McConnell Center Distinguished Speaker Series
Senator Marco Rubio
2013
Gary Gregg: [00:00:00] Good evening—or afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you
for braving the weather to be here with us today. We really very much appreciate it.
My name is Gary Gregg. I’m the Director of the McConnell Center. It’s my
honor to have now had that position for thirteen years and particularly to serve with the
young people on the stage with me this afternoon in McConnell Scholars. Please take
this moment to silent your phones if you haven’t done that yet.
For the last twenty-two years, the McConnell Center has hosted some of the most
consequential public policy leaders in our nation and some of the most important leaders
in the world. Today is absolutely no exception to that. If you would, now please rise and
join me in welcoming the president of the University of Louisville, Jim Ramsey, our
provost, Shirley Willihnganz, the senior senator, United States Senator Mitch McConnell,
and Florida’s junior senator, Marco Rubio. [applause]
Jim Ramsey: [00:01:43] Good afternoon, and welcome to the University of Louisville.
First of all, let me thank Gary Gregg for his outstanding leadership at the McConnell
Center. Would you join me in thanking Gary for all that he does for the University of
Louisville. [applause]
It’s always a great honor and privilege for me to have the opportunity to introduce
Senator Mitch McConnell. But you know the senator. You know that he had served for
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seven years as the Jefferson County Judge Executive before being elected to the United
States Senate. You know that he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and has now
served the people of Kentucky for over twenty-eight years, the longest-serving senator in
the history of Kentucky. [applause] You know that he is the Republican Leader of the
U.S. Senate. [applause]
[00:02:53] These achievements are a big deal, but Mitch’s friendship and support
for the University of Louisville is also a big deal. You’ve heard me say on many
occasions that we at the University of Louisville could have no greater friend than
Senator Mitch McConnell. The senator is an alumnus of the University of Louisville. He
is the father of the prestigious McConnell Scholars Program and the McConnell Center.
The Center has time and time again stepped forward to support the University of
Louisville. His support has helped us take an outstanding university and make it even
better. His support has been transformational. And we are proud to be the archive of
both the senator’s papers and those of his distinguished wife, the Honorable Elaine Chao.
And, finally, you may know, you may just possibly know, that Mitch is a pretty
big UofL sports fan. [applause] Tom Jurich and I knew that if we didn’t achieve
membership in the prestigious Atlantic Coast Conference, there would be one very
disappointed U.S. senator from Kentucky, and we sure didn’t want that. Would you join
me in welcoming Senator Mitch McConnell. [applause]
Senator Mitch McConnell: [00:04:40] Well, thank you very much, Jim. At the risk of
sounding like a mutual admiration society, we’re deeply grateful for your tenure here at
UofL. You’ve really taken this university to new heights, ably assisted by Shirley
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Willihnganz. And I’m, of course, particularly proud of Gary Gregg, who’s done such a
marvelous job of building this program over the years to the point where it has now
significant tradition.
[00:05:07] We are very, very pleased today to have Senator Marco Rubio here.
You know, we all talk a lot about the American Dream, the belief that anyone, no matter
their background, their lot in life, or their country of origin can make it here in America.
As Americans, that conviction is just part of who we are, but we hear the phrase so often,
it can actually become a bit of a cliché. So it’s good to pause every now and then and
remind ourselves exactly what we mean when we say it. Well, I think if we were to
define the American Dream today, we would use two words: Marco Rubio.
I’ve worked with Marco in the Senate for the past two years, and I can tell you
firsthand he is an unbelievably effective senator. It’s clear he’s got a bright future. I
even hear, for example, he’s starting to look at vacation homes in Iowa. [audience
laughter] And New Hampshire. [audience laughter] It has indeed been a meteoric rise.
Marco’s the son of Cuban exiles. His mom worked as a cashier and a maid and a
clerk, pulling overnight shifts at Kmart. His dad mostly served up drinks for a living.
Marco once described his parents this way, “They were never rich, and yet they were
successful, because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible
for us all the things that had been impossible for them.”
As a child growing up in Miami, Marco fell in love with football and with
politics. He went to college and law school at Florida and then Miami, won a seat on the
West Miami City Commission, and, while still in his twenties, a seat in the Florida
legislature. He’d go on to become Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives while
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in his early thirties, the first Cuban American to ever hold the position.
[00:07:47] In 2010 when he ran for the Senate, well, it was no easy race, but
against long odds, he won, defeating a popular governor and then a sitting congressman
in the process, and he did it by boldly defending the principles that allowed his family to
build a better life in this country, ideas like freedom and opportunity. Still a young man
today, Senator Rubio has already accomplished much, and, as he’ll tell you, it’s largely
because his family and his country made it possible. I mean, where else but in America
could someone go so far so fast?
