A Public Address by Senator Rand Paul

[Applause] thank you thank you guys now even the last time i cried like that on the stage after the shellacking that he gave me back four years ago so good afternoon everybody as you all just heard i'm trey grayson i'm the director of the institute of politics and i want to welcome everybody to the john f kennedy junior forum and the harvard kennedy school today's forum speaker is perhaps the most compelling figure not just in the republican party but in all of politics in only his first term senator rand paul is already one of the front runners for the 2016 republican presidential nomination and is without question the republican who best connects with millennial voters across the country not bad for an ophthalmologist from bowling kentucky who won in his first attempt for political office in 2010. i should know for you see this is not the first time that i've shared a stage with senator paul from 2009 in august through may 2010 we shared many stages from pikeville to paducah from covington to corbyn as we crisscross kentucky seeking the nomination for the republican party to the united states senate now when the votes were counted on primary election day senator paul got a lot more votes than i did but i think we both won that day he went on to become a united states senator and i got to be the director of the institute of politics [Applause] so in my capacity as iop director and for the last time here in the forum in that capacity please join me in welcoming to the forum senator rand paul thank you trey i'm a little worried about this forum you know you never know where things can fly from but i understand you guys are supposed to be very civilized some of america's best and brightest so i don't have to worry about that but i i still have a bone to pick with trey he had one bumper sticker that i can't forgive him for it said beat duke vote grayson [Laughter] all right and you really have to understand in kentucky they don't like duke pretty much okay and i did spend a few years there and that one still gets under my skin uh so but i'm trying to make a comeback i've sent two kids to university of kentucky just to try to make sure we don't have anything i think that would i think we're good we're even on that yeah now a couple of miles from here you know they they dump the tea in the harbor and some say oh just a bunch of crazy people upset about their taxes well maybe i think they were upset about taxes but they were also upset about the process about how their taxes were raised they were worried about their rights as free english men mostly men in those days but they were worried about their rights being infringed they didn't have the same privileges and the same ability to vote or not vote for these tax increases it was about the process as much as it was about the tax one of the taxes that came upon the our forefathers was a stamp tax and the stamp tax was a tax on any of your papers and the only way they thought they could collect it because people weren't rushing forward to get their papers stamped because they were pretty upset about it one way to check and see if your papers had been stamped was to go in your house but they had the tradition of warrants even back then and so they said well let's just let the soldiers write their own warrants and in those days they called these the writs of assistance and so james otis wrote repeatedly and and for probably a decade opposing these writs of assistance because they were generalized warrants they weren't written by a judge they were written by soldiers they didn't have anybody's name on them they went from house to house searching through your papers it was a big deal to our to our revolutionary fathers it was a big deal to the american revolution john adams said that the spark that started the american revolution was james otis in his opposition to generalized warrants it's the reason we have the fourth amendment the fourth amendment said that we don't have generalized warrants in our country the fourth amendment says that you have to have your name on the warrant that you have to identify what things you want and that there has to be probable cause and that the warrant doesn't come from a policeman or a soldier it comes from a judge we separated the police power from the judiciary a lot of what we did in setting our country up was to have checks and balances we did not give all of the power to one person they didn't give the power to declare war to one person the president can't declare war he's not supposed to or she's not supposed to the declaration of war comes from congress but it was this idea of checks and balances but when we were attacked on 9 11 we sort of forgot about all this stuff we ran around in hysteria pulling our hair and saying take our freedom take our liberty we want security and so they did what franklin said you shouldn't do you shouldn't trade your liberty for security or you wind up with neither so with the patriot act we allowed for the first time warrants to be written by soldiers essentially soldiers the police we allowed the fbi to write them the fbi now writes warrants to the tune of tens of thousands i think the overall number is in the hundreds of thousands of warrants that are written by the fbi now does this mean that i think the fbi are bad people no i play golf on occasion with my local fbi agent we have this discussion it's like i don't think you're a bad person the same way i don't think the president's a bad person but i don't want to give so much power i want that power to be separated out and i want it to be in a balance in checks and balances so not too much gravitates why do i care so much about this why is it a big deal to me because occasionally we've gone overboard about two weeks ago i had lunch with eric holder and they were telling me in the department of justice that hoover's office used to be right here and i said my goodness with the ever-present reminder that hoover's office was right here why wouldn't we more viscerally oppose allowing eavesdropping or allowing the collection of all our records given what hoover did hoover spied on 300 000 americans mostly people in the civil rights movement also people in the in the anti-war movement in the 1960s we have had problems in our country where we've allowed too much power to gravitate many people say oh well the nsa doesn't abuse the power we're not listening to your phone calls you're just being paranoid they're