Software Vault: The Gold Collection/Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO/cdr11/wh930519.zip/05-19C.TXT

Internet Message Format | 1993-06-19 | 37KB

From @lex-luthor.ai.mit.edu:[e-mail]  Wed May 19 17:09:45 1993
Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 15:40-0400
From: The White House <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: President's Remarks at Los Angeles Valley College

                         THE WHITE HOUSE

                  Office of the Press Secretary
                    (Los Angeles, California)
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                           May 18, 1993


                     REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
           IN DISCUSSION WITH STUDENTS ON JOB TRAINING

                    Los Angeles Valley College
                     Los Angeles, California

12:10 P.M. PDT

         THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  (Applause.)
I'm delighted to see all of you here, and I'm glad to have the
chance to come.  I've had a great time touring some of the
facilities and seeing some of the programs that are offered here
at this college and meeting some of your fellow students.
Everybody here is a student, right?

         AUDIENCE:  Yesss.  (Applause.)

         THE PRESIDENT:  Everybody back there?  I'm glad to
see your president, your chancellor who are here, and Mayor
Bradley I see back there.  Thank you for coming.  (Applause.)
And I see -- we have a number of members of Congress back there.
If you've got anything to ask your congressman, we've got four or
five options back there.  Will the members of Congress stand up?
Walter and Javier and Tony Beilenson, Congressman -- (Applause.)
It's good to see you all.

         I see several state officials back there -- the
Secretary of State, the State Comptroller, the Insurance
Commissioner, Michael Woo -- Councilman Michael Woo, my friend, a
candidate for mayor.  Good for you.  Good luck.  (Applause.)

         That "woo" is interesting, isn't it?  Makes a good
cheer.  I like it.

         I want to say to all of you, first of all, I am
delighted to be back in California; glad to be back in Los
Angeles and to Van Nuys and -- (applause.)  Yesterday I was in
New Mexico, and I was at Los Alamos -- and I said Los Angeles.
So I promised them when I -- they all hooted.  So I promised them
when I got here I'd say I was glad to be in Los Alamos.
(Laughter.)  So there, I did it.  (Laughter.)

         I came here for a very specific purpose today, and
that is to try to illustrate what the economic efforts that our
administration is making will do for you and how your efforts --
can we fix this -- in the work we're doing to try to turn the
California economy around.  And I thought that there was really
no better place to come than to a college like this where all the
people here have already, by definition, taken responsibility for
your own future and made a real commitment to do what it takes to
be competitive, to develop the skills you need to get a good job,
to keep good jobs and to learn new skills continuously.

         I met a very impressive man inside who has got a
full-time job, as many of you do, who has been coming back here
on his own just to continue to hone his skills, because he says,
"what I do requires me to change over and over and over again, so
I will always be able to have a good job."  And this is funny --I
was talking to Dan Palmer, who introduced me, he told me that
before he was married and began to have children, he was a
musician.  And he realized that that's not a very solid basis for
having job security.  I thought about being a musician, too, and
I wasn't as good as he was.  And I knew I had no job security.
So I got into another line of work where I have no job security.
(Laughter.)  But, anyway, I understand very much that sort of
motivation which I imagine got a lot of you in here.

         What I wanted to do was to basically just talk a
little bit about our national economic efforts and how it affects
California and how what you're doing here is essential if we're
ever going to turn the economy of the state and nation around.

         First, when I took office, I found, as you know, a
government with an enormous budget deficit -- that is, we were
running in the red every year, over $300 billion.  Our debt had
gone as a nation from $1 trillion to $4 trillion.  It's hard to
even imagine that kind of money in just 12 years.  We were a
country for 200 years, we ran up $1 trillion worth of debt.  Then
in 12, we ran up $3 trillion more.

         Why?  Because we cut taxes and increased spending.
And it was fun for a while.  It helped California a lot.  Cut
taxes, people had more money in their pocket, increased spending,
mostly in defense, put a lot of people to work in plants out
here.  Put a lot of people to work on and around the bases out
here.