[00:08:30] Since coming to Washington, Senator Rubio made a name for himself
well beyond the Sunshine State. He delivered the Republican’s response to this year’s
State of the Union Address, and, as you probably know, he’s playing a leading role in the
debate over the American immigration system. You might have heard of his love for hiphop too. It wasn’t the most popular musical genre in the Senate cloakroom before he
showed up, I assure you. [audience laughter]
Marco has also established himself as a leading proponent of a strong American
foreign policy and is a principled advocate for conservative policies, focusing on
initiatives to help strengthen and grow the middle class, to give others the same kind of
opportunities he and his family had. And that’s what he’s here to talk to us about today,
how to broaden the middle class, how to create more jobs, and how to ensure those of us
in Washington are helping Americans get the skills and education they need to fill those
jobs.
So, Senator Rubio, welcome to Louisville. You’re on the campus of the next
NCAA basketball champion. [applause] We’re all looking forward to hearing what you
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have to say. Now, I don’t want to heighten the pressure any, but you’re speaking to a
sold-out crowd. And, oh, there’s your water bottle just in case you get thirsty. [audience
laughter and applause]
Ladies and gentlemen, the junior senator from Florida and a man who truly
inspires the promise of America, Senator Marco Rubio. [applause]
Senator Marco Rubio: [00:10:40] Thank you so much for the honor to be here with you
today. First, let me just start by thanking the Leader, Mitch McConnell, who it is my
hope that soon will be our Majority Leader in the United States Senate. [applause]
Thank you. I always say that just to spot the Democrats. Thank you very much.
[audience laughter] And even they were clapping, so that’s good.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really honored you would have me here
today and that you would pick me to come. When you read the list of the people who
have been asked to come here in the past, it truly blows you away that I would be asked
to do this, and I’m just truly grateful for this opportunity to talk for a few moments with
you and with the young people behind me about the future of this country and what it
means to all of us, and I appreciate that deeply.
I also congratulate you at the University of Louisville on your success in
basketball. Of course, the University of Florida, University of Miami, Florida Gulf Coast
are still alive. [audience laughter] Florida Gulf Coast has to play the University of
Florida later this week. All good things must come to an end. So anyway, I actually had
Louisville and Florida playing in the finals, and by then I’ll be safely home and I can tell
you who I’m rooting for. [audience laughter]
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[00:11:55] Anyway, thank you so much for having me. I’m really honored and
grateful. And since I’m here, I might as well tell you that I do believe that the next
Heisman Trophy winner plays football here as your quarterback. He’s from Miami, and
that’s why I want you to know that. [applause] I actually do believe that. I put that up
on Twitter one time. It’s not just because you’re here, trust me.
Anyway, thank you so much for the chance to be here with you, with all of you,
and for the honor of speaking to you for a few moments, and I’d love to hear your
questions in a moment. But I wanted just to start out by saying that one of the things that
I believe with all my heart is that we believe in a truly unique country. I know I’m
supposed to say that because I’m in politics. I know we’re supposed to believe that
because we’re Americans. But I want you to stop for a moment and just analyze what
I’ve just said, because history bears it out. In the history of man, in the whole history of
humanity, think about this. Virtually every single person that has ever lived has been
trapped in the circumstances of their birth. In the history of mankind, almost everyone
who has ever walked this planet, their future was decided before they were even born. In
essence, whatever their parents did for a living, that’s what they would get to do. They
often lived on the same land generation after generation, doing the same jobs as their
parents did. They also had very little choice in who their leaders were. Their leaders
were whoever conquered them or whoever was the son or daughter of the leader before
them. In essence, the same people always were on top, and everybody else was on the
bottom looking up, with no hope of ever improving their lives. This is the condition of
man throughout all of human history, with rare and few exceptions.
When that truly began to change was about two centuries ago here when in this
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nation that we now know as America, and at the time was still a colony, there was this
idea that somehow every single human being has rights, whose source is not the
government or even the circumstances of your birth. We have rights that are natural to
us, that come from our creator, and, therefore, every single person should have the
opportunity to go as far as their talent and their work ethic will take them.
[00:13:53] Now, for those of us like myself who were born and raised in this
country, we take that for granted. We assume that that’s just the way it’s always been
and that’s the way it is everywhere, but the truth is that it isn’t. That idea, that principle,
that notion that every single person has a worth in and of themselves and has a right to go
as far as they’re willing to work and as their talent will take them was a revolutionary
earth-changing idea. And the truth is the world since then has never been the same.
