The Ricochet Podcast - 2015 NRI Ideas Summit: Conversation with Sen. Ben Sasse and Larry Kudlow

Episode Date: May 2, 2015

A conversation with Larry Kudlow and Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE). In this wide ranging conversation, Senator Sasse describes how Secretary of State John Kerry’s effort to whip votes in the Senate against legislation mandating congressional oversight of an Iran nuclear deal inadvertently blew up in the administration’s face. Source

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All right, let's talk. My take is this country has two big challenges ahead of us. There are a lot of sub-challenges, but we have two major challenges ahead of us. Number one is to restore the economy, which has performed badly. We just had a GDP number that's essentially flat. Restore the economy, get people back to work, get prosperity. Number two

is national security. My pal Kellyanne Conway is doing polling, and she's well-known to everybody here, and she says this could be the biggest national security election since 1980. And the says this could be the biggest national security election since 1980. And the deal with Iran and the fact that nobody wants to hold Iran responsible for being a state sponsor of terrorism. Senator, in brief, in brief, I'd like you to talk about how conservatives can win with their philosophy and their principles

and make the future conservative with these issues in mind, if you would. Sure. I don't want to begin by accepting the premise that there are only two crises. You just gave some really good news, right? I think that there are at least four, and I would agree with your two, but I'd want to throw in an entitlement crisis and just fundamentally dishonest budgeting in the city and the fact that we have a crisis of civic engagement and folks have lost an understanding of what the American idea is.

And that definitely informs your economic point. But at your big two, I think the economy is going to go through massive transformation in the next decade, decade and a half, and it's going to go one of two ways. We're either going to head more toward a path of a European model where you pretend that central planners can manage the future, which really would mean managing the decline, or you reembrace an American idea that decentralism and markets and entrepreneurs

and civil society and mediating institutions and local communities build that future. And so I don't agree with both of yours, but maybe I'll separate it, and I'll grab one and let you pick back up the national security one. Of course there's this view out there called secular stagnation, and it's a view coined by my occasional friend, Larry Summers, who worked for President Obama. Summers and I have had so many debates down through the years. But, okay, he's good. He's all right.

Smart. Very smart guy. So he believes in secular stagnation. I believe it's bad policy and that secular stagnation is just a cover-up for bad policies. And I was delighted that Senator Phil Graham was in the paper a week ago, Wall Street Journal, with an op-ed piece to that effect. Tell me just two or three things that you would fix right off the top, if you could wave a magic wand, to restore economic growth.

Well, I mean, I think fundamentally you're right in the debate with Summers, but Summers is also right that there is a crisis in the nature of labor. You think about the history of economics. There were hunter-gatherers, there were settled farmers, there were big tool manufacturing economies, and there's whatever we're entering now. And so I believe with you that there are policy problems, but there's also a transformation in the nature of work that's coming,

and we should have that conversation as well, and I think Secretary Summers has some things to contribute in that. But I think fundamentally, if you think about the nature of this economy and why it's not growing right now, the money that sits on the sidelines in this regulatory environment is sort of breathtaking. I'm new here. I've been here 110 days. But a day doesn't go by where we don't have people who come into the office

and want to lobby us for things that they think they want to ask the legislature to do for them, but really are fundamentally about the fourth branch of government. This permanent regulatory state that is almost unnavigable to small and medium-sized businesses and that has large businesses distracted from core value creation to trying to be the winners and losers that Washington selects. So I think the over-regulation and the inscrutability of the regulatory environment has to be really high on the list. You know, we had Jack and Susie Welsh on yesterday on CNBC for a great interview,

and I asked them basically the same question. You know what? They gave me the same answer. The regulatory environment. It's probably in some sense more punishing than the tax environment, although the tax environment needs to be completely reformed. Okay, let me switch over. We're going to come back to all these issues in

the context of the Senate. Let me just switch over to the national security and foreign policy. What's your take there? We haven't had coherence about a foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. The moment that we're at now is a unique kind of crisis because the president doesn't have any clear foreign policy, and our enemies don't fear us, and our allies don't trust us. I spent eight days in the Middle East three weeks ago, and it's sort of breathtaking what leaders will say to you when you're in private. So not to violate those confidences by tying a particular name to the comments,

but we had heads of state essentially say to us, you know, we believe America should be the great light of freedom around the world. And at just a basic level, any good nation is a nation that gives commitments that you know you can trust. And you look at America right now, and again, I'm quoting someone else, but you look at America right now and you look like a nation that gives your word casually, doesn't intend to keep it to your allies, and has every intention of capitulating before your enemies. There is a joke that a lot of folks are using in Asia now, apparently, that's a play on words about red carpet. And the line is supposedly that in America, if we draw a red line, you know that it ultimately means red carpet, because there's not a red line that we'll ultimately enforce.

