    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [May 10, 1993]
    [Pages 602-610]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Cleveland City Club
    May 10, 1993

        Thank you very much. Well, I don't know what you had for lunch, but
    I wish I'd had some of it. [Laughter] I do want to say I'm delighted to
    be back in Cleveland and glad to be back at the City Club. And I hold
    here in my hand a membership to the City Club given to me by Senator
    Metzenbaum. Now, I'd rather have his vote on all the issues, but I'll
    take this. [Laughter]
        Actually, I want to thank Howard Metzenbaum and Lou Stokes and Eric
    Fingerhut and Congressman Hoke, and all the others who are here, your
    Mayor, your State treasurer, your State attorney general. I'm delighted
    to be here with all of you. I saw in the introduction that you mentioned
    something I was going to say in my own remarks. I very much enjoyed
    being here last year and having the opportunity to talk in Cleveland
    about family values.
        Two years ago, I came here; the Mayor hosted the Democratic
    Leadership Council's national convention. And I said at that time that I
    thought the time had come for us to move beyond the political debate in
    Washington between one party which seemed to have advocated the politics
    of abandonment and another which seemed to advocate a politics of
    entitlement. It seemed to me that time had come for us to face our
    problems squarely as a country and to try to do something about them,
    but not to pretend that the Government could give a solution to the
    American people, solutions to problems that require all of us to give
    something ourselves and to do more. I feel that even more strongly
    today.
        For 110 days, I have lived and worked in

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    Washington, DC. I think that all of us would agree that for too long our
    great Nation's Capital, which is filled with monuments to men and women
    who have done so much to bring us to this point in history, has
    practiced more politics than progress. I'm glad to be back here in a
    place like Cleveland where it's not possible to produce more politics
    than progress. Here you have to produce steel or automobiles or
    biomedical technology, real things with real value. This debate in which
    we are all engaged about America's future should properly take place
    here in the Industrial Belt and in the Grain Belt and in the Sun Belt
    and in the Bible Belt, all across America where people live in a world
    that is determined by consequences and not by talk.
        If you're a Mayor in a city like Cleveland, you either provided more
    houses and people moved into them, or it didn't happen. There either are
    more economic opportunities, or there aren't. You can measure that. In
    Washington, we're told that the most important thing to do is not more
    than one thing at a time. [Laughter] And some want you to do one thing
    at a time because it's easier to stop one thing at a time than it is a
    whole range of things.
        But I would argue to you, my fellow Americans, that the challenges
    of the moment require both a focus and a discipline on the big problems
    of our Nation and a determination to face them in a comprehensive way.
    The challenge of international competition, new technologies, soaring
    health care costs, defense cuts without an offsetting strategy to invest
    in America, a global recession, a global inability of wealthy countries
    to create new jobs in an open and competitive environment, all these
    things create great new challenges for our country.
        Here in the heartland, I've seen you stepping up to the challenges.
    When the Mayor and I rode in from the airport today, he talked to me
    about how people were moving from the suburbs back into the cities, how
    more houses were being built. I looked at some of your economic
    development projects. I see a partnership between the public and private
    sector here that does not require someone to check his political label
    in when you roll up your sleeves and go to work. That is the sort of
    thing we need to do in Washington and the kind of spirit I hope to be
    able to bring to our Nation's Capital.
        I believe very strongly that in the last 12 years, our Nation's
    Government has collectively produced two immense problems. Problem
    number one, obviously, is the enormous explosion of the national debt
    and the continuing growth of the annual Federal deficit. In 1980, our
    debt was $1 trillion. Today, it's $4 trillion and rising to about two-
    thirds of our annual national product, a much bigger percent of our
    annual deficit than, for example, the debt in Japan is. Now, how did it
    happen? It happened partly because we liked it when politicians told us
    what we wanted to hear. It happened because we had big tax cuts and big
    spending increases at the same time. First the spending increases were
    in defense. And then when defense began to be cut, they were totally
    offset, those cuts, by even bigger increases in health care spending
    through Medicare and Medicaid, the fact that one-tenth of America is now
    on food stamps, and by huge increases in interest payments on the
    national debt.
