Bill Clinton Speaks At L.A. Business Convention
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Bill Clinton shared his expertise on a wide variety of issues. (Graham Clark/Neon Tommy)
From September 15-18, the Los Angeles Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth hosted its 16th annual Business Conference. The event concluded with keynote speaker Bill Clinton, who discussed everything from his opinion on current events to his love of basketball.
He began with discussing some of the pros and cons of today’s society: “Look at Syria,” President Clinton said. “The good news is we may have a chance of getting chemical weapons in a country that has one of the biggest stocks of chemical weapons in the world. The country that, just a few days ago, denied that they had any. The bad news is, [Assad still has] enough other weapons to kill all those rebels.”
On the economy, Clinton remarked, “America’s economyhas come back enough that the annual deficit has been cut in half,” though “it looks like it did before the crash, where 90% of the gains of 10% of the people had half the gains of 1% of the people. [This] doesn’t work for the country.”
He also touched upon U.S. healthcare: “We’re beginning to implement a health care reform that estimated its insurance costs to come in at 20% below what they were supposed to cost to insure new people and two and a half million kids living with their parents health insurance. And that is nice, but…we still waste staggering amounts of money. We spend almost 18% of GDP on health care. No other rich country spends more than 12. It could be one reason why we don’t have any pay raises and we’re slow on creating jobs.”
Clinton then spoke of the successes of his Clinton Global Initiative, stating that if America used CGI’s philosophies of “faster, cheaper, better,” the country would be in a better situation economically. Specifically, he believes that the United States should “build on our strengths and innovation, especially in science and technology.” In addition, the former President calls for reform in the insurance and finance systems, both intermediary functions.
“One of the things that distorts all economies is when intermediary functions trump primary production of goods and services that are necessary to improve life,” he said, creating a figure of speech, “You can’t let the tail wag the dog. You want the dog to wag the tail. If the tail wags the dog, it won’t go anywhere.”
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During a later moderated discussion, President Clinton went more in depth with his opinion on Obama allowing Putin to forefront the situation in Syria. “Is this the right thing to do? I believe it is. Does it make it look like Russia and Putin did something good? Maybe,” he admitted. “I think that what we have to do is to use the fact that Russia and Syria want credit for being the good guys and giving up these chemical weapons to say let’s give up all this slaughter and go work this out.”
Clinton declared that this method was beneficial for two reasons: “One is chemical weapons are terrible and we can establish the precedent that we’re not going to have chemical warfare. It will save a lot of lives and a lot of grief not just here but in other places. Two, this drags two authoritarian leaders, the Syrian president and the Russian president into the arena of accountability in the UN, where, if they don’t do what they say they’re going to do, their credibility will be shattered, and if they stay, they’ll have to change the way they do business.”
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Clinton finished on the subject with a broader focus. “We don’t have to like [Russia] or agree with them or anything to try to advance the cause of world peace. But, they have to be in the arena of accountability. So I think this is worth doing.”
The former President was then asked to share his thoughts on how to deal with the economy. “First, I’d like it if [Congress] adopted a ten-year budget deal and tied it to the performance of the economy. It’s simply not true that it’s good for the American economy to keep cutting all this spending if there’s no growth,” he said.
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He also calls for a reformation in the tax system, to “lower the rates, broaden the base, make it competitive with the rest of the world, give these American corporations that have tradeoff wars overseas some incentive to bring the money home.” He then urged of the corporate officials at the convention “to help [the government] fill the public portion of an infrastructure bank, and [the government will] guarantee you a certain rate of return if you do that and then let us build a modern drawback.”
Clinton concluded with urging further investment in green energy and science in technology and biomedical areas, and for Americans to “rely on our strengths, invest in them, and get this show on the road.”
Finally, the former President was asked about his wife’s plans to run for office, to which he cleverly replied, “I don’t have any idea what Hillary is going to do. If I do, I wouldn’t say, I’ll just be honest.” He did disclose, however, that “when I met her forty-three plus years ago, and we started going out, I thought she had the greatest potential for public service…of anybody that I’d ever worked with,” and that he believed she was “the ablest person of our generation. Nothing has happened between that time and now to change my opinion; it just confirmed it.”
