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Article 4906 of alt.politics.clinton:
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Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Thursday, 20 Aug 1992 02:03:54 CDT
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Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: MANUFACTURERS, NAT ASSOC
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REMARKS BY GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MANUFACTURERS
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JUNE 26, 1992

Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Thank you very much, President
Jazanowski.  Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for that warm
welcome.  Thank you for the critique of my economic plan.  And I
will seek to respond to each of the things that you've said as we
go along.

Let me begin by saying that this has been an amazing election
already, nothing quite like it.  The candidates have taken to the
talk show circuits to relate directly to the American people.
And even there, have to endure a fair share of humbling
experiences.  I thought I had finally made it as a first rated
musician when I got to play saxophone on Arsenio Hall, only to
hear him say he was certainly glad to see a Democrat blow
something besides an election.

I intended to go all across the country publicizing my humble
roots only to find Vice-President Quayle saying that I was a
member of the cultural elite.  Since I may be the last person
ever to seek the presidency who once lived in a home without
indoor plumbing, I could not fathom how in the world I may be
culturally elite, but I do think it may have something to do with
the fact that I can spell "potato".

I have been bewildered by the reports of recent days where
apparently Mr. Perot has been about the business of investigating
Mr. Bush and his family and children.  Mr. Bush has complained
about that even though we know that the Republican National
Committee has investigated apparatus that rivals the KGB at its
height.  And I have the unenviable position of being just a guy
who spent all of his time trying to investigate the problems of
America and what we might do about them.

This is partly because of the way I have lived the last decade or
more, as a Governor of a state, always one of the poorest states
of America, struggling to be more competitive in the global
economy.  The state with a falling agricultural income that was
completely beyond my control because of global forces and
national policy.  The state with a manufacturing base that when I
became Governor was strong, but fragile, very vulnerable to lost
lives because so many of the jobs were relatively low-skilled,
low-waged jobs in an increasingly competitive global economy.

I set about as Governor of my state to do something I think our
nation ought to do, to develop a national economic strategy
except we did it on a state basis.  And we decided we would root
that strategy in manufacturing in trying to keep our
manufacturing base and enhance it.  We were, I believe, the first
state to offer a significant investment tax credit to existing
manufacturers who had spent $5 million or more reinvesting in our
state.

Over the last ten years, we've grown manufacturing jobs at ten
times the national average, 22% of our work force is in
manufacturing as compared with about 16% for the nation as a
whole.  We have enjoyed a remarkable amount of cooperation
between business and government.  And in 1991, in an
unprecedented move, the Association of Industries and the State
Chamber of Commerce Executive Board voted to ask us to raise by
one-half percent the corporate income tax if we would put the
funds into a trust designed solely for the education of the work
force in our state.

It has been an interesting and rewarding experience.  I have
watched, meanwhile, while our country has continued to lose
ground in overall productivity growth, notwithstanding, as your
President said, the very impressive productivity range(?) in
manufacturing in the 1980s.

While we have quadrupled the federal deficit and at the same time
unbelievably reduced national investment in those things which
will make us a wealthier country.

All of these things played some role in my decision to run for
President.  I frankly got angry when year in and year out, both
parties in Washington produced a gridlock that never seemed to
create any decisions except those which operated for the short
term benefit of people who were very well organized and had
narrow interests rather than for the long term benefit of the
American economy as a whole.

I believe that we are in trouble because we've been gripped by a
simple idea that is dead wrong.  Our idea has been -- in the last
two administrations -- supported in funny ways that almost made
it worse by Congress members who sometimes agreed and sometimes
disagreed.

The idea was that if we just got taxes low enough on the
wealthiest individuals and on corporate America and got out of
the way, if we shifted the burden to the middle class and off
onto the deficit, that investment would occur and we would get
growth.  We were asked to take a bargain for the last 12 years:
greater inequality for greater growth.