         In the end, it all catches up to you, and you've
seen the last few years what happened:  the Cold War was over, we
began to reduce defense, we had no real plan for dealing with it.
And what's happened to your tax money is, the deficit keeps going
up even though defense has gone down because of the cost of
health care -- something that won't surprise any of you.

         So what I have tried to do is to come up with a plan
that would bring our deficit down, give us control of our budget
and your future, get interest rates down so people can refinance
their homes and their businesses -- and I'll bet you there are
people in this audience today who have refinanced their home
loans since last November and saved a lot of money doing it,
because we're determined to bring interest rates down.  And at
the same time, while cutting a lot of spending and raising some
taxes, almost all of which -- at least well over 70 percent of it
comes from people with incomes above $100,000, and we tried to
give a tax cut to people with families with incomes under $30,000
so they wouldn't have to pay a tax increase.

         But while doing that, there are some things which we
should spend some more money on, and I want to talk about them.
We ought to spend some more money on having more programs like
this.  Why?  Because you can have the best economic policies in
the world, and if the people don't have the training they need to
do the jobs in a global economy, good economic policies don't put
people to work.  (Applause.)

         We also -- I'll give you another example -- there
are also, in this tax bill that I have asked the Congress to
pass, there are also big incentives for small businesses and big
businesses to reinvest their money to put Americans to work, and
special programs to induce people to invest in communities that
are particularly depressed.  More sweeping than anything
anybody's ever offered.

         Why?  Because the government can't put everybody to
work.  Most people work on the private sector, and that's as it
should be.  So we have to find ways to give people special
incentives to reinvest their money.

         Let's take, for example, a business.  If a business
goes out and refinances its business loan and gets a lower
interest rate, what do you want them to do with the money?  Open
another business, right?  Or expand the business they're doing
and hire more people so we can get unemployment down.

         So those are the kinds of things we're trying to do.
The budget I've asked the Congress to pass has over 200 specific
budget cuts.  It's got some really tough things in it.  We
freezed federal employee pay.  We reduce the size of the federal
work force by 150,000 over the next five years by attrition, just
by not hiring people as vacancies occur.  We cut everything from
agriculture subsidies to Medicare.  We cut a lot of things,
starting with the White House staff and the administrative cost
of the federal government.

         We raised the money that I talked about.  But we
have some targeted increases in investment.  So while we're going
to bring the deficit down dramatically, we're going to try to get
some money for more funds for dislocated workers, more funds for
communities that are hurt by base closings or plants being closed
because of defense cutbacks, more funds for things like the Red
Line Transit System here, where our administration announced over
$1 billion in funding to put people back to work and also to have
some more stops in the community.

         And the thing I want to say to you is that, if we're
going to compete, if you're going to be able to have a good job
and we're going to turn this community and this area around, we
have to have the discipline to cut the things out we don't need
to spend money on, to raise some money in order to bring the
deficit down, because that means low interest rates and that's
good for the economy.  But we also have to invest in people and
technology and jobs.  We've got to do that.  (Applause.)

         You know, I got amused when I was on the way in
here, people holding up signs, standing next together.  One of
them said, don't spend any more money, and another one said,
close the border to illegal aliens.  In the jobs program I
presented to Congress, one of the things we had was enough money
to hire a lot more border patrol people.  You can't have it both
ways.  If you're going to hire people, you've got to have the
money to hire them.  And we're going to have to make these kinds
of tough decisions.

         So I wanted to come here because all of you know
this.  If you didn't know this you wouldn't be here.  You have
this figured out.  I mean, maybe not just like I said it, but
you've figured it out.  The average 18-year-old going into the
work force now is going to change work eight times in a lifetime.
Eight times.  And whether you can get and keep a job now depends
as much on what you can learn tomorrow as it does on what you
know today.

         And that's not going to change.  The world will get
smaller and smaller and smaller, more and more of our economy
will depend on our ability to compete with people around the
world.  We'll have to trade more, we'll have to sell more to
other countries.  We'll have to be able to change constantly over
and over and over again.  And you really are on the cutting edge
of that change.