collecting your records they may or may not be listening to your phone calls but they are on occasion and there have been abuses but even if there had been no abuses i don't want them collecting your records for the possibility of abuse we don't know who the next president will be we don't know what particular pattern of bias people might bring into this but we do know some of the things that have happened in our past one of the other things that's bothered me in the last couple years that i've spoken out against is something called indefinite detention in 2011 in our defense authorization bill we allowed for the first time in our country someone to be detained without trial without attorney without charge forever you say that's crazy i've never heard of that happening it hasn't happened yet the president says he won't allow it to happen but he signed the bill it's not not for me good enough it's not about this president's about who may well use that power this president above all others ought to know what the government's done in the past and it alarms me that he would sign this legislation and if he if this president wanted to be a great president he would have vetoed that piece of legislation you say well it's a big deal we're not going to do it the big deal is is that we now can arrest people who they say maybe are unsafe for the rest of the country so i had this debate with john mccain you all had john mccain the other day and he's on the floor and i said my goodness you would allow an american citizen to be sent to guantanamo bay for the rest of their life and he said yeah if they're dangerous it sort of begs the question though doesn't it who gets to decide who's dangerous and who's not i've had this debate with the wall street journal they just say enemy combatants yeah if they're enemy combatants lock them up well who are enemy combatants and who gets to decide the department of justice has put out some criteria for people who might be terrorists people who have more than seven days worth of food in their house i met with some people who some of them were mormon today and i said they'd have to lock up the whole state of utah people have more more than one gun in the house people who have missing fingers on one hand people have stains on their clothing are all things you're supposed to be suspicious if you see these people report these people this is the kind of crazy foolishness and overzealousness we had in world war one when we had hundreds of thousands of people reported we had people jailed who opposed the war we had people jailed who opposed selective service eugene debs the socialist the perennial socialist candidate was put in jail for 20 years now i have nothing in common i like nothing about socialism or what he promoted but my goodness i would have stood there and defended a guy who's put in jail for opposing the war for 20 years took it took harding to get him out finally after 10 years in prison he ran from prison with a number of his his jail cell number and he got over a million votes we have made mistakes in our past with indefinite detention i tell people if you want to think of the problem you want to crystallize it into one quick story remember richard jewell richard jewell was the guy everybody said he was the olympic bomber he was convicted on tv he had to be guilty he was a loner he had a backpack he looked suspicious he was kind of nerdy that's right he could be a student up here or me i was a nerd too so i'm not casting aspersions but here's the thing richard jewell was convicted on tv but he wasn't guilty but imagine if richard jewell had been a black man in 1920 in the south you see the reason why we have these rules is because bias can enter into the law minority rights need to be protected individual rights need to be protected and the thing is is you don't it's you don't have to be a minority just because of the color of your skin you can be a minority because of the shade of your ideology so we do have to protect these things we should protect against indefinite detention and the president could have been a real hero saying he won't use the law isn't isn't a great is in a great stand he could have vetoed the legislation a week later they would have sent it to him without it in there but that's the kind of leadership we need in our country and there are dangers to where we are on this and if we let it go too far if you let your phone records be scoured and collected and you say government says trust me we won't look at them two stanford students developed an app recently and they put it on cell phones and this app sort of collects your phone data voluntarily to show what you can collect what the government can figure out from boring old phone records what they found is is that in most of the people i think it was 15 out of 18 people they looked at out of the 500 they could tell what religion you were they could tell what doctor you went to see they could for the most part tell what diseases you had think about it this way the government says that your credit card statement is not protected by the fourth amendment and they say oh yes we'll have privacy controls and this and that we're not going to read it but they always conclude every statement by saying the fourth amendment doesn't protect your records your records are not protected this is something that needs to be adjudicated i'm fighting this in the court and i want it to go all the way to the supreme court but think about what's on your credit card statement we can tell whether you smea smoke whether you drink whether you gamble and how much we can tell what magazines you read what books you read where you you know think about what's on your credit card statement it's nobody's business what you do on your credit card statement there should have to be an independent body a judge there should have to be probable cause these protections are for all of us i think they're very important i think it's an issue of our age i'll continue to fight this issue and i hope you'll join with me and saying enough's enough we need to get our constitution back thank you very much for those who are veterans of the formula now is the time to bring all of you into the discussion we have four microphones two on the floor and two in the boxes uh for questions a reminder about our question rules first identify yourself and your harvard affiliation if any second um your question does not contain a long speech in the middle of it or at the beginning