The first part of the bargain came true.  We now know from widely
publicized reports just in the last few weeks that 70% of the
gains in the 1980s went to the top 1% of the American population.
We now know that for the first time since the roaring '20s, the
top 1% of our population controls more wealth than the bottom
90%.  We now know that the savings and loan bailout is the
greatest single transfer of wealth from middle class taxpayers to
upper income insured people in the history of the United States
of America.

But we also know that in the bargain, we didn't get high growth.
We got low growth.  We know now that based on census data, two-
thirds of the American people are working harder for lower wages
than they had ten years ago in real dollar terms.  We know that
most middle class people are paying higher taxes, paying more for
health care, for housing, for education, even though they have
lower incomes.  A recent study showed that the average American
family is spending 158 hours per year longer on the job and less
time with their children than they were spending twenty years
ago.

Not surprisingly, voters in this country are angry and they're
disappointed.  I can understand their frustration.  It's also
true that the government alone is not to blame.  In the last 10
years, according to the business magazines, not some political
production, executive salaries have gone up by four times the
percentage that workers' salaries have gone up, three times the
percentage that profits have gone up.

According to the report in the Philadelphia Enquirer by two
Pulitzer Prize winning journalists entitled "America, what went
wrong?" in the 1950s, we were spending $3 billion in new plant
and equipment for every billion dollars in interest payment.  In
the 1990s, we're spending half of that.  In the 1950s,
corporations paid $2.3 billion in taxes for every $1 billion in
executive compensation.  Now those numbers have been reversed.

What has been the result of all of this?  Just a couple of days
ago, USA Today carried an interesting analysis by 18,000 business
executives around the world rating the nations of the world in
terms of their economic performance.  In this rating system, the
United States had fallen from second last year behind Japan to
fifth behind Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark.  The
business executives themselves rated America fifth because they
said we were inferior to these other countries in the education
and training of our work force, in our ability to move ideas into
production in jobs in our own economy, because we are falling
behind every year in infrastructure investment, investing in
communications, in transportation, into things that public
investment does to generate private economic growth, and because
our productivity lags behind many other nations.

In the last ten years, we've gone from first to tenth in the
world in wages.  It is clearly time to reassess our present
position and to change our policies.  This has not very much to
do with Republicans and Democrats, and everything to do with
whether we're prepared to face reality, identify the problems,
meet the competition, and restore America's long-term economic
health and well-being.

I certainly believe that manufacturing has to be a key to that
strategy.  I had an interesting argument in the course of this
campaign with a man who has some plants in my own state who said
to me, absolutely seriously, that he thought America would do
fine if all of our manufacturing base moved offshore and we had
to generate jobs out of a service economy.

Now, when I was a boy growing up in Arkansas, we were all
dominated by the lure of the Great Depression.  And my granddaddy
used to tell me that in the depression, people were so poor, they
had to take in one another's washing for a living.  That's where
we'll be if we stop producing things in America.

So we may have differences of opinion, you and I, over my
economic programs, and I welcome those and I want to respond to
them.  But I want you to know that I believe that this country
has to produce in order to be great.  This country has to produce
in order to get its growth rates back.  If the rest of the
economy had  the same productivity growth rate that manufacturing
had in the 1980s, we wouldn't be in half of the trouble we're in
today.  We have got to rebuild our manufacturing strength,
maintain it, and do it while increasing our exports, but
maintaining a strong manufacturing base here at home.

Now, what is the reality we face?  Yes, we have a $400 billion
deficit, a deficit that you can lay at the feet of both parties
since we know if all of the budgets presented by the last two
Presidents had been adopted by Congress exactly as they were
presented, the deficit would be even bigger than it is, but that
the Congress did adopt budget compromises which also led to the
position we now find ourselves in.

As I said, this budget deficit masks another deficit, and it's
very important to focus on this so that I can answer one of the
points that your President made about the trade-offs between
public investment and reducing the debt.

While we quadrupled the debt in the last 12 years, we also
reduced investment.  Every company here represented, I would bet,
has taken on some debt at some time.  Most of you in your private
lives have taken on some debt at some time.  Families borrow
money to finance a car, a house, a college education for a child.
The anticipation is that the investment will produce a greater
return than the cost of the borrowing.

