Charlie Rose Talks to Senator Marco Rubio

How do you balance the need for tax reform and entitlement reform?
The drivers of our long-term debt are Medicare and Medicaid programs and, to some extent, Social Security. I talked about this in my book [American Dreams]—that I don’t want to make any changes for people like my mother, who are in the system now, or people near retirement. If we act now, we can save Medicare and Social Security. We can place our country on a sustainable spending path without making disruptive changes for current beneficiaries—in fact without making any changes at all for them. The people who we would need to ask to accept a different system are people like me. I’ll be 44 in May.

Will economic mobility be a defining theme of the 2016 campaign?
I think it’s a defining theme of our time. My experience in this country is largely through the lens of someone raised by two people with very limited education who, as a bartender and a maid, achieved the American dream. They were never rich, but they owned a home in a safe and stable neighborhood. All four of their children went to college. There are millions of [Americans] today living one broken-down car away from catastrophe.