Setting National Priorities: The 2000 Election and Beyond

Transcript

Michael H. Armacost (President, The Brookings Institution): Ladies and gentlemen, I think we'll have some others joining us, but I wanted to welcome you on behalf of the Brookings Institution for this National Issues Forum on Setting National Priorities. And I think those of you in Washington who follow government know that the government has to choose, and to choose means setting priorities. And setting priorities invites contention and controversy, sometimes conflict. And as a free people, we resolve those conflicts through the political process.

The nexus between managing these substantive choices politically is the universe of Brookings' work, basically. We're in the business of trying to illuminate the choices we face to the people, and to improve the process through which we make those decisions and carry them out.

So it's no surprise that Setting National Priorities has been a signature publication for Brookings for more than 30 years. At least I saw the first issue that came to my attention in 1968 in a volume edited, as I recall, by Kermit Gordon.

And this year, the volume's edited by Hank Aaron and by Bob Reischauer. Now normally, we published in December or January—about the time the president is ready to submit a budget to the Congress. And this year, for a variety of reasons, it comes out a little later. And in a way, that's salutary because the public is tuning into the fact that a presidential contest is underway. It's been going on for many months, of course. But I think the issues are finally penetrating through to the public.

We're a non-partisan, independent institution. We don't endorse candidates, of course. But we do think it's within our mission to try and urge a thoughtful debate among the candidates and thoughtful coverage by the press on those issues of greatest consequence to our people. And therefore, we will conduct a number of national issues forums over the coming year leading up to the election about a year from tomorrow on these issues.

Beginning in January—I think there's material in your packets about these fora. We'll begin in January a forum on the racial divide—promoting equal opportunity for a diverse people. We'll follow with four forums between April and June after the primary season is, for the most part, over on the urban agenda, on dealing with problems of an aging population, and on ensuring that the people who fall a bit behind in our go-go economy are not forgotten, and about problems of governance—improving our democratic institutions.

And we'll finish up with three fora after Labor Day on fixing our schools, and on keeping a roaring economy roaring, and on what we do with our international primacy by pursuing a foreign policy that Americans can believe in and yet is sensitive to the interests of others.

So that's the set of activities that will flow from the issues to be discussed this morning. And to help us in our discussion this morning, we're delighted that Susan Page is with us. As you all know, she's a White House correspondent for USA Today. And she's the president apparently of the White House Correspondents Association. And I'm sure you see her on many radio—or on a TV program, hear her on the radio—on the "Washington Week in Review," the "Diane Rehm Show" and others. And we're very pleased, Susan that you're here to guide this discussion. Thank you all for coming.

S. Page: Thanks very much. I've attended many of the Brookings forums on the other side of the divide here, and reporting out stories and listening to what the experts and scholars have to say. So I'm delighted to be on this side today.

And what we're going to do is, I'm going to pose a question or two to each of these distinguished people in turn and—to start the discussion. And then, in relatively quick order, we'd like to turn and see if the audience has questions and be more general.

But first of all, I want to get each of them to talk a little bit about the chapter that they wrote in the book or the subject about which they're going to discuss with us in this discussion of the major priorities of the next president.

We're going to start with Robert Reischauer. And I know that in your package, you have some biographical material about each of these men. So I'm not going to bother to go through that, although we—of course, although Bob Reischauer is the former director of the CBO and a very distinguished expert on budget issues.

When the next president takes office, he's going to face a world different from that of his predecessors that the presidents have faced for more than four decades. He's going to face a world of budget surpluses.

The fiscal year that ended just six weeks ago had a unified budget surplus of $123 billion—the first time the nation has scored back-to-back surpluses since the middle of the 1950s. And I wonder if you think this means the next president is going to have a lot more fiscal flexibility to pursue new initiatives than presidents have had for the last several generations.

R. Reischauer: The simple answer to that I think is no. [Laughter] And the reason is that we have changed the goal line for fiscal policy—that for a 30-year period, we said what we are trying to do in fiscal policy is achieve balance in the unified budget. And no sooner had we achieved that in 1998 than we shifted our focus and our definition of fiscal rectitude to balance in the non-Social Security portion of the budget. And what that basically did was move the goal line another 125 to 50 billion dollars down the field.

The candidates right now are acting as if that hasn't really taken place. They're looking at a set of budget projections that were released by the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget this summer that suggests that over the next 10 years, there will be about a trillion-dollar surplus cumulatively in the non-Social Security portion of the budget. And they've been busy spending that.

George W. Bush wants to spend it on expanded defense and some tax cuts, Bradley wants to spend it on health care for the uninsured and anti-poverty programs. George—I mean, Al Gore—wants to spend it on new brown suits. [Laughter] No. Wants to spend it on a whole lot of incremental adjustments.

But that rosy picture of the non-Social Security surplus situation rests on an assumption that we adhere to the 1997 caps on discretionary spending. And that might be a noble wish, but it's a wish that has not been reinforced by Congressional action in 1998, '99 or for the year 2000.

If Congress is unable to achieve those caps, which require about a 12 percent real cut in discretionary spending by 2002 but instead is only able to maintain 1990 spending levels at an inflation-adjusted rate, really the trillion-dollar surplus shrinks to $46 billion. In other words, it disappears entirely.

So far, the Congress hasn't even been able to do that. Excuse me—the Congress and the President haven't even been able to do that. Right now they are somewhere between five and 10 billion dollars above the inflation-adjusted amount for the year 2000. And so we're looking like we're eating into that tiny surplus and making it disappear.

Now, one can always be saved in this game by stronger than expected economic developments and inflow of revenues. And to put this into some kind of perspective, let me say that over the last four years, the adjustment that has been made between this point in the fiscal year and the end of the fiscal year in the outlook for the surplus or deficit for the non-Social Security budget has been $92 billion.

And so Congress could, in a sense, look like it's engaged in serious sin and dipping into the Social Security surplus, only to have its chestnuts pulled out of the fire by a strong economy. And even saying that, I think the new president who comes in is not going to be awash in uncommitted resources but is going to face some kind of constraints. Not as serious certainly as previous presidents, because he's not going to have to suggest serious deficit reduction.

S. Page: That question looked forward. Let's look back, just very briefly. President Clinton says he deserves credit for the surplus, Congressional Republicans say they deserve credit. Alan Greenspan might like some credit, too.

Who really deserves credit for the fact that whatever the problems in an era of budget surpluses, they're certainly a nicer set of problems than the era of budget deficit? Who deserves the credit?

R. Reischauer: The answer is "All of the Above" and a few more. I think the current surpluses that we're enjoying are the result of sound policy, strong economics and a lot of good luck. Sound policy in the form of multi-year deficit reduction packages, the first and most significance [sic] of which was enacted under George Bush's watch. And that really set the tone and set up enforcement procedures that were enforceable.

Then it was reiterated by Clinton in '93, and then the 1997 Budget Act. We didn't only have sound fiscal policy, we had good monetary policy—that the actions of the lawmakers to slow the growth of spending, increase taxes, allowed the Federal Reserve to adopt a looser monetary policy than it otherwise would.

The combination of these two forces helped stimulate what will be the longest expansion in American economic history. Right now, it's the longest peacetime expansion. But as of January of this year, it will be the longest expansion in our entire economic history.

Then, we were benefitted from good luck. And we have had good luck in all sorts of forms. Probably the most significant piece of good luck was the fact that the Soviet Union fell apart in a benign way in 1989, and that allowed us to downsize our military 27 percent in real terms over the course of this decade. But there were many other bits of good news, such as the exuberance in the stock market, which generated a lot of realized capital gains that caused money to pour into the Treasury, and so on.

S. Page: Henry Aaron, you write this morning in the Washington Post about the lockbox idea with Social Security, which policymakers—Republicans came up with the idea, but the president's adopted it. Does this in fact device make some sense in protecting Social Security?

H. Aaron:: The lockbox may be good fiscal policy—it does precisely nothing to affect the future course of Social Security in any direct way. Social Security's fate depends on the revenues flowing into it and the benefits flowing out. The proposal to, in effect, maintain balance in the rest of the federal budget, which is what the lockbox idea amounts to, does nothing either to Social Security revenues directly or to Social Security benefits.

The same is true incidentally for Medicare, which faces fiscal problems as large as or larger than those of Social Security, and sooner.

There could be some indirect effects down the road from good fiscal policy on Social Security. Wages might rise a little bit faster if we save more as a nation, by not running deficits in the national government—and higher wage growth somewhat helps the Social Security system.

On the other hand, if we save more, we may have lower real interest rates down the road, and that would marginally reduce the amount of income flowing into the Social Security Trust Fund. Obviously, how much depends on how large the Trust Fund actually is.

These two would partially offset one another. The net effects would be very small, and they would be a long time in coming. So again, the brief answer after that long answer is: the lockbox idea does nothing to affect the long-run fate of the Social Security.

S. Page: Well, there's—the issues that you hear most about on the campaign trail are number one, Social Security and Medicare, and number two, education which we'll talk about in a moment. When it comes to Social Security and Medicare, what do you think about the seriousness of the debate, among the candidates who would like to be the next president, about the steps they would take to preserve the long-term solvency of the system?

H. Aaron: Well, among the candidates, Vice President Gore is supporting the administration's proposals that were put forward in various forms throughout 1999. Those proposals would extend the life of Social Security to about mid-century?about 50 years from now.

The other—Senator Bradley has not issued a Social Security plan. Among the Republicans, the most articulated version has come from Steve Forbes, who unabashedly wishes to privatize the Social Security system.