Businesses borrow money to build new plant and equipment, to
start new businesses, to expand, to train the work force
sometimes.  But we don't like to borrow the money to meet the
payroll or to pay for dinner for the kids, or, as farmers say
where I come from, you don't like to get to the point where
you're eating your seed corn.  That is the tragic dimension of
the American deficit we must focus on.  We have not only
increased our debt, we have reduced our investment.  So more and
more of our debt, if you will, is eating our seed corn, taking
our kids to dinner, and making payroll.

Less and less of it is for investing in the future that will
produce more wealth, greater growth, and a greater return than
the cost of borrowing.  And that is a critical, critical element.
In my analysis of this -- you have to decide whether you agree --
but the facts are inescapable.  We increased the debt and reduced
the investment at the same time.  And that made a major
contribution to the drag on our economic growth for the last 12
years.

We also have taxes going up while incomes go down on middle class
people, because even though the Tax Reform Act of '86 reduced
rates on most people, there were six increases in Social Security
taxes which capped out at about $51,000 a year, which meant that
the vast majority of Americans had their incomes going down and
their taxes going up, caught in a double bind in the 1980s.

Now, I have offered a plan which I think responds to these
problems and which I believe will make us more competitive in the
global economy.  It may be to respond to the second criticism
that there was not enough language in the plan I presented about
that, but every recommendation I made was with the thought, "What
are our competitors doing?  What will it take to generate a high-
wage, high-growth economy in America instead of a hard-work, low-
wage economy?  How can we have more job growth and income
growth?"

And here is what the plan does.  It recommends that we increase
investment in America by $50 billion a year over the next four
years through government incentives, either private investment,
investment in education and training, or investment in public
infrastructure, in communication and transportation, in building
an economy in the 21st century.

It recommends that we invest -- excuse me.  I'm having trouble
with my voice.  It recommends that we invest in reducing our
deficit, and that we reduce the deficit by more than 50% over the
next four years with very modest growth projections.  And if you
take the projections that Mr. Darman has made for rosy growth
over at the Office of Management and Budget with nowhere near
this level of investment, if his projections are right, we will
reduce the deficit by over 75% between now and the end of the
next four year presidency.  It pays for these investments in this
deficit reduction, one-half from raising money from those whose
incomes went up while their taxes went down in the 1980s, and
one-half from a vigorous program to cut government spending in
inessential areas.

Let me come back and go through each item, if I might.   One,
investment.  As the President said, I recommend that we increase
private investment by adopting a permanent and broad-based
investment tax credit, a credit for new business investment, a
research and development tax credit, a low-income housing tax
credit.  I also recommended something that I think may be
somewhat controversial, that we restrict tax deductions for the
cost of shutting operations down in America and putting them
overseas.  I have done my best to put that recommendation on a
parity with a tax code for most of our European competitors.

I recommend that we increase cooperation between government and
the private sector, in commercial technologies much as we have
done in defense technologies with the Defense Advance Research
Products Agency.  I recommend that we consolidate our efforts in
product research and development in a new civilian agency and
increase our investment dramatically to help identify the new
technologies in the 21st century and help to move them from the
developmental stage into the product stage in the United States.

Everybody who looks at this problem says that we still do a
pretty good job of doing basic research although we're losing
ground in the patent war in America every year because we're
underinvesting in research.

The Japanese, with one-half our population, spend twice as much
real dollars, not per capita, real dollars as we do in commercial
R and D.  The government has to do a better job of increasing
partnership.   I'm not talking about picking winners and losers.
I'm talking about the technologies that we know will shape the
future of the 21st century in making sure that we have our fair
share of those jobs.

One of the saddest things that many people who were down at the
Rio Earth Summit talked to me about when they came back is that
other countries were down there doing a better job of promoting
products they manufactured in their country for environmental
technologies and environmental cleanup that are good investments
that create jobs.  70% of major American markets now are
dominated by foreign firms, partly because we do not have a good
enough system of cooperation to take ideas and turn them into
manufacturing jobs here at home.  So I feel very strongly that
this needs to be done.  It needs to be coupled with an aggressive
trade policy to open new markets and to expand markets.

