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« Back to Thinking About Think Tanks, Part Two of Two main page   Transcript for: Thinking About Think Tanks, Part Two of TwoTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1329 Thinking about Think Tanks, Part Two of Two. FEED DATE: October 20, 2005 Christopher DeMuth Opening Billboard: Funding for this program is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Today on Think Tank we are going to talk about Think Tanks. In Washington and elsewhere there are a plethora of such institutions – sometimes shrouded in mystery. Ideologically, they range from left, to right, to center; they play an important role in defining issues and ideas for both governments and for the public. How do these Think Tanks work; why are they important? To find out, Think Tank is joined by Christopher DeMuth, an attorney, scholar, a former high-ranking government official, a fund raiser, a writer, and President of the American Enterprise Institute, a Think Tank. The topic before the house: thinking about think tanks, part two, this week on Think Tank. WATTENBERG: Chris DeMuth, welcome to Think Tank, again. DEMUTH: It’s good to be back. WATTENBERG: Chris DeMuth, for our viewers’ benefit, is my boss at AEI, which is a think tank. And I think our viewers should understand I do not intend to bend over backwards and throw nothing but softballs, nor will I be extra harsh on criticisms, but I will ask some questions that - about criticisms that have been made about think tanks – conservative, neo-conservative, liberal - including AEI. Okay, let us begin. One of the phrases that has been associated with AEI going way back is “ideas have consequences” - and that’s what we’re talking about - and AEI and many of the conservative-leaning or neo-conservative-leaning think tanks have concentrated on ideas. It’s said, at the same time, that most of the left of center think tanks have concentrated more on bricks and mortar, like a daycare center or something like that, and that those on the left are beginning to say that those on the right, like AEI, had it right, that you get more bang for the buck by making the case for an idea, and that now, the left is beginning to change their focus toward the development of ideas. Is that a correct summation of what’s going on? DEMUTH: Yes. Yes. I would say that an original and important insight, innovation, that the think tanks were responsible for back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was understanding that Washington, while it appears to be run by power and contributions and who you know and who can get an appointment with a staffer on the Ways & Means Committee, over the long run is really very deeply influenced by ideas. So our investment was in ideas and we stuck with them for the long term. You can remember - I can remember reading works of yours debunking the population explosion myth back when I was in college. And you worked on that over many, many years, and it turned out to be a profoundly influential project. WATTENBERG: Thank you very much. DEMUTH: Your book on the real America, I mean, these things have had an influence on what people talk about; how they see a wide variety of public policy issues; the decisions that the government actually makes far and above the money that’s been put into it, far above the more visible expressions or emblems of power that you read about in the newspapers. WATTENBERG: Now, you have at AEI many conferences. Maybe you have a number. Some of them are seen by the public on C-SPAN or somewhere else. Did they include panelists who are in disagreement with what is perceived to be AEI policy? Maybe you could give us an example or two. DEMUTH: We go out of our way, we like a good argument. We think it’s more illuminating on both sides. And we think, for whatever positions our people may have, if you’re going to actually win an argument you’ve actually made some progress rather than just speaking to the converted. We always try to get, for any contentious issue, the best proponent of a different viewpoint, or a contrasting point... WATTENBERG: Do you recall any specifics? DEMUTH: I couldn’t give you any specifics, but if anybody went to our website and looked at the last three or four days, we always try to get... WATTENBERG: I recall one recently on economics where you had an economist for the Employment Policy Institute, which takes a diametrically opposite... DEMUTH: Sure. We have disagreements with economists at the Brookings Institution. We invite them over; they invite us over. We came out with a book, you may know, just two months ago: a series of proposals for tax reform. WATTENBERG: Some AEI scholars will disagree with each other - and maybe you can give us a couple of examples. Is that correct? DEMUTH: Yes. I think that on some subjects - the sugar input quota program or whether the Small Business Administration is doing a good job for small business in America - we could walk up and down the halls and I think we would find unanimity and complete opposition to both of those. On many other questions - and the kind of things we like to work on, such as the foreign policy challenges of terrorism and how to deal with the phenomenon of radical Islam - you will find people with serious disagreements. On tax policy, on school reform, you will find people with differences of opinion around here that may not be as great as the differences between them and people, say, on the left wing of the Democratic Party, but which we regard as extremely important and very important to get right. WATTENBERG: So, many people at AEI would be against the Estate Tax or the so-called Death Tax. I can be - I can say - I happen to believe it should be raised, but it should not be permanently eliminated, and nobody is going to say... DEMUTH: Whether it should be raised, lowered, or eliminated is a subject which reasonable people could disagree on and will around our hallways. WATTENBERG: Alright, now... DEMUTH: Can I give you another example? The centerpiece of our foreign policy now is promoting democratic institutions as a way to bring the Arab Middle East into the civilized world. In doing this, what is our position with respect to avowedly Islamist parties, which have renounced violence or are not adherents of violence, but embrace views such as on women’s legal rights that we in the west would regard as profoundly illiberal? Some people would say they can’t be part of the political process. Individual rights and a western style liberal values have to come first. Other people would say no, we have to get the