The result is this exceptional country, not a perfect one, clearly one with
blemishes in its history, but one of perpetual improvement, of a place where every
generation left it better than the generation that came before them, and, in the process,
changed the lives of millions of people, many of whom weren’t born here, but came here
because they heard about this place on this planet where it didn’t matter what your
parents did for a living, it didn’t matter what the circumstances of your birth were, it
didn’t matter how poor you were on the day you were born. If you had a good idea and
you were willing to work hard, you would have the chance—the chance—not the
guarantee, the chance to take that idea as far as your work would allow you to take it.
And so they came here, they changed this country, but in the process they changed the
world, because people all over the world have been inspired by the American idea and, in
fact, have said, “If it’s possible there, why isn’t it possible here?”
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And today, as you look across this planet, you see millions of people emerging
out of poverty and into the middle class, finding freedom, democracy, and prosperity
because the light of the American example has shown throughout the world. This is not a
theory. This is a fact. It is our identity of who we are as a people and as a nation. It’s
what makes us different. It is among the most important things that makes us
exceptional.
[00:15:37] What most troubles me today is that elements of it are at risk. You
look across our country today, and there is a growing doubt in the minds of many people
about whether this is still that country where those things are still possible, that people
who are now part of generational poverty, whose families have been living in public
housing and dependent on government for generations, people in the working class who
are starting to wonder whether if they really work hard, they will be able to give their
children a chance at a life better than theirs, people in the middle class who feel like
they’ve gotten stuck with everything, that, in essence, they’ve done it the right way, they
paid their mortgage on time, but now they got stuck holding the bill while the ones who
caused this chaos were bailed out, and those who were irresponsible and took out loans
that couldn’t afford it often have better credit ratings now than they do, and upside-down
homes, living in neighborhoods where they can’t move from because no one will appraise
their home at higher values.
This is the sense that we get from a lot of people across this country. This is
what’s happening in our nation today in the minds of many of our people. The first point
we have to ask ourselves is why is this happening. And the truth is the source of why this
is happening is not necessarily our politics. We have certainly had our share of bad
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decisions made in American policymaking, but at the heart of what’s happening today in
this country is that the world around us has changed. We don’t have a national economy
anymore; we have a global one. Twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago, fifteen years
ago, so much of what affected your business and your job was whatever was going on
down the street or on the other side of the state. Today it’s things that are happening
halfway around the world. The world economy has changed. It is a global one now, and
both your business partner and your competitor is someone living halfway across the
world in a different place under different circumstances.
[00:17:29] Another thing that’s changed the world is the information technology
revolution. All you have to do is go into a grocery store or a Home Depot or a bank, and
you will find machines doing the jobs that people once did. That’s not necessarily a bad
thing. The jobs that it takes to build that machine and maintain it pay more than the jobs
that those machines replaced, but it has destroyed hundreds of thousands of blue-collar
jobs across this country. Today one person is more productive than five workers used to
be. That means four people are out of a job that once existed. Some of these blue-collar
jobs were the backbone of certain communities. There is benefit in all of this, but there is
also a lot of pain. This is what’s led to the situation we’re facing today economically.
And hovering over all of this is something that politicians can’t do much about
but our country needs to accept, and that is the reality that societal breakdown has an
economic impact that cannot be overstated. Today one of the leading contributors to
poverty in America is the breakdown of the American family. [applause] There are
limits to what government can do about it, but one of the things it can do is acknowledge
it, acknowledge the fact that children that are being raised in dangerous neighborhoods,
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in substandard housing, in broken families with no access to healthcare and no choice as
to where they get their education, those kids are going to struggle unless something
dramatic happens to turn the tide.
[00:18:58] This is the reality of our time, and for those of us in public policy, the
question for us is what is the government’s role in this. And that’s the debate we’ve
always had in this country. What is the government’s role? But today it’s more
pronounced than ever because we somehow have to adjust the government’s role to the
needs of a new time, to a twenty-first century that’s so different from what we knew just
five or ten years ago. And somehow our institutions have to keep pace with a world that
is changing faster than it has ever changed before.
To understand what government’s role should be, from my perspective, it begins
by acknowledging that the kind of prosperity, the kind of middle-class prosperity that we
Americans want for ourselves and for our families is not the product of government; it’s
the product of the free-enterprise private economy. That’s what creates the kinds of jobs
that pay people the living that they need and want. That’s what creates the opportunities
for upward mobility and advancement. It’s the free-enterprise system. It is the private
economy that creates those opportunities.
Now, that doesn’t mean that’s there’s no role for government to play. There is a
role, an important role, to play. But we have to begin by acknowledging that the source
of our prosperity is our private economy, that prosperity is created through a very simple
but straightforward cycle, and that is this. When someone has access to money takes that
money and risks it, risks it, putting it behind an idea, they take that money and they open
up a business out of the spare bedroom of their home, out of the spare space in their
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garage, and the idea works, and five years from now they have fifteen people working for
them. That means there are now fifteen families that are being fed, fifteen homes that are
being provided for, fifteen people who have a job that provides them a middle-class
living and beyond.