I have generated some controversy in my own party, as you might
imagine, because I said I would have voted, had I been a member
of Congress, to authorize the fast track negotiations with
Mexico, but that I want a trade agreement with Mexico that will
increase prosperity on both sides of the Rio Grande River by
raising labor standards and environmental standards there in
return for greater trade and investment.

A rich country can only grow richer by expanding its exports and
its trade.  And we have to do that, but we have to do it on terms
that are generally fair to the United States of America,
something we have not always done in the past.

This plan also increases public investment in two big categories;
one, public investment to build an economy for the 21st century,
$20 billion a year for roads, for streets, for rehabilitation of
basic facilities, for a high speed rail network, for a national
fiber optics network, for the technologies for short-haul
aircraft and other things that will permit us to build the kind
of infrastructure we need.  We are way, way, way below any other
major country in the percentage of our income we invest in these
kinds of things.  We have to meet the competition, and there is a
direct return of jobs and income in the private sector.  This
money is going to be put out to contractors in the private
sector, and that kind of investment will generate even more
private sector jobs.  Everybody says this part of the program
alone will generate at a minimum a million jobs a year in the
private sector for each of the next four years.

Number two, we want to invest that much or more in the education
and training of our work force, full funding of Head Start, more
emphasis on programs for children from disadvantaged homes and in
disadvantaged schools, smaller classes in the early grades,
implementation of real national standards in our schools, and a
national examination system that means something that will
measure whether our young people are learning what they need to
know by international benchmarks.

And next, and perhaps most important, a new partnership between
government, education, and business to provide a guarantee of two
years of further training to every young American who finishes
high school but does not want to go on to college.  We are alone
among our competitors in not having a system for the forgotten
half of Americans who don't go to college.  We've got to train
everybody to do a better job in the work force.  That's why the
manufacturers in my state said, "We'll pay for two years of
further training if you'll dedicate it all to training the
workers in our plants for tomorrow."

That's one of the things that we could all agree on, I hope, that
America has to do.  We have got to have a comprehensive
apprenticeship program to meet the competition and to lift the
earnings of our younger workers.  The census data shows that
workers under 30 are earning 17% less in real dollar terms than
they were 15 years ago.  They are not worth more in the global
economy.  We have to invest them with that worth because we live
in a world where what you earn depends on what you can learn.
And we have got to do this for the non-college bound young
people.

Next there is a program which I think is the most exciting new
idea in the package which would replace the existing student loan
program and make it possible for any American to borrow the money
to go to college by combining two of the best ideas this country
ever had, the GI Bill and the Peace Corps.  Today the student
loan program costs you about $4 billion a year as taxpayers, $3
billion in loan defaults which are unconscionable mostly, and a
billion dollars in bank transfer fees.

What I propose is the government establish a domestic GI Bill, a
national service trust fund out of which any American can borrow
the money to finance a college education, and then pay it back in
one of two ways: either as a small percentage of income every
year at tax time so you can't beat the bill, or, better, with two
years of service to our country here at home paid for at a
reduced salary, dramatically reduced salary for two years by the
national government.  Come home and be a police officer, be a
teacher, work in a program to keep kids off drugs and out of
gangs, do things to help solve the problems of your community.
We can make a major dent in many of our social problems and
educate a whole generation of Americans.

At the end of World War II, we had to rebuild Europe and Japan.
We're now at the end of the Cold War and need to focus on
rebuilding America.  This would be the best money we ever spent.
I cannot tell you how enthusiastic the young people of the
country are who I've talked to about this, how eager they are.  I
can't tell you how important it is to many people with whom I
talk to around the country who are trying to solve the problems
of their communities.

The third thing I want to say is that we need to do something
about adult education.  Here one of my recommendations may be
quite controversial in this group, and so I want to put it out on
the table and invite your response now or later.  I recommend
that we invest more federal money in trying to make sure that
every adult with a job can read in the next five years.