        The deficit is also aggravated by the fact that we index both
    payments to people and income taxes. Now, it's fair to index income
    taxes. If you get pushed by inflation into a higher bracket, we adjust
    the brackets upward. For the first time, that's happened in the last few
    years. No one can doubt that is fair. But consider the impact on that if
    you offset on the one--hello, Congressman Brown, I didn't see you out
    there--you offset, on the one hand, your income, and at the same time
    you promise to pay more out. So everybody that gets a salary or a
    retirement check, their payments go up with inflation even as your
    intake comes down with inflation. So these are the two things that have
    created the kind of problem we have in the budget deficit.
        The second thing that happened, interestingly enough, is that that
    portion of our Government budget which is in partnership with the
    private sector, making investments in our future and promoting economic
    growth, actually shrank as a percentage of the whole and often in
    absolute terms. So that at a time when we are more dependent than ever
    before on how skilled our work force is, the Federal commitment to
    education and training of the work force went down, as other nations
    were exploding their commitment. At a time when we were cutting high
    technology in the defense sector, the peace dividend was not
    automatically reinvested in new technologies in the commercial sector
    and new partnerships. Why? Because, as any Member of Congress here will
    tell you, the easiest place

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    to cut spending is in that broad category known as discretionary
    nondefense spending. That doesn't mean anything. That's a lot of
    gobbledygook. But when you strip it away, a lot of it is our investment
    in our future. So we wind up with this unusual difficulty: a huge debt,
    an increasing deficit, and a diminished commitment to invest in our
    future.
        The results have been clear: a limited ability to create new jobs,
    even when productivity is growing. We're allegedly in an economic
    recovery of some 17 months in duration, and yet the unemployment rate is
    higher this month than it was at the depths of the recession. We had a
    huge increase in productivity in the last 3 months of last year and in
    the first 3 months of this year, another big increase in output for a
    person in the manufacturing sector. But that money now is being plowed
    back into new technologies or kept for profit, not to increase new jobs.
    As any small business person here knows, it is difficult to increase
    employment in a small business because of the extra added costs. By the
    time you pay the Social Security and the worker's comp and all the other
    costs, you've got more and more small businesses using overtime workers
    or part-time workers and fewer new jobs being created there.
        So here we are. What are we to do? I have asked the United States
    Congress to adopt a plan that I believe over the next 5 years will do
    something to make real, measurable change in both those areas. It will
    substantially reduce the Federal deficit in the most disciplined deficit
    reduction plan ever presented to Congress, and it will permit some very
    disciplined, targeted increases in those investments which are critical
    to our future. We do it by a combination of things: cutting spending,
    raising taxes, and targeting investment.
        Because this involves a whole lot of change, as you might imagine,
    it challenges a lot of established interests in Washington who would
    prefer that things go on as they are. Because while as a whole our
    country is disadvantaged, I would argue, by what we're doing, certain
    specific groups benefit from everything that is done. Now, the lobbyists
    are lining the corridors of Washington as never before. There are about
    80,000 of them there. And unless all the American people speak out loud
    and clear, it's going to be hard for us to hold this program together.
    There are those fighting for the national interests and those who are
    properly there to be heard about more narrow interests. There are those
    who believe we can make things better and those who believe that any
    change will make things worse for them. There are those who believe we
    can spend money more productively and less wastefully and others who
    believe that we ought to just keep on spending it the way we are now.
        This is the oldest conflict in our history and the eternal battle of
    any great democracy. The impetus for inertia is always strong, and very
    often a country does not have the courage to change until it is almost
    too late. But I believe with all my heart that the voters said last
    November--not just those who voted for me, either--but all the voters
    said, we know this country has got to take a different course. We know
    we can't keep drifting. We know we can't wander. We have to have a plan;
    we have to follow it. We have to try to make some things happen that
    will lift this country's spirits again, lift this country's prospects
    again, and yes, that will insist that all of us have the discipline and
    will and vision to change.