[00:20:43] This is how prosperity is created, and the best way to understand
government’s role in that perspective is that government’s job is to make all of that easier
to do, not harder. And that’s what we’re struggling with right now, is that the cycle of
prosperity, that cycle of identifying a great idea and putting it into practice behind a
business that one day employs people is easier in many ways because of technology, but
is harder in many others because of globalism, because of barriers to entry created by
government, and because of the information technology revolution that has changed the
nature of the jobs that we have.
So when we examine government’s role, we have to examine it through the lens
of that cycle, and the number-one objective of our government should be to create the
conditions for economic growth. Now, let me begin by saying that on that front I think
there’s actually agreement in Washington. No one’s ever crystallized it that way, but if
you listen carefully, that’s what the debate is about today in American politics. It’s about
growth. You have one party that believes that growth is created when government
spends a bunch of money, and that creates demand, and the demand leads to economic
growth. And you have another group that believes that growth is created when the
government creates an environment where the private sector can go out and create growth
and opportunity for people. Everyone agrees, though, that growth is the only solution to
our problems. Growth is the only solution to our debt problem. You cannot cut nor tax
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your way out of the situation that we face. We can only grow our way out of the situation
that we face.
Do you realize that if our economy could grow at 4 percent a year for just a
decade, 4 percent being our historical average, that would generate between three and
four trillion dollars of new revenue for government without raising a single tax. There
isn’t a tax increase in the world that can do that. There isn’t a realistic budget that can cut
that. But if we grow at 4 percent a year, in addition to providing revenue for government
to pay down its debt, it’ll pull people out of poverty. It will pull millions of people out of
poverty and into the middle class.
[00:22:43] So we need to have a debate in America about how to generate growth,
and I believe that for those of us who believe that limited government is the best way to
create the environment for growth, history’s on our side. So what does it mean in this
twenty-first century? What can constitutionally limited government do to create the
conditions for the kind of growth we need so that we can have the kind of exceptional
and vibrant middle class that makes us different from the rest of the world? And that’s
what’s at stake, that’s what we’re discussing, and that’s what I wanted to talk about with
you today. The first is we should embrace the global economy. We should embrace free
but fair trade. We should embrace the fact that all over the world there are people today
emerging in the middle class that can afford to pay for and buy the things that we invent,
that we sell, that we make, and the services that we offer. This is a positive development
that we should fully embrace.
But in order to embrace the world’s global economy, we also have to embrace
being involved in the world. We had this question earlier when we were with the
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students a moment ago. The U.S. and our military and in our foreign policy, we can’t
solve every humanitarian crisis on the planet. We can’t be involved in every dispute and
every civil war and every conflict, but we also can’t retreat from the world. It’s not that
America should continue to function as the world’s police officer. The problem is that
like anything in the world, if you pull back from it, a vacuum will be created, and what
will fill that space in the absence of the United States?
[00:24:09] There still is no institution on this planet prepared to be who we are
and have been since the end of World War II. The alternative to the U.S. disengagement
on the global stage is chaos. In the absence of U.S. engagement on the global stage, what
will fill that vacuum is tyranny, tyrannical governments, governments that don’t even
care about the welfare of their own people, governments who want to be global powers,
but meanwhile back home are denying their own people access to the Internet, forcibly
repatriating people to places like North Korea. This is what will replace us on the global
stage: chaos and tyranny.
That doesn’t mean we have to engage in every firefight, every war. On the
contrary, we should always avoid to the extent we possibly can engaging our national
security apparatus in armed conflicts. But I can tell you this, and history bears this out,
the world has been a safer, more prosperous, and freer place because the United States of
America has been its predominant military power since the end of the Second World
War. And if that changes, the world will change. [applause]
Beyond that, the opportunities of energy are real. You look at what energy and
what American technology has done in the energy portfolio of this country. For a term
that’s overly used, I’ll use it: it’s a game-changer. It makes manufacturing, particularly
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energy-dependent manufacturing, cost-effective in the U.S. again. These are hundreds of
thousands of jobs that we thought were gone forever, now potentially returning here.
What we need now is a government that allows us to explore on federal lands
safely and responsibly, regulations that encourage innovations in American energy
technology and American energy exploration. But the promise of energy, of natural gas,
of oil, of all of the above, it’s real. Of course solar and wind and the alternatives can be a
part of it, but not instead of oil and natural gas, but in addition to. This all-of-the-above
strategy can’t just be in word, it has to be in deed, and we should fully embrace the
energy advances this nation has made, because in the twenty-first century it will be a
difference maker in this global competition that I’ve just talked about.