But what the Republican candidate will end up endorsing remains to be seen. A negotiation is going to occur in the course of the platform-writing, focus groups will be held, opinion polls will be taken I think before we see the final version emerging for the Republican candidate.

The party as a whole has been generally supportive of moving the management of Social Security from the federal government into the private sector. The proportion that would get moved varies from plan to plan, but that's the overall theme.

I think the most striking thing though about all of the proposals for dealing with Social Security, Democratic and Republican, is that among the four ways of improving the balance in the system—raising taxes, cutting benefits, increasing investment returns flowing into the pension system, or simply transferring general revenues to support the system—virtually no one among the—certainly not the administration and not the Republican candidates—have proposed either of the first two, which might be called the "painful approaches" to dealing with Social Security.

The administration spoke of no cuts in Social Security benefits. It proposed to transfer general revenues and increase returns by investing in a diversified portfolio—investing reserves in a diversified portfolio, including common stocks.

The Republicans, if you look closely, have actually gone one better. They would shift the system in the direction of private management but over the long haul, would raise benefits and transfer more general revenues into the system. The mechanisms by which that occurs are very indirect and it occurs through the private sector as an intermediary.

But neither party has so far been willing to belly-up to the bar and say either that benefits should be somewhat reduced or that taxes flowing in earmarked for the system should be somewhat increased.

S. Page: Just very briefly, we have Medicare plans on the table for prescription drug coverage from both parties. What do you think the odds are that there will be legislation enacted before the presidential election next year?

H. Aaron: I hope my life expectancy—[Ms. Page laughs]—is as certain as that action will not occur. [Laughter] These issues are the most explosive, difficult and vital issues to the majority of American families that the federal government deals with. They're ahead of taxes. Social Security taxes are larger than income taxes for a large majority of American voters.

The benefits flow to between 40 and 50 million people—over 20 percent of the population. This isn't the third rail, in the sense that "touch it and you die"; but it is an issue that requires the mobilization of a national consensus, which is not remotely visible on the horizon.

Both parties—I believe correctly—understand that the positions they take on these issues—Social Security and Medicare—can have a material effect on whether they are able to sustain or become the majority party for many years to come. And therefore, they're going to tread extremely cautiously leading up to the election. And action after that I think will be equally cautious, because at that point, the parties will be looking ahead to the mid-term elections in, God save us, 2002.

S. Page: Tom Loveless, let's talk about education. You know, if you're out covering candidates, as I've been and some of the other people in the audience have been, you'd think sometimes they were running for school board president, not president of the United States. They talk so much about education.

What's the reality when it comes to the president's role, and the next president's role, in addressing the educational system—the educational problems in this country?

T. Loveless: Well, the reality is it's quite limited. And if you recall, the last time education was a big issue in a campaign was 1988, and that had to do with the "Pledge of Allegiance" of all things, and Michael Dukakis in Massachusetts.

Very often in the campaigns, education takes on really a symbolic role, because the federal government's true role is so limited. The federal government only supplies about 7 percent of kindergarten through 12th-grade funding in the United States. State and local governments provide the rest.

And so, when you hear about these great debates carried on at the national level about education, they're very often more about symbolic politics than real substantive educational policy.

S. Page: When it comes to the substance of education, do you think public schools in this country are generally getting better, are getting worse or are staying about the same?

T. Loveless: They have essentially stayed about the same, with minor deviations around this very stable pattern for the last 25 years. If you look at reading and math scores, they went up—first of all, they declined in the 1970s, they went up in the 1980s. They declined slightly at the beginning of the 1990s, and they've gone up slightly in the latter part of this decade.

So schools aren't declining. They're not falling apart like a lot of people think. They're also not improving at a rate that most Americans are comfortable with. There's a general feeling on the part of the public that education, especially in terms of the skills and knowledge that it provides to students, is becoming more and more important. And there's some unease about the rate of progress.

S. Page: If this is?if education is largely a state and local concern, what are the states that are doing the best job of providing innovative leadership in education program?

T. Loveless: Well, all of the states in the last four or five years have adopted standards. Now—and they're also going to have tests that measure whether or not kids have actually learned what those standards delineate.

Some states have done a better job of this than others. I think Virginia, for instance, has done a very good job of it, in terms of specifically laying out what it is that kids—say, a third-grader—needs to know in mathematics; what a third-grader needs to know in terms of history.

Now, there's going to be a lot of tinkering with these tests as they come to be real—as we actually give them to children, and find out what it is that they know. As you know, the failure rates in Virginia have been horrendously high. And the first impulse on the part of many parents is to criticize the tests and to question whether—measuring the right things, for instance.

So as these tests come on line—and they're coming on line across the country—you're going to see more questions asked about what it is that children are actually learning, and what we can do to help that.

S. Page: Are there some states that are clearly doing the worst job in the nation, in terms of looking at education?

T. Loveless: Well, California—[Laughter]—all right, now. I was born and raised in Sacramento, so I have the right to say that. California—and I also taught sixth grade in California for nine years. So perhaps I contributed to the problem. [Laughter] Unwittingly, believe me.

California certainly—again, at the beginning of the 1990s, I would target it as one state that did a number of things wrong. It adopted several sort of trendy ideas in the teaching of reading whole language, for instance. Its math curriculum went to a very soft, sort of mushy mathematics that didn't have much math in it at all. So California made some mistakes. But I think that they've tried to turn themselves around in the last three or four years.

Kentucky is another state that's very interesting, because in one sense, it's been reforming itself really in an old way. That is, that the court came in and found their method of financing schools to be unconstitutional, ordered remedies on the school system. The whole school system was essentially thrown out and the Kentuckians started over in formulating a new system and building a new system.

They've also done some—they've done some good things and some bad things. And the bad things they've done, again, is adopt many reforms that are top—down in orientation and are questionable in terms of their effectiveness. For instance, multi-age—they implemented multi-age classrooms in the primary grades. And the research on that is mixed at best. So some of the Kentucky reforms I would pinpoint as not very good.

S. Page: Is there a single thing that accounts for the state that do well? Is it a governor or a parents' force, or teachers? What's the force that makes states address this issue in a smart way?

T. Loveless: Well, Pat Moynihan always jokes that the thing that really makes a state do well on the NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] test is to be located close to Canada. [Laughter] Right, because the states that border Canada have the very highest NAEP scores in the country.

No, the state's the wrong level of analysis to look at in education. The thing to look at—and perhaps I'm just revealing my own bias as a former teacher—but the thing to look at in education are schools, classrooms, school systems. That's where reform really takes place, and not at the state or federal level.

S. Page: And about as far as you can get from the White House as you can imagine.

T. Loveless: Yes. [Laughter]

S. Page: Bruce Katz, let's talk about urban problems. I think historically we've seen a sharp line between suburban issues and urban issues. And I wonder if you think that's now getting blurred.

B. Katz: Well, I think it's fundamentally getting blurred. I think that the dominant trend in the United States today is the decentralization of economic and residential life?the spreading out of metropolitan areas further and further away from the central core.

And so the issue is no longer just about central cities that may be seeing a concentration of poverty and lower fiscal capacity and the inability to deal with a whole range of challenges. But increasingly, it's about older suburbs—suburbs built after the war that are beginning to look more and more like central cities. Their school poverty rate is rapidly increasing, their fiscal capacity is not keeping pace.

These are the places where you find the dead malls. And the older suburbs are also the places that you don't find the central business district, the large downtown commercial area. You don't find the large philanthropic foundation. You don't have the waterfront. So their ability to sort of come back is greatly less, I would think, than the central cities'.

S. Page: We talked about whether a president has a role in education. What's a president's role or the federal role when it comes to addressing some of these metropolitan issues?

B. Katz: Well, I think the Feds contribute to the problem. I think the federal government and to a much greater extent the state governments, set the rules of the development game—through spending policy, through tax policy, through regulatory policy. And generally those rules today basically tilt the playing field against the redevelopment of older communities and toward the development of greenfields.

So to some extent, the federal and state governments are subsidizing the sprawl or setting rules that basically make sprawl less expensive than it otherwise should be.

S. Page: To talk about today, what would be the most important thing the federal government could do to avoid continuing to contribute to the problem? And what's the thing the federal government mostly likely would be willing to do —

B. Katz: Willing to do—

S. Page: Toward that line.

B. Katz: Well, I think the federal government has already moved down the line towards some very helpful responses. And that's setting the geography of governance at the metropolitan level with regard to some key programs. They've done it with regard to environmental and air quality and water quality. They've done it to some extent with regard to transportation.

So the federal government increasingly is basically saying: "We should not govern either just at the state level or at these parochial levels. We need to think about metropolitan areas as the new units of the economy. And when we talk about environment and transportation but increasingly workforce, housing, welfare, the metropolitan unit is probably the right level of governance."

It's not just government, but governance—collaboration among local jurisdictions.

Will it move that way in workforce and housing and welfare? Probably in incremental steps. What can it do in the short term that's feasible?

The federal government should basically require that all spending be disclosed in a spatial manner. We require that of banks. We require that of thrifts. We require them to disclose where they lend by race or by income or by state. We don't require that of transportation entities.

So if you're living in a particular jurisdiction and you want to know how your state department of transportation spends your money—does it spend it on the next round of beltways, or does it spend on large bypass projects, or does it invest back in the urban core—it's pretty hard to find out.

So that would be a simple thing for the federal government could do—sort of a neutral kind of issue. Let's just tell everyone where we spend our funding.

S. Page: Does anybody do that now at the state level, say? [Off mic]

B. Katz: Oh, no. I mean, one of the most difficult things to figure out is where these entities actually do spend their money. So they tend to sort of hide the ball, and they don't want anyone particularly to know, because therein lies the road toward coalition-building.

