The private sector's obligation to create jobs
If you're in the private sector, your first obligation to your investors, to your customers, and to your employees is to provide a product or a service at a sufficient profit to keep the enterprise going. But when a company does have extra money, I think it's a good idea to invest in the community, because I think it's not only the morally right thing to do, it's good for the companies involved.
The Tea Party's government phobia
The problem is that there's not a single example on the planet of a successful economy that runs on the antigovernment model. All the successful economies have public/private cooperation to generate economic opportunity, provide a good education, create an environment where government and the private sector work together and advance economies. The only thing I'd say to the antigovernment crowd is that we've got to do what works and what works is cooperation, not conflict.
Does the President have power over the economy?
Oh, quite a bit. Look at President Reagan's policies. I give him a lot of credit for the deregulation work he did and the bipartisan resolution for the Social Security problem. But I also think that his tax cuts, which were very large, spurred economic growth in a way that wasn't sustainable. It worked, but when the first President Bush took office, he basically got all the downside of having a deficit-spending model of generating jobs. Now, my program wouldn't have been successful either if we hadn't had a theory of private sector growth. I was fortunate. I became President when the information technology revolution broke out.
More on the housing market
There are all these options and I don't think we ought to keep dumping these houses on the market right now when it's so depressed. I'd like to see them converted into rental property in an aggressive, comprehensive way, and let people rent it for the price of the utilities, the taxes, and the maintenance, just to maintain the housing stock. Then as the economy picks up, you can put it back on the market in a way that will support economic growth, not undermine it. That's what I think should be done.
And in a larger sense, the market is so depressed that it's hurting everyone else. It used to be as a rule of thumb, people would say, well, if the mortgage is foreclosed on on your block, it will drive down the value of your house because it's on your block, by 10, 15, 20%.
But now there are so many houses that have been foreclosed on, it's driven down the value of almost everybody's houses, except -- let's talk about the upside -- the people that are in the prosperity centers of America: in Silicon Valley, in San Diego, in Orlando, and places where the economy is booming. Except for those places, this is a problem.
I can't -- I think it would really get us going in a hurry if we could flush this out.
On paying more taxes
No, no, I'm in favor of it because -- and I don't consider it class warfare. I mean we had -- if you look at from 19 -- from the end of the Second World War to about 1980, we had enough inequality to reward hard work and raw talent and creativity, and enough equality to build the world's greatest middle class and allow poor people a reasonable chance to work their way into it.
And the distribution was the bottom 90% had 65% of the income; the top 10% had 35% of the income; the top 1% had about 9% of the income.
And those numbers have changed in the last 30 years. The 90% share has dropped from 65 to 52. The 10% share has gone from 35 to 48. The 1% share has gone from 9 to 21.
That's a breathtaking increase in inequality, and I don't think it's good for our long-term stability.
On the Clinton Global Initiative
This year we're working on the creation of jobs in America and around the world. We're working on building an economy that can be maintained. That is helping countries develop an economic model that takes account of the challenges of global warming and resource depletion locally, where you can still keep promoting growth and jobs in a sustainable way.
And we're working on trying to equalize opportunities in the world for girls and women because that's a big economic drag on a lot of very poor countries. It's not anything we think about. We tend to take that for granted in America, that women should be able to stay in school as much as they want, and have access to the workforce. That's not the case in many, many countries.
