Remarks and a question-and-answer session at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, California - Bill Clinton's speech, May 18, 1993

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 24, 1993

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 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.