        Now, I think that there are a lot of, I would call them preachers of
    pessimism in our Nation's Capital who underestimate the capacity of the
    American people to know the cost of what is happening to us right now. I
    readily admit that none of these changes can occur unless a vast
    majority of us understand the cost of what is happening to us right now:
    the cost of maintaining this deficit at its present level; the cost of
    maintaining the present health care system; the cost of maintaining a
    system which is underinvesting in our future compared to all of our
    major competitors in a high-wage, high-growth economy; the cost of
    maintaining the credit crunch on small business; the cost of having no
    technology policy; the cost of having no plan to convert from a defense
    to a domestic economy. I would argue that those costs are very high. The
    cost of having no strategy to put young people to work in our cities,
    and instead spending money to pay for the cleanup and the consequences
    of drug problems, gang problems, gun problems--the costs of the status
    quo are very, very high, even when you don't see it directly attributed
    on the Government's ledger books. I believe we don't see that enough.
        So I think we can do more than one thing at once. I think we can
    reduce the deficit and provide the opportunity for all of our young

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    people to go to college. I think we can reduce the deficit and provide
    decent job training and education for our working people when the
    average worker will change jobs eight times in a lifetime. I believe we
    can reduce the deficit and put more police on our streets to protect our
    communities better. I believe we can reduce the deficit and offer more
    targeted incentives for real investment to American businesses and to
    their workers. I believe we can reduce the deficit and change the
    welfare system so that we move people from welfare to work after a
    certain amount of time. I believe we can do these things. I believe
    we're strong enough to provide for a budget that reduces the deficit and
    invests in the future in a prudent way. And I can't help noting that
    some of those who say that we can't do that are the very ones that
    brought the debt from $1 trillion to $4 trillion over the last 12 years.
        Our greatest Republican President, perhaps our greatest President,
    Abraham Lincoln, used to tell the story about when he was practicing law
    in Illinois. It kind of reminds me about some of these folks today
    talking about the deficit in Washington. He said it reminded him of a
    man who killed his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the
    court because he was an orphan. [Laughter] I think we've all got to
    understand that we didn't get where we are overnight. We have to accept
    where we are. I don't care about who should bear the blame, but I don't
    think we should have people pointing fingers who helped to create the
    current course of events.
        We should pull together. My whole approach has been to try to say to
    the American people, we are all in this together. If we ask, what's in
    this program for me, instead of what's in it for us, we'll all find
    something we don't like, including me. If the issue is going to be now,
    what's in it for me, instead of what's in it for us, we are defeated
    before we begin. But the what's-in-it-for-me decade didn't work out very
    well for us over the long run, and I think we can do better.
        Now, shortly after I took office I submitted to Congress a blueprint
    of a budget that makes now over 200 specific budget cuts, reduces the
    deficit by over $500 billion over 5 years, and refocuses the priorities
    of our Government from consumption to investment in our future. Both
    Houses of the Congress passed that blueprint in record time; the first
    time in 17 years the budget resolution had passed within the calendar
    required.
        Our commitment to cut the deficit clearly boosted confidence on Wall
    Street, and it's beginning to be felt on Main Street. It is beginning to
    change lives for the better already. Starting after the November
    election, when we announced a clear determination to bring the deficit
    down, interest rates have been going down. The trend line is steady,
    with only minor interruptions whenever there's some sense that maybe we
    won't really reduce this deficit after all. The plan that I announced
    and the outline that Congress adopted clearly played a major role in
    bringing interest rates down to historic lows, mortgage rates to 20-year
    lows. There's been a huge wave of refinancing. I'll bet you anything
    there are lots of people in this room that since November have
    refinanced their home mortgages. I know that there are people in every
    city in America who have gotten business loans, whose consumer loans
    have gone down, whose costs of car financing have gone down.
        It is estimated that in the aggregate, if we can keep these rates
    down just a few more months, this will lead to enough refinancing of
    debt that it will release another $100 billion to be reinvested into
    this economy. That's one and two-thirds percent of our total gross
    domestic product in a given year. That is a huge impetus to stay on the
    track we're on to bring this deficit down. According to a bipartisan
    survey, a poll recently conducted in these conditions, 74 percent of all
    Americans now believe that homeownership is within reach for most young
    people. Do you know that it was a year ago? The reverse, 47 percent. The
    reason for the change is obvious: lower interest rates.
