Bill Clinton: “That's good. Well, I think first of all, most big businesses will invest more in the education of their employees than…”

“That's good. Well, I think first of all, most big businesses will invest more in the education of their employees than ever before because it's in their interest to do so. And I think what I should be doing is trying to figure out ways to give businesses incentives to reinvest in America and in putting Americans to work, and also, if possible, to try to make sure that every State has a chance to keep the manufacturing base. Now, that affects California in two ways; let me just mention them. In the program that I have asked Congress to adopt, in addition to the tax increases, which you were good enough to ask about--and I'm really glad you gave me a chance just to lay it out because it's not near as bad as everybody thinks it is, is it--there is also a lot of incentives for businesses to reinvest. Small businesses today can expense or write off $10,000 of expenditures every year on their taxes. We've proposed to take that to $25,000. That's a good incentive for the small businesses to hire maybe one more employee. And most new jobs are created by small businesses. So this is a good thing to do. Another thing we do is to let larger businesses who make investments in new equipment and modernize write that off more quickly in this Tax Code, which is an incentive to invest more. The third thing that's real important to California is, at least I have read--you know, you had an economic summit out here not very long ago, and I read that a lot of business people believe that it's harder to keep manufacturing jobs in California because of the costs of the workmen's compensation system. More than half of that--and I'll say a plug for your insurance commissioner, Mr. Garamendi is the first person who ever talked to me about this--more than half the cost of workers' comp comes from health care costs. And in the work that my wife, the First Lady, is doing with the health care commission, one of the things we're trying to come up with is a national system to take the health care portion of workers' comp cost and fold it into a national health system so you lift that burden off of the businesses separately and so no State ever has an advantage over any other State just because of the health care cost of workers' comp. That will also be a huge boost to California and the manufacturing economy of California if we can get it done. I'll take one more. Yes, ma'am? I wish I could stay here all day, but I've got to go shake hands with them because they feel deprived. And you. Thanks. Education”