[00:26:27] As Senator McConnell mentioned a moment ago, immigration is an
important aspect of this as well. America needs to have a twenty-first-century
immigration system. [applause] Now, all the attention on immigration goes to those who
are here illegally, and that’s a problem, and the decisions that led to 11 million people
being in this country illegally today, those decisions were made when I was in ninth
grade. But we have to deal with what we have now. We can’t go back. We have to deal
with the cards that we’ve been dealt in the best way possible. And that’s what I hope
we’ll endeavor to do is to figure out a way to deal with those who are here illegally now
that does both: honor our legacy as a nation of laws but also honors our legacy as a
compassionate people. We have to deal with it in a way that doesn’t encourage people to
illegally immigrate in the future. We have to do it in a way that doesn’t reward people
that illegally immigrated here. We have to do it in a way that isn’t unfair to the people
who did it the right way, but we have to address it, because we can’t do the more
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important thing if we don’t address that, and that is modernize our legal immigration
system.
We are in a competition for global talent, and the analogy I always use is sports.
If tomorrow we identified a foreign national who could consistently throw 98-mile-anhour strikes in baseball, you know we’re going to bring him here. [audience laughter] If
tomorrow your lead recruiter identified a six-foot-nine power forward that never missed a
twenty-foot jumper, you know you’re going to bring him here. If we do that in sports,
how are we not going to do that for our economy? How are we not going to continue to
be the place where the world’s smartest people live, where the smartest people in the
world want to come to and can come to? Why would we continue to graduate some of
the world’s best young scientists and then ask them to leave? And that’s what our
immigration system today does.
[00:28:24] In addition, it doesn’t provide a workforce for agriculture that needs
this workforce. And in times of low unemployment, I don’t always buy this idea that
there’s some jobs—there are some jobs that Americans won’t do. There are other jobs
that Americans would do if it paid more, if it was more stable, but there are times, times
of high growth and low unemployment, where you do need seasonable labor, and there
are some industries that depend on seasonable labor. And if you don’t have a system for
those people to come here and work and then return home, they’ll come, but they’ll come
illegally, and instead of returning home, they’ll stay. And it hurts our business and it
hurts our competitiveness, particularly in fields like agriculture.
So we do have to modernize our legal immigration system. A twenty-firstcentury pro-growth immigration system that allows us to attract to this country the
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world’s finest entrepreneurs, our greatest thinkers, our smartest scientists, that’s what
we’ve always been. We can’t stop being that in a global economy.
Beyond that, we all agree that you need to have regulations. You certainly want
the air you breathe to be clean. You want the water you drink to be clean. You want
rules that govern the conduct of business. The problem is when regulations are used
either as barriers to entry by large companies that come to dominate the political process
or when they’re used to justify the existence of the regulators, and today we have many
regulations that do both. You hear how some of our businessmen talk with envy when
they go to other countries to negotiate deals and they find that government and business
in these new countries, particularly in the emerging economies, they’re partners, they
work together. They view each others as allies towards a common cause. And in the
United States, they view the government as an impediment, as agencies that are looking
for a way to keep you out of business, to make it more expensive to do business here, to
make it harder for people to succeed.
[00:30:23] Of course we have to have regulations, but our regulations must
always be a product of a cost-benefit analysis, and that’s why we desperately need more
legislative involvement in how these regulations are created. Today, much of American
public-policy making is done by rulemaking, by unaccountable bureaucracies that answer
to no one, who only weigh the potential benefits of a regulation but don’t take into
account any of the costs. How many jobs will they wipe out? How many people will go
out of business? How many businesses will relocate to other countries? None of that is
asked anymore. That has to change.
The same is true of our tax code. We all understand that you need taxes. You
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have to pay your firefighters and your police officers. You have to have roads and
bridges. All these things matter, and government has an important role to play. The
problem is there’s only so much money in the world, and every penny that goes into
government is a dollar or a penny that’s not circulating in the private economy. And in a
globally competitive marketplace, people make decisions about where they invest their
money based on where they think they’re going to keep more profit, and they are wary
about investing their money in countries where the tax code is used as a place to engineer
economic outcomes, where the tax code is used to punish people that are successful,
where the tax code is manipulated as a barrier to entry in the marketplace or, quite
frankly, when the tax code is unpredictable and unaffordable.