S. Page: Well, Vice President Gore has made an issue of sprawl. And I wonder if you think this is an issue that's getting some resonance politically, or whether—or what you think about the quality of the debate on this set of issues.

B. Katz: Well, I think, you know, what he's responding to is in part what the Washington Post found yesterday in a poll. The sort of polled all these folks, and one about, you know, one of the issues that most people were talking about is: "I don't have time to spend with my family."

That's not because we're traveling more to work. The journey is—stays fairly constant. It's that we're getting into our car for everything else. I mean, we haven't really organized our communities, in a way so that people can easily get to school, run errands of daily life, and so forth.

I think what Gore has done is elevated the issue. I mean, he's basically said "This is an issue for public conversation. This is not just a market, this is not just consumer preferences. This is really about how government policies affect these decentralization trends."

And I think what he's done is basically given a lot of constituencies and coalitions within the states more authority, you know, more legitimacy in their efforts to principally reform state policy.

S. Page: Gary Burtless, when it comes to income inequality, it's an issue that I think there's a general feeling that income inequality has in fact—is a trend that's gotten much worse in recent years, and especially with this booming economy. Is that in fact correct?

G. Burtless: Well, it's not true in the last five or six years. It's definitely the case that all levels of the income distribution, all regions of the country, with the exception of Hawaii, and all races have participated in the economic progress of the last five or six years.

The incomes of people in the bottom one-fifth of the American income distribution—it improved just as fast as the income for people in the top 5 percent, according to recent Census figures.

So recent economic progress has been very uniform. If you go back to the end of the 1980s and you say "Well, where do we stand relative to that?", progress has been very much more concentrated amongst people in the higher ranks of the American income distribution. I just ran off some numbers before coming down here. Among people in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, incomes have risen about a third since 1989; and in the bottom one fifth they've risen about 3 percent. And that 3 percent gain since the end of the 1980s has not really been enough to wipe off the substantial losses in income that people in the bottom ranks of the income distribution sustain during the 1980s. So they are still behind where they were at the end of the 1970s.

S. Page: If everybody is not participating in the economic good times to some degree, should we worry about the fact that rich people are doing the best?

G. Burtless: Well, if your time horizon is the last 5 or 6 years, you could say that the economy is doing the job for a few decades we expected the government to do. The economy is lifting the boats of people in the bottom ranks of the distribution as much as it is people in the middle class and in the higher ranks of the income distribution. If on the other hand you say, Well, over a long period of time that includes periods of recession as well as periods of economic expansion, how was the U.S. economy doing in allocating the prosperity across people in different positions, I think you would remain quite dissatisfied with progress.

S. Page: I've been handed a question, which is a good question, and I'm going to ask it—I don't want to take credit for it, because I didn't think of it. But the question is: In a time of such long expansion, wouldn't you expect inequalities to decline rather than to widen?

G. Burtless: Well, that is in fact what used to occur in economic expansions. There used to be a considerable narrowing of the gap between lower-income families and higher-income families. And the main reason is that one of the big things that happens in an expansion is a lot of the people who are unemployed at the beginning of the expansion become employed and work longer hours, and that especially helps lower-income families enjoy rapid economic progress. And that was the trend over the postwar period up to the 1980s. The 1980s represented a very strong break with that historical pattern.

So, yes, you would expect that there would be a narrowing. But apparently a lot of other things are occurring to frustrate that normal expectation.

S. Page: If the next president thought this was a problem and wanted to narrow income inequality, and it's an issue that Bill Bradley for one has talked about to some degree, what could he or she do?

G. Burtless: Well, I in my chapter in this book, "Setting National Priorities," I urged two kinds of changes. One is a change that would include all of the youngsters in the United States in some kind of health insurance program that is publicly organized, exactly as we have all of the older people in the United States in publicly organized insurance, known as Medicare. And I think that that would greatly help one of the populations that has sustained the worst fate over the last 20 years, and that is younger families where there are children. If the government helps organize and pay for the insurance that these youngsters receive, the wages to young parents I think could improve, because their employers wouldn't be making such a large direct contribution for them; and, even more importantly, many more of these youngsters and their families would have insurance protection, which they currently lack.

The second thing I mention is that there's been a major change in the way the United States helps lower-income families over the last 20 years, especially over the last 10. We have really redirected our policy towards helping low-income families where there is a worker present. We don't provide them all with health insurance, but we try to provide them with better health insurance. But most importantly, we greatly expanded the tax refunds that these families receive under the income tax system. They get vastly larger tax refunds than they used to, and that has improved their situation. But there is one group of working age, low-income families that have fared a lot worse than the others, and that is the families where there is a potential breadwinner in the family but that breadwinner is not working full-time—often because they experience recurrent spells of unemployment. And I say for these families we have an expectation that they would go to work. If they cannot find work after 6 months or so, and we obligate them to if they want to continue to receive welfare, then we should provide them with some kind of job.

S. Page: We've got—let's talk to William Gale about tax policy. We've got this wonderful economy, we have got budget surpluses. Is it the time to have a major debate about the kind of tax system we have and think about a flat tax, a national sales tax or some kind of much simpler tax system than we have today?

W. Gale: Well, it's always a good time to talk about tax policies. [Laughter] We definitely have a strong economy. Most of the discussion in past policy the last year has also been predicated on the idea that we have a big surplus with lots of free cash to spend on various items. For the reasons that Bob mentioned earlier, what you think is a surplus issue is central to what you think of the tax cut debate. If you think like I do, and apparently like Bob does, that there is not a whole lot of extra money in the surplus, then it's not just free money that is sitting there waiting to be cut. In fact, none of the long-term tradeoffs between?that are typically involved in budget deficits or surpluses have changed merely by virtue of the fact that we currently have a surplus. Every dollar we take today we reduce some future resources by a certain amount, by the same amount now that we have a current surplus, as we did?as it would have in the 1980s when we had a budget deficit. So none of the inter-generational issues change, and I think if you just look at the surplus there's sort of?there's no case based just on the surplus for a large-scale tax cut. But that's not what you asked me about.

You asked about the flat tax and the sales tax. Basically there are two types of tax policies that you could pursue. One is a change in the level of tax revenues which for the reason I just mentioned I don't think it's particularly in the cards. The other is a change in the structure of taxation; that is, what do we tax, what do we give exemptions for, deductions or credits for, and what tax base do we employ.

The tax debate—while the debate on the level of taxation has been poor, the debate on the structure of taxation has been even worse I think. Things like the flat tax and the sales tax are wonderful things to have debates about. They put in very stark contrast a lot of the issues we face in tax policy, like tradeoff between fairness and simplicity, tradeoffs between economic growth and the other goals of tax policy. And it would be wonderful if we could have a serious debate about these issues. What happened though I think is tax policy somehow becomes the whipping boy for every anti-government fever that's out there, and the debate quickly turns into demagoguery pretty much on both sides.

S. Page: You know, it's interesting though historically being in favor of cutting taxes is one of the safest political positions a president candidate could take. But it didn't seem to do much for Bob Dole three years ago. And I'm not sure there are signs that this is an issue that really resonates with the public. Do they want—do you think Americans' attitudes generally toward taxes and whether they are too high has changed?

W. Gale: [?] We have this notion that tax cuts are a fail-safe political issue. I think we get that notion from Ronald Reagan. When he was proposing these massive tax cuts in the '80 campaign and after he was elected, they were pretty controversial issues. And since then proposals for tax cuts have gone over like lead balloons basically. And so it might not be true that arguing for a tax cut is the most fail-safe political view. It certainly worked for Reagan, but Dole is no Reagan. And I think right now with—people are doing fairly well, this is not objecting to anything that Gary just said about the lower end of the income distribution, but generally times are good and generally this is a time when people are willing to look beyond their own pocketbook toward broader issues like taking care of the aged, taking care of the poor, taking care of children. And so no poll indicates that tax cuts are high on the public agenda. And I think that makes sense both from a political perspective and from an economic perspective.

S. Page: Do we have some veterans of the Mondale campaign here who probably have some strong views about the efficacy of tax cuts? [Laughter]

Paul Light, let's talk about the political system generally. Some analysts think that this next election will set a record low in terms of voter turnout in modern times. And we see that even though times are good, the economy is good, the nation is at relative peace, that Americans continue to be skeptical about or cynical towards elected leaders. One of the things that has contributed to that is the bitter partisan divide we've seen in the past couple years. And I wonder if you think whoever the next president is, if there is a divided government will we see this kind of partisan bickering continue? Or is there—do you see some light that means that this is not inevitable?

P. Light: That's really not my strength area. I'll answer it. I'm looking down —

S. Page: You don't get to choose the questions here. [Laughter]

P. Light: I'm looking down the line here, and I can see a hole in Tom Mann's shoe. Obviously—[Laughter]—the income distribution has not gotten—[Laughter]—this panel. I think it's a nasty time. I don't think it's going to become less nasty in the future. I don't think that candidates are learning important lessons out there all the time about how you get elected, and I think they're importing the campaign into governing more and more, which is what Tom and his colleague at—dare I suggest at this issues forum—at the American Enterprise Institute about working on in terms of dealing with the permanent campaign. So there's been over the last 10 years longer the importation of campaign tactics to the floors of the House and Senate, and I don't expect that that will change. And a lot of candidates and the next president certainly will have gone to school on Bill Clinton, who has shown that mounting a permanent campaign is arguably the best way to survive as president and increase your popularity. The lesson from all the tragedy in the Clinton administration is that you too can survive the kind of terrible problems that he's had by campaigning constantly. And I expect that constant campaign to continue to penetrate into governing, and I think it's going to be—it will be some time—unless we're able to call on candidates to think more highly of the democratic process. And I know journalists are coming along on that issue.