conversation going. We have to get democracy going. We have to teach people how to compromise and take accountability for decisions, and that’s the best way to isolate the violent radicals. That is a big, hot question in Washington today. It’s being argued about within the government, and it’s being argued about at AEI, and we have very strong proponents of both sides. WATTENBERG: I want to get to one issue which has some sub-issues, and I want to get to them sort of quickly. First, it’s said that AEI and the neo-conservatives in particular played a big role in the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And my first question is: did you, like most Americans, sort of have an epiphany after 9/11 and did you decide to bring on foreign policy scholars, most of whom approved that policy? We did bring on a lot of foreign policy experts at about that time. DEMUTH: Yes to that; no to everything else. In the 1990s, I was looking for defense and foreign policy scholars to beef up our program at AEI. I was not convinced that history was over, that... I had an uneasy sense that there was going to be new and very different foreign policy challenges for the United States. It was hard to find people in those days. Ambitious, bright young people were doing other things. They were designing software for supermarket checkout counters. If they were academics, they were working on tax policy or regulatory policy. 9/11 changed that, and many very bright and talented people, some of them with skills - Arabic language skills, background in Islam, in counter-intelligence and terrorism. WATTENBERG: CIA-like... DEMUTH: Many people poured themselves into thinking through this very different new epoch that is clearly upon us. Its entire outline and shape are not completely clear, but we have a sense of a very new, challenging security problem that we’re going to be facing for a generation. WATTENBERG: But, just as a general matter, and this can change from day to day, but how do you think things are going? Are we going to prevail there, in your judgment? DEMUTH: I think that things are going poorly and I think that we will prevail in the end. There were several missteps made after the fall of Baghdad, and I think we lost at least a year, maybe two years, in the establishment of public safety and security, which allowed insurgents and foreign mischief makers to gather and get organized. WATTENBERG: And yet, those photographs - of women, particularly, - with - waving the purple finger will probably be the defining image of the first part of the 21st century? I think so. DEMUTH: That’s true, and they will prevail. WATTENBERG: Okay. I hope so. Chris, at your bigger AEI dinner in 2003, President George W. Bush said, and I quote: “At the American Enterprise Institute, some of the finest minds in our nation are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed twenty such minds,” end quote. One of those, of course, was Vice President Dick Cheney. Can you think of some others? That’s a lot of people. DEMUTH: He was very nice to say that, and we did send a lot of people into the administration. The Vice President had been a Senior Fellow; he had been a member of the Board of Trustees, and he had been coming over here and taking part in debates and conferences since he was a Junior Congressman. The Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow, was almost a former Fellow. As a young man he worked at AEI doing research. Later on he made something of himself and was a business tycoon and was a member of our Board of Trustees. Larry Lindsey and Glenn Hubbard were the President’s two top economic advisors in his first term. Both had been at AEI. The two tax reform bills that the President succeeded in getting enacted in his first term were based on a great deal of research that we did here at AEI in the 1990s that Hubbard and Lindsey had been involved with. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you this, because it has been brought up. The relationship between AEI and the Bush administration may be – you might comment on this if you want – really unprecedentedly - if that’s a word - close. They’ve taken a lot of our people and a lot of our ideas. My question is, does it ever worry you that AEI could consequently lose its reputation as an independent voice, that people start saying, “well, AEI does what Bush wants them to do”? DEMUTH: Right. We’re very close to the Bush administration. I think we were probably equally close to the Reagan administration, especially in the first term. But this happens on occasion. The chance that we would become a spokesman for the administration or lose our independence is zero. Our intellectual independence is our greatest asset. The people in the administration, or at least most of them, and certainly everybody at AEI, understands that we’re in different lines of work. The job of political leadership, the job of government management, you have to make choices. You have to engage in compromise. That’s what democratic politics is about. And you have to render judgments that are of a practical nature and somewhat different than even a practically oriented think tank like ours does. We think and research and we take positions. They actually have to decide. WATTENBERG: Let’s talk very briefly about some of the work that AEI scholars have done so people kind of get a sense of what we’re up to. Your scholar, Rick Kassan, and other people as well, have written on this very controversial issue of school vouchers. Maybe you can just give us a brief take out on where you come out, where you think most people at the institute come out. I like them. DEMUTH: I think that the poor performance of our schools, especially in poor urban areas, is one of the two or three gravest and greatest problems that America is facing. I think that when parents are put in a position to deny resources to an individual school, take their money and their students elsewhere, the schools will start to improve immediately, and I think until parents have that power, the power of the unions will prevent... WATTENBERG: Of setting up a competition? DEMUTH: Of real competition. WATTENBERG: Welfare reform, I guess that’s Doug Besharov... how did we come out on that, or how do you come out on that? DEMUTH: Welfare reform has been an important part of AEI’s work over a long period of time, and I would say that the developing consensus on the perverse effects of AFDC especially in promoting long term dependency and moving our progress against poverty backwards, was a very important part of our work in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, leading