[00:31:48] It leads me to the second point I want to make about taxes, and that’s
the debt. Our national debt isn’t just a moral hazard—and it’s a real moral hazard and it’s
wrong that we are straddling future generations of Americans, in fact, current generations
of Americans, with a debt that no people in this country have ever seen—but it’s not
something that’s going to hurt us twenty years from now, it is something that is hurting
us right now. There are businesses that are not opening and there are jobs that are not
being created in America, because we don’t have a plan for our long-term debt. And that
debt needs to be solved, because if it isn’t, people aren’t going to invest money in an
economy they believe is destined for confiscatory tax rates. They’re not going to invest
in a country they believe is headed for a day of reckoning. They’re not going to invest in
a country that’s headed towards large instability gaps because of this debt problem that
we face.
Now, I laugh when people in Washington talk about a balanced approach to this
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issue, because what they offer is not a balanced approach at all. The balanced approach
they issue is a handful of tax increases combined with some cosmetic reductions in
spending. But the truth is, none of these plans that you’ve seen discussed that have been
offered by the folks that advocate that approach ever balance.
[00:33:04] The fact is that if we raise taxes on millionaires 100 percent, 100
percent, if we took every penny that millionaires made next year, that would only fund
less than sixty days’ worth of government, which leaves you with three hundred days that
you have to borrow money to pay for. As I said earlier, there is only one solution to this
debt problem, and it’s the combination of fiscal discipline moving forward, basically
reducing the increases in spending moving forward, combined with robust economic
growth. Growth is the only answer to this debt problem, and the sooner we embrace that
as the solution, the better off we’re going to be as a country.
After creating the environment for growth, the second thing government can do is
help people help themselves. I believe in a safety net, not as a way of life, but as a way to
help those who cannot help themselves and as a way to help those who have failed to
stand up and try again. Our safety-net programs need to be reformed so that they can be
saved so that, in fact, they don’t discourage work and innovation, they don’t discourage
investment and upward mobility, but also so that they survive, so that they’re truly there
to reflect our nature as a compassionate people.
Beyond that, the safety net, the second thing that we need is educational reforms
throughout our educational system. The United States of America does not have a
twenty-first-century education system. At the school level, at the state level, at the local
school districts, many of our curriculums do not reflect the needs of the twenty-first
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century. They’re not teaching our kids what they need to know to succeed in a highly
competitive global environment.
I personally believe that every child in America, particularly those from lowincome households, should have the opportunity to attend any school of their parents’
choice. [applause] It’s a travesty. It’s a travesty. Rich parents can send their kids to any
school they want. Many middle-class families struggle but they save enough money to
send their kids to any school they want. The only people in America who are guaranteed
to have no choice on where their kids go to school is a poor family. And put yourself in
that position for a moment. Put yourself in the position of a single mom trying to raise
her kids in a dangerous neighborhood, with an absent father, in a school that’s failing,
and every year you’re told, “Don’t worry. Next year we’re going to put more money into
that school, and we’re going to turn it around.” And while the politicians keep
experimenting with that school, the years keep going by, and the window continues to
close.
[00:35:35] Imagine the desperation that a parent in those circumstances have, and
yet that is the circumstances that millions of our children in this country face, with no
options about where they go to school. Imagine if it’s children with special needs. It’s
even more devastating, because many of these special needs like autism require early
intervention in those children’s lives. You literally begin to lose opportunities to
empower them in the future if you don’t get them in the right programs early in their life.
And if those children with special needs happen to be in a poor family, the chances of
them getting that intervention are increasingly remote, and that’s wrong.
Beyond that, I would say to you I don’t understand why this country has
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stigmatized career education. You look at these jobs that we’re today trying to attract
guest workers to fill, they’re the jobs that Americans should be doing, but somehow
along the way, we have stigmatized being a plumber, a carpenter, an engineer, a
mechanic. [applause] We have told children that if they don’t plan on going to a fouryear university, they’re not going to be successful. There’s nothing wrong with going to
a four-year university, but there’s also nothing wrong with fixing airplane engines. And
we need to ensure that we have more of our kids able to graduate from high school not
just with a diploma, but with an industry certification that allows them to go work the
next day at a good-paying middle-class job that allows them the opportunity to go even
further in the future.
[00:37:05] Beyond that, I would say on education that we have nontraditional
students unlike ever before. Today’s student isn’t just an eighteen-year-old that
graduated high school going to college. It’s a thirty-five-year-old that needs to be
retrained. It’s that single mom I described to you that’s always the first person laid off
every time things go wrong, who needs to get back to school and get those skills they
didn’t get when they were eighteen or nineteen. That parent can’t just drop everything
and move to Gainesville, Florida, for four years to go to the University of Florida in my
home state. We need to have programs that allow nontraditional students to get these
kinds of life-empowering skills through online courses and other innovative programs. In
essence, our educational systems of high education should reflect our students, not just
our students reflect our education.