S. Page: When it comes to making the government work better—the Clinton administration had this reinventing government initiative which Vice President Gore headed—do you think there's a legacy there? Have they in fact reinvented the government or made the government work better?

P. Light: I think there are places where reinventing government has made a difference. I think customer satisfaction is a little bit higher here and there. And the Social Security Administration has a better, actually an award-winning 800 telephone number. Now if you call up and ask for a different benefit package you can't get one, but it is more customer friendly.

I think reinventing has kind of created this notion that there is something big happening in terms of how we deliver services, when the real story is in the dramatic reshaping of government. The federal government is shrinking in terms of its total work force. The bureaucracy is changing. We have lost a huge number of jobs both under contract and within the career civil service. We have gone from about 2.1 million full-time federal employees down to 1.7. We are going to get down to 1.5. And there is no question that Bush and/or Gore and/or any of the candidates can get the federal government down below a million. The current rhetoric is not only have we gone to pre-Kennedy era levels, we can get to pre-Korean War levels, and I'm expecting Pat Buchanan to announce shortly that he would like to get us back to pre-Revolutionary War levels. [Laughter]

The ultimate issue though is that those jobs are not disappearing; they are being contracted out. And right now within the federal government there is a huge campaign underway to identify targets for outsourcing. The contracts that the federal government is making are getting larger and larger. The procurement work force is getting smaller and smaller. There's a blurring of the boundaries between government, the private sector and the non-profit sector. It's really a remarkable time in administrative history. We are seeing the way government works redefined in a dramatic way, and we are talking a lot about reinventing government, and there is a disconnect between that conversation between about really interesting and important novel changes out in the agencies in terms of technologies and customer satisfaction, while this huge change is underway that goes back to the end of the Cold War.

S. Page: Tom Mann, you know even Bill Bradley bought a new pair of shoes in New Hampshire.

T. Mann: I have to break down.

S. Page: Let's talk about campaign finance. You know, I think there's a general widespread sense that the campaign finance system is broken or there is something wrong with it. What do you think fundamentally is amiss about the way we finance campaigns?

T. Mann: Well, it's not the total amount of money that's spent, which is oftentimes the first complaint raised. We spend 2 billion, 3 billion dollars?sounds like a lot. But in a country with 270 million Americans and lots of commercial products, it's hard to get anyone's attention to politics and public affairs, and God knows Americans don't really think about that that much. Nor is it a matter I think of campaign contributions buying votes on the House, the floor of the House and the Senate. It really goes to a whole host of other problems. One is the problem of raising that money, the money chase, what it does to the way politicians spend their time, who they see, who they talk to, how it discourages people from running, how it leads to conflicts of interest that oftentimes develop, how it leads to great imbalances between incumbents and challengers. Those are the kind of chronic problems that have been with us for a good long time. But it's gone beyond that now. We've had laws on the books since 1907 saying corporations cannot finance federal elections through their treasuries, and since the '40s not with labor unions. And yet that's exactly what's happening today. We have 5-, 6-, 7-figure contributions. Mind you it's not so much that the corporate world is trying to push its resources on politicians; it's just the opposite. It's heavy-handed efforts by public officials to raise big bucks, because there is such a competitive environment now between the political parties. This creates a widespread impression going back to the concerns about trusting government that politicians are bought and sold. I think in fact they're not. But the whole process looks so tawdry right now.

S. Page: So what's the remedy?

T. Mann: Well, first of all, there is no solution to the problem of money and politics. There is not a country in the world that's solved it. And we will not solve it by passing the McCain-Feingold legislation or passing voluntary full public financing or deregulating the system. The tensions between the inequalities generated by a market system and our quest for political equality are inherent in our democracies. All we can do is try to manage it without violating other values that we hold dear, like free speech. So my own personal view is that we've got to keep slugging away, patching the holes as they burst in the system. Most immediately we have got a crazy system where contributions limits were set in 1974 and fixed. And their real value now is a third of what they were 25 years ago. We ought to raise the contribution limits to reflect inflation, and index them from now on. We ought to look for other sorts of resources for candidates. That might be 100 percent tax credits for a small contribution, direct or indirect public subsidies for broadcast time, direct mailing. And then I think we have to try to patch the holes with soft money. I mean, either prohibit it entirely and free parties to raise hard money and spend hard money easier or set a limit on it, as Senator Chuck Hagel has proposed in his most recent legislation.

With the so-called issue advocacy it's really a dilemma here. You know, companies and other groups are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on legitimate issue advertising, but there is now a category of electioneering that isn't regulated, isn't disclosed. And the reason being is that it's designed to fall just this side of the Supreme Court's definition of so-called express advocacy. It's the most disingenuous political communication going on now. Our research demonstrates that that kind of sham issue advocacy has no issue content, is more negative, tends to have more attack component to it, and is more political than campaign ads. That makes a mockery of the whole system. But it's tricky dealing with that. I think we've got to keep working away and not promise a panacea either through full public financing or full deregulation.

There are areas of our system where more public financing and some deregulation makes sense, but alas neither is the solution.

R. Haass: Like the campaign, foreign policy is last here. [Laughter] A sign of the times?

S. Page: Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and sort of the unofficial end of the Cold War, which we apparently won. What do we do with it now? Is there a consensus or a debate about what the U.S. role is in this world?

R. Haass: Well, we didn't just apparently win it—we did win it. No, there's no consensus. There's no consensus over what our priorities in the world ought to be, there is no consensus over how we ought to go about realizing or protecting those priorities. There is no consensus over the use of tools. So essentially a decade has gone by and the search for something to take the place for containment is really no farther along than it was.

S. Page: Who is to blame for that?

R. Haass: Lots of people. Lots to go around here. I would begin with the president. My biggest critique of this president is not what he said and not what he's done but it's what he hasn't said and he hasn't done. If you simply did a quantitative analysis of his State of the Union addresses and added up all the paragraphs devoted to foreign policy as opposed to everything else, you'd get less than 10 percent. That tells you something. When you don't use the bully pulpit the American people get the clue. I think Republicans in the Congress share some of the responsibility. If you look at the "Contract For America," there was precious little to deal with foreign policy, defense policy.

I think the media, your profession, deserves a lot of the responsibility, the closed bureaus. You know, covering Princess Di's funeral does not account for international coverage I am sorry to say. If you look at the evening news, you're down to about the quarter of the time you used to have for this.

I think schools deserve responsibility. Certain foundations no longer give money in this area. So essentially the natural reaction of American society and its politicians after you won the Cold War was to move away from international affairs, was exactly the wrong reaction. If anything we are more integrated with the world than ever before, but you wouldn't know it.

S. Page: When the Senate defeated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty last month, President Clinton said there was a new strain of isolationism in the land, and particularly among the other party. Do you think that's true? Is there more isolationism?

R. Haass: No. In order to be an isolationist you have got to care passionately about foreign policy. You have got to care enough about it?[Laughter]?there's no isolationism out there. There's no Lindberghs for the most part. The Buchanans are the fringe people right now.

So people are not isolationists; they're indifferent. The hallmark characteristic right now of the American people is they couldn't care less. When you do polls after people vote and you ask them, Why did you vote the way you did?—foreign policy doesn't figure in the exit polling. Or just the other week there was a major national poll, and they asked the American people, What bothers you most—what concerns you most when you get up in the morning? And it's essentially every issue we have heard around this forum. But foreign policy in the most recent poll came in 13th. So it's not isolationism; it's essentially indifference.

And I think what you are really seeing in the Republican opposition to the CTBT, to the Comprehensive Test Ban, is the beginnings of a debate about how we approach the world, how unilateral, and to the extent it's multilateral do we do it through the U.N., do we do it through treaties, do we do it through alliances, for example the way NATO fought the Kosovo War? Do we do it through informal coalitions? That's the real debate.

S. Page: We've had one foreign policy issue breakthrough in this campaign, and that is whether George W. Bush could name the leaders of—[Laughter]—breakaway republics. I'm not going to ask you to name those—[Laughter]—

R. Haass: What a relief.

S. Page: Do you think—

R. Haass: All those flash cards were for nought. [Laughter]

S. Page: Is it correct, or do you think a serious candidate for the presidency should be able to respond in a more—in a better way than George W. Bush did when asked those kinds of questions?

R. Haass: No, I don't think it much matters. We're interested in judgment. Information is something that's easy to get. I thought it said more about the state of journalism than it did about anything else. But I also thought the most interesting answer he got was not the question of who was prime minister or president, but was his answer on Pakistan. And what he essentially said on Pakistan—he couldn't remember the guy's name—couldn't remember Musharrif's name. But then he said, This is not such a bad thing, the coup, that it actually provides a bit of stability. And that to me was substantively the right answer, that democracy is simply one of our goals out there. And more important right now than having a succession of essentially corrupt, incompetent politicians in Pakistan is that they get something of a respite to deal with the very real problems that they have. This is a failing country with nuclear weapons. It's a smaller version of Russia. It's one of the most dangerous countries on the earth. And for the United States to simply have a simplistic, narrow policy that says all we care about is the restoration of democracy is wrong.

So actually his substantive answer in the one set, in that series of questions, was a very good one, and it's unfortunate for example that the Washington Post in its editorial yesterday I think got it exactly wrong, and lots of pundits have been disagreeing with him on that. But it actually turned out to be the right answer.