        Businesses are paying less to borrow. That means new investments and
    new jobs. The taxpayers, by the way, are saving billions of dollars in
    financing the Government debt. We've already brought the deficit down
    this year because of those interest rates. Along with that, we have
    launched a real effort to attack the credit crunch in partnership with
    community banks all across America, and that should mean that farmers,
    small business people, and homeowners will be able to do even more in
    the weeks and months ahead. These are things that happen when a people
    take some responsibility for their financial future. Having passed the
    budgetary blueprint, the Congress is now about to move into

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    the specifics in what is called the budget reconciliation process. That
    means they've got to take the targets that were adopted in the budget
    resolution and specify how we're going to meet those targets: What kind
    of taxes are going to be raised? What kind of spending is going to be
    cut? What kinds of investments are going to be made? That is the process
    now beginning. And that is the kind of thing that will require us all to
    make tough choices to make good on the results that are being achieved.
    I've asked Congress to join me in making real spending cuts, and that
    process is now unfolding.
        Our budget contains, as I said, over 200 specific cuts. I thought I
    should start as President by setting an example. In the new fiscal year
    we'll be operating the White House with a staff that is 25 percent
    smaller than my predecessor's. I must say, I made that commitment, and
    we're going to do all that work. I have to say, in parenthesis, I didn't
    know that I'd receive more letters in the first 100 days than came into
    the White House in all of 1992. So if you haven't gotten your letter
    answered, hold on, I'm coming. [Laughter] We're trying to do it. We are
    going to reduce just in our office alone $10 million in payroll and
    perks and costs of Government.
        In the executive branch, I have ordered over the next 4 years a 14
    percent cumulative reduction in the administrative costs of the Federal
    Government, 100,000 person reduction in the Federal payroll by
    attrition. That will save well over $9 billion. I have asked the Federal
    employees to have a pay freeze in this coming year and reduced raises in
    all the rest of this first term. I just left the Galleria, and right
    across the street there's a big Federal office building, and a lot of
    those Federal employees said they weren't looking forward particularly
    to doing without a raise next year. We have put the clamps on Federal
    spending, and we have asked Federal employees to make a sacrifice. I
    didn't see how I could ask people to raise their taxes unless the people
    who were getting the tax money also made a sacrifice.
        I come from a rural State where the Rural Electrification Agency,
    the REA, has been very important to my family and our people. They have
    brought life and hope to millions of Americans. But now our country is
    about 100 percent electrified, and I have recommended that we reduce the
    interest subsidies to the REA, something that is tough to do for Members
    of Congress from rural areas and for this President who came from that
    place. I may get shocked instead of light when I go home. [Laughter]
        I've asked the Congress to join me in repealing the special interest
    exemption for lobbying. It's only been in the Tax Code since 1962.
    Before that, it didn't exist. You had to pay if you wanted to go lobby.
    Now the taxpayers actually, at large, bear the burden of people's
    lobbying costs. Now, again, I'm all for people lobbying, and frankly,
    it's a good thing if it's in balance. But I don't see why the taxpayers
    should subsidize someone's costs when they go and try to influence the
    outcome of legislation in Washington.
        I've asked to cut urban programs that don't work. While I plead
    guilty to trying to get more community block grant funds for Mayor White
    so he could build more houses in Cleveland, I also called for the
    abolition of a designated project program at the Housing and Urban
    Development Department because it had no real accountability to the
    taxpayers and cost over $100 million a year.
        I also believe that after all these cuts are in place, if you really
    expect this deficit to be brought down, we have got to raise some more
    tax money. And I believe that we ought to do it in a progressive way. I
    can tell you this just to start out, I have proposed more budget cuts
    and more taxes than I thought I would when I was running, and the reason
    is simple: After the election the Government said the deficit was going
    to be $50 billion a year bigger in 3 of the next 4 years than we
    thought, and $15 billion in the 4th year. The deficit was announced
    after the election in each year to be much, much bigger than had
    previously been forecast.
