    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [February 22, 1993]
    [Pages 171-179]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session With Silicon Graphics
    Employees in Mountain View, California
    February 22, 1993

        The President. First of all, I want to thank you all for the
    introduction to your wonderful company. I want to thank Ed and Ken. We
    saw them last night with a number of other of the executives from
    Silicon Valley, people, many of them with whom I've worked for a good
    length of time, many of whom the Vice President's known for a long time
    in connection with his work on supercomputing and other issues.
        We came here today for two reasons, and since mostly we just want to
    listen to you, I'll try to state this briefly. One reason was to pick
    this setting to announce the implementation of the technology policy we
    talked about in the campaign, as an expression of what we think the
    National Government's role is in creating a partnership with the private
    sector to generate more of these kinds of companies, more technological
    advances to keep the United States always on the cutting edge of change
    and to try to make sure we'll be able to create a lot of good new jobs
    for the future.
        The second reason--can I put that down? We're not ready yet for
    this. The second reason I wanted to come here is, I think the Govern-

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    ment ought to work like you do. And before that can ever happen we have
    to be able to get the people, the Congress, and the press, who have to
    interpret all this to the people, to imagine what we're talking about.
        I have, for example, the first State government in the country that
    started a total quality management program in all the departments of
    government, trying to figure out how we could reinvent the government.
    And I basically believe my job as President is to try to adjust America
    in good ways so that we can win in the 21st century, so that we can make
    change our friend and not our enemy.
        Ed said that you plan your new products knowing they'll be obsolete
    within 12 to 18 months, and you want to be able to replace them. We live
    in an era of constant change. And America's biggest problem, if you look
    at it through that lens, is that for too many people change is an enemy,
    not a friend. I mean, one reason you're all so happy is you found a way
    to make change your friend, right? Diversity is a strength, not a source
    of division, right? Change is a way to make money, not throw people out
    of work, right?
        If you decentralize and push decisions made down to the lowest
    possible level, you enable every employee to live up to the fullest of
    their ability. By giving them a 6-week break every 4 years, you don't
    force them to make these sharp divisions between your work life and your
    private life. It's sort of a seamless web. These are things we need to
    learn in America and we need to incorporate even into more traditional
    workplaces.
        So I'd like to start--we'll talk about the technology policy later,
    and the Vice President, who had done so much work, will talk a lot about
    the details at the end of this meeting. But I just want to start by
    telling you that one of our missions--in order to make this whole thing
    work we're going to have to make the Government work differently.
        Example: We cut the White House staff by 25 percent to set a
    standard for cutting inessential spending in the Government. But the
    work load of the White House is way up. We're getting all-time record
    telephone calls and letters coming in, and we have to serve our
    customers, too. Our customers are the people that put us there, and if
    they have to wait 3 months for an answer to a letter, that's not
    service.
        But when we took office, I walked into the Oval Office--it's
    supposed to be the nerve center of the United States--and we found Jimmy
    Carter's telephone system. [Laughter] All right. No speaker phone, no
    conference calls, but anybody in the office could punch the lighted
    button and listen to the President talk, so that I could have the
    conference call I didn't want but not the one I did. [Laughter]
        Then we went down into the basement where we found Lyndon Johnson's
    switchboard--[laughter]--true story--where there were four operators
    working from early morning till late at night. Literally, when a phone
    would come and they'd say, ``I want to talk to the Vice President's
    office,'' they would pick up a little cord and push it into a little
    hole. [Laughter] That's today, right?
        We found procedures that were so bureaucratic and cumbersome for
    procurement that Einstein couldn't figure them out. And all the offices
    were organized in little closed boxes, just the opposite of what you
    see.
        In our campaign, however, we ran an organization in the Presidential
    campaign that was very much like this. Most decisions were made in a
    great big room in morning meetings that we had our senior staff in, but
    any 20-year-old volunteer who had a good idea could walk right in and
    say, ``Here's my idea.'' Some of them were very good, and we
    incorporated them.
        And we had a man named Ellis Mottur who helped us to put together
    our technology policy. He was one of our senior citizens; he was in his
    fifties. And he said, ``I've been writing about high-performance work
    organizations all my life. And this is the first one I've ever worked
    in, and it has no organizational chart. I can't figure out what it looks
    like on paper, but it works.''
        The Vice President was making fun of me when we were getting ready
    for the speech I gave Wednesday night to the Congress; it was like
    making sausage. People were running in and out saying, ``Put this in,
    and take this out.'' [Laughter] But it worked. You know, it worked.
        So I want to hear from you, but I want you to know that we have
    hired a person at the Office of Management and Budget who has done a lot
    of work in creating new businesses and turning businesses around, to run
    the management part of that. We're trying to review all these
    indictments that have been issued over the last several years about the
    way the Federal Government is run. But I want you to know that I think a
    major part of my mission is to