         So I wanted to come here to try to illustrate that
and to ask you as citizens to support my economic program, to
support our efforts to bring the deficit down, to cut spending,
to ask wealthy people to pay their fair share -- (applause) -- to
give people incentives for more jobs, and to invest more in
education, training and technology.  (Applause.)

         I also want to tell you -- before I open the floor
to questions I want to introduce one more person.  When I was
running for President out here --

         AUDIENCE:  No new taxes!

         THE PRESIDENT:  We tried it their way for 12 years.
Look what it got us.  (Applause.)  You know what the "no new
taxes" crowd did for 12 years?  They cut taxes on the rich,
raised taxes on the middle class, ran the country in a ditch.
They had it their way for 12 years.  (Applause.)  It sounds
great, all this talk.  They had their chance.

         AUDIENCE:  You broke your promise!

         THE PRESIDENT:  They had their chance.  I broke my
-- you know what else they don't say?  Their crowd, what did they
do after the election -- oh, after the election they said, oh, by
the way -- the previous administration -- oh, by the way, the
deficit is going to be $50 billion a year bigger every year than
we told you.  But go ahead and do everything you said you were
going to do before -- sorry we didn't tell you that.

         AUDIENCE:  You broke your promise!

         THE PRESIDENT:  What did they say, guys?  So the
free lunch crowd has had their chance.  (Applause.)  And I'm
telling you there is no free lunch crowd.  And so we'll just have
to decide whether we're going to take a different course.  I want
you to have a chance to do that.

         The other thing I want to tell you is, we can't turn
this country's economy around unless we lift California up.  And
so I have -- (applause) -- I asked the Secretary of Commerce Ron
Brown to head a team in my administration to develop a specific
strategy to try to make sure we were doing everything we could do
to help to turn this economy around.  He has now made -- just
since I've been President, in four months, seven trips to
California, meeting with people, working with people, trying to
develop a strategy for what our partnership should be.  And he
came with me today, so I want to introduce him.  Ron, stand up,
please.  (Applause.)  He's spending more time here than in
Washington.

         We're going to work hard, but you've got to do your
part, too.  And one of the messages that I hope will come out of
this event today is that thousands of people in southern
California will see you -- they will see you and they will think,
I've got to do my part, too.  I've got to do something.  I have
to do something to change what I'm doing.  I have to do something
to lift up my circumstances.  Because I'm telling you, there is
nothing the President, nothing the Mayor, nothing the Governor,
nothing anybody can do for you that you're not prepared to do for
yourself.  This has got to be a partnership and a two-way street.

         Thank you very much.  (Applause.)

         Who's got a question or a comment?

         Q      Hi.  First off, I thought you look mighty
handsome in that.  (Applause.)

         THE PRESIDENT:  I don't know about that, but it's a
handsome cap.  (Applause.)  Thank you.

         Q      I'm a 29-year-old returning student.  And I
didn't know if you knew, but we are the number one voter
registration campus in southern California -- LAVC is.
(Applause.)  I wanted to know, will you support an amendment to
your motor voter bill which will allow students to register to
vote at the same time they register for classes when they come
here to school?  (Applause.)

         THE PRESIDENT:  The answer to that is, I support
that concept, but it's too late to amend that bill, because we
had to fight like crazy just to get it through.  You know, it was
filibustered once by the minority in the Senate.  And finally, we
got an agreement and passed the bill, the motor voter bill, after
it was passed last year and then vetoed.  So it's a great
improvement over the present law, the motor voter bill, and so I
think that it's unrealistic to think we can amend it.

         Now, what I think -- as a matter of fact, I want to
get it up and sign it before anybody decides to do anything else
with it.  But what I think you should do, since California has
such an incredible array of community colleges and other
institutions of higher education, is to try to get a state bill
through requiring that to be done here.  (Applause.)  I mean,
that's what I think you should do.  I'll bet you could get a lot
of help.