or at the end um it actually must contain a question and doesn't any question mark and the third thing i'd say is we've got a lot of people who want to ask questions we've got a limited time this afternoon so definitely keep them short jim why don't we start with you and we'll work our way around thanks for coming senator paul it's an honor to hear from you i wanted to ask you about your stances on abortion and uh how you see your role in that debate you were talking earlier this week in chicago about how you know you don't want to pass things that are outside the will of the people and i was wondering how you see your role as a statesman and potentially as a future candidate and shifting the ground to the debate more favorably towards your views right you know i think uh when we talk about abortion there are sort of a spectrum of where you can be on the issue one spectrum would be that we allow no abortions without exceptions that's not where we are but that's what some people propose another end of the spectrum would be i think kind of where we are that abortion is allowed up until the day of birth with very few restrictions most people don't realize this but that's where the law is today the law says that if you are one week before birth and that there's a health concern but the concern doesn't necessarily have to be defined and the concern could be that you're anxious or that you think you might hurt yourself if you have a baby you can have an abortion one week before delivery does that happen very often no but that's sort of where the law is i think that the american people are somewhere in between those i am pro-life i think there's something special about life i think it comes from our creator and that'll always be my position now as a legislator i've introduced legislation that reflects that uh where are the people the people aren't exactly there and so i think there needs to be discussion and persuasion but i think sometimes it gets dumbed down too much that we are in one extreme or the other and that our discussion needs to be more uh what what does the vast majority of of the public want and i think there may well could be incremental change and i think that's most likely to happen thanks up here in the box all right hello my name is jacob i'm a freshman at the college thank you again for taking the time to speak to us this afternoon now in your proposed budget it only mentions the word stimulus six times and five of the six times it's in a negative connotation about president obama's policies uh the only one one time you mention it positively is about the stimulus that result from businesses abroad benefiting from american tax breaks so my question is do you support uh this type of stimulus that could still bolster the economy or are you willing to like rick perry did in 2012 decide that kids in economics is dead i think the question is about how you define a stimulus so for example for most people think of a stimulus as government's going to send you some money and we're going to stimulate the economy we're going to inject some money or let's say we're going to give a 500 million dollar loan to solyndra and we will stimulate the solar panel industry i think there's another way to stimulate the economy and what i would say is is that you can send your money to washington and then people in washington can choose who they give it to and try to stimulate the economy that's what we've tried didn't work so well with president obama's stimulus we had about an 800 billion dollar stimulus when you divided it out dollars per job created is about 400 000 per job wasn't very effective why one of the reasons why i think president obama's or in general the democrats idea of stimulus getting the money taking it to washington and then sending it back doesn't work as well is because eight or nine out of ten small businesses fail so if i say mr smith here's a hundred thousand dollars go create some jobs i'll pick the wrong person eight or nine times out of ten but there's another way to stimulate the economy and this is what i would propose instead of taking money and then bringing some back and me picking who i give it to which with the department of energy loans turned about to be 80 of them were contributors of the president what i would do is give it back in the form of reducing taxes so for example detroit is struggling right now detroit has nearly 20 percent unemployment thousands of abandoned houses 50 000 feral dogs it's a disaster but it's been run by the democrats for 50 years my question would be are the policies working very well so what i would do is i would go into detroit or areas with high unemployment and i would lower the taxes dramatically i would take the corporate income tax to five percent i would take the personal income tax to five percent i would take the capital gains to zero and i would take the the uh fica tax down two points on both sides employer employee if you add all that up for ten years it's 1.3 billion dollars but it's not me taxing people in boston and sending it to detroit it's just simply leaving money in detroit that originated in detroit i think it would stimulate the economy more because the money when you give a tax reduction goes to people that you've all voted on so in boston if there's a store that's succeeding a walmart or a kroger or a kmart it's succeeding because you went there so you all vote every day that's what democratic capitalism is you vote every day and the people who succeed in business are the ones you you you buy their stuff and so when you give a tax reduction the people get more of the tax reduction the people who pay more the taxes what does that mean i think you'd stimulate and create jobs because the money would go back to existing businesses through tax reduction so is that keynesian you know it is supply it is stimulating demand but it's trying not to choose the the winners and losers and so i think it's different than what has been offered and i think it would work better if you're in this box hi my my name is kyle welch i'm a doctoral student um at harvard business school and my question is related to your ability to change the republican party and i asked this question i was on the floor of in down in tampa when they were casting the votes for your father to simply speak down at the convention and i observed the the political handling of a situation that seemed very reasonable for your father to speak at this convention and it was squashed by