Bill Clinton: “A lottery is a different issue. I doubt it would raise a great deal of money, and I've always been opposed to them…”

“A lottery is a different issue. I doubt it would raise a great deal of money, and I've always been opposed to them, because lotteries tend to have an unequal effect, taking a disproportionate amount of money from lower income people. So I've always been opposed to that. But let's talk about the national sales tax. Almost every country that I know of that we compete with, advanced countries, all the European countries and Japan and Canada, have a national sales tax. They call it a value-added tax. Most of them--if you go to Canada you see it on your bill--you know, they separate it out, just like the sales tax. But most countries just put the value-added tax into the wholesale price, and you don't even see it on your bill. And a lot of those countries like that because what they do is they tax things sold in their country. Now, what's good about that? That means that--let's take, again, your plant here--if Mead Paper makes, let's say, stationery and sells 15 percent of its products overseas, those products would not be subject to the VAT tax. Or, you're in the UAW, if you make an automobile, and any automobile you sold in another country would be subject to no tax at all. Then, when another country's car came in here, it would be subject to the tax. So a lot a people in manufacturing like this national sales tax because it helps your exports, and it puts a burden on imports coming in, supports the job base of the country. It's perfectly legal; all our other competitors do it. Now, here's why I didn't propose it right now. That is a radical change in the tax system of the United States. It is something I think we may well have to look at in the years ahead. But I did not want to confuse two different things: One is the imperative of getting the deficit down, with the need to maybe change our tax system. I mean, there's only so much change a country can accommodate at the same time. Also, the energy tax equals about 1.5 percent of total Federal revenues, or 1.6 percent. And it will have a very modest impact on energy, and it is pretty equal throughout the regions of the country, actually. If you take a farmer, you might argue that a farmer might pay a little more directly or indirectly because if you buy fuel it's about 2 cents a gallon, but then if you buy fertilizer, that's got a lot of fuel in it. So the only people who will be unevenly affected are people who buy things that have a lot of fuel component. But I thought, and by the way, we still have the lowest energy cost by far of any of our competitors, and our energy taxes are very low. If it were to put us out of compliance, I might have thought of that. But I do believe that America, at another time, and maybe not too long in the future, will debate whether we want to shift the nature of our tax system because we're in a global economy. But let me say one other thing. If you do a value-added tax, if you do a national sales tax, you have to be really careful to be fair to people. You have to exempt food; you have to exempt maybe clothing or a certain amount of allowance. You've got to be careful how you do it so you don't make it a regressive tax. But they can be designed that way, and we're the only major nation without one. Prescription Drug Costs”