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    literally change the way the National Government works, spends your tax
    dollars, so that we can invest more and consume less and look toward the
    future. And that literally will require rethinking everything about the
    way the Government operates.
        The Government operates so much to keep bad things from happening
    that there's very little energy left in some places to make good things
    happen. If you spend all your time trying to make sure nothing bad
    happens, there's very little time and money and human energy left to
    make good things happen. We're going to try to pare away a lot of that
    bureaucracy and speed up the decisionmaking process and modernize it.
    And I know a lot of you can help. Technology is a part of that, but so
    is organization and empowerment, which is something you've taught us
    again today. And I thank you very much.
        We want to do a question and answer now, and then the Vice President
    is going to talk in more detail about our technology policy later. But
    that's what we and Ed agreed to do. He's my boss today; I'm doing what
    he --[laughter]. So I wonder if any of you have a question you want to
    ask us or a comment you want to make.
        Yes, go ahead.

    Export Control Policy

        Q. Now that Silicon Graphics has entered the supercomputer arena,
    supercomputers are subject to very stringent and costly export controls.
    Is part of your agenda to review the export control system, and can
    industry count on export regulations that will keep pace with technology
    advances in our changing world?
        The Vice President. Let me start off on that. As you may know, the
    President appointed as the Deputy Secretary of Commerce John Rollwagen,
    who was the CEO at Cray. And he and Ron Brown, the Secretary of
    Commerce, have been reviewing a lot of procedures for stimulating U.S.
    exports around the world. And we're going to be a very export-oriented
    administration. However, we are also going to keep a close eye on the
    legitimate concerns that have in the past limited the free export of
    some technologies that can make a dramatic difference in the ability of
    a Qadhafi or a Saddam Hussein to develop nuclear weapons or ICBM's.
        Now, in some cases in the past, these legitimate concerns have been
    interpreted and implemented in a way that has frustrated American
    business unnecessarily. There are, for example, some software packages
    that are available off the shelf in stores here that are nevertheless
    prohibited from being exported. And sometimes that's a little bit
    unrealistic. On the other hand, there are some in business who are
    understandably so anxious to find new customers that they will not
    necessarily pay as much attention as they should to what the customer
    might use this new capacity for. And that's a legitimate role for
    Government, to say, hold on, the world will be a much more dangerous
    place if we have 15 or 20 nuclear powers instead of 5 or 6, and if they
    have ICBM's and so forth.
        So it's a balance that has to be struck very carefully. And we're
    going to have a tough nonproliferation strategy while we promote more
    exports.
        The President. If I might just add to that, the short answer to your
    question, of course, is yes, we're going to review this. And let me give
    you one example: Ken told me last night at dinner, he said, ``If we
    export substantially the same product to the same person, if we have to
    get one permit to do it, we'll have to get a permit every time we want
    to do the same thing, over and over again. They always give it to us,
    but we have to wait 6 months, and it puts us behind the competitive
    arc.'' Now, that's something that ought to be changed, and we'll try to
    change that.
        We also know that some of our export controls, rules and
    regulations, are a function of the realities of the cold war which
    aren't there anymore. But what the Vice President was trying to say, and
    he said so well--I just want to reemphasize--our biggest security
    problem in the future may well be the proliferation of nuclear and
    nonnuclear, like biological and chemical, weapons of mass destruction to
    small, by our standards, countries with militant governments who may not
    care what the damage to their own people could be. So that's something
    we have to watch very closely.
        But apart from that, we want to move this much more quickly, and
    we'll try to slash a lot of the time delays where we ought to be doing
    these things.