        So we asked for about 73 percent of the money to be paid for by
    people with incomes above $100,000; the rest to be paid for, 27 percent,
    by the 93 percent or so of us that are under $100,000. And then there is
    an exemption in effect for the energy tax burden for lower middle income
    working people and middle income working people with children up to the
    levels of about $29,000 by the increase in the earned-income tax credit,
    which will offset the impact of the energy tax. I think it is a very
    fair program, and I hope it will be adopted.
        We take on the entitlements in this plan. People say, why don't you
    take on the entitlements? I'll tell you why, because people get mad at

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    you when you do that. We asked Social Security recipients who are in the
    top 20 percent of income to pay taxes on more of their income than they
    do today, coming from Social Security. We have done our best to restrain
    the exploding costs of Medicare. We have taken on these tough issues to
    cut spending and to raise some money. But I would also argue to you that
    we must have some disciplined increases in investment. And I'll tell you
    where my recommendations are.
        I recommend, first of all, that we focus on rewarding work,
    strengthening families, and creating more jobs, especially for the
    middle class. These ideas include the following--this is where we spend
    money: First of all, in tax cuts to encourage investments for new jobs.
    Private enterprise is, after all, the engine of this economy, not the
    Government, and we need to get it running as close as we can to full
    throttle. So there are substantial new incentives in this program for
    both large business and small business to lower their taxes through
    direct investments. Investments mean lower taxes and more jobs and,
    therefore, more revenue to the Government by putting people to work if
    you target it to investment. I think it's very important.
        Secondly, we focus especially on the depressed areas of the country,
    both rural and urban, with establishing a new network of community
    development banks to make loans to people who want to go into business
    in these areas with special incentives to get others to do the same
    thing. With special kinds of enterprise zones, especially in the urban
    and rural areas which are particularly depressed, that will at least
    give us a chance to see if free enterprise alone can revive these areas
    if the Government gives them enough incentives. These are things I
    believe that will make the private sector work for all Americans.
        The plan also strengthens our schools by providing access to Head
    Start to all children who need it, by setting higher standards
    throughout the country and enshrining in the law the national education
    goals and the standards that they will produce. The plan encourages
    experimentation with things like public school choice and charter
    schools in public school. It contains a bold national apprenticeship
    program where the Federal Government is a partner with the private
    sector and State and local government in helping to retrain the work
    force for a lifetime. We are the only advanced country, the only one,
    that doesn't worry about having a systematic way of training high school
    graduates who don't go on to college. And yet we now have clear
    evidence, in the 1990 census, that anybody who graduates from high
    school but gets no further training or who drops out of high school who
    goes into the work force is likely to have declining earnings. This is
    good money, and it will be really shaped by private sector people and
    public trainers at the local grassroots level, not a national program
    but a national partnership. And it will really, really increase the
    productivity of the American work force.
        This plan also will open the doors of college education to all
    Americans by changing the nature of the student loan program. And I want
    to explain this. Today, the way the student loan program works, you can
    go down to your bank, you borrow the money, you pay it back based on how
    much you borrow. If you don't pay it back, the Government gives the bank
    90 percent of the loan. That's the way it works. The college dropout
    rate is more than twice the high school dropout rate, in part because of
    the cost of a college education. The student loan program is very
    profitable for many banks and for the national mortgage organization
    that's behind it. They have made a killing out of it. It's terrible for
    the taxpayers. Why? Because if somebody defaults on the loan, there's no
    incentive to go get it because there's a 90 percent Government
    guarantee. And no offense to all of us lawyers in the crowd, but it's
    going to cost you more than 10 percent of the loan to pay a lawyer to go
    get it. Not only that, the repayment terms are often too burdensome.
        Here's what we want to do: Set up a system to make the loans
    directly. Let people pay back the loans only when they go to work, and
    then as a percentage of their income. So no one will ever not be able to
    repay, and no one will be discouraged from taking a lower paying but
    perhaps more rewarding job as a teacher or a police officer or whatever,
    but collect the money at tax time so you cannot beat the bill. Don't let
    people welch on their student loan anymore. And we estimate this system
    can save you $4.3 billion in the next 5 years. That's a lot of money.
