[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[May 18, 1993]
[Pages 693-700]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at Los Angeles Valley College 
in Van Nuys, California
May 18, 1993

    The President. Thank you very much. I'm delighted to see all of you 
here, and I'm glad to have the chance to come. I've had a great time 
touring some of the facilities and seeing some of the programs that are 
offered here at this college and meeting some of your fellow students. 
Everybody here is a student, right?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Everybody back there? I'm glad to see your president, 
your chancellor who are here, and Mayor Bradley I see back there. Thank 
you for coming. And I see we have a number of Members of Congress back 
there. If you've got anything to ask your Congressman, we've got four or 
five options back there. Will the Members of Congress stand up? Walter 
and Xavier and Tony Beilenson, Congressmen, it's good to see you all.
    I see several State officials back there--the secretary of state, 
the State comptroller, the insurance commissioner, Michael Woo, 
Councilman Michael Woo, my friend, a candidate for mayor. Good for you. 
Good luck.
    That ``woo'' is interesting, isn't it? Makes a good cheer. I like 
it.
    I want to say to all of you, first of all, I am delighted to be back 
in California; glad to be back in Los Angeles and to Van Nuys and--
[applause]. Yesterday I was in New Mexico, and I was at Los Alamos, and 
I said Los Angeles. They all hooted. So I promised them when I got here 
I'd say I was glad to be in Los Alamos. So there, I did it. [Laughter]
    I came here for a very specific purpose today, and that is to try to 
illustrate what the economic efforts that our administration is making 
will do for you and how your efforts--can we fix this----

[At this point, a microphone malfunction interrupted the President's 
remarks.]

----in the work we're doing to try to turn the California economy 
around. And I thought that there was really no better place to come than 
to a college like this where all the people here have already, by 
definition, taken responsibility for your own future and made a real 
commitment to do what it takes to be competitive, to develop the skills 
you need to get a good job, to keep good jobs, and to learn new skills 
continuously.
    I met a very impressive man inside who has got a full-time job, as 
many of you do, who has been coming back here on his own just to 
continue to hone his skills, because he says, ``What I do requires me to 
change over and over and over again. So I will always be able to have a 
good job.'' And, this is funny, when I was talking to Dan Palmer, who 
introduced me, he told me that before he was married and began to have 
children, he was a musician. And he realized that that's not a very 
solid basis for having job security. I thought about being a musician, 
too, and I wasn't as good as he was. And I knew I had no job security. 
So I got into another line of work where I have no job security. 
[Laughter] But, anyway, I understand very much that sort of motivation 
which I imagine got a lot of you in here.
    What I wanted to do was to basically just talk a little bit about 
our national economic efforts and how it affects California and how what 
you're doing here is essential if we're ever going to turn the economy 
of the State and Nation around.
    First, when I took office, I found, as you know, a Government with 
an enormous budget deficit. That is, we were running in the red every 
year, over $300 billion. Our debt had gone as a nation from $1 trillion 
to $4 trillion. It's hard to even imagine that kind of money in

[[Page 694]]