And so I think that we can't make sense of how bad the 2011 to 2015 moment is without also admitting that the rise of non-state actors and these ungoverned spaces that are being filled by jihadis is the kind of problem that we didn't really anticipate in 1989, and we don't have clarity as a nation in the policy-making communities, obviously, but the public doesn't know what to make of this either. We lived on a bus in our campaign for about 16 months. We did around 1,000 public events.

John Miller was one of our favorite guests to come ride our disease-infested bus with us. So I'm a longtime lover of National Review, but when he came and was willing to tolerate all the tetanus shots you needed to get to ride our bus, it made me respect you all even more. But we did around 1,000 public events, and if you were a journalist who came to Nebraska and listened to the town halls that we did, and you only listened for maybe half a day, I think you would assume that there's a radical move toward isolationism among the American public.

I don't believe that. Among the public. Among the public. Not just the administration. I don't believe that the public is really isolationist. I think that the public is so tired of this city living for sound bites and having no commitment to long-term policy that we deliberate about as a nation and plan to stick to for months and months,

ideally years and decades. But if you think that your policy makers are making decisions based on whether or not they can get headlines tomorrow, nobody's willing to have their sons and daughters go and die for those politicians to be whimsical about foreign policy. But...

I just want to follow up on that. Recent polling data says you're wrong. In fact, recent polling data suggests that for the first time in many years, the public would be in favor of boots on the ground. Those are pretty respected polls. One is the Fox poll, I believe the Gallup poll, and there's another poll too.

Now, that's a long time coming. People have not said that, but now they're saying that. People also believe that ISIS, if you give them big chunks of real estate to live in, will eventually regroup, get larger, get more sophisticated, train, and they're coming after us. Sooner or later, Senator, they're coming after us. Now, I don't know if the people out in the rural areas get that. I'm from New York. I get that.

They're coming at me. We need to do something about that. We're missing each other here. My point is if you listen to the first lines of what they say, it might sound isolationist. I fundamentally believe what you're saying is accurate. What they want is clarity about the long term. The first point of Bush Doctrine 1 at the end of 9-11 in the two to six weeks that came next were we are no longer going to turn a blind eye to rogue states that either intentionally or because they can't govern their own country allow ungoverned spaces to emerge in their territory that become terror training sites. And we're going to go after the people who would plot terrorist attacks on innocents either at home or among our allies. And I think the public fundamentally believes that.

What they don't believe is that there are politicians in this city who are interested in the long-term good of the country as opposed to short-term finger in the brain guessing where the public is. What they don't believe, with all due respect, is that Barack Obama can do this. That's what they don't believe. And that's the root of the entire problem. That's the root of a lot of problems right now. But basically, they don't want to entrust him with more military.

But let me come back to your other point, and then I want to switch back to what's going on in the Senate. Bush's doctrine was that you're either with us or against us. State-sponsored terrorism. You're against us, and we're going to punish you. And he said that a lot of times. Now, Iran, this is the part that I don't get. The president is trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran that will give up the sanctions, economic sanctions,

which actually, at least in finance and oil, were pretty darn effective. That's why they went to the negotiating table. For what I think is an unverifiable situation in their nuclear arsenal. But Iran, day in and day out, is out there sponsoring terrorism, trying to take over the entire Middle East. That's basically what they want to do. They're probably going to take over Iraq, and we're letting them do it. Now, how the hell can we not link negotiations with Iran with their terrorist actions? I don't get that. And I'd say to them, okay, you did this today,

you did that tomorrow. We're going to keep the economic sanctions right in place. That's what Bush would have done, I think. Thank you for advocating for the amendment that I co-sponsored last night. John Barrasso from Wyoming and I last night co-sponsored exactly this amendment on the Corker bill. Let's be clear. There are two macro issues, and then there's a distant third issue. Macro issue one is the substance of a nuclear deal with Iran. We should never have a nuclear-armed Iran. This is the world's largest state-sponsored terror. And the thing that people in my state believe we learned

at 9-11 was that if people are going to allow either intentionally state-sponsoring terror or the difference between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, if you can't govern your territory and you allow others to plan terror attacks from your land, we're against you. There's no deal to be cut with Iran. That's the substantive point one. Substantive point two is we should make foreign policy by treaty. Our founders were wise in believing that these should be bipartisan and durable issues.