up to the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. WATTENBERG: Which has worked pretty well, hasn’t it? DEMUTH: Well, it has had - there are some - I think that that’s correct. The first years were a time of very bracing economic growth. At the same time, many other forms of welfare... If you take welfare spending today, in fact, it’s hard to find much of a decrease since 1996. Some parts have been contracted, but other parts have greatly expanded. WATTENBERG: But some critics - and I assume at AEI as well and perhaps you - think that President Bush and the Republican majority in Congress have embraced big government. I mean, those deficits keep going on. I’m not talking about Katrina or emergencies. I don’t think Bush has vetoed a spending bill. That would not be generally seen as an AEI view of the world. Are you concerned that the days of big government are back? DEMUTH: Yes, I am. I think that there are two parts of the problem. One is that spending is growing at unprecedented rates, and that is true even if we back out new spending that is related to 9/11, the War in Iraq, Homeland Security, Katrina. If you put all of that aside, everything else has been growing as well. And, we had an historic moment two years ago. We passed a major new entitlement program, the prescription drug benefit, with no taxes to pay for it. The net effect is that the difference between the government’s promises to current and future generations and the taxes it’s going to collect to pay for those is about $50 Trillion. It is immense. I think that there are two causes. One is that we are in wartime and traditionally – you will get some debates about this – but traditionally government has grown across the board in wartime. Presidents have big needs, and they tend to - sometimes people say that pork is the lubricant that makes the legislative machinery work and presidents need a lot of legislation during the time of a crisis. But the other part of it – and the part that worries me more - is that the very notion that government is limited. Limited government was probably the single-most originating idea, original idea, animating idea, in our Constitution. The government had certain essential functions. Everything else was to be left to private society. When I was a boy there were senators that would rise - and usually they were Republican curmudgeons from the Midwest - in legislative debate and say, gentlemen – they were all gentlemen then – this may be a perfectly good idea, but where does it say in the Constitution we get to do this? Nobody says that anymore. Nobody argues that something may be a good idea, but it simply isn’t the role of the government, or it isn’t the role of the federal government. There used to be some attention that presidents would pay toward the limits on the appropriate functions of government that has simply gone beyond the boards. And it’s more dramatic in the case of the Republican Party because we think of the Republicans as the party of limited government, but, in fact, there are no champions of limited government anymore. And I think it’s a profoundly - I think it’s a tremendously important development and very, very worrisome. WATTENBERG: I find it sort of amusing that critics on both sides of the aisle talk in a very derogatory way about pork barrel spending; on the other hand, in the next week they’re saying our infrastructure is falling down. Well, that’s what so-called pork barrel, I mean, highway bills and things like that. There’s waste and slippage in there, but we have real needs! DEMUTH: When the government’s involved there’ll be a certain amount of pork and we want to constrain that. What worries me is that it’s not so much that there may be some favoritism in the siting of a highway. I mean, that seems to me unavoidable in democratic politics and not something to worry about too much. What I worry about is that the basic distinction between highways and airports on the one hand, or elementary disaster relief - those sorts of things - which are essential functions of government, and the many, many, endless lists, innumerable things that the government is doing that it has no business doing, has simply been lost site of. A little bit of pork here and there bothers me much less than that the federal government is growing at the expense of the states, that nobody thinks seriously about whether some new program... Should the federal government provide internet hookups for rural health clinics? You know, we have a special program just for that and we have literally thousands and thousands of such programs. WATTENBERG: There is something called the AEI/Brookings Center. DEMUTH: Well, we have a joint center for regulatory studies, where we work together on regulatory issues, such as the one I just mentioned. WATTENBERG: And that - with a right of center think tank and a left of center think tank with great scholarly assets - tend to agree on something, the Congress is going to say, hey, it’s probably legitimate? That’s a powerful tool. DEMUTH: That’s what we hope. Environmental and other areas of regulatory policy tend to produce a consensus among experts pretty much across the spectrum. And Brookings and AEI together did terrific work on airline deregulation way back in the 1970s. Airline deregulation was more the work of Senator Kennedy and President Carter than it was of President Reagan. It was wholly bipartisan. But, in most cases, there is a division. That is between the people who are studying these things and trying to understand what is good policy and the practicing politicians. The airline deregulation act was something of a rarity. Our environmental policies are shot through with waste and inefficiency even today, and there’s very little difference between a Republican and a Democratic administration. They tend to pursue bad, wasteful environmental policies across the board. And we joined up with Brookings hoping that the practicing politicians might pay a little more attention to us. WATTENBERG: Okay, on that note, Chris DeMuth, thank you very much for joining us on Think Tank. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments by e-mail. We think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Announcer: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 4455 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite C-100, Washington, DC 20008 or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS online at pbs.org and please let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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