         And, also, I think that the local registrar of
voters would probably be happy do to it.  And if they're
reluctant, then you ought to pursue trying to get a state law
passed.

         Q      Mr. President, I still believe in having the
American Dream.  And one of those dreams is to have an education.
Another one is to own a home.  And I want to know, what do you
have in your economic policy that would help me buy a home?
(Applause.)

         THE PRESIDENT:  The most important thing that I
could do to help you buy a home is to keep the cost of buying a
home low.  And the best way to do that is to keep interest rates
down.  Home mortgage rates have been at 20-year lows -- 20-year
lows.  And I want you to understand why.  I hope we can keep them
down there.

         First, interest rates dropped for a long time
because of the recession, but they still were pretty high.  Then,
after the election, I said we were going to bring this deficit
down, and I gave a specific outline of how I was going to do it.
The rates started dropping rather dramatically.

         Last year, a poll was done which said that only 47
percent of the American people under the age of 35 thought they
had a real good chance to own their own home.  This year, a poll
was done that said 74 percent of the people thought they had a
chance to own their own home.  The only thing that's changed is
that the cost of financing a home has gone way down.

         So the central premise of what we're trying to do in
bringing this deficit down is to lower interest rates, lower home
mortgage rates, lower credit card rates, lower business rates,
lower the car payment rates so that we can help make these things
more affordable to average citizens.  In other words, doing the
right thing for all Americans will help individual Americans more
than any specific program I could have on home-buying.

         Now, let me say one other thing.  I have also
supported having the federal government give states the right to
issue tax-exempt bonds to provide for lower interest financing
for middle-class families and for working families with modest
means.  And again, one of the things that I have tried to do in
my program, if it passes, is to make sure that we make that
permanent so that every state in America will be able to continue
to do what I did vigorously in my state, which is to make
available more low-income, low-interest financing to people to
buy homes.

         Q      Mr. President, there are many different claims
on how much your economic plan will actually increase middle-
income taxes.  Can you tell us in very simple, nonpolitical
language how much more money middle-income people, those making
less than $60,000, will pay in new taxes?

         THE PRESIDENT:  Yes, I'll be glad to.  First of all,
there is one middle-income -- there is one tax in this program
that falls on middle-income people.  And that's the so-called BTU
tax.  It's an energy tax based on, basically, the heat content of
various sources of energy.

         The purpose of the tax, aside from raising money, is
to encourage utilities and industries to ship to the most fuel-
efficient and environmentally-sensitive forms of energy so that
we can do more energy conservation and do more fuel shifting.
And we've made some changes in it to try to make sure it works in
a more practical way.

         But because you consume energy, eventually those
things will find their way down to you.  That is, some of it will
be in the fuel you buy, some of it will be in products you buy
that themselves use fuel, a little bit of it would be in anything
that's brought to a store by a truck.  I other words, ultimately,
all people pay these things.

         Now, here's how the pricing works.  The average
family of four, next year will pay virtually nothing -- I mean,
literally virtually nothing -- $1.00 a month or less.  The next
year after that, it will be probably about $6.00 a month -- this
is $60,000 a year and less.  The next year it will be, and the
year after that and from then on, it will be someplace between
$14.00 and $17.00 per month, maximum for a family of four.  If
you're single, it's much less.

         Now, if your income is under $60,000, but is also
under $30,000, and especially if you have children, there is a
good chance that you will not pay any more money, net, because
another provision of this tax bill does something that I
personally think is very important; I've wanted to do it for a
long time.  It increases the earned income tax credit, which is
already in the tax code, to the point that we'll be able to say
to anybody who works 40 hours a week and has a child in the
house, if you do this, you will not be in poverty.  In other
words, even if we have to give you a tax credit, we're going to
lift you out of poverty.  We're going to reward work instead of
welfare; we're going to say that you'll be out of poverty.
(Applause.)