the leadership of the republican party and so the question is essentially do you believe are are you in in the light to change ideology or do you actually believe that the republican party and that leadership can change and adapt because it doesn't seem like it will i think it's easy to be pessimistic when you see that but what i would say is that and what i've said repeatedly the republican party will adapt evolve or die they're not big enough they they have to be bigger they have to include more people i tell people that the republican party needs to look like the rest of america to have a chance that means with tattoos and without tattoos with earrings without earrings black white brown you know you go to republican event and it's all white people not because we're excluding anybody but we just haven't done a good enough job encouraging people to come into our party we need more young people president obama won the youth vote three to one but the youth votes fickle they're not all attached to party and if you ask them whether they're happy about president obama collecting all their phone records i'll bet you we can win the vote in here on people they might not necessarily go republican but i think if we ask people in here are you happy about your phone records being collected i'll bet you we get a 75 percent vote saying that people are unhappy then we have to say to him listen to us on other issues i don't think anybody gets to decide whether the republican party hears this or not the message comes out republican party is whoever comes on in the next generation and that's what's happening now but the republican party i will tell you from talking to whoever the establishment is they are recognizing they need to be bigger to win and they need to broaden their message and it has to be a bigger party we have an office now in downtown detroit we've got one in chicago we've got one in atlanta the republican party if you look at the demographics wins 80 percent of the countryside we lose all of the big cities overwhelmingly primarily because we don't get very much african-american vote we're doing poorly with hispanic vote you name it we got to do better but i think people are recognizing that and i think that if people recognize that and that ideas have consequences and that ideas will open doors to new people i think there's going to i think a change will come about or we'll keep losing one of the two valentina hi my name is valentina perez and i'm a junior at the college thank you for being here today jumping off of your response how do you think that the republican party what steps can the republican party take to appeal to these groups that it's traditionally not appealed to in the past specifically women voters and hispanic voters i think on immigration we need to have a different attitude and a different policy some republicans were talking about hey deportation that's what our policy is that's not my policy and i think we need to have immigration reform will people then say well you voted against the senate bill i'll tell you exactly why i voted against the senate bill because it doesn't do enough the senate bill limits farm workers agricultural workers to a hundred thousand right now four hundred thousand come in to pick crops in america every year if you limit it to a hundred thousand you're guaranteeing that there's gonna be three hundred thousand illegal people coming in because that's how many we need that's how many are coming in the bill also limited uh construction workers to 15 000. there's a couple million undocumented workers doing construction work we can't have a limit so small that it doesn't encompass what the demand is the other main problem is they say there's 11 million people here of the 11 million they say 40 percent of them came legally but now have become illegal why did they become illegal primary reason is because they changed jobs it is illegal to come in here to pick crops at nine dollars an hour and then you walk down the street you see sign says 14 an hour for construction work the senate bill still didn't fix that i think all of that said there is a there is a compromise on immigration that could happen people have to acknowledge though that democrats if they want it passed have to be part of the compromise the compromise will be i think finding status and a place for the people who are here letting them come out of the shadows let them begin paying taxes let them not being run not having them run from the authorities but it may not involve uh the voting that everybody wants will that come someday maybe but at this point in time the only thing that will pass is something that would uh legalize or create a bigger uh more encompassing work visa program i think that's a possibility now but people have to decide some people on the democratic side said let's just keep beating up the republicans on this we're winning hispanic vote who cares whether we pass anything let's just keep beating them up and then there are some responsible people on both sides who would like to pass something i still think something could pass this year and but some of it i think more important than anything is attitude that we treat people with dignity and respect and that we acknowledge that you know we were all immigrants at one point in time that immigrants are an asset and you just look at at this crowd and see that you see many different diverse faces what a good thing that is for america thank you john well thanks for coming uh my name is john acton i'm a freshman at the college and in the past you've uh supported various uh libertarian candidates in a couple of elections i'm wondering if in 2016 the republican party doesn't adapt in the way you feel it needs to and nominate someone who disagrees with you on issues such as privacy and what security should look like would you consider voting for and supporting a libertarian candidate who was more ideologically consistent with yourself or would you go with your party loyalties instead i pretty much have always supported republican candidates i haven't gone out and supported libertarian case my my dad did some but i i haven't so much and i think that there needs to be and i want the republican party to have a libertarian influence in it um but people have different ideas exactly what they mean to be libertarian i always say i'm libertarian-ish you know and that uh because that still can mean we might you know there is whatever pure libertarianism there's