that he'd be here on that. Just a couple very quick things. One, I really do wanna thank Leo and the New America Foundation for all their work on this. Not only is it timely, but it's critical. I think it goes without saying that we're in a crisis. It's urgent. And we can ill afford to spend all of our time getting more studies done and kind of sifting and winnowing. The answers are here. And we just have to act and act as the senator mentioned by showing true leadership in and out of government. A couple of quick points. One is on one of the recommendations that has been discussed and on one of them that hasn't. The one on Buy America is obviously a critical one. I think we were all shocked, the pushback that many of us received when we were trying to get Buy America locked in to the Recovery Act on that. I think we were a little shocked about the pushback on that because it was seen as being protectionist and Representative Garamani, I couldn't agree with you more. We would like to call it industrial policy. We'd like to call it national and economic security on that and I don't think there's anything to hide behind that. But when we're talking about Buy America, we're not only talking about buying goods that are produced here in America using US supplies and raw materials, but we also have to ask ourselves that the taxpayer would be shocked to learn some things we consider to be domestically made only have 51% domestic content in them. Now if you were to ask most folks down the street or even folks maybe, some folks at the Federal Trade Commission what is made in the USA mean, it would mean an entirely different thing. It would mean it really made here in the US. The second part is there's no really uniform guidelines throughout government on defining what is domestic content. Some would be shocked to learn that intangible items like the value of intellectual property rights and so forth are figured in, in some cases, to determining what domestic content is. And those things should be low-hanging fruit and it would be interesting to see those who actually oppose that, particularly when we see unemployment as high as it is. It should be a low-hanging fruit to make sure that our government procurement employs people here. The second related recommendation goes to the issue of employment impact statements. We've got environmental impact statements. They've been around, they've been tested for a long time. It doesn't appear that many government agencies have incorporated a simple question when letting out a contract and award, whether it's for a huge military issue like the tanker deal or even smaller ones, to simply ask the question, how many direct jobs is this gonna create in the US? What kind of jobs will be created and how long will those jobs last? These are simple questions that should be factored into all of this. And if they were, at least it would give policymakers and our fine political leaders that are up on the panel much more information that they can consider when they fund government programs, when they fund procurement and so forth. Thanks. Thank you very much, Owen. Now, I'd like to open it up to the audience. Michael? Oh, go ahead, Senator. Can I just one other? Before we do that. Short thing I wanted to mention. When we're thinking about two things on the infrastructure bank, it's got to be an investment that is in addition to but not a substitute for the level of federal government grant levels that we have right now. So I still think we need some pay go as we go along with gasoline taxes and other things like that. So we have to be careful that they don't say, well, we're gonna do that. Now we don't have to spend any federal money whatsoever on the infrastructure. That's just one thing. Secondly, to really invest in long-term infrastructure projects, you need what others and I have referred to as patient capital. Capital is not looking to spin over in a hurry. There, here is a place where we can get really a twofer. My committee has been having a series of hearings. I started a little over a year and a half ago on what's happening to pensions in America and the fact that people are losing their pensions at an alarming rate. It started in the 80s when we shifted from defined benefits to defined contributions, 401Ks. So everybody could have their 401Ks and take it with them and it all sounded so nice and good and everything like that. But it has decimated any kind of a pension system. In other words, something that you can rely on until you die. 401Ks, we know now about two out of three people that have 401Ks that are going to be approaching retirement within the next 20 years do not have sufficient money to last in their lifetimes. A lot of people are taking out lump sums of $100,000 thinking I'm now rich but they don't have any kind of retirement. One out of every four persons in America today of working age have absolutely zero amount of money in a pension, zero. So we need to rejuvenate the pension system so that we have more of a defined benefit program. We can build a hybrid system so that it's portable so you can move around no matter where you go, you have a system like that. But that then provides you with patient capital. Capital that can be invested for long periods of time. And that's where the infrastructure bank and others can go to get that kind of capital and guess what, Vuela? Now you have a pension system that will pay back to people later on in life, a pension. So I hope that we can keep that in mind about the benefit of a defined benefit pension plan. Well, unless there are any further thoughts right now we'll take some questions. Yes, sir, right over here. My name is Martin Appel from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. I wanna commend you first on being able to integrate a whole number of separate realms and ideas. Everybody who's prescribing the solutions has one little lever they'd like to push to solve everything. And I think you realize and have shown us that you have to integrate a lot of different parts of the system to make it work. Now among the parts of the system that we seem to always get to no matter how we follow the trails seems to be our trade balance with China. I mean this has in all your sets of data seems to be a bigger lever than most. And if you look at how that came about and we have a mechanism called the Bretton Woods Committee that was supposed to solve this by preventing it from happening. It doesn't work. Why don't we recreate it immediately in a form that will? I don't care whose name it has and how it works but set it up so that it can function and solve the problem of fair trade balances between countries based on currency exchange. If we do this