DEUTSCH: I've asked Bill Gates when he was on the show, would you ever run for president, and of course, he laughed. My theory is the greatest minds in this country are the business minds, and a businessman is trained to cut through, solve problems, lead. Would you have been a more effective politician had you started out as a businessman? Because I bet going forward, you would have been?

Mr. GORE: Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I grew up in a political family. My father was in Congress for 10 years before I was born, and 32 years overall. And both my father and mother were really passionately devoted to American democracy, and they were idealists. And my sister and I grew up with that idealism. And--so I, you know, after I came out of the Army, I actually worked as a journalist for a long time, but then when I got into politics, that was the bulk of my career before business. I think you do learn a lot of skills in the business world that are very useful for the kind of problem-solving efforts that government demands today.

DEUTSCH: Specific policy question. You've talked about if you had your wish list as this, there would be the CO2 tax, which basically let's replace—and know everybody's of can't do, can't do, let's replace, payroll tax with a gas tax.

Mr. GORE: Yeah. Not an increase, a shift.

DEUTSCH: Is the irony of that, coming from a Democratic world, that in a strange way, forget whether that's feasible or not, that's actually punishing the every man consumer, and in a certain way, rewarding business? It's kind of a Republican view, in a certain way.

Mr. GORE: I don't think so. I don't buy that.

DEUTSCH: No?

Mr. GORE: First of all, you'd have to have transition measures to deal with the particular professions where there would be an uneven impact. But you don't--look, the working person, the biggest tax that person pays is not income tax, it's the payroll tax. You get rid of the payroll tax, that encourages more jobs and better jobs. And then people make the rational adjustments that the CO2 tax would lead them to make, you know. And sitting in these traffic jams for two hours a day is no fun, either. So, I mean, I really think--here's another point. In a globalized economy with IT empowered outsourcing, our biggest disadvantage is our competition with low wage rates overseas, now they have the technology and information to marry to it. Well, we don't want to lower the wages and salaries here but why do we worsen that disadvantage by stacking on top of the wages all of the costs of social welfare programs and health programs and retirement programs? It's really kind of odd to try to put that on the backs of salaries and wages in the first place. We should be encouraging work, encouraging jobs and discouraging pollution and the destruction of the planet, instead of the other way around.

Now, we dump 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day and it's considered to be free. There's no cost assessed. It's not even recognized. It's like, OK, fine. And some of the largest polluters who can't imagine a business plan that doesn't allow them to continue treating the atmosphere as an open sewer, they've been really misbehaving in trying to slow down the development of common sense about this. But in the economy, if you don't send an accurate signal to the market, if you don't price it in, if you take--if you take a huge big factor and take it completely out of the market and say, this doesn't exist, then no wonder it's going to get out of control. So if we replace dollar for dollar the money that we're now putting on the backs of salaries and wages with the CO2 and other pollution taxes, I think it would clarify things and help us unleash the power of the market to solve this.

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