    Scientific Visualization

        Q. Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, you've seen scientific
    visualization in practice here. As a company we're also very interested
    in ongoing research in high-performance computing and

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    scientific visualization. Can we expect to see a change in the national
    scientific agenda that includes scientific visualization? Right now I
    don't see the scientific visualization as being represented, for
    example, on the FCCSET committee.
        The Vice President. It is a good question. One of the people who
    flew out here with us for this event and for the release of the
    technology policy in just a few minutes is Dr. Jack Gibbons, who is in
    the back of the room, the President's science adviser and head of the
    Office of Science and Technology Policy. And he will be in charge of the
    FCCSET process. That's an acronym that--what does it stand for, Jack--
    the Federal Coordinating Council on Science and Engin--what is it?
        Jack Gibbons. Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering,
    and Technology.
        The Vice President. Right. And visualization will play a key role in
    the deliberations of the FCCSET.
        We were actually, believe it or not, talking about this a little bit
    with Dr. Gibbons on the way over here. I had hearings one time where a
    scientist used sort of technical terms that he then explained. It made
    an impression on me. He said, ``If you tried to describe the human mind
    in terms applicable to a computer, you'd say we have a low bit rate but
    high resolution.'' Meaning--this is one of the few audiences I can use
    that line with. [Laughter]
        But he went on to explain what that means. When we try to absorb
    information bit by bit, we don't have a huge capacity to do it. That's
    why the telephone company, after extensive studies, decided that seven
    numbers were the most that we could keep in short-term memory. And then
    they added three more. [Laughter] But if we can see lots of information
    portrayed visually in a pattern or mosaic, where each bit of data
    relates to all of the others, we can instantly absorb a lot of
    information. We can all recognize the Milky Way, for example, even
    though there are trillions of points of light, stars, and so forth.
        And so the idea of incorporating visualization as a key component of
    this strategy is one that we recognize as very important, and we're
    going to pursue it.
        The President. Let me just add one thing to that. First of all, I
    told the crowd last night that the Vice President was the only person
    ever to hold national office in America who knew what the gestalt of the
    gigabit is. [Laughter] But anyway--and now we're going to get some very
    funny articles out of this. They're going to make fun of us for being
    policy wonks. [Laughter]
        Let me say something to sort of take this one step further. This
    whole visualization movement that you have been a part of in your line
    of work is going to merge in a very short time with the whole business
    in traditional education theory called applied academics. We're now
    finding, with just sort of basic computer work in the elementary schools
    of our country, dramatic differences in learning curves among people who
    can see the work they're doing as opposed to people who are supposed to
    read it. And we're now finding that the IQ's of young people who might
    take a vocational track in school may not be all that different from
    kids that would stay in a traditional academic track and wind up at
    Stanford, but their learning patterns are dramatically different. And
    there are some people--this is a huge new discovery, basically, that's
    coming into the whole business of traditional educational theory.
        So someday what you're doing here will revolutionize the basic
    teaching in our schools, starting at kindergarten and going forward, so
    that the world of work and the world of education will begin to be
    merged backwards all the way to the beginning. And it's going to be, I
    think, the most important thing we've ever done and very important for
    proving that in a diverse population all people can reach very high
    levels of achievement.
        Ed McCracken. The President and Vice President have also come here
    today to present a new national technology policy for the country. Do
    you want to----
        The President. We'll answer some more questions. I'm going to forego
    my time and just let him announce the policy, so we can hear some more
    questions. Got to give the man equal time, I know. [Laughter]

    Economic Program

        Q. I'd just like to say, I didn't vote for you; I wish I had.
    [Laughter]
        The President. I hope you feel that way 4 years from now. [Laughter]
        Q. Well, that's actually why I'm standing up. I really see a
    possibility in what you stand for, and I really think this is why you
    were elected, that you say you stand for change. You said