just 12 years. We were a country for 200 years, we ran up $1 trillion 
worth of debt. Then in 12, we ran up $3 trillion more.
    Why? Because we cut taxes and increased spending. And it was fun for 
a while. It helped California a lot: cut taxes, people had more money in 
their pocket; increased spending, mostly in defense; put a lot of people 
to work in plants out here; put a lot of people to work on and around 
the bases out here.
    In the end, it all catches up to you, and you've seen the last few 
years what happened: the cold war was over; we began to reduce defense; 
we had no real plan for dealing with it. And what's happened to your tax 
money is, the deficit keeps going up even though defense has gone down 
because of the cost of health care, something that won't surprise any of 
you.
    So what I have tried to do is to come up with a plan that would 
bring our deficit down, give us control of our budget and your future, 
get interest rates down so people can refinance their homes and their 
businesses--and I bet you there are people in this audience today who 
have refinanced their home loans since last November and saved a lot of 
money doing it, because we're determined to bring interest rates down--
and at the same time, while cutting a lot of spending and raising some 
taxes, almost all of which--well at least well over 70 percent of it 
comes from people with incomes above $100,000. And we tried to give a 
tax cut to people with families with incomes under $30,000 so they 
wouldn't have to pay a tax increase.
    But while doing that, there are some things which we should spend 
some more money on, and I want to talk about them. We ought to spend 
some more money on having more programs like this. Why? Because you can 
have the best economic policies in the world, and if the people don't 
have the training they need to do the jobs in a global economy, good 
economic policies don't put people to work.
    I'll give you another example: There are also, in this tax bill that 
I have asked the Congress to pass, there are also big incentives for 
small businesses and big businesses to reinvest their money to put 
Americans to work and special programs to induce people to invest in 
communities that are particularly depressed, more sweeping than anything 
anybody's ever offered.
    Why? Because the Government can't put everybody to work. Most people 
work in the private sector, and that's as it should be. So we have to 
find ways to give people special incentives to reinvest their money.
    Let's take, for example, a business. If a business goes out and 
refinances its business loan and gets a lower interest rate, what do you 
want them to do with the money? Open another business, right? Or expand 
the business they're doing and hire more people so we can get 
unemployment down.
    So those are the kinds of things we're trying to do. The budget I've 
asked the Congress to pass has over 200 specific budget cuts. It's got 
some really tough things in it. We freezed Federal employee pay. We 
reduced the size of the Federal work force by 150,000 over the next 5 
years by attrition, just by not hiring people as vacancies occur. We cut 
everything from agriculture subsidies to Medicare. We cut a lot of 
things, starting with the White House staff and the administrative cost 
of the Federal Government.
    We raised the money that I talked about. But we have some targeted 
increases in investment. So while we're going to bring the deficit down 
dramatically, we're going to try to get some money for more funds for 
dislocated workers, more funds for communities that are hurt by base 
closings or plants being closed because of defense cutbacks, more funds 
for things like the Red Line Transit System here, where our 
administration announced over $1 billion in funding to put people back 
to work and also to have some more stops in the community.
    And the thing I want to say to you is that, if we're going to 
compete, if you're going to be able to have a good job and we're going 
to turn this community and this area around, we have to have the 
discipline to cut the things out we don't need to spend money on, to 
raise some money in order to bring the deficit down, because that means 
low interest rates, and that's good for the economy. But we also have to 
invest in people and technology and jobs. We've got to do that.
    You know, I got amused when I was on the way in here, people holding 
up signs, standing together. One of them said, ``Don't spend any more 
money.'' And another one said, ``Close the border to illegal aliens.'' 
In the jobs program I presented to Congress, one of the things we had 
was enough money to hire a lot more border patrol people. You can't have 
it both ways. If you're going to hire people, you've got to

[[Page 695]]

have the money to hire them. And we're going to have to make these kinds 
of tough decisions.
    So I wanted to come here because all of you know this. If you didn't 
know this, you wouldn't be here. You have this figured out. I mean, 
maybe not just like I said it, but you've figured it out. The average 
18-year-old going into the work force now is going to change work eight 
times in a lifetime. Eight times. And whether you can get and keep a job 
now depends as much on what you can learn tomorrow as it does on what 
you know today. And that's not going to change. The world will get 
smaller and smaller and smaller, more and more of our economy will 
depend upon our ability to compete with people around the world. We'll 
have to trade more. We'll have to sell more to other countries. We'll 
have to be able to change constantly over and over and over again. And 
you really are on the cutting edge of that change.
    So I wanted to come here to try to illustrate that and to ask you as 
citizens to support my economic program, to support our efforts to bring 
the deficit down, to cut spending, to ask wealthy people to pay their 
fair share, to give people incentives for new jobs, and to invest more 
in education, training, and technology.
    I also want to tell you before I open the floor to questions, I want 
to introduce one more person. When I was running for President out 
here----
    Audience members. No new taxes!
    The President. We tried it their way for 12 years. Look what it got 
us. You know what the ``no new taxes'' crowd did for 12 years? They cut 
taxes on the rich, raised taxes on the middle class, ran the country in 
a ditch. They had it their way for 12 years. It sounds great, all this 
talk. They had their chance.
    Audience members. You broke your promise!
    The President. They had their chance. I broke my promise--you know 
what else they don't say? Their crowd, what did they do after the 
election? Oh, after the election they said, ``Oh, by the way,''--the 
previous administration--``Oh, by the way, the deficit is going to be 
$50 billion a year bigger every year than we told you. But go ahead and 
do everything you said you were going to do before. Sorry we didn't tell 
you that.''
    Audience members. You broke your promise!
    The President. What did they say, guys? So the free lunch crowd has 
had their chance. And I'm telling you there is no free lunch crowd. And 
so we'll just have to decide whether we're going to take a different 
course. I want you to have a chance to do that.
    The other thing I want to tell you is, we can't turn this country's 
economy around unless we lift California up. And so I asked the 
Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown to head a team in my administration to 
develop a specific strategy to try to make sure we were doing everything 
we could do to help to turn this economy around. He has now made, just 
since I've been President, in 4 months, seven trips to California, 
meeting with people, working with people, trying to develop a strategy 
for what our partnership should be. And he came with me today, so I want 
to introduce him. Ron, stand up, please. He's spending more time here 
than in Washington.
    We're going to work hard, but you've got to do your part, too. And 
one of the messages that I hope will come out of this event today is 
that thousands of people in southern California will see you. They will 
see you and they will think, ``I've got to do my part, too. I've got to 
do something. I have to do something to change what I'm doing. I have to 
do something to lift up my circumstances.'' Because I'm telling you, 
there is nothing the President, nothing the mayor, nothing the Governor, 
nothing anybody can do for you that you're not prepared to do for 
yourself. This has got to be a partnership and a two-way street.
    Thank you very much.
    Who's got a question or a comment?
    Q. Hi. First off, I thought you look mighty handsome in that.
    The President. I don't know about that, but it's a handsome cap. 
Thank you.

