 So, I heard all the arguments before, and I've read all these arguments, you know. Income inequality, the problem with the rich is they save too much. And the problem with saving too much is economy is driven by consumption. And what we need is poor people to have the money so they can consume a lot, right? So what we should really do is tax people with a low propensity to consume, which poor middle class doesn't matter, and give the money to people with a high propensity to consume. That's nuts. And it's economically upside down completely. Economies are not driven by consumption. Economies are not driven by consumption. Sorry, Keynes. Consumption is driven by production. How do you consume? How do you consume? Where do you get the money to consume from? Where do you get the money to consume? From working, from producing. You can't consume until we're produced. What do you consume? Stuff that's being produced. The primary in economics, the thing we should be obsessed about, concerned about, is production. How many of you have a problem consuming? Nobody has a problem consuming if you've got money in your pockets, if you have a secure future, if you have a good job, if you know what's going to happen in the future. The problem in this country is not under consumption. That would be a new phenomena for Americans to under consume. The problem in this country is lack of saving. The problem in this country is uncertainty about the future. The problem in this country is not no good jobs for many people, the lack of good jobs and good income, and a secure future. It's not that we don't consume enough. You don't want to tax, I mean, if you really completely thought about this from an economic perspective, you would tax consumption. You wouldn't tax work, you wouldn't tax production. Production is what drives the economy. Those rich guys, they save. How horrible is that? Now what is saving? Saving is not putting the money in the mattress. Saving is, if it's in the bank, what does the bank do with it? Lends it out to whom? Either to people trying to buy a home, or to people starting to try to build a business. The money's working, it's not sitting in a closet. Now we'll talk about today's economy, which is a bizarre economy because of what the Fed is doing, but in a normal economy. And then what is investment? That's not tucking the money away, it's investing. It's creating capital. It's building companies. It's going somewhere that is productive. It's creating jobs. The way you create jobs is by increasing saving. The way you create jobs is by increasing investment. One of the things that we look at Asia and say, oh, look at their success. One of the things we attribute the success to is what? Their high savings rate, which allows them to have capital so they can grow and expand their economies. And for years, people have been bemoaning the low saving rate in the United States, which is restricting long-term economic growth. And now suddenly, no, no, the problem is not low saving rates, it's not, we're not consuming enough. I mean, this is upside down economics. It's simply wrong. And it doesn't make any sense. By the way, Keynes, who came up with this theory, his solution was not to tax the rich because he understood about investment. His solution was big government stimuluses and very loose monetary policy, exactly what we've been doing for the last six years with the slowest, most mega-economic recovery pretty much in American history. So but nobody, I believe, serious in economics argues that taxing the rich produces economic growth. That's just not economically viable. You're taxing your future. Future of any country is its savings, its investments. And you're taxing work, you're taxing production, you want incredibly productive people to do what? Work more or work less? Work more. If you tax something, do you get more of it or less of it? Less of it. Think sin taxes. Why do we have sin taxes to get less of something? So if you tax work, do you get more of it or less of it? You get less of it. But some margin, you get less of it. So what we really want, if you really want, well, I don't want to reduce economic inequality, but if you really want economic progress, what you want is lower taxes, less government intervention, and let inequality form where it may. How can you be against that? The only thing you didn't add is we're all in favor of kissing babies, too, right? On this type of thing. Let me first talk a little bit about how we think of, when we talk about inequality, there are different ways of thinking about it other than just how much income you have or how much wealth you have. I think one of the interesting and fantastic things about this country is we're not just a country but we're a continent. The diversity of this country in terms of trying to build a common community, it's an amazing achievement. I think they asked Bismarck at the end of the 19th century what was the greatest achievement of the century? And he spun the globe around and pointed and said they all speak English, or most of them at least on this type of thing, to build a sense of what is common about us. And so around the geography of this country, the issues about inequality can be quite different. You know what? I'd like to have a discussion and debate about how we allocate water and I'd like it to start over in the California Nevada. I'd like to have a discussion and debate about how we can serve agricultural land and I'd like that to start in Iowa. I'd like to have a discussion and debate about how urban development works and I'd like to start with it in New York City. I think if we want to think about how we reduce inequality, and I do believe that by reduction of inequality to some reasonable standard on this thing, that we all grow better. There are lots of great varieties of capitalism where there's less of this and they're growing faster. There are also a lot of great examples of this where there's less of this and they're not growing faster on these things. On this, I think it has a lot to do with what happens not nationally but locally. And I think we should care deeply about how we address those issues. You all have neighbors. You look at your neighbor. You