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    that during your campaign. I think the company believed that. They're
    counting on you--I'm nervous--and I just want to say we're really, as a
    country, behind you. I think that's why the statistics are saying that
    we're willing to have our taxes increased; we're willing to have cuts,
    because you say you're really going to do it this time and decrease the
    deficit. I hope to God that you do. We need it not just for this present
    time, but by your actually fulfilling on this it will make a major
    change in how we feel about Government; that when Government says
    they're going to make a difference and they really come through, it will
    make a huge impact for the future. And I'm really personally behind you
    all the way. I wish I'd voted for you.
        The President. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Let me make one
    comment in response, if I might. I think it's important, and you can
    help others understand this, to understand why we have to reduce the
    deficit, which is something that is normally not done when unemployment
    is high. And unemployment is still too high. Even though we're in an
    economic recovery, most of our recovery is due to higher productivity
    from firms that, in turn, this time are not hiring new people for all
    kinds of reasons.
        And we have to reduce the deficit for two reasons: Number one, we're
    already spending 15 percent of your tax money just to pay interest on
    past debt. If we don't change present patterns, we'll be over 20 cents
    by the year 2000. That's money we should be spending on education and
    technology in the future.
        Number two, the more money we take out of the pool of funds for
    borrowing, the more expensive it is for companies like this and other
    companies that have to go into the markets and borrow to borrow. Just
    since the election, since we made it clear we were going to try to bring
    the deficit down, long-term interest rates have dropped seven-tenths of
    one percent. That is a huge savings for everybody that is going to
    borrow money or that has a variable interest rate on a loan, whether
    it's a home mortgage or a business loan or a car loan or whatever.
    That's important.
        The second thing we're trying to do that I know you will also
    appreciate is to shift the balance of the money we do spend more away
    from consumption toward investment, investments in education,
    technology, environmental cleanup, and converting from a defense to a
    domestic economy. One of the bizarre things that happened to us in the
    eighties is that we increased the deficit first through defense expenses
    and then through exploding health care costs and increasing interest
    payments. But we reduced our investments in the future and the things
    that make us richer.
        So those are the changes we're trying to effect. Let me just make
    one other point. I will not support raising anybody's taxes unless
    budget cuts also pass.

    Foreign Trade

        Q. One of the things that Silicon Graphics has been really
    successful in is selling into the international markets. Approximately
    50 percent of our revenues come internationally, including a substantial
    market in Japan. What types of programs does your administration plan to
    help the high-growth companies of the nineties sell to the international
    markets?
        The President. Two things. First of all, we intend to try to open
    new markets and new markets in our region. That is, to keep America
    growing, I believe high-growth companies are going to have to sell south
    of the border more. And to do that we have to negotiate trade agreements
    that will help to raise incomes in those countries even as we are
    growing. That's why I support, with some extra agreements, the NAFTA
    agreement and why I hope we can have an agreement with Chile and hope we
    can have an agreement with other countries like Argentina that are
    making a serious effort to build market economies: because we want to
    build new markets for all of you.
        With Japan, I think what we have to do is to try to continue to help
    more companies figure out how to do business there and keep pushing them
    to open their markets. I don't want to close American markets to
    Japanese products, but it is the only nation with which we have a
    persistent and unchanging structural deficit. The product deficit with
    Japan is not $43 billion, which is our overall trade deficit, it is
    actually about $60 billion in product, in manufactured production. So
    we've got a lot of problems we have to work out there.
        With Europe, we sometimes are in surplus; we're sometimes in
    deficit. But it's a floating thing, so it's more or less in balance.
    With developing nations like Taiwan and Korea, those countries had big
    surpluses with us, but as they became richer they brought them down, so
    that we're more or less in balance. We have our

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    biggest trade relationship with Canada, and we're more or less in
    balance.
        So we have to work on this Japanese issue while trying to help more
    of you get involved. Let me make one final comment on that. I think we
    should devote more Government resources to helping small and medium-size
    companies figure out how to trade, because that's what the Germans do
    with such great success and why they're one of the great exporters of
    the world. They don't waste a lot of money on the real big companies
    that have already figured it out, but they have extra efforts for small
    and medium-size companies to get them to think global from the beginning
    of their endeavors. And I think we're going to have to do more of that.