promptly and set a time limit of a couple of years to have it completely done then there may be a lot of things that will happen between us in China. There'll be some frictions. The Middle Kingdom has its own view of what the world looks like and so do we. But somewhere in that exchange rate whether their currency goes up 40% or ours devalues in some way we have to make an exchange that can help generate the necessary stay at home kind of things. The second thing about patient capital. I love the idea but there's another way to look at it. Our financial system is the tail that's driving the dog and it makes all of the large companies in the country look at short term profits. In order to do that they can't invest in long term potential opportunities. And that driving force that in patient capital has been pushing one of the drivers that moves a lot of our jobs offshore. We have a lot of invention in this country but it's not being able to be kept here because as soon as it becomes valuable enough it has an opportunity to go offshore and make a higher profit. So these are the things we have to attack together. I think you've got a good set of steps to begin. And the last component is education. I appreciate you're looking at community colleges and how to integrate. But we have to have a university system in which the people who graduate are effectively able to work in the industry that don't exist yet. Let's confine this to questions and not speeches. Thank you. Let me just give you three quick answers to that. In terms of trade we spent a lot of time in the document on enforcement. Enforcement of existing agreements which the senator spoke to. We mentioned the word tariffs as an inducement to proper behavior. If we don't see the sort of behavior that we're entitled to we actually advocate tariffs. In the area of the corporations I'm very, very strongly opposed to a lot of these multinational practices. But as the representative in the congress and the senator will tell you we don't have in place attack structure that incents them to do the right thing. So we have to put that in place. Finally on education with all respect it is one of the greatest insults to the American people with those roughly 30 million women and men unemployed today to suggest that they're insufficiently educated and overpaid. Everybody in this room and in this nation wants to fix the education system. It is, I promise you there are millions and millions and millions of sufficiently educated and sufficiently motivated and sufficiently unemployed Americans to fill any gap we have to fill in the near term. So we didn't see education as our prerogative. That's left, we left that mostly to the members. Thank you. Let's take some more questions and please do keep them short and make sure that they are questions. Identify yourself with the outset. This gentleman here in the yellow shirt. Paul Gallagher, EIR News Service. I just wanted to bring up that in creating jobs it's best to take the order that Franklin Roosevelt did it first deal with a completely out of whack banking system that is exhausting the credit of nations and we could see. Is there a question in there? Find a fourth sentence which is all I need. The, we can see in Europe yesterday this bailout policy spirals on and on until it destroys the economy or we stop it. So I wanted to bring up that Glass-Steagall restoration is introduced in the Congress has gone beyond 35 Republican and Democratic co-sponsors. Both Democrats and Republicans are pushing for that bill and invite anyone in the panel to comment on the relevance of that. It's extremely relevant. I was the insurance commissioner for eight years in my life and understand exactly what happened when a bad mistake was made in 1998 and Glass-Steagall was repealed. It ought to be reinstituted for many, many reasons some of which you've already described. Let me just add that the other part of the Roosevelt agenda was to create a parallel banking system, a public purpose finance system. My colleague, Mike Lind has written, I think a very important study on how you recreate a public purpose finance system that has been eroded over the last 10 to 15, 20 years. And it seems like the first missing piece is to with the infrastructure bank in particular is to put in place where ways to be able to channel excess idle capital into productive public investment and public and private investment. And indeed one of the true legacies of the new deals were all these loan and lending and banking quasi banking systems that was put in place in the 1930s and 40s. You know, and those of us who have been here as long as I have, we all have votes that were wish we could change and the other votes were proud of. One of the votes I'm proud of so I was one of eight senators in 1998 to vote against repeal of Glass-Steagall. And I gave a speech that, well, I don't mean for, I didn't mean to do that, I wouldn't do that. I'm just saying that. Yes you do. I would say was that, and a lot of us gave speeches at the time, but I just wanted to say that I remember the pressure that was put on us by the White House, by Bob Rubin, by Larry Summers and others, that this was the way to go, the thing to do, and also what's his name, the head of the Fed, Greenspan. Greenspan. Boy, this is. How soon we forget. I'd like to forget. Next question. And I just wanted to mention a very call correctly, Senator, your floor speech at the time was quite prescient in warning of what might happen. Let's take some questions at the back of the room, maybe. The lady there, right along the aisle, to the glass. Hi, I'm Lauren, I'm a freelance writer. I've been to a number of job creation panels over the last year, and one thing that always seems to be left out are how to remove impediments to even existing jobs. And the thing that really concerns me is the growing practice of credit, use of credit reports by employers. There's been a bill sitting in Congress forever that's not getting any traction. Six states have passed similar legislation, and I wanna know from the panel if this is an area of work they would consider bringing into the task force. There's almost nobody in this country doing any serious work on reining in this practice, and it's creating an underclass of millions of unemployable people. People like me who have degrees from Oxford and Georgetown and cut out completely from federal work, federal contracting, and many, many private sector jobs because of the requirement to have sterling credit, even though we know credit reports are often filled with errors. I think what we're really, there are many, many issues involved in getting the American economy back on track. You've just raised one other. There