    Let me tell you what we'd like to do with that money, or some of it,
    anyway. We'd like to give tens of thousands of our young people the
    opportunity to earn credit against college or pay off their college loan
    by doing

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    community service before, during, or after they go to college: working
    with housing projects, working with environmental projects, working to
    help keep streets safer, working after they graduate as teachers or
    police officers in underserved areas. We can have a program of national
    service that is community based that will help us solve so many of our
    problems.
        I got a letter from a friend of mine, with whom I was in grade
    school, the other day, reminiscing about all kinds of things. And she
    had a very wise thing in this letter. She said, ``You know, somebody
    came up to me the other day and said, `How are we going to save all
    these kids that are in trouble? How are we going to get them back?'.''
    And she said, ``Without even thinking I said, `We're going to get them
    back just the way we lost them, one at a time'.'' Now, you think about
    that. That's what this national service proposal could do. It could give
    all kinds of young people a chance to do something meaningful to help
    earn credit to go to college and to help solve the problems of Cleveland
    and Cincinnati and Columbus and Dayton and every other community in this
    country. That's the kind of thing that I think is money well spent. And
    we can pay for it if we just have the discipline to make the student
    loan program make sense again. I think we have to do it.
        Let me say, there are many other issues I could talk about, but I
    want to mention one other. I have spent a lot of the last 6 years
    working on the issue of welfare. I have probably spent more time than
    any elected politician talking to people who live on welfare checks. And
    I can tell you that nobody likes the system, least of all most people
    who live on it. But if you want to move people from welfare to work, you
    have to realize three or four basic things. First of all, you've got to
    make work pay; welfare can never be a better deal. Secondly, we've got
    to realize that it's not the welfare check that keeps people on welfare
    as much as it is the child care and the medical coverage for the
    children. Most people on welfare have kids. The third thing you've got
    to realize is that most people, not all but most people on welfare are
    woefully undereducated and can't claim a very good paycheck in the
    market that we're in, not all but a lot. So what is the answer? The
    answer is a comprehensive plan that will empower people to go to work,
    require them to take jobs when they can, and set a date certain beyond
    which no check comes without an effort being made either in a public or
    a private job. That's what I think should be done. We should do away
    with the system as we know it forever. It is a shackle on the spirit of
    millions of Americans, and we can change it.
        Now, here's what we're going to propose. One, in this plan, increase
    the earned-income tax credit. You can fill out a form on your taxes and
    get money back if you're eligible for the earned-income tax credit. And
    let's fix it so that any American who works 40 hours a week and has a
    child in the house is not in poverty. That is a simple, elemental
    principle that will reduce the incentive of welfare. Second, strengthen
    the system of child support enforcement. Don't lose $20 billion a year
    for people who beat their bills and won't support their kids. Let it
    cross the State lines. Third, provide a system of education and training
    so that people are empowered to do what can be done in this economy.
    Fourth, deal with the health care issue through the national health
    initiative that I'll say more about in a minute. And then finally, set
    up a system, it will take us a while to do it and to work out the
    financing, but set up a system so that after a certain amount of time,
    if there is no private sector job, to keep drawing a check you must make
    an effort. I think that will be a very good thing. And most people on
    welfare, once you take care of these other issues, will applaud the
    American people for changing that system. Nobody likes the system we've
    got. We've got to have the courage to change it, and I think we will
    this year.
        Finally, let me say a word about the last issue, which incorporates
    so much of the other. If you want to bring the deficit down to zero,
    which is what our goal ought to be, over a period of years, we must face
    the biggest exploder of the deficit and perhaps the biggest human
    dilemma America faces, and that's the health care crisis.
        This year we're going to spend 15 percent of our income on health
    care. The next nearest country will not spend 10 percent. Now, we should
    be spending more than everybody else for a number of reasons: Number
    one, we do more on medical research than any other country. Number two,
    we rely more on new technologies, and we enjoy that when we need it, as
    opposed to somebody else needing it. Number three, we have a more
    diverse population

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    with more poor people than most other advanced countries, more cases of
    AIDS than most other advanced countries, and we are a more violent
    country than any other advanced country. So we pay more money, keeping
    emergency rooms open on the weekend for people getting shot and cut up.