    The Environment

        Q. In addition to concerns about the economy, Silicon Graphics
    employees are also concerned about the environment. Your economic plan
    does a great job of promoting R&D investment. Are there any elements
    that are specifically targeted to promote the application of Silicon
    Graphics technology to environmental-friendly initiatives such as the
    electric car or the mag-lev train?
        The President. I think I should let the Vice President answer that
    since it's his consuming passion. And if I do it, his book sales will go
    up again. [Laughter]
        We devoted a lot of time and attention to that for two reasons. One
    is the environment needs it. Secondly, we think it's wonderful
    economics, because I believe that all these environmental opportunities
    that are out there for us represent a major chunk of what people who
    used to be involved in defense technologies could be doing in the future
    if we're going to maintain a high wage base in America.
        So I'd like for the Vice President to talk a little about the
    specifics that we're working on.
        The Vice President. That goal is integrated into the technology plan
    as one of our key objectives. The Japanese and the Germans are now
    openly saying that the biggest new market in the history of world
    business is the market for the new products, technologies, and processes
    that foster economic progress without environmental destruction.
        Some have compared the drive for environmental efficiency to the
    movement for quality control and the quality revolution in the sixties
    and seventies. At that time, you know, many companies in the United
    States felt that the existing level of product quality was more or less
    ordained by the forces of supply and demand and it couldn't be improved
    without taking it out of the bottom line. But the Japanese, taking U.S.
    innovations from Dr. Deming and others, began to introduce a new theory
    of product quality and simultaneously improved quality, profits, wages,
    and productivity.
        The environmental challenge now presents us with the same
    opportunity. By introducing new attention to environmental efficiency at
    every step along the way, we can simultaneously reduce the impact of all
    our processes on the environment, improve environmental efficiency, and
    improve productivity at the same time. We need to set clear, specific
    goals in the technology policy, in the economic plan.
        And you know, both the stimulus package and the investment package
    focus a great deal on environmental cleanup and environmental
    innovation. And whereas we've talked a lot about roads and bridges in
    the past, and they're a big part of this plan also, we're putting
    relatively more emphasis as well on water lines and sewer lines and
    water treatment plants and renovating the facilities in the national
    parks and cleaning up trails, taking kids from inner cities and putting
    them to work cleaning up trails in national parks, for example, as part
    of the summer jobs program.
        So you'll find when you look at both the technology plan and the
    economic plan an enormous emphasis on the environment.
        The President. Go ahead, sir. They say we have to quit in a minute.
    I'll take one more question after this.

    The Economy

        Q. Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, the news stories and articles
    that the public has access to regarding the budget and the economy are
    very often confusing and contradictory. I might explain it in the same
    terms that you used: The information is delivered low bit rate, but the
    problem is huge and requires the high-res view. So my question is: I
    wonder if you're using Lyndon Johnson's computer to analyze the budget
    and the economy, or whether or not you might be open to using some of
    the things you've seen here to get the bigger picture and also
    communicate that to us?
        The President. Thank you. There are two