         Now, again, I want to be very specific.  The higher
you go toward $30,000, the more likely you are to pay a little
bit.  But if you have children, you can make maximum use of the
earned income tax credit so that if you've got, let's say, a
family of four with an income of $29,000, you will pay nothing or
next to nothing on the energy tax, because while you pay it,
you'll get an offset on your income tax.

         So the lion's share of this, what I told you, $1.00
a month, $6.00, $7.00 a month, up to a maximum of $14.00 to
$17.00 a month, three years, four years, five years from now,
will be paid by people with incomes between $30,000 and really
all the way up to about $100,000 a year.  Then, it's at that
point, when you get to the upper six percent of income earners,
that the income tax increases trigger in.

         So that's what it does.

         Q      Mr. President, as Republican filibusters
torpedoed your original jobs bill, thereby leaving countless of
unemployed and underemployed Americans less hopeful than they
were in January, and as the dichotomy between costs and quality
in health care and the education system widens, I would like to
know what this administration will do to stem the unconscionable
flood of illegal aliens that pours virtually unchecked into this
country, and that erodes the quality of life for those Americans
in the lower economic brackets and must eventually threaten the
American middle class?  (Applause.)

         THE PRESIDENT:  I'd like to answer the question you
asked, and also then make a reference to the other issues you
raised on the jobs and the health care issue.  The first thing I
want to do is to hire a strong, sensible, practical person to be
head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.  I have asked
the Attorney General, Janet Reno, whom I think has really done a
good job, to put a very high -- (applause) -- priority on
selecting a nominee who will be compassionate, but also hard-
headed.  I mean, I think you want somebody who is compassionate,
but hard-headed, who is realistic about what we're up against and
what we're facing.  I think she will make a recommendation to me
this week, and we'll resolve that; that's the first thing.

         That's the first thing.  The second thing I think we
have to do is to make a better effort to enforce the law that we
have.  If we've got a law on the books we ought to try to enforce
it, even if it's difficult to enforce.  One of the things that
was in the jobs program that you referred to that was killed by
the filibuster was funds for more border guards to enforce the
law.  A lot of people don't know that, but that was in there.

         So I think we have to find ways to get the resources
necessary to do as much as we can to enforce the law that exists.
There is a limit to how much any economy can have.  You've got
the California economy very depressed now.  This   is a state
made by immigrants.  It's very important to recognize that.
(Applause.)  Los Angeles County has people from 150 different
racial and ethnic groups.  We also will continue to have people
who are exiles really from political oppression.  And we have to
-- under our law they get a different set of treatment.  But I
think we have to really role our sleeves up and do this.

         In the meantime, there's something else I think we
ought to say.  Whatever we do on immigration is a national
decision that has uneven impacts.  You would admit that, right?
It hurts California and Texas and Florida and New York and, to a
lesser extent, a handful of other states more financially than it
does the rest of the country.  But it's a national policy.  Or if
there's a lack of a policy, it's a national policy.

         One of the things that has really bothered me,
especially as we've seen all these educational cutbacks in
California with your economy down after the defense cuts and the
other problems, is that the federal government has essentially
been willing to let you in California eat the cost of the federal
policy.  So another thing we have done in spite of all the budget
cutting we've done, there are funds in this budget to
substantially increase funding to California to deal with the
cost of immigration, thereby freeing up other funds in California
to be spent on education or jobs or whatever else you all want to
do here.  I think we need to do more of that.  (Applause.)

         Now, I don't want to mislead you -- there is not as
much money here in the budget as a lot of people asked for from
California.  But there's a whole lot more; I mean, several
hundred million dollars more than was previously given.  And I
just think it is imperative that we have to provide -- if the
federal government is going to have a policy, or lack of it, then
the federal government ought to pay for the policy, or lack of
it, so that the states can be free to spend their money on
educating and training and finding jobs for the people who live
within the state.  That's what I think.  So we're going to move
toward that.