And that’s something we have to work on, because a growing number of
Americans who have lost these blue-collar jobs, they need to be retrained. As I’ve
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learned through this immigration reform, it’s not enough to just be a welder. You have to
be a twenty-first-century welder. It’s not enough to just be an electrician. You have to
be a twenty-first-century electrician. The needs that these jobs require in this
environment are very different than they were just ten years ago, and you better have
programs that effectively allow people to acquire these skills in a time-effective and
uncostly manner or we will not be able to close the skills gap in this country. [applause]
[00:38:35] One more point I would raise with regards to all this is the cost of
college, and I know that being here at a university campus with so many students that
we’ll probably get some head nods. But I graduated from the University of Florida and
the University of Miami, two schools in the Sweet Sixteen, by the way. [audience
laughter] But anyway, University of Miami School of Law, I owed over $100,000 in
student loans. That’s just what I owed, and I was able to pay that off with the proceeds of
my book, An American Son, available on Amazon for $9.99 now. It’s on sale. [audience
laughter and applause] But, anyway, an aside, paperback out in April. [audience
laughter] Anyway, but let me tell you early on, first of all, for the first few years of the
loan, I couldn’t even pay it. I had to forebear it, so the interest compounded. Then there
were months where my student loan payment was higher than our mortgage. It was the
single biggest bill that I had. We are facing a crisis in this country where over 50 percent
of the current student loans may default. Over a trillion dollars in student loan debt
looms. This is going to be a major problem that we face. We cannot continue to
graduate people from school with thirty, forty, and fifty thousand dollars in loans that
they may never be able to repay.
Now, I didn’t bring a magic answer for you today on this, but I think there’s a
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couple things that are important. Number one is our students need to have more
information before they take out these loans. That’s why I hope we can somehow,
universities coming together will standardize the financial aid award letters, so you can
compare apples to apples and understand when you go to this school, you’re going to
have to take out loans versus that school that you may not.
[00:40:12] Beyond that, I hope that we can give kids more information about the
loans they’re taking out. A lot of schools don’t like this. A lot of liberal arts colleges
don’t like this. Not saying all. But I truly believe that students should be told this is how
much you can expect to make if you graduate from this degree that you’re getting, and
this is how much you’re going to owe, so you can compare your monthly payments to
your paycheck that you’re going to get. And then you will realize that there hasn’t been
much of a market for philosophy majors since the end of ancient Greece. [audience
laughter] I’m not criticizing. Sorry. [applause] You can still graduate from philosophy,
you can still graduate from any program that you want, but you deserve to know the
information about what you can do with that degree so you can compare it to what you’re
going to owe.
But, ultimately, we need to figure out a more cost-effective way to give kids
higher education. And I know that there are many of our universities out there that are
working on online platforms. There are courses you can take online. Ironically, one of
the courses that they can’t go online is the one that I give at the University of Florida
International University. That must be in person, it just requires that, but others can be
done online. And you see some of the finest institutions in the country offering some of
these free Massive [Open] Online Courses. That’s not the only answer. There’s certainly
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room for classroom education. There will always be a room for practical education. But
we can save a lot of money and time if we give kids more access to early college while
still in high school and, ultimately, online courses that lower the cost of education across
the platform. These are just some ideas, none of them are the magic bullet, but I can tell
you we do have an emerging student loan crisis in America that we must confront and we
must solve, or it will be the next big bubble that confronts our economy.
[00:41:55] I guess probably the best way to conclude in all this is to say, well,
what happens if we do all these things? And I think that if we can start to find solutions
to all these things, I believe with all my heart that the twenty-first century can also be an
American century. When you look around the world at the direction that things are
going, they’re going our way. All over the world, people are becoming more like us.
There are more democracies than ever. There are more free-enterprise economies than
ever. There are more entrepreneurs than ever. All over the world, every time restrictions
are removed and people are allowed to turn their ideas into a business, they’re creating
what they did here, opportunity for themselves and for others.
The world is going in the direction that America inspired it to go. I just think it
would be tragic for us to go in the opposite direction. It would be tragic for us to be less
of who we’ve been in the past at a time when so much of the world wants to be who we
are, because, don’t fool yourself, they may claim they don’t like us and they may protest
and burn our flag and they may say nasty things about individual Americans or about our
country, but I know for a fact that the world admires what we’ve accomplished here.
There is no people on Earth that can’t look here and see someone just like them who was
able to go further here than they ever would have been able to go in the nation of their
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birth. And we should never take for granted how special and important that is and how
much it’s worth fighting for, because what’s at stake here is not just the kind of country
we leave the next generation, and by all means I think all of us would agree none of us
want to be part of the first generation of Americans that leaves the next generation worse
off. But what’s at stake is so much more important than that. What’s truly at stake here
is what kind of world we’ll leave our children, and whether there will still be a living,
shining example on this planet of what can happen when you tell people that they can go
as far as their talent and their work will take them.
