Bill Clinton: “Let me tell you, we're going to try to do two things. One is to provide a much more comprehensive program of retraining…”

“Let me tell you, we're going to try to do two things. One is to provide a much more comprehensive program of retraining and job placement; and secondly is to try to have a strategy available when we know that major, major industries are going to shut down, to try to do conversion, to try to provide investment opportunities for new kinds of economic activities. I said earlier something that I probably should have broadened. This is not just a problem in defense industries. It's also a problem in other big employers. As we're in Michigan tonight, as the people in Michigan know, the biggest companies in America did nothing but basically lay off people in the 1980's and the early nineties. Even when they were making more money, they restructured. For the last 10 years, until 2 or 3 years ago, a lot of the jobs that were lost by big companies were made up by jobs that were created by small companies. About 2 or 3 years ago, that process slowed to a halt because of the cost of health care to small business, because of the general recession, because of the credit crunch. So my answer to your question is: We're going to be much more aggressive than American governments have been in the past in trying to find ways to deal with these problems when we know in advance they're coming, and go in and give people the chance to restructure their lives, to rebuild them, and try to create other kinds of economic activities with new partnerships in the private sector. We're also going to try to change the tax system to favor investment more. That is, we want to raise the corporate tax rate some. But then we want to say, if you want to lower your taxes, invest more. And you can lower your taxes if you invest to create jobs. And I think that will help a lot. We're going to try to do that.”