S. Page: We're going to open up to the audience for questions in just a minute. I am just going to ask one question of this group as a whole, and that is the Brookings Institution has laid out these eight big priorities for the next president. Well, no president will come with eight priorities—you can't do that—you can have two or three. What are the priorities that will drop away, won't really be factors for the next president? What are the priorities that should drop away? Because perhaps your answer to those two issues might be different. What do you think? Which one of you should be—you know, if we were playing musical chairs, which one of you should be back in the audience —

H. Aaron: I think an easier question is which ones should remain.

S. Page: All right.

H. Aaron: And I would nominate reform of Medicare and dealing if possible with the growing ranks of the uninsured. But the Medicare system is experiencing a number of increasingly serious problems.

The big question though is whether a consensus can emerge around which legislation might be crafted. There are the hints of such a core group of beliefs in the rather important similarities between the administration's proposals on Medicare reform and those of the Breaux-Thomas Commission. But I want to reiterate what I said earlier: this is an extremely sensitive area, and unless one is going to spend more money one is going to redistribute costs inevitably in any major legislation. And there is a simple law I think of politics which is those who figure out that they are losers tend to scream louder than those who figure out they are winners cheer. Elected officials are aware of that and therefore they move with great caution.

The saving grace of pleas of manna from heaven in one form or another in the case of Medicare is increased efficiency will enable us to provide the same services at greatly reduced costs. There may be something to that claim, but it isn't enough to provide drug coverage, improved long-term care coverage, better catastrophic coverage and various other short-comings with the system that critics have observed.

So I think Medicare reform is an issue that—[audio break]—whether it gets off the platter because Congress has effectively dealt with it by 2004, I think is much less certain.

S. Page: Tom.

T. Mann: Susan, I'll offer my issue for the cutting room floor, only because past experience suggests it's going to end up there anyways and I might as well get some credit for it. What I do, though, is really substitute a plea, and sort of for a general area. It's not about substantive policy, but it's about conversations during the campaign about means as well as ends, about governance as well as policy. You know, we focus a lot on the personal characteristics of the candidates, and we plumb the details the of their policy proposals, but we talk almost not at all about how they would aspire to implement any of this, what their take on the nature of the political system is, how they would propose to lead, how they would propose to build coalitions given the nature of the Congress, the polarization of the parties, the super majority requirement in the Senate. So, there's a lot of broader governance questions. Campaign finance is a piece of that, but only a piece of it. I'll give it up if you'll give me governance.

S. Page: Go ahead.

B. Katz: I think urban issues are going to remain a priority, particularly if the Democrats take back the House, irrespective of what happens in the presidential election. The question is whether we're going to redefine urban policy. If you saw Clinton and Hastert the other day, what they basically proposed was conventional urban policy, a series of targeted, principaling out tax initiatives that only go to the most distressed areas of either inner-city communities or perhaps rural communities. I think that's the wrong way to define urban policy going forward. I think we need to lift the conversation, talk about the larger sets of policies, spending, tax and regulatory policies that are affecting cities and older suburbs and begin to reverse the affect of those policies, which principally are to facilitate further sprawl and further decentralization.

So, I don't doubt that, particularly with a Democratic House, we will continue to talk about urban issues or places left behind. The question is whether we're going to talk about it in the old way or in the new way.

S. Page: William Gale, before I go to this side, did you have something you wanted to say?

W. Gale: Yes. I wanted to say something similar to what Tom had said, but I figured that's Tom bailiwick, so let him say it. But, I think somehow elevating the level of the debate would make more difference than anything in tax policy. And this summer, for example, the president agreed to a $200 to $300 billion tax cut, moderate, a moderate force in Congress, a moderate group in Congress agreed to a $300 to $500 billion tax cut, the Republicans want an $800 billion tax cut. Well, you know, given that set of options, a group of people that basically trust each other and respect each other and realize that they have to get along could come to some sort of agreement. Instead, we had this ridiculous spectacle of drawing the tax cut debate out all summer, with the House and the Senate passing something that they knew was going to be vetoed, then holding on to it for a long time. Then the president finally vetoing it, I don't know when, September. And then all of a sudden they had two weeks to take care of the whole rest of the budget.

And so, if they had—no—granted, both sides have reasons not to like each other, I'm not disputing that. But one can imagine a different set of arrangements where, regardless of the merits of the policy, they could agree on a target for tax cut in April or May, I mean, all of the issues were out by then, and then they could spend the next four or five months working out the rest of the budget issues instead of bringing the, you know, instead of passing continuing budget resolutions, et cetera.

So, I think in things like tax policy and in Medicare, for example, where there are very big trade-offs and deals that have to be made, and where you won't get any pure policy, the biggest priority is to get a group of people that can actually work together and trust each other to do something about it.

S. Page: Bob Reischauer, what survives and what doesn't in terms of presidential priorities?

R. Reischauer: Well, you asked the question, what should and what will, and my guess is this will be largely a campaign for mayor of the United States than education, crime, sprawl and those types of issues will be played with. I don't think those are the appropriate issues. I see the future much like Henry does because he and I wrote the chapter on Medicare and Social Security, and that was not because we knew so much about it, but because that was the important issue, which is dealing with the challenge that will face our system in the second or third decades of this century. My guess is that that, there won't be a serious debate about either of those issues—meaning, candidates won't come forward and ask, you know, what pain will we have to endure. They will hope that manna will fall from Heaven, that the economy will grow faster and they can avoid making painful choices. But, by doing that, we don't develop the consensus that you will need to move forward in a bipartisan way to address these issues in the near future.

I—every year I've edited this book, Bill Gale has complained that the tax chapter gets pushed, you know, way to the back, and now that I'm leaving Brookings, the best thing he could see that would come from that is maybe the tax chapter next time will be up front and center. So, I will take this last opportunity to say one thing that I really think should be on the agenda, should be part of the debate, is restructuring our tax system, simply because we know over the next four we're going to cut taxes, and that's the political reality. And it would be a real shame if we continued doing what we've done since the 1986 reforms, which is to have a whole lot of little tax changes that make the system more complex, more confusing, more at cross-purposes, that there should be a discussion, really, of how to make this tax system simpler, fairer, and more pro-economic growth.

S. Page: How about others? Yes.

T. Loveless: I also think there is a difference between what will happen and what should happen. If you read the polls, the things that Americans are concerned about with schools are things like school safety, and getting computers into classrooms, and reducing class size. And I really doubt that those three—all three of those issues, if the federal government addresses them, will essentially expand the traditional role of the federal government in education, which, as I pointed out, is quite limited.

What I think should happen is the federal government should take a serious look at reforming what it already does, its roles that already exist in education. There are three big kindergarten through 12th grade programs in education—special ed, bilingual, and Title 1—and there aren't many people out there that think that those three programs do a very good job, they don't function very well. And so, reforming those three programs so that they do a better job of serving the kids who are in those programs is one thing that should happen. And that doesn't involve expanding federal powers.

S. Page: My personal school issue was getting through 8th grade geometry.

P. Light: I would like to say that I think that Bob and Hank should be successful, how come you're not? I mean, the Social Security-Medicare issue is at the front of setting national priorities. I think it has a lot to do with Tom's failure that you're not as successful as you could be. We have this politics around these issues that drive them to the tiny, the micro-policy. The presidency becomes kind of a micro-brewery.

My issue is never going to be at the top. We're going to continue to change the shape of government. We've got voluntary by—outs authorized, so basically over the last five years we've lost about 200,000 federal executives through these voluntary buy-outs, most of whom we're about to retire anyway. It's kind of an indirect subsidy to Carnival Cruises—we could probably figure out a better way to support that industry.

I do, I do worry in the future about the inability to attract good people to politics and to government. We are working on some, a project here to help get the best we can in terms of senior level appointees into office. And I worry that this kind of descent of the presidency into a kind of a mayoralcy, and the nastiness in politics—it's a disincentive for good people to come into government and to take the risks involved in coming to Washington. I think that's a serious problem that we need to address.

B. Katz: It's okay. I resent the attack on the mayors—

T. Mann: It's a point of personal privilege.

S. Page: Richard Haass, what's going to be the toughest foreign policy issue the next president will face, whether we debate about it in this campaign or not?

R. Haass: It's probably—the most important is clearly Russia in terms of what to do about that. And, it's not—this is a country of 150 million people, the population is going down. Life expectancy is going down. The economy is going down. The only thing that's not going down is nuclear weapons. And, it's still the one most dangerous country in the world. So, the gap between the scale of the problem and the scale of the policy is larger here than I would venture to say anything else we're heard here this morning. I'd say that is a tough one.

Secondly, trade. It's an engine for a lot of what also gets talked about here, and we have not had essentially a positive trade policy now for about five years. Fast-track authority has been allowed to expire, so after a very promising start with both NAFTA and the WTO, trade policy has ground to a halt. And if that continues, it will have economic consequences domestically, but it will also have strategic consequences internationally. So, I would hope one of the first things the new president would do would be to try to get fast-track authority and marry it up with a positive trade initiative—for example, the expansion of NAFTA.

S. Page: Let's go to the floor. Does anyone here have a question? And maybe, if you do, you could start by identifying yourself. Hillary?

Participant: Hilary Mackenzie, Southam News. I think I?d like to ask you to go one step back and talk about the pathetic voter turnout rate. If you want people to discuss these issues, the priorities, how do you first get people to get to the booth and actually vote? You have one of the lowest voter turnouts in the world.