care for your neighbor. And if your neighbor's down, you're there to help them. It's the other. It's that person that lives far off that has a lot of other differences on dimensions that allow you to look at them as the other. They're the source of inequality. They're the source of the sucking sound that comes from your pocket into theirs. In many respects, we need to have a clear-minded debate about what the issue is driving that. I believe the issue is driving inequality around issues that are about how we invest in public infrastructure. I think we all do best when we invest together. Whether it's for common defense or for common transportation or health care and education for that. I also believe that that has a substantial element which has been lacking, a local element for that. I don't mean that in Minnesota we should decide how wide the interstate highway is and the highway may decide to sue it differently. I don't mean that, but there are so many different ways by which we think about and try to address inequality that are tailored to our own particulars, our own situation, urban or rural, wider, black, rich or poor on this thing. When we make the issues of inequality nearer to us, in front of us, when they are our neighbors rather than the other, we address them because we're Americans, we're the most generous people in the world and we're ultimately the most generous people in the world. And that's not just about us. That's about the rest of the developing world too. The world that's been freed from the bonds of totalitarianism of the left and the right in the last 25 years. They're discovering these things too and they need the guidance from us. They need the guidance that says one size does not fit all. The old Washington consensus of privatized, democratized and liberalized and we're gonna do it here from the World Bank or the IMF. Any better follow that? I think that's been one of the great policy disasters of all time and I think it's one that's really besmirched the name of capitalism and how it works. We've gotta let others figure out what their variations will be on that. We gotta let this be a community that comes together and if you opt out of it, because you've done so well, you have maybe an incentive to make sure that community doesn't meet. You need to be a part of it. We need to start at the top, work down at the bottom and build this all up together. I think what works is when we leave individuals free to pursue their own lives, to pursue their own values, to pursue their own happiness. Countries that do this and to the extent that they do this thrive, countries that don't and to the extent that they don't demise, are destructive. It is ultimately about individual choice, individual freedom and a whole inequality debate in my view is structured to obstruct individual freedom, to restrict our ability to make choices for ourselves in the name of somebody deciding what's the right allocation of wealth? Cause we haven't even talked about what's the right level of inequality? Does anybody know? What genealogy coefficient is a good one? Nobody ever wants to answer that question. I've debated many people in equality. Nobody ever wants to actually tell me when is enough enough? What's the right level? Because there is no right level. The only right level is that level we attain when we are free, when we are left alone. When we form communities and I'm all for communities, I'm all for civilization, but we form communities based on voluntary interactions, not when we're sacrificing one group to another, not when we're penalizing somebody for making or creating more than we think is fair, but when we treat each other as equal and established between us, win-win relationships based on values, giving, receiving, based on trade. In my view, trade is the fundamental virtue of human interaction. Thank you. Thank you. It's hard to come up with the right genealogy coefficient. It's hard to come up with the right tax rates, but let me give you two tax rates that aren't right because they yield the anarchy that I think would ensue if we got them that way. That's 0% or 100%. That's 0% which nothing comes in and 100% which is a totalitarian regime. We're not here for any of that. And I think the same thing we could talk about in the genealogy coefficient. We could have absolute inequality and absolute equality. Neither of these extremes are here. We're not here to argue those. We're here as reasonable individuals, part of a community, to decide what we think should be part of that discussion and debate and what shouldn't be. We have a constitution which we've talked about. We also have a Bill of Rights and we're both, I should say, exercising that First Amendment right now for it. We also have a Fifth Amendment. It says you don't strike my property and my liberty without due process for that. That's a decision, a decision that was taken in Philadelphia to say we're gonna make it really hard to ever change that. We're gonna have to make it so that three quarters of the states and the two thirds majorities in Congress are gonna have to say yes to these things. But it's still political, it's still a choice and we can change it. We've done it more than two dozen times over 200 and some odd years because the world's changed because values and norms and other things that go with it and that's okay. It hasn't stopped investment in this country. Ask an investor whether there's enough certainty in the world and all you say it's again like prices with farmers and the like. There's always uncertainty they don't like. You know what they really would like is they'd like the guy who makes the trains run on time. That's what they said about the duche. They like the guy who builds the Autobahn and gives them certainty about those things. That's not the kind of society that we want. We want a society where there's reasonable certainty but flexibility. Investors will value that as well. Not just as investors but as citizens. We address inequality. We address it flexibly across localities. We address it with some degree. I would say an awareness of the world not just as investors but as citizens. We all do well, including those at the bottom. Thank you.