 I think it's time for me to stop. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. See you. We do it done so that while they're not feuding. Okay. Mark, how are you? How are you? Good morning, sir. Good morning, Mr. President. Good morning, Mr. President. Good morning, Mr. President. Good morning. Hello, sir. Please sit down. I just want to interrupt you. I litter up too long, but I know you have a great time. Are there general ideas of that speech tonight? I hope no one gave away the taglines or anything. But then you know we've decided in different formats to the laundry list of all the chores that we look forward to. I'm undertaking this time to be a little more generalized to present the laundry list in writing tomorrow. But maybe some of you have some questions that haven't been answered to be liked for just a few minutes that I have here. President, when you talk about not having any tax increase, do you include the possibility of a oil import fee as part of the tax increase? So is that another unrelated matter? Well, that might be discussed in the committee that is not dealing with tax reform. But it would not, in any sense, it would be a change of tax if they turned to that. I know that's under consideration as a part of the tax reform, but the ultimate goal, of course, would be tax neutrality. It would only be there to offset some of the loophole changes that they may feel are necessary. Mr. President, given the rather moderate rate of economic growth present and projected, where do you see revenue increase or enhancement coming from in the near years? Well, all of our projections show that it will and it's based on what has taken place already with the program that we had passed in 1980. I think that all of us would be a little disturbed if somehow there was a sudden big boom week. We think that too often the cliched might fit boom and bust, but we have to be pretty much satisfied with what has been taking place when you start to think of more than 9 million new jobs and our trading partners in Europe there hasn't been an increase of a single new job in the last 10 or 15 years. We, the figure, one figure of the youth is 11,000 new business incorporations and has been every week for the last couple of years. So we feel that this is normal or that this is a growth pattern that shows that where it might not be in boom terms, it does mean a steady growth which will also be reflected in a steady increase in revenues. Is that 11,000 new business incorporations and that figure, or is it offset by some corporations that go belly up in the course of the world? Well, I'm sure there are some growths. That's growths, growths. As I understand it, there are some major new initiatives that they're talking about. One is a study of international monetary conference. The other is catastrophic health insurance. And the third is a look at whether cash payments or vouchers would be an alternate way to some federal aid to the poor. All three of these ideas have been kicking around for years, in some cases as far back as the Nixon administration. So how can you claim that these are really new smart insurance administrations? Well, not everything is new, but out there among the states, there is a thing that we've overlooked for a very many years that our system of a federation of sovereign states is based partly on the realization that states can afford to experiment, can do things that turn out to be effective for them. One example that we have of that right now is the thing we've been trying to get at the federal level of the enterprise zones. Well, a number of states, because we haven't been able to get that through Congress, a number of states have gone ahead with it and it's proving extremely successful where they're doing it. It could be that much more successful if we could get it at the federal level also. But, yes, some of these ideas have been growing, for example, in the field of welfare. Welfare came into being at a time of great crisis, federal welfare, which was the great depression. There had never been anything of that kind before. And then it became institutionalized this emergency measure that had been put into effect. We never went back to the previous ways in which this had been handled in the community at the state level. But what we now find we've created is something in which you have to wonder if it hasn't departed from the original purpose, that if welfare was truly successful, it would be reporting each year how many people it had succeeded in moving from dependence on welfare and made it independent on the workplace. We tried an experiment in California when I was governor. It was tremendously successful. And on that basis when we came here we started to encourage states and a number of states now were doing the same thing. In fact, Governor Dukakis over the weekend on one of the talk shows was speaking of the great success that they've had with it and the thing that loosely is called work fair. We asked when I was governor if the federal government would allow us to conduct an experiment. And that was to require able-bodied welfare recipients to work at useful community projects. To make sure that they wouldn't be boondoggles we asked every county and every community to send us a list of the things that they could honestly say they would be doing if they had the manpower and the money. And we went through them to see if there were any just make-believe projects and dig holes and fill them up again. And as a matter of fact we didn't find if we found any it would be here and there just a few. We found pretty legitimate tasks. So we told them, okay we had the manpower and the money. It was the same money that was being used for welfare in their community or their county and with the personnel on welfare. And we put out the order that all had to be able-bodied had to report. At the same time from our state labor office we assigned what we tagged as job agents, personnel and gave them each a list of names of these people and said, your job is the jobs can be permanent. We want the people in them to be temporary. Your job is to see how quickly can you watching these people in these tasks funnel them out into private enterprise jobs and free of welfare forever. And this was all in the 73-74 recession. And we funneled 76,000 welfare recipients in that brief period out into private jobs. And the federal government had not allowed us to do the experiments statewide. They had only allowed us to do it in 35 counties and exempted the two biggest San Francisco and Los Angeles counties from being eligible for this program. So they never got to try it there. But that's why these may sound like old ideas. I tried also in California to