         If I might just make one other comment on what you
said earlier.  I'm going to try to come back with various pieces
of this jobs initiative.  I hope we can still get some more money
for summer jobs, because we've got the best summer jobs program
this country has ever organized.  We've worked in partnership
with the private sector.  We're going to require 90 hours of
educational work for people who have summer jobs, hoping that we
can actually help people to get full-time continuing jobs and to
continue their education -- something that's never been done with
a federal summer jobs program before.  So we're going to try to
get some more.

         I also believe very strongly that we need to make a
down payment now on the efforts that I'm making to put 100,000
more police officers on the streets so we can have more
community-based policing -- (applause) -- which means the best of
both worlds if you've got the right kind of community policing.
It means less crime, tougher law enforcement and less abuse of
authority because you have people working the neighborhoods,
knowing their friends and neighbors, and less pressure.

         So we're going to start with that and then try to
move back toward these other issues.

         Q      Mr. President, I transferred to a state
university from here at Valley.  I had to drop out of school this
semester because I can't afford to go and I don't qualify for
financial aid.  And there are other students that are in my
situation.  We really want to go back to school.  We can't afford
the fees.  What are you going to do to help us, please tell us.
(Applause.)

         THE PRESIDENT:  I have introduced into the Congress
a bill that I do believe will pass with both Republican and
Democratic support -- two bills -- designed to deal with your
problem.  And let me just talk a little bit about it because you
could tell by the clapping that you're not the only person in
your fix.

         The college dropout rate is two and a half times the
high school dropout rate.  And an awful lot of people quit
because they can't afford to stay.  Now, in California this
previously was not as big a problem because we had -- so many of
the institutions were free.  But you've got all these economic
problems now; that can't be the case anymore.  And even if you
don't have big tuition you have expensive other -- other expenses
are significant.

         So here are the things we're trying to do.  First of
all, I've asked the Congress to adopt a national service program
which would permit young people to earn up to $5,000 a year in
credit either before, during or after college to pay off loans
for college expenses by doing important work in the community.
It can be done before, during or after college.  Like after
college, if someone agreed to be a teacher, for example, or a
police officer in an underserved community, they could get $5,000
a year credit for that to pay off their loans.  So that's, in
effect, a scholarship program in return for national service.

         In addition to that, I've asked the Congress to
totally reform the present student loan program.  The present
student loan program costs $4 billion a year -- $3 billion in
unpaid debts, and $1 billion in fees to banks and to other people
who handle the money for the student loan program.  It is amazing
the money that's in the student loan program.  And there is also
no incentive for them to collect on people who won't repay,
because the government guarantees 90 percent of it.  So if you
borrow $20,000 from a bank and you don't repay it, the government
will give them $18,000, and it will cost them $2,000 to go to
court and get it, right?  So it's not a good system.

         What I recommend is that we shift to a system of
direct loans by a protected financial entity to be created by the
government to give you lower interest loans, to give you the
money you need, and to give it to you on terms that won't
frighten you.  And here's what I mean -- and people would be
eligible without regard to their income, and here's how it would
work:

         If you borrowed the money, you would not have to pay
it back until you actually go to work.  Then, you would be able
to decide how you want to pay it back among two choices:  You
could pay it back on a regular loan repayment schedule, based on
how much you borrowed, or if that was too tough and that scares a
lot of people, you could pay it back as a percentage of your
income so that you would never be required to pay more than a
modest percentage of your income.  So there would never be an
incentive not to take the loan out, because it would always be an
affordable percentage of your income.

         The catch is that we can't afford to lose $3 billion
a year, so you'd have to pay it back at tax time so you couldn't
beat the bill, but you would always be able to afford to pay it
back, and no one would expect you to pay it back unless you were
actually working.  This will dramatically change the economics of
college financing.  (Applause.)

         Q      Hi, Mr. President.  How are you doing?

         THE PRESIDENT:  I'm fine.

         Q      Okay.  My question to you, sir -- we have a
plant in Van Nuys, the GM plant.  I notice a lot of businesses
such as that went out of state.  What can the government do to
motivate big business to invest in the community college as well
as state college and major universities?  (Applause.)