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    things I'd like to respond to on that, and I'd like to invite you to
    help. [Laughter] I'd like to invite you to help, and I'd like to invite
    you to help on two grounds: One is the simple ground of helping to
    decide which visual images best capture the reality of where we are and
    where we're going.
        Senator Moynihan and I went to Franklin Roosevelt's home in Hyde
    Park, New York, just a couple of days ago. You may have seen the press
    on it. And on the way back he said to me that the challenges that we
    face are different from those that Roosevelt faced but just as profound.
    Unemployment was higher and America was more devastated when he took
    office, he said, but everybody knew what the problem was. Therefore, he
    had a lot of leeway working with the Congress in the beginning to work
    toward a solution. Now, he said, we are facing severe challenges to a
    century of economic leadership, and it's not clear to every American
    exactly what the dimensions of the problem are. The capacity you have to
    help me help the American people conceptualize this is quite
    significant: showing the trends in the deficit, showing the trends in
    the investment, showing how the money is spent now and how we propose to
    spend it.
        The second big problem we have you can see if you look at the front
    page of USA Today today, which shows a traditional analysis, yesterday's
    analysis--of the business section--of the economic program. It basically
    says, ``Oh, it will bring unemployment down a little and it will
    increase economic growth a little if we do this, but not all that
    much.'' Now, why is that? That's because traditional economic analysis
    says that the only way the Government can ever help the economy grow is
    by spending more money and taxing less. In other words, traditional
    Keynesian economics: Run a bigger deficit. But we can't do that. The
    deficit's already so big, I can't run the risk to the long-term
    stability of this country by going in and doing that.
        This analysis doesn't really make a distinction between investment
    and consumption, doesn't take any account of what we might do with a
    technology policy or a trade policy to make the economy grow faster, has
    no way of factoring in what other good things could happen in the
    private market if you brought long-term interest rates down through the
    deficit. So you could also help us to reconceptualize this. A lot of the
    models that dominate policymaking are yesterday's models, too.
        I'll give you just one example. The Japanese had a deficit about as
    big as ours, and they were increasing spending at 19 percent a year,
    government spending, back in the early seventies when the oil prices
    went way up and they were more energy-dependent than we were on foreign
    oil. And they just decided they had to change it, but they couldn't stop
    investing. So they had a budget which drew a big distinction, a literal
    distinction, legal distinction, between investment and consumption, and
    they embarked on a 10 or 11 year effort to bring the budget into
    balance. And during that time they increased investment and lowered
    unemployment and increased growth through the right kind of spending and
    investment.
        And I want to lead in, if I might, and ask the Vice President before
    we go to give you some of the specifics of this technology policy, by
    making one more pitch to you about this whole economic plan. This plan
    has 150 specific budget cuts. And I'm welcome to more. I told the
    Republican leadership if they had more budget cuts that didn't
    compromise our economy, if they helped us, I would be glad to embrace
    them. I'm not hung up about that. But I did pretty good in 4 weeks to
    find 150, and I'll try to find some more on my own.
        It also has the revenue increases that you know about. It also has
    some spending increases, and there will be debate about that. There will
    be people who say, ``Well, just don't spend this new money. Don't
    immunize all the kids. Don't fully fund Head Start. Don't pay for this
    technology policy. Don't invest in all these environmental cleanup
    things, and that way you won't have to raise taxes so much.''
        The problem is, if you look at the historic spending trends, we are
    too low on investment and too high on the deficit, and both are
    problems. And secondly, we've got to have some of these economic
    cooperations in order to move the economy forward.
        So I want you to listen to what the Vice President says in that
    context. Because what you will hear is, we don't need to do what we
    think we should do in this area. If we don't, I think we'll be out of
    competition. People like you will do fine because you've got a good
    company here, but the country as a whole will fall behind. And you can
    help on both those points.
        So would you proceed?

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    Note: The President spoke at 10 a.m. at Silicon Graphics. In his
    remarks, he referred to company officers Ed McCracken, founder and
    president, and Ken Coleman, senior vice president.

      At the conclusion of the question-and-answer session, the Vice
    President made the following statement on the new technology policy:

      I want to give you just a few of the details of this technology
    policy. There will be a printed copy available, and you will be able to
    see for yourself all of the goals and all of the elements of it.

      But I want to start by describing how it fits into the President's
    economic plan. You know, some of the special interests who oppose the
    President's plan are saying to the American people, ``Don't pass this
    plan because everything's fine just the way it is.'' Well, anybody who
    says everything's fine with our economy hasn't been to California
    lately. We need some change. We can't stand the status quo.

      California has to participate in the recovery in order for America to
    have a recovery that is worth the name ``recovery,'' so that we can
    start creating new jobs. And many of the high-skill, high-wage jobs of
    the future are in technology areas. And that's why a key component of
    the President's economic plan is the technology policy that we're
    announcing here today.

      It starts with an appreciation of the importance of continuing basic
    R&D because that's the foundation for all of the exciting products that
    this company and others like this company come up with. It continues
    with an emphasis on improving education because in order for companies
    like this one to survive and prosper in the world economy, we as a
    nation have to have highly educated, well-trained young men and women
    coming out of colleges on to campuses like this. You call it a campus,
    right? That's the term that's very common now.