some arbiter of that but i'm i'm probably not that um but i think a libertarian twist or a libertarian influence in the republican party is good but i pretty much just uh stayed with the party and uh plan on doing so what about your father's you supported your father when he ran as a libertarian i did you're right and i did you're right you're right i did and i i stand corrected i did and i i hope i don't have to uh oppose him in anything because [Laughter] somebody asked me the other day what if your dad runs and what if you guys like i'm not going there all right hi my name is max i'm also a freshman at the college i want to ask you um about the second amendment about gun rights so the second amendment as you obviously know does guarantee a right to bear arms but it specifies that there's a right to bear arms for a well-regulated militia and in recent years especially in the supreme court it seems like that part of the second amendment has been largely forgotten now you have i think a perfect record from gun owners of america so i'm wondering how do you interpret the second amendment and based on what reasoning in particular do you arrive at your interpretation of the importance and the meaning of the militia clause which i'm sure you know the founders didn't just put in by accident right you know some states have actually taken this to heart and actually passed and defined what a militia is i think oklahoma has and several other states have sort of passed and defined what a militia is uh the people who go back and look at this history uh say that the militia was uh it wasn't really concrete in the sense that it wasn't it was sort of like hey guys it's time to collect our arms and go fight the king or whatever so it wasn't so much an organized body as it was a collection of just the able-bodied arms-bearing people um i think that our founding fathers were less inclined to be for you know significant uh gun control of any kind i'm a believer that guns while you know used incorrectly or used maliciously obviously can be really uh something that is that can be that needs and needs to be feared as far as injuries or accidents or maliciousness but at the same time i'm also a believer that guns prevent crime in the sense that there is a deterrent value we have a country where we have some of the lowest home invasions because you don't know who has a gun and who doesn't but about 50 percent of america does and i think that for example these tragedies i don't think any gun registration or control would have stopped the the most recent one you know the tragedy where all the children were killed up in in new england i think that those guns were registered and you know they were they were gotten illegally by the kid almost all of these things that seemed to have happened the shootings they're almost all young white males with mental illness and we do have to figure out why this is happening and figure out if there's a way to prevent it unfortunately even the mental illness aspect of it most of them haven't committed a crime or done anything beforehand did everybody know this kid had something wrong with him yeah and people made terrible mistakes and his mother most specifically and she she unfortunately suffered the consequences as well you know there are no easy answers i do think though that there is something to be said for these uh crazy or mentally deranged young men are not going to the police station and shooting the police station they're going to places where there are signs that say there are no guns and so one of the first things i would do and may not be popular with you guys but i would i would put a sign up in in in every school saying come in but you know we have concealed carry we may have a security guard we may may have concealed carry but you will be opposed if you come in here same with our military bases you would think well there'd be a deterrence there most military bases don't allow any of the soldiers to carry their weapons about are there some common sense rules yeah i would think the bar on the base you probably shouldn't have your weapon in there when you're drinking but at the same time for most of our soldiers are very responsible young men and women i think there would be a deterrence fact actually to having them with their having them walk around their weapons and if a person does make this decision they'll be stopped a lot quicker virginia tech shooting went on for hour after dreadful hour and had one teacher had a gun in their in their drawer they might have been ought to stop it uh so i think guns do provide a deterrence this box right here hi thank you for coming as senator paul my name is reshma ramachandran i'm a joint masters in public policy student and a fourth year medical student i had a question in regards to some of your comments regarding lowering healthcare costs and the plans that you mentioned such as enrolling patients into more high deductible plans and foregoing insurance all together in favor of out-of-pocket payments some recent studies have shown that these plans instead disproportionately affect patients that are require ongoing care or have chronic illnesses or and also shift the cost burden from hospitals and providers onto consumers i was just wondering in light of this and the possibility that these plans would force consumers to choose between foregoing treatment and high out-of-pocket costs how do you support your rationale or how do you what's your rationale for supporting such plans and has your stance on the affordable care act shifted in light of the recent congressional budget office analysis showing lowered costs of the aca and also greater benefits for your constituents in kentucky right ideally if you went to a higher deductible plan you'd get a cheaper cost unfortunately under obamacare you have high deductible plans that still are very expensive you also have some people are being subsidized to buy high deductible plans but still uncertain what's going to happen with them if you can't afford to buy insurance and you have 80 or 90 of it paid for by the government but you have a 6 000 deductible what do you think the odds are that these people are going to pay i think there's going to be a great disruption with hospitals with people thinking they've got great insurance and now you can go but they're going to end up being non-payers ideally the system would work as such insurance is something that what we have when we say health insurance isn't