In my state, we have drastically increased the number of people
in adult education programs and the amount of money we're
spending on it.  I believe in that very strongly.  I'm trying to
make sure everybody with a job gets a chance to learn to read and
then get a high school diploma, and when the work force is of any
size at all, we bring the people to the work force to teach the
courses there.  But I also know we have to do a better job of
retraining the work force.  And so one of the controversial
things in this program from your point of view is my
recommendation that we require all major American corporations
over a certain size to devote one and a half percent of payroll
to worker retraining every year.  Now, that's the average that is
spent in America right now.  So that's not the problem.

The problem is that in America, again, as opposed to our high-
wage competitors, we spend more money on people at the top and
less money on people on the front line.  70% of the training
dollars in this country are spent on the top 10% of the employees
in the corporate hierarchy.  In our competitors, more of the
training dollars are spent on the front line.

This is my recommendation to meet the competition.  If you don't
like it, I welcome your response and tell me why, but I know
this.  We've got to do a better job of drastically increasing the
productivity of our front-line workers.  We ought to reward
businesses who do it.  And those who don't, we need to have them
contribute into a fund so that the government can pay for it
because we're going to have more and more people who aren't
trained, aren't employed structurally for longer periods of time,
and we have to find a way to make them competitive in this
economy so we can push them back into it in ways that will make
them worthy employees for you.

Next area is the family investment component of this.  As your
President said, I did scale back, but not eliminate all tax
relief from middle class people for two reasons.  One is there's
the essence of fairness.  This is a group of people whose taxes
went up while their incomes went down, just the reverse of what
happened to upper income people.  That's very important.  These
are the people who are paying for the S and L bailouts.  These
are the people who are paying for the interest cost on the debt.
These are the people who are paying for a government that has
lost its way while their own incomes are not going up.

The more important thing is, we are also taking a much higher
percentage of most families' incomes away from them and away from
their children than we were 30 years ago.  The children's tax
deduction a generation ago really left a much higher percentage
of people's income to raise their kids.  So what I have left in
this program is an election for most middle class taxpayers.  You
can take a children's tax credit or a modest income relief in the
next few years so that we can build into this system reward for
work in family.

We talk about family values all of the time in America, but the
truth is, we make it harder to raise kids than just about any
country.  We talk about family values, but the truth is, we're
about the only country without a family policy.  That's why I
favor the family leave bill.  Even though it is unpopular among
some employers, our competitors manage to do it.  The Germans,
the Europeans, others manage to do it.  And I think we have to --
we have to revere the rearing of children as still the most
important work of any society.

The second thing this program does, which I hope you will all
support, is to say that anybody who is out there working 40 hours
a week, raising children, should have a benefit of a tax system
which lifts them above the poverty line.  We could increase the
earned income tax credit by a couple of billion dollars a year,
and, far more efficiently than raising the minimum wage, lift the
working poor out of poverty.  The great explosion of poverty in
the 1980s was among working people.

When Los Angeles broke out in riots, the great unsung heroes in
Los Angeles were the working poor whose children stayed home, who
did not loot, who did not burn, who did not steal, who did not
riot.  There are millions of people in this country everyday who
are living on unsafe streets, in difficult housing, doing
difficult jobs, working like crazy, obeying the law, playing by
the rules, who literally do not make a poverty level wage or a
wage above poverty.

The earned income tax credit, made refundable and increased, can
lift these people above the poverty line.  They will invest that
money by spending it in our society.  We will get it back.  It's
one way of America saying, "Hey, we're going to reward you.  If
you work hard, play by the rules, you work 40 hours a week,
you've got a kid in your house, the tax system ought not to leave
you in poverty."  I think it's a good idea, and I hope you will
support it.

This program also calls for changing the welfare system as we
know it.  It would require us to invest some more money in people
on welfare in education, training, child care, medical coverage
for their children.  We'd say, then after we do that, when you
can get a job you must take it.  You cannot stay on welfare if
there is a job available -- once we have supported your children
and empowered you to go to work.  If no private sector job is
available after two years, then you must do community service
work.  We have to end welfare as we know it.  It should be a
second chance, not a way of life.