      We also have to pay attention to the financial environment in which
    companies like this have to exist. In order for this company to attract
    investors for the kind of products that you are building here, you have
    got to be able to tell them that the interest rates are not going to be
    too high if they're borrowing money to invest; you've got to be able to
    tell them, look, President Clinton is making permanent the R&E tax
    credit, for example, and there are going to be specific new provisions
    in the law to encourage investment in high-risk ventures that are very
    common in the high-technology area.

      And then this plan makes specific investments in something called the
    national information infrastructure. Now, infrastructure is a five-
    dollar word that used to describe roads, bridges, water lines, and sewer
    lines. But if we're going to compete in the 21st century, we have to
    invest in a new kind of infrastructure.

      During the Industrial Revolution, the nations that competed most
    successfully were often ones that did the best job of building deep-
    water ports, those that did the best job of putting in good railway
    systems to carry the coal and the products to the major centers where
    they were going to be sold and consumed. But now we are seeing a change
    in the definition of commerce. Technology plays a much more important
    role. Information plays a much more important role. And one of the
    things that this plan calls for is the rapid completion of a nationwide
    network of information super-highways so that the kind of demonstrations
    that we saw upstairs will be accessible in everybody's home. We want to
    make it possible for a school child to come home after class and,
    instead of just playing Nintendo, to plug into a digital library that
    has color moving graphics that respond interactively to that child's
    curiosity.

      Now, that's not the only reason to have such a network or a national
    information infrastructure. Think about the importance of software. If
    we could make it possible for talented young software writers here in
    Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the United States to sell their latest
    product by downloading it from their desk into a nationwide network that
    represented a marketplace with an outlet right there in that person's
    home or business, we would make it possible for the men and women who
    are interested in technology jobs here in the United States to really
    thrive and prosper.

      In keeping with one of the questions that was asked earlier about how
    we can export more into the world marketplace and how we can be more
    successful in world competition, one way is by making our own domestic
    market the most challenging, most exciting, with the most exacting
    standards and levels of quality of any nation in the world. And then we
    will naturally roll out of our domestic marketplace into the world
    marketplace and compete successfully with our counterparts everywhere in
    the world.

      Now, there are some other specific elements of this package which you
    can read for yourself when you see the formal package. Let me just

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    list them very briefly: A permanent extension of the research and
    experimentation tax credit; completion of the national information
    infrastructure; specific investments in advanced manufacturing
    technology. And in response to one of the questions that was asked over
    here, there is a specific program on high-speed rail to do the work
    necessary to lay the foundation for a nationwide network of high-speed
    rail transportation, and a specific project to work cooperatively with
    the automobile companies in the United States of America to facilitate
    the more rapid development of a new generation of automobiles that will
    beat all the world standards and position our automobile industry to
    dominate the automobile industry of the future in the world.

      We also have a specific goal to apply technology to education and
    training. Dr. Gibbons and others have given a tremendous amount of
    thought to this because, after all of the dashed hopes and false
    expectations for computers in schools, ironically, we now have a new
    generation of educational hardware and software that really can make a
    revolutionary difference in the classroom, and it's time to use it.

      And we are going to save billions of dollars each year part way
    through this decade with the full implementation of environmental
    technologies and energy efficiency technologies, starting with Federal
    buildings. We're going to save a billion dollars a year in 1997 just in
    the energy costs of Federal buildings around the United States by using
    off-the-shelf technology that has a 4-year payback on the investment.
    And then we're going to encourage the use of those technologies around
    the country, and we're going to invest in the more rapid creation of new
    generations of that technology.

      Now, the other details of this technology program will be available in
    the handout that's going to be passed out here. And any of you who have
    ideas on how we can improve it and make better use of technology, we
    invite you to contact us and let us know how we can improve this program
    as we go along.

      But one final word: The President's economic program is based, as he
    said, on cutting spending; reducing the deficit over time, including
    with some revenue increases that are progressive and fair; and also
    investing in those things which we know will create good, high-wage,
    high-skill jobs here in the United States. You all are pioneers in a
    sense, showing how that can be accomplished. We want to make it easier
    for working men and women throughout this country and other companies to
    follow your example and to create more jobs in high technology. And that
    is the focus of this technology policy, which is part of the overall
    plan to create more jobs for the American people and get our economy
    moving again.

      The Office of the Press Secretary also released a summary of the
    technology initiative.