And so there's a reason why the Senate needs a more than two-thirds vote to set national policy on foreign matters. And we have had a bipartisan consensus for 36 years in this country. This isn't just a Republican position. This has been the Republican and the Democratic position since the Iranian revolution of 1979, 1980. And there is no rightful reason to be abandoning this. There's no inflection point in Iranian politics. There's no repentance and turn of heart of Iran about the fact that they've sowed instability among more than five of their neighbors, but five that we talk about publicly. I spent about four hours today in a classified environment.

I spent a lot of time dealing with some of these foreign policy issues. Those are the two big issues. One, substance of an Iranian deal. Two, the fact that we should set foreign policy by treaty. The distant third issue is the piece of legislation that's dominated this week and will dominate next week. And I am a very mild proponent, but a proponent, of the Corker legislation and here's why. You've made some good cases in your magazine arguing both sides of this issue. There are reasons why people are rightfully opposed to it. Here's what I think is missed by that. The president is acting to unilaterally suspend the sanctions. There are about $130 billion of offshore revenues from the

Iranians frozen right now. But the Congress, by bad legislation five years ago, gave the president the authority to unilaterally suspend these sanctions. And so the reason I'm in favor of the Corker legislation is because we need to claw back those authorities from the president to be able to unilaterally suspend sanctions. And the American public and the Congress should know what's in the horrible deal that they're trying to pass, and then the elected officials, on behalf of the people, should have to explain whether or not they're for or against the President's deal. The much bigger point is we should set foreign policy by treaty.

The Corker legislation is meager gruel, but it's still better than not passing it, given the circumstances we're in. I think it will pass next week, but it's obviously a chaotic environment. And Obama just had to deliver that. Yeah, the president was issuing – we were with John Kerry in a classified setting on the Hill as he was lobbying us against the Corker legislation. And at that point, the president and the White House thought there were about 65 votes for it. And by the time it became clear, John Kerry came to argue against it, and more people got on board with the legislation.

And by the end of the morning, by noon, it was clear that there were about 68 people on board, and so the President pivoted and retracted his veto threat and decided he was for this legislation, and then it passed unanimously out of foreign relations. It's now on the floor, and we should be having a more rigorous amendment process that allows the kinds of things that we voted on last night, and bizarrely, the Democrats were willing to vote down the fact that there should be no ability for this administration to cut a nuclear deal with Iran while they're the world's largest state sponsor of terror, and Democrats voted that down.

That's the total point. That's the total point. It's like, how can we do this? And the money issue... All right, I'm a money guy. Maybe I... Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland.

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But certainly in banking and currency, they were shut down. They were shut down. They were shut down. That's absolutely right. We did a pretty good job. Now we're going to open that up as though we don't know that they are the biggest state sponsor of terrorism, as though we don't know what David Petraeus said in an interview, that Iran is really a bigger enemy than ISIS. Oh, by far. And we don't, as though we don't know what General Keen has been saying, that Obama from day one in 2009 has had in his head some grand design with Iran,

of which nuclear negotiations is part of it, a grand design, a detente, which will allow him to move America out of the region. How could we not know this? You know you're in a bad place when the French are negotiating for a harder deal than we are. That's the circumstance we find ourselves in. Folks in my state rightly think about hard and soft power. You've got the Department of Defense, you've got the Department of State, you've got war, you've got diplomacy. But we do have this other tool, Larry, you being the money guy. I sit on the banking committee, and our sanctions regime is very powerful

because almost all significant financial institutions in the world still have to pass through southern Manhattan. We commute as a family. We've got three little kids. Our girls are 13 and 10, and son is four. And we do the really crazy thing of coming back and forth between D.C. and Nebraska as a family. When you're doing something unique, you're probably foolish.