I would also say that this program would call for a very tough
national system of child support enforcement, to reinforce these
family values.  It is a national scandal that we have billions
and billions and billions of dollars in uncollected child support
every year, up and down the income lines.  Because people know
they can cross state lines and get away with it.  And we are
going to toughen it up.  Well, that's the investment side.  We
also cut the deficit by more than fifty percent.  And as I said,
if we take Mr. Darman's recommendations on growth -- by more than
75 percent.

Why would we do both, and how are we going to pay for it?  Let me
deal with why we'll do both one more time.  A country's level of
investment determines growth rate.  If we didn't invest any of
this money and we put it all against the debt, so that you had
tax increases and spending cuts funding only deficit reduction,
in my opinion you still have low growth and the deficit would be
greater than you think it's going to be.  Why?  Because you'll
have fewer people paying taxes into the government, and more
people drawing taxes out.  So, we have to increase our level of
investment and reduce our debt at the same time.

Why will we pay for it with a combination of tax increases and
spending cuts, and will the tax increases retard economic growth?
I don't believe they will.  Why?  Because we asked people to pay
taxes whose incomes went up and taxes went down in  the 1980's.
Principally, a rate increase on people with incomes above
$200,000 a year and a surcharge on incomes above one million
dollars a year.  Roughly the same program that Senator Bentsen
got the Congress to adopt, but the President vetoed.

Most of that money, today, is being used for consumption.  When
that money is given in taxes to the government, it will all be
used for deficit reduction or for investment -- every last dollar
of it.  We also ask for a strengthening of collections of taxes
on foreign corporations doing business in America.  Why?  Because
in the eighties, incomes for foreign corporations went up sixty-
five percent -- tax receipts went down fifteen percent.  More tax
avoidance.  So we seek to collect about ten billion dollars
there.  I remind you that $150 billion over four years seems like
a big figure.  Let me give it to you in another way, that's less
then forty billion dollars a year in a government that this year
will spend 1.4 trillion dollars.

So, as a percentage of overall public spending this is a very
small percent.  I also propose to have real meaningful spending
cuts -- three percent a year reduction in the administrative
budget of every federal department.  The elimination of 100,000
federal jobs by attrition.  The United States, even though we
have big state and local governments, still has more federal
employees per capita than Germany, Japan and Great Britain.  We
have more federal employees per capita.

We regulate more and create fewer productive environments.  What
I want to do is to require all these federal bureaucracies to go
through the same sort of restructuring process that many major
American companies have already been through.  The kind of
quality management rebuilding that will reduce middle layers of
management, push decisions down to front line workers, do less
with regulation and more with environmental--changing the
environment, I don't mean environmental policy--I mean changing
the environment in which people work.  Although I'm for that too.
But you have to change the environment in which people work.
That would save, alone, billions of dollars.

I want to set an example, I'll cut the White House staff by
twenty-five percent, and send a budget to cut congressional
staffs by the same.  We have grown the government by way too much
in the last twelve years, as we got into more and more paper
pushing, and less and less changing of the conditions in which we
live.

We can reform procurement practices and inventory practices,
there are 1.2 million containers of nasal spray in the Pentagon's
inventory storage today.  Clothing, going back to the fifties,
unbelievable opportunities to save money.  Every recommendation I
have made for spending cuts, is a recommendation made by the
General Accounting Office of the government, by Congressman
Dorgan's government waste commission or by something that I know
from my own experience as the longest serving Governor can be
done in the federal government and done immediately.

We need to reduce the amount of government spending by the
government.  I'm just as against trickle down government as I am
trickle down economics.  I want to give that money back to people
at the grass roots level to invest in America.  Now, I favor, to
get this done, a pretty tough system of political reforms -- some
of which you may be for, some of which you may be opposed.  But I
want you to know what I think has to be done to open this system
up so it will work for all of the people.

