U.S. Senate race, in person, on the issues: Al Franken

In this campaign, I'm trying to be specific [about policy]. It's all hard. It's very into "the weeds." But the weeds are where it is at. You get the respect of your colleagues if you're "in the weeds." You get the respect of your colleagues because so much of the stuff we can get done has nothing to do with partisan politics.

[Strengthening] community and technical colleges is as far as you can get from partisan politics. That effort was not just bipartisan — Lamar [Alexander, R-Tenn.], Patty Murray [D-Wash.], Johnny Isakson [R-Ga.], and me — but bicameral. One of the most conservative members of the House, [Virginia Foxx, R-N.C.], was president of a community and technical college. So she is just all over it. We have so bonded on that.

I've worked with David Vitter [R-La.] on rail. I've worked with Pat Roberts [R-Kansas] on compounded drug safety. I've worked with Chuck Grassley [R-Iowa] on higher-education transparency.

I'm really looking forward to going back — if people give me the honor of re-electing me — to work on this stuff.

We are on the verge of an energy renaissance. In fact, we've started one, because of fracking. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, and we are able to use it instead of coal for electric generation and heating and other things. We have seen the cost of energy in our manufacturing sector go down. That's a huge part of this renaissance.

Here's where I differ with my opponent: We should not be exporting large quantities of liquefied natural gas. The Department of Energy has said that if you ship half the natural gas Mr. McFadden is talking about — half the terminals he's talking about — the price of natural gas in this country will go up 36 percent. It will lower in China. We would be subsidizing Chinese manufacturing.

This is a spectacularly bad idea for Minnesota. We have no natural gas. If you're in the Senate and you've seen this debate, it's very clear who is for exporting and who's against it. Here's who's for it — senators from states that produce a lot of natural gas and don't do a lot of manufacturing. States that are against it are states that have no natural gas.

We need a diversified portfolio. We need fossil fuels. In the short term, we need cleaner fossil fuels like natural gas. But in the middle term and the long term, we need to segue into a portfolio that is far more renewable, that is far more about energy efficiency and far more about storage.

We have extended the solvency of Medicare since the Affordable Care Act was passed by 13 years now. Some of it is the ACA, some of it is delivery reform incentivized by the ACA. And when more people are insured, hospitals are on the line for a lot less uncompensated care.

I believe that if you repeal ACA, then you're basically saying we're just going to give billions of dollars more to insurance companies.

Seventy-five percent of what we spend on health care is for chronic conditions. The biggest thing of all is that we have to incentivize high-value care — health care over sick care. We have to build on the delivery reform that we have seen. I, of course, want to get rid of the medical device tax.

Fee-for-service is sick care. I as a doctor [under that system] don't get paid to stop you from getting diabetes. I as a doctor get paid, if I'm a surgeon, to cut your foot off. Health care ACOs — accountable care organizations — cover a whole big group of people, and it's in their interest to keep them healthy. That's what they get paid for.

People have really responded to this $1.2 trillion in student debt. The cost to our economy — in terms of people delaying buying a house, delaying buying a car, delaying starting a business, delaying getting married and having kids — is tremendous.

But you have to pay for it [help for student debtors] somehow. Sometimes you have to make hard choices.

We got three Republican votes — [a couple] votes short — for the "Buffett rule." It's that after your first million dollars, you pay essentially [the same tax rate] every normal middle class American pays.

We all know that we have this incredible disparity in wealth and income in this country that's only gotten worse. We've seen 55 straight months of private-sector growth, but so much of those gains are going to those at the very top.

This country works from the middle out. When the middle is doing well, the country does well. So I think that you have to do something about all this wealth going to those at the top. And one fair aspect is to take some of that and pay for people being able to refinance their student loans.

In 2005, I proposed the Al Franken doughnut hole. The idea is basically to take it from the threshold at which your income stops being subject to FICA [the Social Security payroll tax], and take it from there [$117,000 in 2014] and have a doughnut hole to $250,000. You don't pay any more in that range, because $250,000 is considered the top level of the middle class. After $250,000, you phase the tax in. From $250,000 to $500,000 (and there are an infinite number of permutations here), it's like 1 percent. From $500,000 to $1 million, it's 2 percent. From $1 million to $10 million, it's 4 percent.

I've signed on to a Bernie Sanders thing [a bill introduced by the independent senator from Vermont]. It has the Al Franken doughnut hole in it. At $250,000, the tax kicks in totally, completely — the whole 12.4 percent kicks in. That pays for it [the long-term funding shortfall in Social Security]. But I don't think that will fly, and I don't think it's actually necessarily totally fair. It's a starting point.

Certainly we need to degrade and destroy ISIS. This is a barbaric group.

We need an authorization to use military force. We did vote for training and equipping the moderate rebels. I voted for that as the least bad option. But it would take a lot of hubris to say, yes, that will work. On the authorization, we want to write something much more narrowly tailored than what they wrote in 2001 and 2002. We didn't think there was any need to rush into this. It needs to be debated. The Senate and the House need to play a role in this, and we need to have a very healthy debate on what that authorization looks like, and on this policy.

This is part of a very complex picture in the region. I don't want to get mired in a sustained ground war there, because the idea that we can control this is — our record is not very good. Again, you have to have a little humility here.

Under No Child Left Behind, a school and a teacher were judged on what percentage of the kids exceed an artificial line of proficiency. So there became something called teaching to the middle, teaching the kids right below and right above this line of proficiency to get the highest percentage possible over proficiency. The kid "up here" — no matter what you did, that kid would not fall below proficiency; the kid "down here" — no matter what you did, that kid would not get to proficiency.

My feeling is that a sixth-grade teacher who takes a kid with a third-grade reading level and gets that kid to a fifth-grade reading level is a hero. But under NCLB, that teacher was a goat.

We need early childhood education. That's the best way to focus on these achievement gaps. The arts are also incredibly important. The brain is not a mind; the mind is not a soul — and because of that we need the arts in our lives, and our education.