But it just seems like the least bad of all the options. We don't want to raise our kids here. No disrespect to those of you who have the hard calling to live here. But we've looked around. We can't find where they would detassel corn and walk beans. So we have to raise them in Nebraska. But we don't want Dad to be away Monday to Friday every week. So we come and go.

And last week, we go home every weekend. Last weekend we were home, and I was in Omaha, Lincoln, Fremont, and Columbus. And in every town I went to, people bring up Iran proactively, and in every town they ask, what does the president mean when he says he would like to see Iran become a successful regional power? This is a nation that is committed constitutionally to the obliteration of Israel that has killed American

men and women in uniform in Lebanon and in Iraq. And I don't know why we would ever want them to be successful with their nefarious ambitions. All right. Senator, let's go back home and talk about health care. You are quite an expert on health care, having served in the HHS and other capacities. Now, we're going to get in a month or two a decision from the Supremes on King v. Burwell. If the decision goes with the plaintiffs, there will be a lot of upset.

There will also be a lot of openings to end and rewrite Obamacare. My question to you is whether the Republican Party is ready for this. Do they have a plan? And what might their plan be? Or what do you want to happen? What's your vision? Yeah, great question. So, first of all, we got Obamacare not just because Democrats are the party of one-size-fits-all Washington-centric solutions. We also got Obamacare because Republicans couldn't explain what we were for, and we needed health care reform, and we've needed it since the late 1940s. A lot of what's broken in American health care is fundamentally still an echo of the accident of wage and price controls, And we got the large group employer-sponsored market by accident. This was not a policy that anybody advocated for, Republican or Democrat.

We got it by accident. And it wasn't good policy, but it worked all right in a world where you were at the same firm for the majority of your career. As recently as the late 1970s, average duration at a firm was still well over two decades. Of the kids who graduated at my college last May, and I shook their hands walking across the podium at commencement, they're not just going to change jobs. They're going to change industries three times in the first decade after undergraduate experience. Most of the uninsurance in America, and let's be clear, the largest problem in American health care is the unsustainability of the cost curve. But the uninsurance problem is a big and real problem. The problem is it's not the one the public thinks and the Obama administration is solving for. It's

not the problem of pre-existing conditions. Pre-existing conditions are a real problem. We should be empathetic to these people. But about 4 million Americans have pre-existing medical conditions that are uninsurable. Joe Biden, at one point in his speech a couple months ago, said 125 million of us who have pre-existing medical conditions owe it to Obamacare that we're not uninsured. There are 125 million people with allergies. That's not an uninsurable condition. Almost everybody in this room has had a speeding ticket. You're not auto-uninsurable. If you've had 12 speeding tickets and you can't get insurance, that's probably an effective market. And so the point you're raising is absolutely right. Republicans

need to be for things, not just against things. But now I want to put a big asterisk on that. I've been for Republican health care reform for a long time that's market-oriented, patient-centric, that can actually deliver higher quality, lower cost care. And I've been frustrated with my party long before I ever thought about running for anything. This is one of the reasons that I ran, because we wouldn't explain what we were for. But at this one moment, I actually think that replacement is not the right strategy in the short term, because we won't get a replacement for Obamacare. We won't get a repeal of Obamacare with this president.

We need a presidential election that's a referendum on Obamacare versus a market-oriented alternative. If we win King v. Burwell, and by we, I don't just mean those of us who really dislike Obamacare, I mean those of us who believe in texts as written and the rule of law, not what the Obama administration has done in unilaterally making up subsidies for 37 states.

But if we win the King v. Burwell case, though, lots of real human beings are going to be disrupted through no fault of their own. What do you do with them? Because the Obama administration wrote a policy that would allow them to be dumped. What will the Republicans do with them? The minute that that decision is made,

if it's made, the Republicans have to come out and say something and do something. There's, what, four, five, I don't know, seven million people. Seven million people who will probably be dumped off their policies. Are you all ready to do that? Are you all ready with a plan for bridge financing while you gather yourself and rewrite Obamacare? What's going to happen that day? So I've proposed a placeholder that is a COBRA-like bridge policy, and here's why.