S. Page: Who'd like to answer that? Tom?

T. Mann: It's true, we have had, through most of this century, the lowest turnout among democracies. We're right down there with Switzerland. It's a consequence of many things, including the fact that we have so many more elections than anyone else in the world. Hardly a month goes by without an election occurring in some local level.

Listen, there's been a disengagement from politics that has intensified what is already a natural tendency in America for its citizens to not be deeply engaged in politics and public affairs. We don't realize ourselves through our political leaders, and our government. And it's also the case that when times are going reasonably well, we have even less incentive. We now have a younger cohort that is more disengaged than any in the century, and so that suggests we'll get even lower levels of turnout in the future.

I'll tell you, there's one thing that really helps turnout, quite apart from improving registration and the like—it's information. It's people who read a newspaper, including something on the first page, are much, much more likely to vote than those who don't. People who know who the candidates are that are running, and one or two of the issues are much more likely as well. And so, part of the challenge here is really an educational one. The schools have absolutely abandoned their responsibility for civic education. They're too busy pursuing other agendas in K-12, and frankly, the news business has abdicated much of its responsibility. The coverage of politics in California last time around shrunk so that it was less than any, virtually any commercial product being advertised. So, there are two ways of going about it.

S. Page: Leo, did you have a question? And would you identify yourself?

Participant: Leo Rennert with McClatchy Newspapers. I'd like to ask Bob Reischauer and Henry Aaron about some of the underlying demographic projections for Social Security and Medicare? We read and hear a lot about the bulge coming up with the retirement of the baby boomers, but if you look at the actuarial reports of Social Security, they indicate that if you have a very slight deviation to more people in the workforce than projected, things could be much brighter than they're projected to be, and I'd like to ask you about three things that maybe are under-rated. One, we look around and we have record enrollments in the elementary grades. Are those being properly factored in as we look 20 years down the road? There's more pressure to open up immigration because of high-tech needs and politically, anti-immigration is going down hill. If we get more immigrants we might get younger workers to support older folks. And in term of—let's see, I had a third one—but maybe address the first two, and I'll come back to the third.

R. Reischauer: Well, I'll tell you what the third one is. [Laughter] With respect to the first one, I don't think there's a problem. I mean, the Social Security actuaries and the Census Bureau know how many children there are. They are factoring them in to the projections in the future. You know, certainly, birth rates do change, and we were way off, you know, in the 50s and the 60s when we were looking at the 80s and the 90s, but, overall, I don't think that's a huge problem.

Immigrants, you know, are a choice variable for all practical purposes. A country can adopt a more liberal immigration policy, and there's no end of people who would want to come in, and so we could increase the size of our labor force substantially. We've got to be careful about the skills that the new immigrants had, but, you know, there are projections for immigrants. There's probably a huge range of error.

I think the third and probably the most uncertain element here is what will be the labor force participation of those age 60 and over. Will there be a resurgence of older people in the labor force, in part because they want to live a higher lifestyle than their Social Security and private pensions will allow them to live because they're used to that, and in part because we are developing an ever more flexible labor market, where you can find jobs that are part-time, part-year, you know eight hours for three days a week, night jobs, various things. Will we find many of the jobs now filled by teenagers and secondary workers filled by people who are 60 and over who want to work a few months or pick up a little extra money? We are gradually increasing the amount of money one can earn and not have your Social Security benefits reduced. So, by some time early in the next century, if you're over 65, you'll be able to earn $30,000 and not have your social security benefits reduced. And there are many proposals—the president has one and the Republicans have another—to eliminate that earnings test altogether.

R. Resichauer: I'd say one thing —

Participant: The third one—

R. Reischauer: Oh, that wasn't the third one.

Participant: There's a battle over the census, if in fact we're undercounting a lot of minorities, millions of minority members in this society, and minorities tend to perhaps be on the younger side of the ledger, might that also have an impact?

H. Aaron: Let me go back to this forecast business. It is a technical question with important ramifications for policy. There's one thing we know for absolute sure about current projections—they will be wrong. That has an analytical and a political side. The analytical side is they could as easily be too optimistic as too pessimistic. The projections are somewhere in the middle of a very uncertain possible range of outcomes. The actuaries are doing a responsible job. The best thing we can do is take their projections as they gave us and not get into a war about whether they're too high or too low in the estimates of the problem we face.

The implication of that is not, from an analytical standpoint, that we should delay actions. If anything, it's the reverse. Should the projections turn out to be unduly pessimistic, future congresses and presidents will have no difficulty whatsoever grappling with how to distribute any largess that becomes available to us. If the problems turn out to be more serious than current projections indicate, and that's an equal possibility—not a likelihood, but an equal possibility—then the importance of having acted early becomes even more significant. It takes time to implement changes in either of these systems. And if you don't believe me, think about the so-called increase in the full—benefits age for Social Security. You know it's going to go from 65 to 67. Look at the calendar. Enacted in 1983, the first people affected were those turning age 62 next year, and the change will not be completed until 2024, 41 years after enactment of the change. Not all changes take that long to implement, but when you're dealing with these programs, no elected official who hopes to return to Washington after the next election is going to come forward with proposals for very abrupt changes. They're going to be phased in very gradually. So, the time to start is now.

With respect to the Census Bureau question, the impact on the Social Security and Medicare projections, I think is decidedly second order. The degree to which we under-count has probably not changed materially over time, to be sure. Certain minority groups have become more signifcant in the population than others. The other point is that the Social Security actuaries don't use Census Bureau numbers exclusively. They work off of them, but they make adjustments in order to form their judgements about what's going to happen in the future. For example, the assume a smaller increase in life expectancy than the Census Bureau projects. It's a very controversial matter. Some people think they're unduly optimistic?optimistic means people will die young—that they're unduly optimistic about the impact on Social Security, and that that adjustment should be changed. That works in the opposite direction from the productivity issue you raised.

S. Page: Gary, did you have something you wanted to say?

G. Burtless: Well, I wanted to say that in my experience—I've served on one of these technical advisory panels to help guide the Social Security actuary and what functions to pick—my experience is that the most controversial assumption is the one that Hank just mentioned, which is how fast will longevity improve in the future. And, it turns out that many more demographers seem to be much more optimistic in the sense that we get to live longer—let's use optimism the way most of us do, not the way—[Inaudible]—types would look at it. There are many demographers and probably medical researchers as well who believe that improvements in longevity in the next century are going to be much more rapid. And I think, in terms of risk factors, that is what is thought to be the biggest dangers. And as Henry also said, that's a danger that would make these projections unduly optimistic.

With regard to the census under-count, remember, the projections depend ultimately on something that the Social Security administrations knows about precisely—how much money is it sending out in recent years, how many people is it sending benefits to, the fact that the census has an incorrect distribution of the age of the population or the number people in the population does not make the Social Security Administration's knowledge about its benefit payments in any way an error. That's exactly right, if we blow up the census population, that just means that, well, we're sending out less checks to fewer people as a proportion of the true population than we know, but the number that really matters, of course, is how many people are sending in tax payments and how many are receiving benefit checks, and the Social Security Administration knows that precisely.

S. Page: Yes sir, you had a question.

Participant: I had a question for —

S. Page: And would you identify yourself.

Participant: —Yes, my name is Steven Hull [?] and I'm director of a private school in Maryland. And, it just has to deal with the voucher system. And do you feel that the voucher system, which will be an ongoing debate, will promote accountability in the school systems? And, if the voucher system does go forward, do you feel that this would further the revenue base of the urban schools? I come from Baltimore and have seen just the, you know, the decline in the, you know, quality of Baltimore city schools. Can you elaborate on the voucher system?

T. Loveless: Well, I think vouchers will be an issue in the campaign, and they'll especially be an issue in places like Michigan where it's going to be on the ballot. And those are the elections that I would be looking for, or looking at, in terms of where this issue is headed.

Will vouchers succeed in redistributing monies towards cities? That's very possible that they would. Many of the voucher plans that are already in existence, like in Cleveland and in Milwaukee, have a means test to them. They're specifically targeted towards parents of, low-income parents. And so in that sense, yes, it would redistribute resources into cities, and benefit cities greater than it would, say, suburbs. You can see this too in the polling data because the groups, slowly over the last few years, you can see that African-Americans have become far more willing to consider vouchers. They're now probably of demographic groups the biggest supporter of vouchers. Traditionally Democratic constituency, and yet the party as a whole remains opposed to vouchers, so that's another interesting political development to look for. And also, the group that appears the most hesitant to embrace vouchers is an old Republican constituency, and that is suburban voters. Suburban white voters, actually, are the least likely to support the adoption of vouchers.

So, the politics of it is going to be interesting to watch, and it might serve the cause of equity, but we don't know yet. We just haven't—we haven't had enough voucher plans in existence to really study them to find out if they'll have a great impact or not.

S. Page: Other questions? Yes ma'am.

Participant: Faye Anderson with politicallyblack.com. Actually, the questions on the census under-count and vouchers are a good segue into what I want to ask, which is to go back to what you had raised, Susan, about which issues will fall by wayside and for me it's the issue of race. I'll just ask it to all of the panelists—do you think race will be much of an issue in the 2000 campaign—race, when you look at race, you can't talk about education, for one, reforming education, without talking about race, given who's trapped in these inner-city schools. We look at urban sprawl, of course, blacks and Hispanics predominantly in urban areas. Even Medicare proposals to raise the age of eligibility when you look at black men with their life expectancy of 64.9 years, they'll die long before they are eligible for Medicare. But, so just simply put, what role will race place in the 2000 election?

