Bill Clinton: “Let me just make a suggestion, all of you in this. This is something that you might--you don't have to have a specific…”

“Let me just make a suggestion, all of you in this. This is something that you might--you don't have to have a specific answer, but if you feel this way and if the small-business community in New Hampshire feels this way, one thing you could do is just write your Senators and your Members of Congress and tell them that. Because we're having two debates over tax cuts in Washington. One is: How big a tax cut can you afford if your first job is to balance the budget? But the second is: Let's assume we agreed on how much we could afford; what kind of tax cut is best? My belief is that the best kind of tax cut is the kind that helps people raise their children or educate them, or that helps businesses deal with the family-based problems or the education problems they have with their own employees. So I would--for example, I'd be more than happy to have a really significant increase in the financial incentives we give to small businesses to help their employees with child care. And I think most families with children would be better off having a tax deduction for the cost of sending their kids to college than having what would be a much smaller across-the-board tax cut. But these are the decisions that we have to kind of grapple with. And let me give you another example. The White House Conference on Small Business said we ought to do something to make it cheaper and easier for smaller businesses to take out pension plans for themselves and their employees. So we've got a bill in Congress now that would make it possible for businesses with 5, 10, 6, 15 employees less expensive and more reliable to take out pension plans for the owners and the employees. These are the kinds of things we're going to have to do if more and more jobs are going to be created by you and more and more jobs are going to be abolished by big companies. Because big companies could do this on their own: They could have good health care, they could have a good pension, they could have continued education benefits. But people will still need them if they go to smaller companies. So if the big companies aren't going to be there to aggregate the money, then the Government has to come in and help give some incentive or support to small business to do the same thing. [A participant suggested a low cost loan fund to help textile businesses adversely affected by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).]”