I think the influence of political action committees should be
reduced.  I don't think a PAC should be able to give more than a
person, no more than a thousand dollars.

I think the general election costs to Congress should be limited.


I think that television stations and radio stations that have
access to government monopolies should have to open the airwaves
to honest debate, so that TV can become an instrument of
education, not a weapon of assassination again.  Not 30 second
ads but real debates and discussions over issues.

I think there should be limits on the revolving door from
government to lobbyist.  I think that we should make it much more
difficult for people to walk out of a government job and start
lobbying the agencies they used to work.  I think that when
people go to testify before congressional committees, it out to
be a matter of public record how much those members of Congress
got from the people that are testifying before them.  I think
people ought to have to work five years before they can go to
work for someone they used to regulate.  I don't think lobbying
expenses should be deductible.

I think we've got to open this system and free Congress from its
own dependence on a special interest system that has paralyzed
our ability to get to the public interest.

And the last point I want to make is this; it's going to be very
difficult to make any of this stuff work unless we reform the
health care system in America.  If you want entitlements control
in federal spending, if you're worried about the budget deficit,
believe me, if you look at the hard numbers, defense is coming
down.  We're going to reinvest all that money in an economy for
the 21st century.

The real problem is health care costs going up at two and three
times the rate of inflation.  Same problem it is for the private
sector.  The reason is clear:  it's meeting the competition.  You
live in the only advanced nation where the government has taken
no action to bring health costs in line with inflation, and
provide a basic package of affordable health care for all.  I
complement the National Association of Manufacturers on
recommending that course for America.

I can tell you, if you don't want somebody who will stay up late
and get up early, to try to figure out a way to make insurance
costs in America in bureaucracy and administrative costs
competitive with our people in Europe and Asia, don't vote for
me.  Because I don't believe you can solve the rest of these
problems unless you bring health costs in line with inflation and
find a way to have a basic package of affordable health care for
everybody, and then get more primary and preventive care out
there so we don't have so much being done at emergency rooms and
passed on to the rest of us.

And finally, we have got to get away from the fee-for-service
system that encourages overutilization, put people in health care
networks and have a system of managed competition.  The reason
productivity went up in the manufacturing sector by 4% a year in
the 80s -- an astonishing thing -- is global competition.  And we
have to have some managed competition in health care.  Not a
system that automatically pays more for doing more whether it
needs to be done or not, but a system in which people still have
some freedom to choose their providers, but in networks where you
can make annual payments instead of fee-for-service systems, and
you have genuine managed competition.

I want to have less micromanagement of health care by government,
and more systematic changes to keep this system in line with
inflation.  That would do more to help our manufacturing be
competitive.  It would do more to help our automobiles be
competitive.  We have a $600 per car differential today and
health care costs between American cars and European and Japanese
cars.  We can not continue this.

So that is the thing I close with.  The thing that makes all of
this work is a determination to bring down the relative cost of
the entitlements of America by controlling health care costs.

Now, this is a plan I think that will put America back to work.
I don't agree that the taxes are prohibitive, or will retard
growth.  I do agree with your second comment, that all of this
has to be done in the context of the global economy.

And finally, even though I went to law school, if you can give me
any recommendations to reduce legal costs that don't do damage to
the environment or worker safety, I would love to have them.  I
want to challenge each and every one of you.  If you don't agree
with my program, write me and tell me what's wrong with it.  Tell
George Bush and Ross Perot you want to know what they'd do if
they got elected President, too.

You know, this program is the boldest, most specific, most
comprehensive plan ever offered by a major candidate for
President.  I am doing it because I don't want the job to live in
the White House and go to Camp David on the weekends.  I think
this country is in trouble.  I want to turn it around.  I want
you to be a part of it.  We're all going to have to change to do
that.

I have challenged labor unions to change, the AARP to change,
teachers' organizations to change.  I have challenged people to
reach across racial and ethnic lines.  I want you to be a part of
this.  This is not a partisan election;  it's an election about
whether we can rebuild and reunite America.  Thank you very much.