    [Laughter] You can laugh about it; these are true things. Anybody comes
    and paints some miracle picture on health care without telling you the
    truth is not credible.
        We cannot get our costs down to the level of other nations unless we
    make changes dealing with these big structural things. We can do
    something about this violence if we wanted to, and I'll have more to say
    about that as we go through this term. I've already tried to do too much
    at once, according to the experts. But let me tell you, we cannot
    continue to have health care costs go up at the rate of inflation
    anymore. We cannot do that here. This deficit, no matter how much we
    bring it down in the next 5 years, will start to go right up again
    because health care costs are going up at a projected 12 percent a year
    for the Government. A hundred thousand Americans a month are now losing
    their health insurance, coming right onto the Government rolls: people
    giving up jobs because they have sick children; people giving up health
    insurance to keep the small business from going broke; people giving up
    health insurance because they have to change jobs, and they have
    somebody in their family sick.
        And there are things that can be done about this. We are spending
    about 15 percent of every dollar in health insurance on administrative
    costs and insurance profit. That is exorbitant. It's about a dime a
    dollar more than any other country in the world is spending. The average
    doctor in 1980 was taking home 75 percent of all of the money that came
    into the clinic that he or she brought in, 75 percent. Do you know what
    it is now? Fifty-two percent; lost 23 cents on the dollar. Why? Because
    of paperwork. The blizzard of insurance requirements, the blizzard of
    Government requirements, and a few other things as well. We can do
    something about this.
        Now, the trick is going to be not to spend a lot more money but to
    move the money from where it shouldn't be to where it should. And some
    people will have to pay some more. But we are going to do the very best
    we can to make sure that the people who are entitled to a reduction in
    their insurance bills start to get it right away, and that we phase in
    the burdens of this so that no small business is bankrupt, so that the
    providers are relieved of a lot of these paperwork burdens, and so that
    we can actually both lower the costs to the millions and millions of
    Americans who are entitled to it and stabilize the rate of increase for
    everybody else.
        Now, the nay-sayers can always call any new responsibility that
    anybody assumes, that they are not assuming now, a tax. Five will get
    you ten, they'll never want to give any credit for all the cost
    reductions that will go to the tens of millions of Americans who are
    paying too much now. We have got to do something about this. We are the
    only advanced country in the world that has no system for covering
    everybody, maintaining health security for working families, and trying
    to keep costs somewhere near inflation. We can do that and preserve
    everything that is best about the American system, keep spending more
    than everybody else is, but not run this country into a ditch. And we've
    got to do it.
        In order to do it, all of us will have to take a view about the
    national interests that will not enable us to say, what's in it for me?
    We'll have to say, what's in it for us? There are a couple of things
    moving through the Congress that are very hopeful in that regard. One is
    the Senate passed a bill this week, that I strongly support, that
    requires all the lobbyists in Washington to register for a change. Did
    you know they didn't have to register before? A whole bunch of them
    never even registered. And limit very strictly the gifts that any Member
    of Congress can receive without reporting them. They're going to have to
    report the money that all the lobbyists make, and the lawyers.
        And now, we introduced last Friday a new campaign finance reform
    bill that will limit the cost of congressional campaigns, limit the
    influence of political action committees, and open the airwaves to
    challengers and incumbents alike so that the people get a real race
    every time, and pays for it by repealing the deduction for lobbyist
    expenses. I hope that those two things can pass. To get economic reform,
    you're going to have to have political reform. I'm sure of that.
        Bring down the deficit; do it with spending cuts and tax increases.
    No tax increases without the spending cuts. Invest in education and
    training, new technologies, incentives to business, changing the welfare
    system. And have political

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    reform; face health care. That is a big agenda, but that is America's
    agenda. If we're going to bring this country back, that is what we must
    do. I hope you and every American, without regard to political party, in
    good faith, will ask the United States Congress to engage these issues
    this year so that we can move this country in the future.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:45 p.m. at the Statler Tower Building.
    In his remarks, he referred to Representatives Lou Stokes and Eric
    Fingerhut.