Bill Clinton: “I was glad to hear what you said about not being able to sit still after 3 o'clock. I'm glad to know you've been sitting…”

“I was glad to hear what you said about not being able to sit still after 3 o'clock. I'm glad to know you've been sitting still before 3 o'clock. [Laughter] I didn't know--I have never seen you still for 2 minutes in all of our acquaintance. This is amazing. [Laughter] I don't think you can answer this now, but I think it's quite important that we be explicit about a dilemma that we will face as we move toward next year--the State of the Union, what our position ought to be. We all know that there will be, in the context of the budget agreement we just adopted, fierce competition for limited money. We're going to have some more money to put into this; we'll do the very best we can. It will be a priority, but still, it seems to me that there will be competition for what the best way the Federal Government can spend more money in child care is. We could increase the tax credit to either make it more generous to people who get it now or move it up in the income limits. We could expand Head Start, particularly the Zero To Three program, where we've only got just a few thousand kids now--25,000 or something--and I think the early results are pretty promising. It's a terribly important initiative. Or we could devise some way to help get these salaries up, which-- you know, abysmal. When you were talking about the salaries, Hillary gave me a chart which showed that child care workers on the whole are better educated than the American work force and lower paid. So we keep saying we want all these people to come in and get more education and more training, and yet--and there are some cases where people don't have any education or training, but there are a lot of them that are quite well-educated that are working for ridiculously limited wages. So what's your sense about how we ought to go about making that decision? And I'll just give a blanket invitation to the audience, too, that if you were in my position and you knew you couldn't do 100 percent of all these things, would you do a little bit of all of them, would you focus on one, would you focus on the other? And I invite you to make your views known to us, either today during the conference or in writing, because this will be a difficult thing. Congressman Lampson is still here; he's going to have to make a decision about how to vote on this stuff. And we will have to decide. [Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala said that resources should be invested in quality, focusing on caregivers. The discussion then continued.]”