S. Page: All right. Thank you. Any responses?

H. Aaron: Let me try a direct response. I think race, per se, will play a small role, but race-correlated issues will be important. When one is talking about education reform, Social Security reform, Medicare reform, the cities, one is talking about issues, as you observed in your question, of central significant to blacks, Hispanics and to other minorities. For that reason, I think there will be, as in a way I think there is a healthful sign, a focus on those issues that are important to various groups, rather than on the ethnic, religious or racial identification of those groups. I'm not pronouncing the end of such group politics in the United States—that would be foolish—but it strikes me that the focus directly on race has receded and an emphasis instead on issues that matter have, insofar as emphasis on those issues exist at all, has, stands in the place of an explicit identification of race. But others many have—

T. Mann: Well, just to underscore that, I think it's important to note that it wasn't that long ago when racial wedge issues were the thing in presidential politics and national politics. It was sort of using race as a way of mobilizing other voters and building support. That has changed really quite dramatically and now both parties are in the political game of trying to attract racial and ethnic minorities. We see it in particular among Latinos where one of the strengths of George W. Bush is his reputed ability to, and real ability in the state of Texas, to attract substantial Latino supporters. We see it in the politics of initiatives, an referendums, and welfare reform, and whole host of other issues. There was a time when even affirmative action was an issue that was sort of high on the agenda, was seen as a sort of a liability to push it. It sort of toned down rather markedly, and now you get —

S. Page: Why do you think that happened?

T. Mann: —I mean, that's a good question. I think a couple of things. Politicians began seeing that they were paying smaller political dividends and there was more to be gained by trying to increase, let's say, the percentage of Latino voters traditionally supporting on party, and there was more to be gained in trying to mobilizing African-Americans, and on the other hand, to avoid a super mobilization of African-American voters by taking racially polarized positions on issues. So, I think it's all self-interest. I think politicians had seen that it just doesn't pay the same dividends it did a generation ago, and all that really is to the good.

G. Burtless: Don't you think this is a political side effect, too, of President Clinton's term in office? There were four, I think, big racially identified topics that got a lot of debate: welfare, crime, education policy and employment policy. The first two have been deftly taken off the partisan disagreement between Republicans and Democrats because the president was a champion of welfare reform and he signed a welfare reform bill, which we're continuing to digest the effects of. With regard to crime, the big decline in crime is not dissociated with the president because he was also associated with the idea of putting lots more uniformed policemen on the streets. I merely say he's finessing this issue in a way that no longer advantages the other party.

On education, that's still a very contentious and racially identified issue, but here, as we just heard, African-Americans' views towards some of the contentious education issues have even changed in a way that makes them similar to what Republicans say they want to achieve.

And with regard to employment policy, when the unemployment rate is four percent, I guess dividing the spoils in a zero-sum game doesn't look to be the main thing we're after if everybody's employment has been going up. This does not seem to be such a divisive issue, I would say.

S. Page: Yes—[Inaudible Name] —

R. Reischauer: That was half of what I was going to say. The other half is, it all depends on who the presidential candidates are. And, should Bradley be the Democrat in the race, we have to remember what issues he's put front and center. And one is access to health care, which, as Henry says, is indirectly is important, and another is child poverty. In addition, I would think whether it was Bradley or Al Gore, minimum wage, if a minimum wage bill is not adopted before then will be an issue, as will prescription drugs in Medicare. And so I think these issues, issues that are important to minority populations will be important in this election.

T. Loveless: In education, I think the most important shift has been from the synthesis on inputs and equalizing resources to an emphasis on output. And so the issues you're going to hear about, if you—I mean, probably the most controversial aspect of education policy the last thirty years has been—[Inaudible]—in terms of race. That's really a dead issue now. And, the issue that is really coming to the fore is the issue of black-white achievement gaps, which is an issue that Republicans can actually sink their teeth into, and, you know, perhaps there can be some bipartisan agreement in that in the next administration and in the next congress.

H. Aaron: Could I just say one more word on this? I think lying behind all of this is a gradual and powerful change documented in public opinion poll information. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies has been working for a long time on a report on, well, it's a report on affirmative action but it's much broader than that as well. The fact is, while racism is still an endemic characteristic of American life, and increasing majority of the population regard it as just bad taste. They may, like other forms of bad taste, engage in it in private, but talking about it in public is just not "on" anymore in the way that it used to be in the past. Again, there are exceptions, but I think what is at work here is a process that has been going on for most of my life, and it's one of the more, one of the events that we have greatest cause, I think to celebrate. There's still a long way to go, but we have come a long way.

S. Page: Yes sir.

Participant: Marvin Liebstone [ph], Global Security and Trade Journal. As we learned this year, our foreign policy still needs strong and firm linkage with effective defense policy. I'd like to ask Dr. Haass what he believes the necessary adjustments that have to take place within defense policy so that it backs an effective foreign policy?

R. Haass: It has very little to do with how much we spend on defense. That tends to be the least interesting debate going, the level of resources. What really matters is what you spend them on. And I think we're beginning to actually have that debate. You may or may not think that's good news depending upon where you come out on the issues. But, the opposition on the F-22 says to me that multiple advance modern weapon systems don't necessarily get a blank check, that we really need to think about how much we put into procurement. So, that's one issue.

I'm hoping that we have some greater debate about base closings, because a lot of bases deserve to be closed that haven't. I think we're about to embark on a major debate about the role of strategic defense. And, it's clear to me we are going to shift the relationship between strategic offense and strategic defense, and we're going to move away from a world of essentially no defense, all offense, and we're going to, hopefully?at least from my point of view hopefully?increase the level of defense and decrease the level of offense. Clearly, that's going to be a major debate.

We've go to—around all this, though, is a problem where you probably will need some more resources simply to handle procurement. We've got an amazing generation, as you know, of aging weapon systems. And it goes back to where we were several decades ago, where all that modernization has now happened, those systems are beginning to age, and the question is what do you replace that with. And you do have something of a procurement gap, and I think that is going to be very much on the agenda. But, I think the amount of money it will take to fix what ails defense is fairly modest, so long as people are willing to make the sorts of difficult decisions that we've heard they're not willing to make on domestic issues. I don't know if, quite honestly, I don't know if the administration and the Congress are going to be willing to make those sorts of tough decisions, that depends.

S. Page: Yes sir.

Participant: Yes. Imagine in this front row you have the six Republican and two Democratic presidential candidates and you each get one hard question—not a "got you" question—to ask them. If you could just ask them a question, what would it be?

S. Page: What would you ask them?

Participant: Yes.

S. Page: Okay, we can just start here and go down. Does anybody have a question you'd really like to pose to George W. Bush or John McCain or Bill Bradley or Al Gore?

W. Gale: It might be easier to say what would be the one thing you would tell them needs to be done. Asking questions is your job—telling them—[Laughter]—and if I were given that opportunity, I would say simplify the tax system.

B. Katz: I guess I would ask a question, actually, which is, it would be principally about the need to get beyond the discussion about poverty and to a discussion around concentrated poverty. So, the question would be to some of these candidates: What do you know about concentrated poverty, particularly concentrated urban poverty, and what are your plans to deal with increasing separation in American society?

H. Aaron: Playing the roles we've either been assigned or assumed in this session, I would ask a simple question: Tell me about your vision for the U.S. system of social insurance, pensions and health benefits in the 21st century?

R. Reischauer: Henry's question was too easy to evade, so I would say: Do you think the Social Security and Medicare programs can be strengthened for the baby boomers' retirement without shaving benefits and increasing dedicated taxes? And they will say "yes," and I will say, "How?"

S. Page: So, a question and a follow-up.

T. Loveless: I would ask them to name three areas of education policy where the federal government should not get involved.

G. Burtless: I actually would ask a foreign policy question. It wouldn?t be about the topic I wrote about. I would ask them: In the last administration, the United States got actively engaged in several places in the world—Haiti, Kosovo—what are your standards for committing American troops, and what is the principle that guides that decision?

P. Light: I'd guess I'd say it's 366 days to your transition. Have you spent even one minute thinking about what the transition team, structure, operation will look like? And I'd ask that question every month up to the election, and the answer will be the same: Zero. And we should be asking that question frequently.

R. Haass: Gary asked one good question, which is the criteria for humanitarian intervention—

G. Burtless: And now you have one about inequality. [Laughter]

R. Haass: In terms of foreign policy, I'm in favor of inequality. I like the United States just where it is. My question would probably be something about policy towards China and Russia. Essentially, those are the major powers, and the real challenge facing the next administration's foreign policy is to work out relations with the other potentially rival, hopefully not, senses of power in the world. And I would try to push candidates in particular about Russia, what are they prepared to do? If they're critical of what's happened over the last seven years, and for good reason, what then is there alternative?

T. Mann: Susan, I think I'd say the parties are as polarized ideologically as they have been in our lifetimes. You can't get anything through Congress without building a super majority. Given that, why should we have any reason to expect that any of your agenda would actually be implemented?

W. Gale: All right, let me rephrase my statement into a question—[Laughter]—and that is: What would you be willing to give up in terms of tax policy goals in order to achieve a simpler tax system?

S. Page: That's not so hard. You all are academics, let me ask to give a grade to the quality of the debate that we're having this year in the presidential campaign. Is it about average? Is it pretty good? Do you think it's pretty poor? How good is the debate we have now leading up to the election of the next president?

T. Mann: Well, it began way to early. It began before anyone was watching other than us. Actually, there have been some pretty good speeches. I wouldn't say the debate is very good. No one is engaged in any real debates yet. What we've had are some fairly serious speeches given by some of the major candidates, and that's rather encouraging, and there's been rather extensive coverage of that. But, alas, it's occurring at a time when the country isn't looking. And the real question is, when we get into a more active phase in the formal period, whether we will be willing to repeat some of the coverage and try to engage the candidates. But I'd say at this stage there's a sense that the candidates have to be more substantive, sort of address some of these issues. I don't think they've gotten to the depths of them in any way, but at least there's a presumption of more seriousness expected on their part.