really insurance insurance is when you buy something that protects against a rare event if you know you're going to see the ob gyn or the pediatrician that year you're prepaying for your health care you're not doing paying for something that's an insurance against like a flood or death like life insurance under the ideal system what i would propose is not and i've never proposed not going out without insurance i've always said you should have insurance i think insurance should cover against catastrophes and what would happen is some of the lower dollar things would be out of pocket you say oh that's terrible people would have to pay well the converse what comes from people paying is it drives prices down i'm an eye surgeon i do lasik surgery and also would provide contacts in basic care in my office neither one of those are covered by insurance and the price went down every year for 15 years the average patient who wants lasik calls for doctors they want quality but they also ask about price when you have insurance when you have a low deductible nobody cares about price so once price gets out of the equation consumers don't make rational decisions nor do they drive prices down the way they do in every other market so what you do want is you do want to to empower consumers and you want them to be knowing what the cost of things is and participating in that cost so they will drive prices down i think in the ideal system when you graduate from college or 22 years old or so you'd go out and you'd say i'll get a 2 000 deductible and it would be very very cheap incredibly cheap because you're young and healthy does this affect everybody no there will be some people with chronic illnesses they are the exception not the rule so instead of making our whole system based on the exception the rule is 98 of you will graduate at 22 and you won't get sick in the first year you should put aside two thousand dollars even if you make twenty four thousand dollars you put aside two thousand what should you do the next year get a 4 000 deductible but you have to have freedom if you allow freedom of insurance policies to be sold then what happens is for 96 98 of you you'll go all the way to 40 without getting sick it's an enormous number and what you do is you go to higher and higher deductibles but lower and lower premiums but the only way that works is if you get choice president obama says that you are not smart enough you are not smart enough to choose your own insurance president obama says you must buy this type of insurance with these things in it so my 21 year old son has pediatric dental coverage we say well that does it cover him no he's got pregnancy coverage he's got fertility coverage he's got in vitro he's got all this stuff but it doesn't apply to him why because the president says he's too dumb and can't buy an individual product that would cost him a lot less it wouldn't have as many things included if you want a real marketplace you have to let people buy the insurance they want that's what you decide would anybody think that the president should dictate what kind of ipad you get why would you think that he should get to dictate what kind of insurance you get you know so i i if you want a marketplace if you believe capitalism lowers prices and competition works you want to go the opposite direction we went to it we're going towards a more of a federal control when really what we needed is more of a market control the old system wasn't perfect but the old system didn't get better i think the old system's gotten worse and there will be a due bill's paid on this nothing's free there is no free lunch most people in my state 85 of them have been signed up for free health care medicaid what's going to happen when they go to the hospital or when these bills come due the hospitals and have trouble making money with that many people on medicaid it's a 50 increase in medicaid for my state so there are a lot of unknowns here i think the president's well intentioned and wanting to help people and have a goal of having everybody have insurance but i don't think it's going to work senator paul uh it's an honor to meet you my name is isaac lara i'm a joint degree student between columbia law school and harvard kennedy school i'm also a member of the harvard kennedy republicans located in that booth over there it's not quite a phone booth it's bigger for those who can't see that behind the bulletproof glass uh just a quick note before my question i just want to express my admiration for you you're the only republican who's been able to actually go to cpac win the straw poll and then go to uc berkeley and receive a standing ovation and i think that's illustrative of your ability to bridge the divide and so i hope you end up running in 2016. thank you that said my question is uh since the times of edmund burke and barry goldwater you've seen conservatism change with the times and i'm curious to hear about your remarks on how this country is changing demographically my generation is becoming more uh accepting of gay marriage and more secular and i would like to find out from you how you feel conservatism will evolve in the future to adapt to these shifting societal norms and is that a good thing you know i think one way that it shifts and one way it would be easier for us as a country to shift is if we had more federalism in the sense that we left things up to local communities and so what you would have is new york state which has gay marriage and you'd have kentucky which may not now i think really you're going to get a uniform standard much more quickly because that's the way the courts seem to be headed in this but i think it would be easier on society if we allow things to gradually unfold state by state in a more of a diffuse manner rather than a centralized decision people are going to be very unhappy if they feel like there have been it's been dictated from another part of the country or from washington to their state that being said i think yeah people's views are changing and what i've said is that look i'm personally very conservative i just you know i'm old-fashioned on some of these ideas if you want to put it that way but also think that we can agree to disagree on some of these things and that there doesn't have to be a litmus test to be in the republican party nor does there have to be a litmus test to run for for office in the republican party uh it doesn't change who i am and i'm i am who i am i've you know i've been