Voter Registration

    Q. I'm a 29-year-old returning student. And I didn't know if you 
knew, but we are the number one voter registration campus in southern 
California, LAVC is. I wanted to know, will you support an amendment to 
your motor voter bill which will allow students to register to vote at 
the same time they register for classes when they come here to school?
    The President. The answer to that is, I support that concept, but 
it's too late to amend that bill, because we had to fight like crazy 
just to get it through. You know, it was filibustered once by the 
minority in the Senate. And finally, we got an agreement and passed the

[[Page 696]]

bill, the motor voter bill, after it was passed last year and then 
vetoed. So it's a great improvement over the present law, the motor 
voter bill, and so I think that it's unrealistic to think we can amend 
it.
    Now, what I think--as a matter of fact, I want to get it up and sign 
it before anybody decides to do anything else with it. But what I think 
you should do, since California has such an incredible array of 
community colleges and other institutions of higher education, is to try 
to get a State bill through requiring that to be done here. I mean, 
that's what I think you should do. I'll bet you could get a lot of help.
    And also, I think that the local registrar of voters would probably 
be happy to do it. And if they're reluctant, then you ought to pursue 
trying to get a State law passed.

Home Ownership

    Q. Mr. President, I still believe in having the American dream. And 
one of those dreams is to have an education. Another one is to own a 
home. And I want to know, what do you have in your economic policy that 
would help me buy a home?
    The President. The most important thing that I could do to help you 
buy a home is to keep the cost of buying a home low. And the best way to 
do that is to keep interest rates down. Home mortgage rates have been at 
20-year lows, 20-year lows. And I want you to understand why. I hope we 
can keep them down there.
    First, interest rates dropped for a long time because of the 
recession, but they still were pretty high. Then, after the election, I 
said we were going to bring this deficit down, and I gave a specific 
outline of how I was going to do it. The rates started dropping rather 
dramatically.
    Last year, a poll was done which said that only 47 percent of the 
American people under the age of 35 thought they had a real good chance 
to own their own home. This year, a poll was done that said 74 percent 
of the people thought they had a chance to own their own home. The only 
thing that's changed is that the cost of financing a home has gone way 
down. So the central premise of what we're trying to do in bringing this 
deficit down is to lower interest rates, lower home mortgage rates, 
lower credit card rates, lower business rates, lower the car payment 
rates so that we can help make these things more affordable to average 
citizens. In other words, doing the right thing for all Americans will 
help individual Americans more than any specific program I could have on 
home-buying.
    Now, let me say one other thing. I have also supported having the 
Federal Government give States the right to issue tax-exempt bonds to 
provide for lower interest financing for middle class families and for 
working families with modest means. And again, one of the things that I 
have tried to do in my program, if it passes, is to make sure that we 
make that permanent so that every State in America will be able to 
continue to do what I did vigorously in my State, which is to make 
available more low-income, low-interest financing to people to buy 
homes.

