All-American Presidential Forums on PBS" Moderated by Tavis Smiley

FORUM RESPONSES

"First off, let me thank the organizers. This is the fairest debate or forum that we've had thus far this year. Let me add that racism was here with us at the beginning of this country. It was here in the last century and it's going to be with us in the twenty-first century.

One of the areas that touches me the most and enrages me the most is our war on drugs that this country has been putting forth for the last generation. In 1972, we had 179,000 human beings in jail in this country. Today it's 2.3 million and seventy percent of them are Black African Americans. I hope my colleagues will join me in standing up and saying like FDR did with prohibition, "We'll do away with that," and FDR did it.

If I'm president, I'll do away with the war on drugs which does nothing but savage our inner cities and put our children at risk. There's no reason for this. There's not an American that doesn't understand that culture and the understanding that prohibition was a failure, so we repeat it again like we repeated Iraq after we had the failure of Vietnam.

When will we learn that the issue of drugs is a public health issue? Addiction is a public health issue and not a criminal issue where we throw people in jail and criminalize them to the no advancement to the people. If there's one group of people in this country that needs to face up to that problem and we have had to face up to it, that is the African American community."

"I think we could cut a little more than fifteen percent, very much so. Stop and think what the opportunity costs. You have heard these nostrums before. I've been watching your heads. You're nodding on all the programs. You heard it ten years ago, you've heard it twenty years ago. Why doesn't it change? The Democratic party hasn't done appreciably better than the Republican party in solving these problems. It has to be solved by the people, not by your leaders.

Stop and think. When he's talking about the money we're squandering, twenty-one million Americans could have a four-year college scholarship for the money we've squandered in Iraq. 7.6 million teachers could have been hired last year if we weren't squandering this money. Now how do you think we got into this problem? The people on this stage, like the rest of us, are all guilty and very guilty and we should recognize that because there is linkage."

"I touched on it earlier. The scourge of our present society, particularly the African American community, is the war on drugs. I'll repeat it again as a challenge to my colleagues on this stage. If they really want to do something about the inner cities, if they really want to do something about what's happening to the health of the African American community, it's time to end this war.

There's no reason to continue it in the slightest. All it does is create criminals out of people who are not criminals. Education, yes. Health care, yes. But understand that the health care that we're talking about, by and large, is going backwards. We're subsidizing the insurance companies and all the plans that I've heard of except Dennis' is a continued subsidization of the insurance companies. Please put pressure on these people to step up and end this war on drugs which is ravishing your communities."

"I want to say that none of you are going to live in your lifetime to see our system of taxation change based upon what you've heard here. I was eight years on a Finance Committee. None of them have served on that committee and, I'll tell you, the code stands that high and there's not a human being alive that understands it. It's with Democrats, with Republicans. They take care of the people.

You think it's an accident that all of a sudden we wake up and the wealthy aren't paying a fair share? The only way they're going to pay a fair share is wipe out the income tax. It is corrupt. It is corrupting our society. Begin to put a place a tax that everybody will know what everybody is paying, and that's a retail sales tax. You can make it as progressive as you want. Keep in mind, a tax where everybody will know what everybody is paying. You won't see it with this."

"Is it a surprise to anybody in this room that, if you don't have any money, you don't get any justice? Is that a surprise to you all? My gracious, the only way you're going to get justice is to turn around and empower yourselves to become lawmakers so you can change the system, and there's no thought of really changing the system today. It's politics as usual."

"The answer is yes. Just keep in mind that, if we weren't squandering our treasure on this terrible war that we didn't have to start, we would have four million housing units available and a good portion of them could go to Katrina residents."

"Outsourcing is not the problem. What is the problem is our trade agreements that we have that benefit the management and, of course, the shareholders and have neglected on either side of the issue whether it's in Mexico or in other countries or the United States. That's the problem that must be addressed. So, no, it's not outsourcing. But I would add to it that it's the way all these people want to finance health care on the backs of businesses that make them noncompetitive in the world. That's part of the problem and our system of taxation is also part of the problem because it makes us noncompetitive in the world."

"Very simply. If we have a president, he has to have moral judgment. Most of the people on this stage with me do not have that judgment and have proven it by the simple fact of what they've done."