get an insurance plan that would involve the private sector for catastrophic illness. No limit on how much would be paid. We would have had to have one compulsory feature. But we found that if everyone who worked for their living in California paid $35 a year, they could be protected at limitless cost for the life of catastrophic illness. And the only reason it never happened was the percentage then out of the 20-odd million people living in California, I've got to stop saying the 20-odd. The 20-odd. There's too many of them. The percentage is only about 10,000 that could expect or anticipate having this. And so we just couldn't get any interest in it. And so all I've asked for is, again, a study to see if there is a way in which we could provide this kind of insurance nationwide. Mr. President, the House has centered its past catastrophic insurance plan at least twice in the past over the last 20 years. The House has refused to go along with that for whatever reason, as I recall. What makes you think that has changed? Well, as I say, maybe it has, but at least let's study and see what we might come up with. I don't know what the origins were and those other things that were had. Ours was actually going to be private insurance. We had worked with the insurance companies, and for that low premium, they could afford to provide statewide for everyone in the state of California. Providing was compulsory, is that correct? Providing everybody, that's why the premium could be so low and be a universal thing of my personal security. But except that it would be paid for by the people as they would with any other health insurance? Mr. President, in addition to delaying your speech for a week, how else has the tragedy of the shuttle challenger affected your state beginning speech? Not only that we feel that we had to make reference to it as we not end with the speech, which had not been in the previous issue, but had it changed the tone of it at all? No. Mr. President, on the work fair in California, are you suggesting that that would work on a federal level? Would you like to see that happen? Yes, I think it is being so successful where it is being employed that I think it could very easily do that and it could lead to more people permanently escaping independence and welfare. Would it mean a substantial increase in federal spending at the outset to get it rolling to create this job? We didn't find that to... No, there wasn't any... a thing in that to call for any added expense. The person got nothing but their welfare grant. Now, the one thing we did to avoid any conflict about minimum wage or anything, they only had to work 20 hours a week, instead of 40. But the other 20 had to be devoted to either seeking employment or taking training, job training, some kind. And as I say, it's important to... Yes, yes, specific programs in mind. Are you proposing a study rather than legislation because you think that it's going to require some generation of support in order to get a program like this to accommodate? This work fair program? Work fair or whatever. I mean, it will reach the area if you think that's the same program. At the federal level, maybe I'd call on Jack for an answer to that one, but because it is... we have encouraged the states and it's been adopted in a number of states. Tonight it will be just calling for a study. I have a report back by the son of the first. The president has his own ideas in mind but wants to see what other ideas there are. Let's catch one more. Mr. President, could you also tell us what some of your ideas are on international monetaries? You're also going to call for a study there and see if the nations can get together and discuss their currencies. What would you like to see accomplished in that area? Well, as a matter of fact, there's nothing that I can say about this. I just ask for them to sit down and see what they can come up with that might take some of the volatility out of the president arrangement and make for a more stable currency system. I could give you one more figure on the California situation on welfare, except I don't want to start another argument with anyone about whether I would be reading the people on welfare. I have to believe that the overwhelming majority of welfare would rather be out in the world with the rest of their neighbors and with the job of the future in working than on welfare. I believe that deeply. On the other hand, I believe that there are two elements. Anytime there's a program of this kind, there are going to be people who take advantage of it and there is an element of fear. I have a letter that I've treasured that came to me from the young mother. Children in California and when we started our welfare reforms, later I got a letter. As it began, she started telling me she had been on welfare, their children and so forth and how she had become so dependent on it that she even turned down offers of marriage rather than give up that security blanket of that welfare check. And I thought, well, the next paragraph is going to get into it. She'll begin beating me over the head and I'm going to get into it. Not at all. She said that she had always felt that someday somebody would take this away and when we announced our plans and started working, there wasn't anything that would have taken her off welfare in our plans. But she was afraid the day had come that she'd always feared. So she said she took $600 of the money she saved from welfare and moved herself and her children up to Alaska where they had relatives. And there she got a job and she was writing to thank me because she never would have moved if she hadn't been afraid we were going to take welfare away from her. And she was telling me how happy she was and she wound up with this line she said about working in the job and all. She said it should be daytime TV. So this was one note on that. The other one was, and this is the one that almost got me into an argument the other day, why I prefaced primary marks with my belief that most of his people would like to be independent with the rest of us. And that is that when we put our work fair program into place, one of the other results in the issue of getting 76,000 people in enterprise jobs, there were thousands of people who never reported the work. And we just simply stopped sending the welfare checks and never heard a single complaint. And the only thing I can conclude is they were what I called paper people. They must have been people that were getting welfare under more than one name and knew that they could not report for work under two names or more and therefore they just did not show up and they couldn't complain when they started getting the checks. Thank you, sir.