Taxes

    Q. Mr. President, there are many different claims on how much your 
economic plan will actually increase middle-income taxes. Can you tell 
us in very simple, nonpolitical language how much more money middle-
income people, those making less than $60,000, will pay in new taxes?
    The President. Yes, I'll be glad to. First of all, there is one tax 
in this program that falls on middle-income people. And that's the so-
called Btu tax. It's an energy tax based on, basically, the heat content 
of various sources of energy.
    The purpose of the tax, aside from raising money, is to encourage 
utilities and industries to shift to the most fuel-efficient and 
environmentally sensitive forms of energy so that we can do more energy 
conservation and do more fuel shifting. And we've made some changes in 
it to try to make sure it works in a more practical way.
    But because you consume energy, eventually those things will find 
their way down to you. That is, some of it will be in the fuel you buy; 
some of it will be in products you buy that themselves use fuel; a 
little bit of it would be in anything that's brought to a store by a 
truck. In other words, ultimately, all people pay these things.
    Now, here's how the pricing works. The average family of four, next 
year will pay virtually nothing. I mean, literally virtually nothing, $1 
a month or less. The next year after that, it will be probably about $6 
a month. This is $60,000 a year and less. The next year it will be, and 
the year after that and from then on,

[[Page 697]]

it will be someplace between $14 and $17 per month, maximum for a family 
of four. If you're single, it's much less.
    Now, if your income is under $60,000, but is also under $30,000, and 
especially if you have children, there is a good chance that you will 
not pay any more money, net, because another provision of this tax bill 
does something that I personally think is very important; I've wanted to 
do it for a long time. It increases the earned-income tax credit, which 
is already in the Tax Code, to the point that we'll be able to say to 
anybody who works 40 hours a week and has a child in the house, if you 
do this, you will not be in poverty. In other words, even if we have to 
give you a tax credit, we're going to lift you out of poverty. We're 
going to reward work instead of welfare. We're going to say that you'll 
be out of poverty.
    Now again, I want to be very specific. The higher you go toward 
$30,000, the more likely you are to pay a little bit. But if you have 
children, you can make maximum use of the earned-income tax credit so 
that if you've got, let's say, a family of four with an income of 
$29,000, you will pay nothing or next to nothing on the energy tax, 
because while you pay it, you'll get an offset on your income tax.
    So the lion's share of this, what I told you, $1 a month, $6, $7 a 
month, up to a maximum of $14 to $17 a month, 3 years, 4 years, 5 years 
from now, will be paid by people with incomes between $30,000 and really 
all the way up to about $100,000 a year. Then, it's at that point, when 
you get to the upper 6 percent of income earners, that the income tax 
increases trigger in.
    So that's what it does.

Illegal Immigration

    Q. Mr. President, as Republican filibusters torpedoed your original 
jobs bill, thereby leaving countless of unemployed and underemployed 
Americans less hopeful than they were in January, and as the dichotomy 
between costs and quality in health care and the education system 
widens, I would like to know what this administration will do to stem 
the unconscionable flood of illegal aliens that pours virtually 
unchecked into this country, and that erodes the quality of life for 
those Americans in the lower economic brackets and must eventually 
threaten the American middle class?
    The President. I'd like to answer the question you asked, and also 
then make a reference to the other issues you raised on the jobs and the 
health care issue. The first thing I want to do is to hire a strong, 
sensible, practical person to be head of the Immigration and 
Naturalization Service. I have asked the Attorney General, Janet Reno, 
whom I think has really done a good job, to put a very high priority on 
selecting a nominee who will be compassionate but also hard-headed. I 
mean, I think you want somebody who is compassionate, but hard-headed, 
who is realistic about what we're up against and what we're facing. I 
think she will make a recommendation to me this week, and we'll resolve 
that. That's the first thing.
    The second thing I think we have to do is to make a better effort to 
enforce the law that we have. If we've got a law on the books, we ought 
to try to enforce it, even if it's difficult to enforce. One of the 
things that was in the jobs program that you referred to that was killed 
by the filibuster was funds for more border guards to enforce the law. A 
lot of people don't know that, but that was in there.
    So I think we have to find ways to get the resources necessary to do 
as much as we can to enforce the law that exists. There is a limit to 
how much any economy can have. You've got the California economy very 
depressed now. This is a State made by immigrants. It's very important 
to recognize that. Los Angeles County has people from 150 different 
racial and ethnic groups. We also will continue to have people who are 
exiles really from political oppression, and under our law they get a 
different set of treatment. But I think we have to really roll our 
sleeves up and do this.
    In the meantime, there's something else I think we ought to say. 
Whatever we do on immigration is a national decision that has uneven 
impacts. You would admit that, right? It hurts California and Texas and 
Florida and New York and, to a lesser extent, a handful of other States 
more financially than it does the rest of the country. But it's a 
national policy. Or if there's a lack of a policy, it's a national 
policy. One of the things that has really bothered me, especially as 
we've seen all these educational cutbacks in California with your 
economy down after the defense cuts and the other problems, is that the 
Federal Government has essentially been willing to let you in California 
eat the cost of the Federal policy. So another thing we have done in 
spite of all the budget cutting