But I don't care very much about my idea. What I care is that we not screw it up in one of the ways that Republicans are most likely to bungle this moment. At one extreme, you've got a bunch of people who think we can do nothing. We'll have won the case. Therefore, the world is resolved. That's not true, and it's not fair to the 7 million-ish people who are on Obamacare, often without having wanted to be there, but the individual market was eviscerated by Obamacare policies that declared their old policies illegal.

So a bunch of people who liked their plan and wanted to keep their plan were made uninsured by Obamacare. They bought the only thing that they could buy because it's all the market offered, and now they could be dumped in the middle of their plan year. So doing nothing is not an option. Trying to do everything is also not a communication strategy that will possibly work. If we try to repeal Obamacare and replace Obamacare in the middle of President Obama's lame duck two-year period, he's going to issue a preemptive veto threat. The media is going to be in his corner and is going to explain that Republicans don't care about the sick and have

no plan for those who are being disrupted. Again, disrupted by the Obama administration's illegality, but disrupted nonetheless. So in the middle, you're exactly right, we need bridge proposals. I think the two most rational ways to do that would be to block grant money to the governors to take care of the social safety net issues for those seven-ish million people, or to offer some COBRA-like transition assistance that winds down over the last 18 months of the Obama administration so that, and the wind down is key to me because I don't want this to become a new entitlement, it phases out over the rest of the Obama administration so the presidential can be a referendum on national security policy and Obamacare versus an alternative. Here's the way

that we could really screw it up. If Republicans initially have no ideas and then say, well, let's just extend Obamacare subsidies for 18 or 24 months. Here's what that would do. It would turn back on the individual and employer mandates that will likely be vitiated by a court ruling in our favor. There's a bunch of technical stuff inside Obamacare that's inappropriate to bore people with at a dinner after dinner talk. But fundamentally, if all these people lose their subsidies, there'll be premium spikes,

which will have the effect of turning off the individual and the employer mandate in 37 states. That is great news. It's a victory for freedom. But if Republicans in Congress act to extend the Obamacare subsidies, it will solve that problem for the Obama administration and will turn back on the, I believe, unconstitutional individual mandate and the job-constraining employer mandate. Well, okay.

I'm a little confused. I think Larry's given me a B+. I'm a little confused on this. A little confused. This is like boots on the ground. I've got to push back a little here. You've got plans out there. You've got Tom Colburn's plan, which is now whatever it is, Burr.

Burr, Hatch, Upton. Hatch et al. And Ryan and Freddie Upton in the House. They're not totally dissimilar plans. You've got a whole lot of people. Tax credit-based plans. Uh-huh. They're tax credit-based plans.

That's correct. As opposed to our current employer exclusion plan. That's right. And the Republican Party has always really gone down that path. Nobody much listened until Obamacare, but that's right. So I should have a chance. I mean, here's what I'm looking for, a real total free choice plan, okay, that will, and yes, we'll give them tax credits up to a certain level.

I'm a 60-something guy. I was guessing 54, but whatever. I don't need lactation services. I don't need mammogram services. Now, there are a lot of people in this audience that do. I think we need to move on now. They should have the choice, and I should have the choice. That's what I want.

Me too. I want to break up the whole regulatory framework. Will Republicans do that? I'm in favor of that. We are not going to be able to message to the American people without a presidential nominee that can tell that story. I'm absolutely for what you're for. But we need a presidential election to be able to carry that message. If a whole bunch of legislators try to give our version of what will inevitably end up sounding like McConnellcare or Boehnercare, we will lose that battle and we will end up with Obamacare light at the best. And that's not good enough. We need markets and freedom and we need actual innovation in the sector.

This is 18 percent of GDP and it's the largest sector of the economy. And to quote a friend of mine, there is no spot at the top of the International Economic Leaderboard for that nation that consumes 22%, 24%, 28%, 30% of GDP on health care. We need an actual revolution in higher quality, lower cost care. And to set that free, you need people to be able to buy insurance products that insure what they want to be insured for and that go with them across job and geographic change, not that try to pre-plan and pre-pay and launder through the tax code every medical expense. We've got to get that out. We've got to get that out. Seriously. I don't think Republicans have communicated that. I agree. I'm just telling you you can't do that in a post-King Burwell 30-day moment.