         THE PRESIDENT:  That's good.  Well, I think first of
all, most big businesses will invest more in the education of
their employees than ever before because it's in their interest
to do so.  And I think what I should be doing is trying to figure
out ways to give businesses incentives to reinvest in America and
in putting Americans to work, and also, if possible, to try to
make sure that every state has a chance to keep the manufacturing
base.

         Now, that affects California in two ways; let me
just mention them.  In the program that I have asked Congress to
adopt, in addition to the tax increases, which you were good
enough to ask about -- and I'm really glad you gave me a chance
just to lay it out because it's not near as bad as everybody
thinks it is, is it -- there is also a lot of incentives for
businesses to reinvest.  Small businesses today can expense or
write off $10,000 of expenditures every year on their taxes.
We've proposed to take that to $25,000.  That's a good incentive
for the small businesses to hire maybe one more employee.  And
most new jobs are created by small businesses.  So this is a good
thing to do.

         Another thing we do is to let larger businesses who
make investments in new equipment and modernize write that off
more quickly in this tax code, which is an incentive to invest
more.

         The third thing that's real important to California
is, at least I have read -- you know, you had an economic summit
out here not very long ago, and I read that a lot of
businesspeople believe that it's harder to keep manufacturing
jobs in California because of the costs of the workmen's
compensation system.  More than half of that -- (applause) -- and
I'll say a plug for your Insurance Commissioner, Mr. Garamendi is
the first person who ever talked to me about this -- more than
half the cost of worker's comp comes from health care costs.  And
in the work that my wife, the First Lady, is doing with the
Health Care Commission -- (applause) -- one of the things we're
trying to come up with is a national system to take the health
care portion of worker's comp cost and fold it into a national
health system so you lift that burden off of the businesses
separately, and so no state ever has an advantage over any other
state just because of the health care cost of worker's comp.
That will also be a huge boost to California and the
manufacturing economy of California if we can get it done.

         I'll take one more.

         Yes, ma'am?  I wish I could stay here all day, but
I've got to go shake hands with them because they feel deprived.
(Applause.)  And you.  Thanks.

         Q       Mr. President, I would like to ask about
education.  The level of education is declining, the on-campus
crime is increasing and the education budget is decreasing.  The
percentage of government expenditure used for education in United
States is three to four percent.  In Japan it's seven percent.
The California education budget is 85 percent of U.S. average,
and it's one-third of New Jersey.  So I would like to know what
actions are you going to take to solve these kinds of problems.
(Applause.)

         THE PRESIDENT:  Well, let me try to reframe a little
of what I've said before because I think you've hit it.  It would
surprise most people to know that while the government's deficit
was going up and the debt was going up in the last 12 years, we
were actually reducing the effort the national government is
making to support education and a lot of other initiatives,
because all the money was going first to defense and then to
health care costs.

         What I am attempting to do with my budget, and will
continue to work on it every year I'm President, is to, every
year, to slowly move our spending priorities back toward
education, training and technology.

         In this budget, for example, we give more funds to
institutions like this for worker training programs.  We give
much more money for Head Start, for preschool kids.  We do a lot
of things to try to, in other words, let the federal government
play a bigger role.  But another real problem you've got, let me
say, in the United States as opposed to Japan where you've got
three levels of government that often operate more or less
independently, the lion's share of the budget for education
always comes at the state and local level.

         So then, the other thing I can do is to help
alleviate the burdens of the state government.  Why is state
government spending less on education in California, more on
uncompensated care for undocumented people coming into the
country, more on exploding health care costs, often mandated by
the national government?

         So if I can persuade the Congress, and if we can be
wise and good enough to work out a health care program that's
good for America, that brings costs in line with inflation, and
then if we can compensate the states better for their costs that
aren't their fault, like dealing with the immigration issues,
then that will free up in California millions and millions and
millions of dollars which the state could then turn around and
put back into education.  So we can help directly  some, and we
can help indirectly a lot.  And I'm trying to do both those
things.

         Thank you.  You were great.  I wish I could stay
longer.  (Applause.)

                               END12:46 P.M. PDT