are probably another several dozen of employment discrimination problems that exist. Credit reporting can be useful. It can also be very discriminatory, and you've raised that issue. It has to be looked at in the context of employment discrimination of many, many types, and that happens to be one. To get something going in Congress, we can't get the big things going, the overarching issues, and certainly the discrimination issues are one of the things we need to deal with. If it's okay with you, Mike, I would like to take this opportunity to ask my colleague, Leonard Boswell, to take my seat. I would like to get out of town before the FAA shuts down the Europe system in America. Please. So, thank you very, very much for the opportunity to be with you. Not often you have the luxury of a reserve congressman. We got a deep bench. Please, Congressman. Thank you, man. Josh, you found an earthquake with a calm block in Florida, yeah? There you go. Leonard, how are you? Congressman, we haven't heard from you, so if you would like to perhaps make a decision. Well, I know the time's short, and I just want to salute all of you for having this in the thought process. We're certainly in a crisis, and you all know that, and history is being written, what you're gonna say. And then that's what's driving me and probably all of you. I was somewhat relieved I even asked for Mr. Summers to leave town. I wonder what we gotta do to get Mr. Geithner to leave. Glad to see him go back and do what he does well. He's a good professor. I would like to see another gentleman go do whatever he does well, because we're in a crisis, and we have got to get to building things with American hands. And until we can do that and all this possibility, we're gonna continue to go the wrong way. So I think, and I'll just say this, I think it's okay, even though amnesia is set in of how we got where we are in this deficit situation, but we've got it. We've got to deal with it. It's okay to have the debate on it in front of all the American people, and they'll get it. But we have the capacity to be doing other things, economic development, infrastructure, and all these things you're talking about. Why aren't we doing that? It's very, very frustrating because the country needs it, the country's in great need, and there's some things there that we know we have to do. Go to any state, any city, and you'll find out that we're falling way behind as we think about our Asian neighbors, our European neighbors, and we think we're gonna compete. We've got to get to doing things. Thank you. I'm sorry. No, thank you, Congressman. I think we just have time for one more question. Yes, sir, on the end there. So just two quick things that just really have to be brought up. My name is Rick Lopez, LPAC TV. So just a couple of things that I think are fundamental to bring up, and these questions are, for the most part, directed to the representative. One, I think it's pretty obvious that Mr. Obama has come out publicly and pushed the agenda of real brutal austerity, and he's talking about putting social security on the table, which most citizens in this country know that means the chopping block. And my question to you is, is there gonna be some serious resistance against this president? And two, this is a more technical question. If we look at the effects of sustainable technologies on third world countries, I mean, it's really murderous, and it keeps these countries backwards. You can't run a modern day hospital with a windmill. I'm sorry, it's just not possible. And so are you guys willing to reconsider technologies that are efficient and are actually of a large enough scale to deal with the crisis, such as nuclear power development? I know the media has been hysterical about trying to make people be afraid of nuclear power, but I think we need ambitious programs, and I'm wondering if you guys agree that we should have programs like the Apollo program or the Adams for Peace program, which were the right kinds of programs which stimulated the economy. Thank you. Well, yes, first of all, there will be resistance to any cuts in Medicare or in Social Security. Social Security is sound. It does not contribute to the debt. You all know that, the data on that. And quite frankly, looking ahead after 2036, when Social Security has anticipated, can only pay 75% of what it's supposed to pay out, not zero, 75%. To make up that additional 25% for the next, oh, for probably the next 50 years, why aren't we talking about raising the cap on payroll taxes? Why is it fair? Why is it fair that someone who makes $50,000 a year pays payroll taxes on every last dollar? Someone who makes $500,000 a year only pays on 20 cents on the dollar. Why is that fair? Just by simply raising the cap, you'll have sufficient funds to take care of any problems in Social Security for at least the next 50 to 75 years. So yes, we're gonna resist any of those kind of things. Look, there's been a move of foot within the Republican Party to privatize Social Security for years. I can remember in the 90s with Gingrich and them, and Wall Street has always wanted to get its hands on some of that money. Boy, talk about free money coming in Social Security that they can invest and start to spin around. They've always wanted to get their hands on some of it. And so you hear about partial privatization and that. So we had to be very careful about any kind of partial types of privatization of Social Security. On energy, the cheapest barrel of oil is still the barrel of oil you don't buy. What do I mean by that? The cheapest barrel of oil is the one that you say, you don't buy, which means conservation. We, and here's jobs. Here's jobs, infrastructure jobs. Just rebuilding, that's not the right word, I'm just. Renovation. Renovation, renovating the buildings we have in America to make them energy efficient. Huge, huge savings in energy. And there you could lock in American-made goods, doors, windows, new heating and ventilation systems. Geothermal systems were practicable in buildings. Retrofitting the buildings of America, which save you, I don't have all the data, but you can get it all, and you employ a lot of people to do that. So yeah, you can talk about nuclear power and wind and all that, and a lot of that's okay for the future, but why aren't we focusing on the things that will create jobs, stimulate manufacturing in America and save energy all at the same time? And that is renovation and conservation of energy. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for the panel. I think we have a lot of agreement here on the need for national policies. Here's the report, read it, take it home. Thanks so much. Thank you, Michael, thank you.