Thank you both, and thank you again for being here. You've been with Batten students before, and I'm very grateful for your time with the students. As you know, Congressman, the organizing principle of this semester-length inquiry is future public policy challenges. So I want to begin our discussion with the very basic question that we start our course with, and frankly, we'll end it with next week. What are the two or three major public policy challenges likely to be in the year 2030, and how can these students best prepare themselves to meet these challenges? >> I, I think the demographic shift going on globally and certainly here in the United States, is profound and completely reshapes the world you're going to inherit. Here in the United States, this is going to be a very diverse, pluralistic community the community Tom and I represent. When Tom was first elected to the Board of Supervisors, 3% of Fairfax's population was foreign born. When I became chairman, 27% foreign born and double the population. So the base was much bigger. And that has completely changed how we do things in northern Virginia. It changes the workplace. It changes the educational challenges in our school system. It's made us, however, a stronger, better place. If you look at any objective measurement globally, it's also going to have an impact. You look at certain industrialized countries, Russia, Japan, and Germany, and by the time, roughly you're, you know, reaching your golden years, each one of those countries will have half the population they have today. >> I'll add a couple. There are issues today and I don't see any resolution in the near future. And I just, I hope it can last til 2030, we deal with that be. And I think in, in each case, you got one party in denial about the problems. The case of first of all climate change. I think that will continue to be an issue. And the ability of this country and the world to address that is very complicated because it goes into economies, goes into jobs, goes into major transformations with winners and losers. And by and large, political leaders are unable to bite the bullet on that until you get something a major crisis, and then of course they always over react. The other is the booming deficit. You can't continue to borrow the kind of money this country is borrowing. It's masked today because the interest rates are so low. But those interest rates inevitably rise, it squeezes out everything else. I'll just give you one thought. When you start taking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, pensions, veteran's benefits, and, and interest on the debt, and you put that together, it's almost three-fourths of the budget we're basically invested on retirees. Which means we're not investing it on your generation, on education, on infrastructure, on research and development that will get us ahead. Our global competitors aren't doing that, and I think over time, this just catches up with you. It's that we're basically paying for you, we're paying for the party my generation's enjoying. It's not a major concern right now with young people as a vote but I think, eventually both these issues come to back to bite us and I'm afraid, 2030 they're, they're still going to be around. >> We talked a great deal about technology and technology driven change in this class and how it outpaces our governing structures, incidentally the CIA report that we were briefed on that the Global Trans 2030 report makes, makes much of that fact. But think drones and the rules of war, think NSA meta data mining and, and, and privacy, think about computer-generated safe districts and the abuses of gerrymandering. Could you talk a little bit about how Congress might anticipate and address some of this change, and are there any specific reforms that you gentlemen feel particularly strongly we should have at the forefront of our agenda, either within Congress or in our voting system. >> I rarely see Congress get ahead of any issue. Politicians are great followers. But rarely do you get out front and lead the pack before the public is willing to be there that you don't pay a major price. So they've become a pretty risk averse group. I'll just take one issue here, which I'm sure there are divisions in this room. You take the issue of marriage equality or gay marriage it wasn't until the public started to change to get the President and everybody who's already switched their position saying now we're embracing it, and you see the politicians following public opinion, not really leading the public opinion. And I think on these technological changes because every time you, there's so many winners and losers every time you start making changes in these kind of things, you're going to see the same thing, that Congress will follow but the marketplace is going to lead. And I think that's what you, you see now, is that the economy and the marketplace way ahead of the politicians on these issues. >> If you look at the issue of cyber security Congress. >> [COUGH]. >> Has not passed a new law dealing with cyber security in 12 years. Now think about the pace of technology. What is happening here is our whole sense of what, what is privacy is that zone of privacy is under assault, or at least under tremendous stress to be redefined. You know, I can remember the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. And one of the things that got him in trouble was he, he questioned, he challenged, whether there was an implicit right to privacy contained within the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution does not talk about a right to privacy. But it's become pretty much settled law that it's implicit. And yet, if you look at technology today, Facebook. Facebook executives will tell you we have to redefine what privacy is. People are going to have to get more comfortable with a lot more information about themselves being out in the public sphere. And, and similarly in terms of cyber security and you know, large mega databases we're having a, a very vigorous debate, although as Tom said, we're not doing very much about it legislatively, about where is that proper boundary? We want to protect security. We don't want another 9/11. But on the other hand, we don't want to have to sacrifice personal liberty and privacy in the name of national security.