an adult for at least a few years now so i probably where i'm going to be on these things but i am open enough to know that um you know my wife doesn't agree with me on every issue neither does every republican agree with me and if we're very doctrinaire and we say you have to believe x to be in the party we'll have a real small debating society we won't win many elections and so i think we need to welcome everybody who wants to believe in some of the core limited government principles you know that the republican party believes in and that the greatest amount of wealth and jobs is created by a a small government with great freedom in the marketplace back over here hi my name is neil sweden i'm an incoming master's student here at the kennedy school thank you for coming and talking with us today starting with then senator obama's decision to forego public financing in his 2008 presidential run and continuing with the supreme court's campaign finance ruling since study after study has found the influence of money in american politics growing at a rapid rate as a prospective presidential candidate yourself it has estimated that a campaign will need to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election what is your opinion on the state of money in our political system if you consider it to be a problem what is your plan to fix it thank you yes i think money is a problem and it is a corrupting influence the other thing that i think is a corrupting influence is a revolving door between wall street sometimes and government and then back to wall street and so i think there should be limitations on former officials what they can do going back in and influencing and vice versa you know it goes both ways you can go from being a government contractor into government back to being a government contractor and i think there are potential conflicts of interest however i agree with citizens united in the sense that i don't think you can restrict speech i think paid speech is the same for example the boston globe has a lot more power and speaking than than i do and they get to print stuff every day but they own the paper that costs millions of dollars and they got to employ people but they have more speech than i do but we don't limit theirs and no one would dream of limiting the boston globe but if i can only get my speech by buying an ad in the boston globe or buying it out on tv speech is exactly the same as far as i'm concerned however the way i would fix it and most has been struck down and they've been five four decisions but most of these things have been struck down mccain feingold et cetera i think there's a way to fix this it would be constitutional what i would do is make all government contracts have a clause in them that limits your either contributions or political activities an analogy would be in the military when you join the military you join voluntarily we have an all-volunteer military but you accept certain restrictions they have more restrictions than the rest of us do about their living arrangements and everything else but also about campaigning they can't campaign in uniform there are restrictions on our military i think if you get a 10 billion dollar defense contract i think there should be some limitations because i don't like the idea of you getting a contract and then you take your first million you buy a lobbyist and then you lobby for more money with the money i just gave you but in order to get it passed and to make it consistent i would make it on big business contractors but also the unions if it were big business and the unions who do any government work i would have them sign in the contract saying that they're voluntarily giving up some uh activities i think it would be upheld by the constitution because it wouldn't be mandatory and the punishment would be you don't get your contract so if you don't want the contract you don't want the government money do anything you want if you want the government money you accept certain restrictions would that fix the problem no but i think it might help up here in this box here hi thank you for uh speaking with us today my name is anish meita i'm also a first year kidney school student and starting my fourth year of med school in about a month so i admire your career in medicine and public service um as you mentioned kentucky is one of the most successful states in terms of rolling out obamacare 400 000 in the exchanges about 300 000 of those um in met in medicaid uh if you were successful in repealing obamacare as you uh have supported what would be your explanation to those constituents who would be who would be losing uh health insurance as a result of that right i think it's going to be difficult to turn the clock back you know people get assumed and accustomed to receiving things particularly things that they get for free but there are cost to what's for free so the question is what will happen and who's going to bear those costs and will the cost bring down local hospitals will they bring down government state governments don't have a printing press and so they are much more restricted on where their money comes from federal government has a printing press but we're also reaching limits at 17 trillion dollars where there are ramifications of so much borrowing because it devalues your currency who does the devaluation of the currency hurt most working class poor people on fixed income senior citizens because they can't increase their income to make up for lost purchasing power what will happen we would have to get see we got to an extraordinary point in our history to get obamacare we had 60 democrat senators we had a democrat president and a democrat house in order to completely undo it to go back to where there was there is no obamacare you have to have 60 republican senators who are pretty close probably with some democrat help republican president and a republican house so while i am for undoing it i would go the opposite way though to try to help people it's difficult once people become accustomed to things what i think one of the practical things you might be able to do and i think the public at large might accept this is to make obamacare voluntary you make it voluntary basically you get rid of the coercion right now the government tells you what kind of insurance you can buy and you can't buy anything unless they approve of it let's say that we're going to make it voluntary and see does that get rid of the subsidies not necessarily