[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.