You need a presidential campaign to do that. Probably so, but at least you can make the statements and be on the record. And you do want to take care of the sick. You should say that to Republicans. We need temporary transition assistance for the last 18 months of this administration. All right, whatever. Good. Is the trade bill going to pass? I believe so, but it will require the president to actually talk to some people.

Why is the trade bill going to pass? Why is Obama, this is like a free market capitalist thing he's doing. It's extremely out of character. Why is he doing this? He's been a free trader for a long time and let's applaud him for it. When we can agree with the president, let's agree with him. And he's for free trade and I'm thrilled he is. So if he goes to free trade, free trade is a tax cut, right? Tariffs get lowered on both sides, tariffs or tax rates. Why can't we have a deal on, let's say, corporate tax reform? Go from free trade to corporate tax reform.

You're basically dealing with the same lobbyists and the same large companies, and maybe some small companies, hopefully, too. Probably nothing would help this economy more than getting the roughly $2 trillion that are offshore back into the U.S. and lowering the rate. Agreed. That's worth applauding. Ron Wyden has been great on this.

So in the Senate, in the Finance Committee, Orrin Hatch from Utah is our chairman, and Ron Wyden from Oregon has fought hard. And there are people who are putting up blimps over his town halls and public events in Oregon just to draw the protesters to come and oppose him for what he's fighting for. So Ron Wyden is another free trader. This deserves to be applauded. On the Pacific, they would benefit from this. That's because they smoke too much pot. They don't get it. Is that fair? Or am I being too hard on them?

Let's let Lindsey Graham speak about the pot smoking vote. He's witty at it, and I'll just pass. All right, you'll pass on that. But we should do, the point is, we should do corporate tax reform. We should do comprehensive tax reform. We should do any and all tax reforms that get away from the ability of lobbyists and politicians to have so much power over who wins and loses. We need a fairer, simpler, flatter code with fewer carve-outs, loopholes, and exemptions. That's really one of the key points of tax reform, is to take K Street out and take the cronyism out and take the corporate welfarism out. I mean, lowering the rates will create incentives to grow.

Very important. But the simplification and getting rid of these crony deductions, that's key. Now, the GOP should stand for that. That's stuff for the little man, the little business person who doesn't have an office of 100 reps in Washington. Amen. Are they? Some. Some Republicans

are, and some Republicans come here and really like the whole world you just defined. Is corporate tax reform dead in this session? Almost certainly. I mean, the only way it would happen is if the President decided to embrace it and move a bunch of Democrats, and obviously there have been no signs of that, but

Wyden and Hatch have worked together to define the template of what could have been used in this administration if the president wanted to, and I think sets the stage for 2017 for wherever the next president is. You're just going to have to take it to the voters, right? You're just going to have to do that. Another problem with the economy. My friend Casey Mulligan teaches economics at the University of Chicago, and he calls it the redistribution recession.

The federal government is paying people not to work, and because the eligibility requirements, which were formed with Clinton and Gingrich in the mid-90s, have all been thrown out the window on the Republican and Democratic presidents, we now have vast amounts and easy pickings on food stamps, on welfare programs, on disability insurance. And what we've learned, and you know this, once they go out onto those programs, they never come back to the workforce. So our participation rate remains at record lows. So when will the Republican Party go back in and do the blocking and tackling on the reform of the small entitlements. I'm not even talking Social Security here, because the small entitlements are ruining our work ethic.

Yeah, so let's stay there. I'll make a small policy point, but let's talk about the work ethic, because America is a lot more about country music lyrics than it's about the Federal Register. I mean, what defines American greatness is a shared understanding of the dignity and nature of people and the dignity of work. But one policy point. The first person to endorse me in my race when we decided to run in the summer of 2013 was Tom Coburn. And when you look at a lot of the crisis in the disability program, the instability of the funds in that program,

it's because it's just rampant with fraud, waste, and abuse, but also with a temptation to a kind of dependency that warps the rules and undermines the shared civic sense we have about the dignity of work. And fundamentally, that's what the American idea was really about. It was about religious liberty, and it was about the dignity of workers at the American founding. Throughout human history, lots of peoples had believed