and or and or the medicaid but the thing is is i think also we're going to find out we can't afford to have everybody on medicaid and we can't afford to have everybody on subsidized insurance i think that the so there are repercussions right now a lot of people are graduating you may have heard with big loans and debt as they're graduating with all this debt there aren't any jobs or the jobs don't pay for the debt and part of the consequence of that is because your government's soaking up so much of the money you know because so much is going into enterprises at the government funds and to debt some people estimate it may is a million jobs a year being lost simply because of the burden of our debt so ultimately yes i'm for getting rid of obamacare i'd get rid of the whole thing if i had the votes but we have to figure out how we would help those people in another manner for example i've been proposing for 20 years that poor people you should give physicians a uh tax credit for seeing them in fact i'd give you the choice it used to be that i only saw about five percent of my patients were medicaid let me choose either to build the government for that or not bill at all and just take a tax deduction also why not give the doctor a tax deduction if people come in and don't pay if you if you sell stuff and you have non-payers you write it off from your business and you can deduct it a doctor sees if i see 10 patients a week who don't pay i can't write that off so i spent that time and expected that payment and and got rid of people who would have paid to see those people why not allow people uh a tax benefit for seeing the poor ultimately be a lot cheaper instead of sending the money to your state capital and then back in the form of medicaid to the doctor you just give the doctor a tax deduction we had a problem when we had about 15 million people maybe actually was more like 40 45 million people without insurance if you were to break it down and look at that problem and figure it out there were other ways of doing it other than turning the whole system upside down which is what we're doing that's why i know a lot of people don't know what's going to happen from what we've done because it's such a you know a dramatic change in our insurance but of the fif of the 45 million people about a third of those were people who made between 50 and 75 000 a year they were young and healthy and chose not to get insurance because of the expense i think what we're going to find is a lot of those people still aren't getting it because of the expense and that if we get to november president's moved it back beyond the election when people enroll in november i think we're going to find the price goes up again and it's more of a disincentive for the young people to buy it there's so many unknowns but there were other ways i think of figuring out how to provide health care for people at a cheap rate other than the government doing everything we have time for one more question and with your apologies to you i'm going to editorialize and let this gentleman's a kentuckian i want my gum chat's the last question sorry see i actually don't know what you're going to ask so so don't let me down here [Laughter] hi um i'm megan i'm a sophomore at the the college and i'm from kentucky i lived eight years in bowling green um so my question was uh i think it's a pretty non-controversial statement to say that washington has gotten really polarized over the years um where do you see your role in uh both both inside of the republican party building compromise as well as with both parties or nationally i think the way to make washington less dysfunctional and get more done is to break the problems down into narrower bills and narrower topics so for example everybody says we've got to pass comprehensive immigration reform well comprehensive means a lot of stuff a lot of moving parts and we don't agree on all of them so why not try to pick them up individually at a time like the stem visas science and technology these people with advanced degrees some of them probably hear in this audience 90 of congress is for that and yet we can't get a vote on that because they want us to vote on comprehensive uh taxes taxes are very complicated as far as uh tax reform getting everybody to agree on who gets a little bit more taxation who's going to get a little bit less taxation but if we narrow the focus for example there's one bill that i am working with the democratic leadership on i would like to pass right now money that's earned by american corporations overseas for it to come home and has to come home at 35 percent they already pay income tax in ireland england europe wherever they are apple has a 180 billion dollars overseas rather than bring any of it home they borrowed money at two percent rather than pay 35 what i'm proposing is let's tax it at five percent when it comes home and then let's put it all into infrastructure we don't have enough money for roads and bridges because the gas tax isn't enough to pay for everything we want if you take this 5 tax which is a lowered rate but actually increases revenue it would bring between 20 and 30 billion a year in revenue home we put that into bridges but the way we pass it is let's don't waste our time talking about tax reform which is a thousand moving pieces let's pass this one then once we're done with that let's say you know what our corporate income tax is 35 candidates is 15. why don't we lower our corporate income tax to be more competitive with the rest of the world so we don't lose jobs overseas let's do that and maybe just make the bills more narrow it's kind of like this audience uh five percent republican 10 republican this audience oh i'm sorry let's say this audience but we have a bunch of different opinions and we if we want to agree to something if we only agreed on two why don't we sit down and hammer out the two we agree on and pass them that's not even happening in washington so i would say let's try to find areas of agreement and pass those but make the bills more narrow so we can do it well i'm sorry all the folks want to ask questions but the senator's got a really tight schedule so please join me in thanking him

Channel: Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics

Views: 6,258

Rating: 4.5294118 out of 5

Keywords: Intelligence, Congress, Campaigns and Elections-Republican

Id: RFGMFFIAjyQ

Length: 49min 41sec (2981 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021