[00:43:45] Earlier, Senator McConnell introduced me in something that was a
tremendous honor to be described as the American Dream, and I take that as a huge
compliment. But the American Dream isn’t just an individual story of academic success
or a story of economic success or political success. What I meant in that line that he read
to you was that the American Dream is a lot of things. It’s the opportunity to leave your
children better off than yourself. It’s the opportunity to take an idea that no one believed
in and turn it into reality. It’s the opportunity to do something you love for a living,
whether or not it pays a lot of money. It’s the opportunity to be who you were created
and meant to be, to fulfill your ambitions and not be held back by artificial barriers that
society or government or others may try to impose on you.
It reminds me of a story of someone that I knew in Florida. He came when he
was relatively a young man, but he had come from a troubled past. His mom died when
he was a very young boy, grew up in poverty in the streets of his city, never had much of
an education, came to this country, didn’t know a soul, had very little money in his
pocket and very few skills, but somehow he made it to the middle class because he came
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to this country at a time when people that had very few skills could find a job that can
provide for your family. He didn’t have to have gone to school. He didn’t have to have
any special skills. If you were willing to work hard, you could get an entry-level job and
eventually work your way into a place. You may never be rich, but you would own a
house, you’d have a car, you’d be able to take your kids on vacation, take your wife out
to dinner every now and then. You’d be able to be fulfilled. This person that I knew, he
lived a life so far removed from the life he was destined to live in had he stayed in his
home country, that it used to amaze him every time—I mean, you could tell, when he
looked at his children and their accomplishments, it would amaze them how far they had
come, how different their life was from what his life was just a generation earlier.
[00:45:43] The reason why I know that story so well is because that’s my father.
That’s the life he lived. At the end of his life during the middle of my Senate campaign,
it was hard to talk about these things with him, but one of the things that gave me peace
in his passing was knowing that he had felt accomplished. He had felt like he had done
something with his life, that his life had a meaning and his life had a purpose, not because
he ever became famous, not because he ever owned a business with his name on it, or
because he was ever written about in a newspaper or a magazine. The reason why his life
had a purpose was because at some point in his life, I don’t know when that was, but at
some point in his life he realized, “I’m only going to be able to go so far, but if I do
certain things, there is nothing my kids will not be able to do. They will never have to
feel what I feel, limited by the circumstances of my birth, limited by the fact that I wasn’t
born here and so my language and my skills only allow me to go so far.” He was always
grateful for what he was able to have here because it was so much more than what he
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ever had as a child. But what really excited him about the future was that we would have
no limits, and they made sure we understood that from the very first day we were able to
understand anything.
[00:46:59] As a child, it was very clear to me that there was nothing I couldn’t do.
My parents made sure that I knew that just because my last name ended in a vowel didn’t
mean there’s certain things I couldn’t accomplish, that because they didn’t know anybody
famous didn’t mean that I couldn’t one day be famous or whatever it is that I wanted to
be, that I could literally do anything I wanted to do. The second thing they wanted me to
know was that that was unique, that that’s not the way it was in other places, that I should
always cherish that and value it.
And that’s what makes America special. That story I just told you, it’s not unique
at all. It’s so common. It’s your story. It’s the story of your parents and your
grandparents. It’s the story of all of us. It’s what we’ve been able to accomplish here in
this special and unique country, and what we fight for now is not just who wins the next
election or whether we’re a conservative country or a liberal country. What we fight for
is to see whether we will still remain that place or whether we will become like those
countries we replaced, whether we will become like the old world, a stagnant place where
government is so dominant that the same people, the same families, and the same
companies dominate generation after generation, or whether we will remain that special
place where stories like yours and mine were possible here, what would have been
possible anywhere else. Because if the world loses that, then it has nothing left to inspire
it. It has nothing left to take its place. And yet in the depths of my heart, despite the
problems that we face, that is what I believe our destiny is, to remain yet again in this
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new century an example to the world of what can happen when you give people the
freedom and the opportunity to go as far as their work and talent will take them. And
that’s why I believe with all my heart that if we just give them a chance, if we just give
the young men and women here today and seated behind me a chance, if we just give
them the kind of country that our parents and our grandparents left for us, they will do
what Americans have always done: they will create prosperity for themselves, for their
families, for their fellow Americans, and they will do what Americans have always done.
They will change the world.
Thank you so much. I’m honored to be here. [applause]
[End of presentation]
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