[[Page 698]]

we've done, there are funds in this budget to substantially increase 
funding to California to deal with the cost of immigration, thereby 
freeing up other funds in California to be spent on education or jobs or 
whatever else you all want to do here. I think we need to do more of 
that.
    Now, I don't want to mislead you. There is not as much money here in 
the budget as a lot of people asked for from California. But there's a 
whole lot more; I mean, several hundred million dollars more than was 
previously given. And I just think it is imperative that we have to 
provide--if the Federal Government is going to have a policy, or lack of 
it, then the Federal Government ought to pay for the policy, or lack of 
it, so that the States can be free to spend their money on educating and 
training and finding jobs for the people who live within the State. 
That's what I think. So we're going to move toward that.
    If I might just make one other comment on what you said earlier. I'm 
going to try to come back with various pieces of this jobs initiative. I 
hope we can still get some more money for summer jobs, because we've got 
the best summer jobs program this country has ever organized. We've 
worked in partnership with the private sector. We're going to require 90 
hours of educational work for people who have summer jobs, hoping that 
we can actually help people to get full-time continuing jobs and to 
continue their education, something that's never been done with a 
Federal summer jobs program before. So we're going to try to get some 
more.
    I also believe very strongly that we need to make a down payment now 
on the efforts that I'm making to put 100,000 more police officers on 
the streets so we can have more community-based policing, which means 
the best of both worlds if you've got the right kind of community 
policing. It means less crime, tougher law enforcement, and less abuse 
of authority because you have people working the neighborhoods, knowing 
their friends and neighbors, and less pressure.
    So we're going to start with that and then try to move back toward 
these other issues.

Financial Aid for Education

    Q. Mr. President, I transferred to a State university from here at 
Valley. I had to drop out of school this semester because I can't afford 
to go, and I don't qualify for financial aid. And there are other 
students that are in my situation. We really want to go back to school. 
We can't afford the fees. What are you going to do to help us, please 
tell us. [Applause]
    The President. I have introduced into the Congress a bill that I do 
believe will pass with both Republican and Democratic support--two 
bills--designed to deal with your problem. And let me just talk a little 
bit about it because you could tell by the clapping that you're not the 
only person in your fix.
    The college dropout rate is 2\1/2\ times the high school dropout 
rate. And an awful lot of people quit because they can't afford to stay. 
Now, in California this previously was not as big a problem because so 
many of the institutions were free. But you've got all these economic 
problems now; that can't be the case anymore. And even if you don't have 
big tuition you have expensive other--other expenses are significant.
    So here are the things we're trying to do. First of all, I've asked 
the Congress to adopt a national service program which would permit 
young people to earn up to $5,000 a year in credit either before, 
during, or after college to pay off loans for college expenses by doing 
important work in the community. It can be done before, during, or after 
college. Like after college, if someone agreed to be a teacher, for 
example, or a police officer in an underserved community, they could get 
$5,000 a year credit for that to pay off their loans. So that's, in 
effect, a scholarship program in return for national service.
    In addition to that, I've asked the Congress to totally reform the 
present student loan program. The present student loan program costs $4 
billion a year: $3 billion in unpaid debts and $1 billion in fees to 
banks and to other people who handle the money for the student loan 
program. It is amazing the money that's in the student loan program. And 
there is also no incentive for them to collect on people who won't 
repay, because the Government guarantees 90 percent of it. So if you 
borrow $20,000 from a bank and you don't repay it, the Government will 
give them $18,000, and it will cost them $2,000 to go to court and get 
it, right? So it's not a good system.
    What I recommend is that we shift to a system of direct loans by a 
protected financial entity to be created by the Government to give you 
lower interest loans, to give you the money