R. Reischauer: It's a major issue that's been a debate has been is Bradley's health plan affordable, and it's been a debate between Gore and Bradley. And I think that argument totally misses the point, that the real point here is that Bill Bradley has put this issue front and center in his campaign and is willing to back it up with big bucks. Now, whether the particular elements of this plan are affordable within a $65 billion price tag is in a way irrelevant, and yet this has been an issue that they've gone mano-a-mano on.

S. Page: And not an issue we really expected to see this year. Yes ma'am.

Participant: Mary Dejevsky from the London newspaper The Independent. I'd like to ask any of the people on the panel who'd like to answer it—having identified the issues that you think, the main issues for the election next year, which of the candidates, of either party, do you think best matches the priorities of the voters?

S. Page: Don't everyone jump at once.

B. Katz: Based on yesterday's Washington Post poll?

S. Page: Paul?

P. Light: None of them are really talking about my priorities, so—[Laughter]—well, I mean, I think that there is this kind of fuzzy moment right now where you have some esoteric debate that isn't very well connected to the ordinary lives of voters who will turn out a year from now. The worry is that the media will exhaust itself talking about issues now, and then when we get into the meat of the campaign and citizens might actually be interested, that we won't have much to talk about again.

T. Mann: Well, I mean, I'd just say a little good news. I think there are, there are at least and maybe precisely four serious candidates for the presidency, two in each party. I think by virtue of their experience, intelligence, knowledge, sort of character, they are qualified to be president and if the rest of us do our job, we'll get them engaged in thinking about the trade-off in some difficult issues, and thinking about the means of achieving those after the election, and come out of this campaign in pretty good shape.

B. Katz: In terms of the two major trends I think affecting the cities and some of these older communities, one, the sort of spreading out of metropolitan areas, the undermining of the vitality of the core, and also the failure of working family incomes to pace with costs, I think on the Democratic side of the ticket, clearly, I mean they're talking about both of those issues with an incredible amount of specificity for this time of the election. You know, even, you know, George Bush talked about keeping earned income tax credit off the table when that was sort of put on a couple of weeks ago by the Appropriations Committee. And that wasn't a proactive, positive step, but at least it was better than what you'd expect. So, I think, you know, decentralization, sprawling issues on one hand, working family questions on the other hand, I mean, those are two serious issues which seem to be getting an enormous amount of air time.

If Bush is the nominee of the Republican Party, I think he will have a built-in advantage in that he is a governor, and just as Clinton had that same advantage, in terms of speaking about education, Bush is able to point to several successful reforms in Texas. He really has done some extraordinary things. To get back to the question about the race gap, this is one of the issues in Texas. All the scores in Texas that are reported are reported by racial group at each school, and schools are held responsible not just for elevating the mean achievement levels of their school, but also the mean achievement levels of each ethnic group in the school. And what was seen in Texas were really some very incredible gains, some unprecedented gains among African-Americans and Hispanics. So, the fact, my point is that politically the fact that Bush is running as a former governor gives him an advantage, I think, on the education issue.

S. Page: Other questions? Yes sir.

Participant: I'm Myungyul Lee from Embassy of South Korea. I read an article in newspaper that former Senator Bradley refused to answer the foreign policy pop quiz when he was asked who was the leader of the reclusive North Korea. Well, I'm not sure he knew the answer or not. But the Korean peninsula is one of, is where the United States maintains overseas military presence, and there's the possibility of U.S. direct involvement in military conflict. So, foreign policy sure may not be maybe hot issue in this campaign, but my question goes to Dr. Haass, do you expect North Korea will become an issue in the campaign debate?

R. Haass: Well, if Mr. Bush had been asked about Korea, I hope he would have answered either "Kim" or "Park." [Laughter] It's a safe way to basically go. You have at least a half chance. I don't think Korea will be much of an issue unless something bad happens. You're right, we've got 36,000 or 37,000 Americans there. It's a forgotten commitment by most Americans. It's arguably one of the most dangerous places in the world. There's two scenarios that have kept a lot of foreign policy types up late at night. One is the crisis of implosion, that North Korea essentially unravels, massive refugee flows, what we then do. Or the other is the scenario of explosion, where a desperate North Korea sends its forces across in one last effort to try to change the balance on the peninsula before economics and demographics and everything else worked against it. Those are both possible. If, God forbid either of those happen, that will hijack the presidential campaign.

Indeed, that's almost the only way foreign policy becomes prominent in the presidential campaign, if something big happens somewhere—a problem with Saddam, a problem with North Korea, a problem with the Taiwan Straits, in which case we will find out in great detail what the candidates think, but otherwise, for the most part, no. You may see some very muted criticism from the Republican side of Mr. Perry's diplomacy's which will be seen as unduly generous to the North, but by and large, I do not think it will figure as an issue unless something bad happens.

S. Page: Richard, you've noted that foreign policy doesn't play much of a part in the debate unless there is some catastrophe. Is that a bad thing, because, I mean, if you don't hear these, or is it a good thing because it means a president comes in without having spouted off on a lot of issues that are going to limit his flexibility when he's in office.

R. Haass: It's a couple of things. One is it's good at least in one respect, that you don't have candidates saying, you know, truly silly things that then they have to contend with if they should get elected. And almost every incumbent tends to regret several of the things he said during the campaign.

G. Burtless: You're forgetting Pat Buchanan.

R. Haass: Yes, but there are several things that Mr. Clinton said during the campaign that he then regretted and had to reverse course on. And so, but, and by and large, debates about foreign policy during campaigns are not helpful. One looks at, you know, some of the early debates in the 50s and 60s, almost every single campaign has polarized things in ways that tended to be somewhat simplistic. So, I think in the narrow policy sense, it's just as well. I think in the larger, governing sense though, it does cause a problem, which is that once again signals to the American public that foreign policy doesn't matter. It pushes it away—either on the back burner or even off the stove.

And I think that's unhelpful, because it then makes it so much harder for a president to govern. He has no mandate, the issues haven't picked up any public support or momentum, and it then makes it harder to appeal for sacrifices, to appeal for resources and so forth, because these issues simply haven't gained any real salience.

S. Page: We're almost out of time, but we can pass another question through. Yes, sir.

Participant: My name is Matthew Dodson [ph], I'm a freelance writer. I've just come back to academia after spending six years traveling the country and working. [Ms. Page laughs] And I'm part of that "younger cohort" that was referred to earlier. And I've found that working people generally have quite a good awareness of what the political issues are.

And in regards to low voter turnout, I think the most significant factor is that people of my age, as well as a lot of older friends, are aware of the narrowness of political debate that goes on nationally especially. Whether it's Dick Armey and Richard Gephardt making the news, or Shields and Gigot commenting on the news, I think the electorate is savvy enough to understand that these people agree on a lot more than they disagree on. And they essentially just play ping-pong.

So, I was wondering: could someone comment how we could possibly open up the political debate, whether it's changing the election rules, the Electoral College. Because I think—as far as I see it, I think that's the most significant factor in turning people off to the election process.

S. Page: You know, and that also relates to the issue of whether there will be a third party candidate. It looks like we'll probably have a third party candidate who's colorful from the Reform Party, although we don't know who it's going to be.

T. Mann: I certainly wouldn't defend the quality of debate in the Congress. So much of it—as Henry wrote this morning in the Post—has been "transparently disingenuous." But your argument about Tweedledee and Tweedledum I think just doesn't hold. There are few periods in American history where the center of gravity of each party, at least in its sort of legislative base, has been so polarized.

I don't think Tom DeLay and Dick Armey on the one hand and Dick Gephardt and David Bonior on the other see eye to eye on almost anything. Now, they're forced to have some fights over incremental matters. But their philosophies are really quite—quite distinctive.

Maybe our politics would be improved if what are now minor parties became major parties—if we had a genuine multi-party system with some kind of PR system that allowed coalitions to be built after elections rather than before. But as you look around our sister democracies, it isn't obvious that building coalitions after the election rather than before is a big plus, nor is there any clear evidence that that kind of electoral change and major restructuring of our party system would actually increase turnout.

In fact, the time of highest turnout in American history was in the late 19th century, when we had two vibrant political parties that meant something at the local level as well as at the national level. I would argue sort of strengthening those political parties rather than increasing their numbers would do as well.

G. Burtless: Can I say something? As—I'm an amateur in this area, and you've just had a pro, what strikes me is that the structure of democracy in the United States, where we have a system in which of all the people running there's one person who wins based on getting a plurality of the vote pushes the major parties toward the center. That's what explains I think that—that there's so much similarity, but that's because that's what the public wants.

They want to choose parties that are close to their views. And if you want to be competitive, you have to have views that are close to the center. If your sole goal is to open up the terms of discourse, well then establish a political party system like the one in Israel, where one percent of the national vote will get your crazed person representation in the national legislature.

That certainly opens up the discussion amongst all of the people competing to get your vote. The question is: does it give you better governance than the United States has? and I am very skeptical that it does.

S. Page: All right. Well, I think we're just about at the two-hour mark, remarkably. Thank you all for joining us. If you want to say anything. Well, thank you all for joining us for this event. [Applause]

Ron Nessen: The Henry Aaron op-ed piece from this morning's Post that has been discussed here is available outside on the counter. Henry will probably autograph it for you if you want.

[END OF EVENT]