that the king is free because he has a monopoly on power, and he has to give you rights. Rights come from government if you're the king, and everybody else is a dependent subject. You want to start a business? You need a charter from the government. You supplicate before the king and his court to see if you can do that. The American founding was about claiming that that idea was fundamentally flawed. People are created with dignity by God, and government is our shared project to secure those rights, and you want to live out a life of gratitude

by putting bread on the table for your kids and benefiting your neighbor. But people want to work. People absolutely want to work. Arthur Brooks did the work on this at AEI. I interviewed him a couple of years ago at a National Review Conference. People who get earned income, as in work, are happier, this is what the data show, than people who get welfare-based income. They're not happy. The earned income people are happy. And as you

properly noted, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness does come from the Lord, not from the government. So my question is, we've got a moral dimension, we've got an economic dimension. When's the GOP going to tackle this? This is a big issue. People are furious at how the welfare rolls are exploding, and we don't have people to work. Yeah, so we need to do all those things, but I do want to push back a tiny bit, because there isn't a policy solution first. There has to be a shared cultural understanding of the virtue and dignity of work. And when you travel my state as we did as a family for

16 months, people absolutely believe Arthur Brooks' stuff, even if they can't quote him and don't know the specific sociological study that says the least happy people on Earth are those who've won the lottery. Fascinating findings that Arthur has. Truly.

I mean, if you move from really poor to lower middle class, you get a little bit happier because you're not hungry. At every point of wealth beyond that, people don't actually get any happier. It changes the denominator of what it takes to satisfy you. And the more likely you are to have that money without having worked for it, the less likely you are to be happy. And so if you get to work and you find satisfaction in the fact that you're actually benefiting someone else by your calling, people are satisfied. And government should be celebrating and securing those fruits of labor. And we should be making the kinds of societal investments that make it possible for people to lift themselves up out of poverty and benefit their neighbors. But that shared cultural understanding has to be there first, and government is corroding

and corrupting that shared cultural sense. Let me walk with you on the cultural and moral standing. I believe we have to revive the culture of marriage. And I believe that family breakup is probably the single biggest cause of poverty. We are here, too. We are paying, the government is paying mothers to have out-of-wedlock kids. The government is paying fathers not to be fathers.

This has gone on for quite some time, only it's getting worse. So look at Baltimore. Look at the statistics are overwhelming. So what do we do here? When do we start fixing marriage penalties? But more than that, when do we start talking about the culture of marriage and what it can do to help kids instead of damage the kids, which is what it's doing now? Amen. I sit on the Senate floor in the desk of Daniel Patrick Moynihan on purpose because of exactly this argument. When we declared war on poverty in 1965, roughly the same percentage of the population lived in poverty as lives in poverty today. About 15% of the populace lived in poverty in 1965, same exact numbers today.

We've spent a whole lot of money since then, not made a dent in poverty, but we have done a lot to advance the marriage penalty. Let me be clear. Obviously, the causes of family and marriage breakdown are much more complicated than one input variable. But there are lots of input variables, not all of them that tell the story. But there are lots of input variables in bad policy. And what we have done is we've deprived lots and lots and lots of kids and dad. And there's no greater predictor of future criminality and poverty and lack of educational success and attainment than not having two parents.

And on the positive side, all the studies show, left of center think tanks, right of center think tanks. Married people have more income. Married people have more wealth. Somebody in this presidential campaign has got to get up and talk about this. However, diplomatically, nonetheless, you have a cultural problem, you have a moral problem, and you have a welfare problem all wrapped into one. I just say it's the culture of marriage.

If we don't fix this, then we've got Baltimore as far as the eye can see. In 1965, 7% of kids grew up without dad. Today, it's 40%. But it's much, much worse than that because when you disaggregate by the age of mom, I think the current numbers are around 59% of kids whose moms are under 30 don't currently have a dad actively engaged in their life. No government policy is ever going to fix that problem. That's a core problem that's

going to lead to all the indicators of societal decline. And if you love kids and you care about the future, we'd be talking about these cultural variables well before the policy fights that consume this town. SEN. BEN ZESSELSSON It's a leadership issue. Is it not? It's a leadership issue. We shouldn't be ashamed to lead on moral and cultural issues. MR. O' Agreed. SEN. BEN ZESSELSSON Senator Ben Sasse, thank you for coming to the National Broadcast. Thanks for having me.

We appreciate it. Thank you.