Michael Milken, chairman of the Milken Foundation was recently a guest on CNBC’s influential “Squawk Box” program where he spoke about his “Six Strategies to Fix America.”

Of the six strategies, three involve “human capital”

— Education – a country’s future begins in its classrooms

— Health Care – both prevention and treatment

— Investing in America – attracting the best and the brightest from around the world.

The other three are:

— Entitlements – getting entitlement spending under control

— Energy – including getting control of oil imports

— Housing – helping people realize that the American dream does not include a house you can’t afford.

Talking about Mr. Milken’s support of Boone Pickens and the Pickens plan, he was asked whether there was “any shot” at getting a bill through Congress which would promote the use of domestic natural gas over imported OPEC oil as a transportation fuel for trucks.

Milken talked about reflecting on the “past 40 years in America” where “the past eight Presidents have told us, in passionate speeches to the nation, that we would never import more oil (as a percentage of what we use) than we did at the time they gave their speech.”

When Richard Nixon gave that speech “we were importing 36 percent of our oil, and today we’re importing 66-67 percent.” He said he remembered Jimmy Carter’s speech in which he called America’s dependence on foreign oil “the moral equivalent of war.” He called on national leaders to “finally make those decisions” to migrate America’s heavy truck and bus fleets from diesel to natural gas as is done elsewhere “around the world.”

Mr. Milken said that at the Milken Institute they have determined that the “actual cost of a gallon of gasoline is $14 when you factor in aircraft carriers and, especially, American lives.”

He concluded the section on energy by saying, “can you imagine what the world would be like today if we had made good on those [forty years of promises], deployed our natural gas, changed our fleets to run on domestic natural gas.”

You can watch the entire CNBC segment by clicking HERE. The section on energy begins at about the three minute mark.

— The Pickens Team