Bill Clinton: “Well, I think that in and of itself, it's probably a phenomenon of companies bidding for management talent at a time…”

“Well, I think that in and of itself, it's probably a phenomenon of companies bidding for management talent at a time when management talent is important in how these companies do in the market. So in that sense, it may not be any different than asking whether it's acceptable that professional athletes earn as much money as they do. I think the real question is, are working people earning a fair share of their company's prosperity and their country's prosperity? And are we, in the aggregate, decreasing the level of income inequality that developed over the last 20 years--because we had a very, as you know, very sharp increase in inequality among various classes of working people, with folks on the bottom getting the short end of the stick. Government policies I think had something to do with it, but I think the larger thing was that we were changing the dominant economic factors of this age. And now the dominant economic factors relate to people's level of education and skills, so that there became--there's a huge education premium now in the work force, and people that don't have it, particularly younger workers, tend to get punished very harshly by the low incomes they earn. So to me, what I've tried to do is to reduce income inequality, not necessarily by reducing upper income people's incomes, except to ask them to pay their fair--what I believe is a fair share of the country's tax burden, but instead by lowering the incomes of the lower 40 percent of the people and trying to create more high-wage jobs by tying more of them to trade, because we know trade-related jobs and technology-related jobs pay 17 to 20 percent more than average wages. And the evidence is that in the last couple of years, we have slowly, finally, begun to reduce income inequality, particularly when you take into account the impacts of the earned-income tax credit, which is worth about $1,000 a year to a working family of four with an income under $30,000. Projected Federal Budget Surplus Mr. Hunt. Another of the benefits of the booming economy, of course, has been we have something that people thought unimaginable a few years ago, a budget surplus. The latest CBO estimate I think, was----”