[[Page 699]]

you need, and to give it to you on terms that won't frighten you. And 
here's what I mean--and people would be eligible without regard to their 
income, and here's how it would work:
    If you borrowed the money, you would not have to pay it back until 
you actually go to work. Then, you would be able to decide how you want 
to pay it back among two choices: You could pay it back on a regular 
loan repayment schedule, based on how much you borrowed, or if that was 
too tough and that scares a lot of people, you could pay it back as a 
percentage of your income so that you would never be required to pay 
more than a modest percentage of your income. So there would never be an 
incentive not to take the loan out, because it would always be an 
affordable percentage of your income.
    The catch is that we can't afford to lose $3 billion a year. So 
you'd have to pay it back at tax time. So you couldn't beat the bill, 
but you would always be able to afford to pay it back, and no one would 
expect you to pay it back unless you were actually working. This will 
dramatically change the economics of college financing.

Initiatives To Assist the Private Sector

    Q. Hi, Mr. President. How are you doing?
    The President. I'm fine.
    Q. Okay. My question to you, sir, we have a plant in Van Nuys, the 
GM plant. I notice a lot of businesses such as that went out of State. 
What can the Government do to motivate big business to invest in the 
community college as well as State college and major universities?
    The President. 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

    Q. Mr. President, I would like to ask about education. The level of 
education is declining, the on-campus crime is increasing, and the 
education budget is decreasing. The percentage of Government expenditure 
used for education in the United States is 3 to 4 percent. In Japan, 
it's 7 percent. The California education budget is 85 percent of U.S. 
average, and it's one-third of New Jersey. So I would like to know what 
actions are you going to take to solve these kinds of problems.
    The President. Well, let me try to reframe a little of what I've 
said before because I think you've hit it. It would surprise most people 
to

[[Page 700]]

know that while the Government's deficit was going up and the debt was 
going up in the last 12 years, we were actually reducing the effort the 
National Government is making to support education and a lot of other 
initiatives, because all the money was going first to defense and then 
to health care costs.
    What I am attempting to do with my budget and will continue to work 
on it every year I'm President, is to, every year, to slowly move our 
spending priorities back toward education, training, and technology.
    In this budget, for example, we give more funds to institutions like 
this for worker training programs. We give much more money for Head 
Start for preschool kids. We do a lot of things to try to, in other 
words, let the Federal Government play a bigger role. But another real 
problem you've got, let me say, in the United States as opposed to Japan 
where you've got three levels of government that often operate more or 
less independently, the lion's share of the budget for education always 
comes at the State and local level.
    So then, the other thing I can do is to help alleviate the burdens 
of the State government. Why is State government spending less on 
education in California, more on uncompensated care for undocumented 
people coming into the country, more on exploding health care costs, 
often mandated by the National Government?
    So if I can persuade the Congress, and if we can be wise and good 
enough to work out a health care program that's good for America, that 
brings costs in line with inflation, and then if we can compensate the 
States better for their costs that aren't their fault, like dealing with 
the immigration issues, then that will free up in California millions 
and millions and millions of dollars which the State could then turn 
around and put back into education. So we can help directly some, and we 
can help indirectly a lot. And I'm trying to do both those things.
    Thank you. You were great. I wish I could stay longer.

Note: The President spoke at 12:10 p.m. in the courtyard. In his 
remarks, he referred to Representatives Walter R. Tucker III and Xavier 
Becerra; Donald G. Phelps, chancellor, and Mary E. Lee, president, Los 
Angeles Valley College; and Daniel A. Palmer, former student who 
successfully retrained for a new career.