[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[April 25, 1993]
[Pages 496-505]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Newspaper Association of America in Boston, Massachusetts
April 25, 1993

    Thank you very much. Frank, I am delighted to be here. You reminded 
me, when you said that I came last year to the Waldorf, that I was in 
Los Angeles last year on the day before this convention. And I was 
flying back, and I got somewhere around Las Vegas, and our plane

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malfunctioned. We had to go back to California, and I took the red-eye 
into the Waldorf. I've always thought that was why I was the first 
Democrat in 28 years to receive a majority of the newspaper endorsements 
in the last election. I was thinking today whether there was some stunt 
I could pull that would have the equal effect. [Laughter]
    When Frank was giving me the introduction, he said it was just a 
year ago, and this young, charismatic Governor was out--I thought to 
myself, what happened to that guy? [Laughter] You know, people ask me 
all the time whether there's anything really different about being 
President, and is it different from being a Governor or some other job? 
And it really is.
    One of the things is that people walk around on eggshells all the 
time, and they're always trying to protect you, even from things that 
aren't necessarily in need of protecting. The other day I came down from 
the residence floor at the White House to the first floor. And I didn't 
know this, but my wife was having a meeting with some women there, about 
30 of them, talking about health care, and the meeting just let out as I 
got off on the floor. I was going around the corner to another little 
room, and all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of 30 people whom 
I had never met before. I literally just walked out into their midst. So 
I shook hands with them, said hello. It was quite pleasant. And this 
young aide who was working there, a man who's a full-time employee of 
the White House, said, ``Oh, Mr. President, I'm so sorry that I let you 
out in the middle of all those people.'' And I looked at him, and I 
said, ``That's all right, young man, I used to be one.'' [Laughter] 
That's the way I sort of feel sometimes.
    I want to tell you how very proud I am to be here today with you, 
all of you who offer our fellow countrymen and women the information, 
the analysis, the range of opinions that they need to make decisions 
about their future.
    I know that there's always a healthy tension between the people in 
public service and the press. And when I have bad days I remember that 
another President who had a few bad days with the press himself, Thomas 
Jefferson, said that if he had to choose between having a Government 
without newspapers or newspapers without a Government, that he would not 
hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter. I think that was on one of 
the days when he got a good press. [Laughter]
    I want to say, in all seriousness, that I've had the opportunity 
over the last several years to read a fairly large number of newspapers 
from around the country. As all of you know, I believe very strongly 
that over the last 10 to 12 years the political system, which includes 
both parties, in many important ways failed our people. And oftentimes, 
it was newspapers of our country who continued to put the human concerns 
of people back at the center stage of public debate, reporting on the 
stagnation of living standards that created so much anxiety for the 
middle class and so much despair for the poor.
    I think, in particular, of the incredible series run by the 
Philadelphia Inquirer, called ``America: What Went Wrong?'', and the 
detail in which that series documented what happened to the middle class 
in America as most families worked harder for lower wages and had more 
insecurity in the fundamentals of their lives.
    But many other papers, perhaps all of them all across the country, 
issued various reports on other problems that were neglected for too 
long: how we went from a $1 trillion to a $4 trillion deficit in 
national debt in 12 years; how most of the gains, the economic gains of 
the 1980's went to people in the top 3 to 4 percent of income brackets; 
how we came to spend over 33 percent more than any other country in the 
world on health care and still had over 35 million people without any 
health insurance and millions of others at risk of losing it at a 
moment's notice; the problems we had in our school systems, our welfare 
systems; the problems we had with drug abuse and crime; the problems we 
have in the rising tide of people in what may well be for them a 
permanent underclass, most of them young women and their little children 
or young, single, unemployed and uneducated men.
    Editorial writers warned us about organized interest having too much 
dominance over public policy, and the slogans and the smears and the 
sound bites having too much dominance over public debate and election 
decisions. Newspaper after newspaper reported on the profound 
disaffection of so many of our people from the political process itself. 
When the political system seemed brain-dead and deadlocked, with so many 
people locked into yesterday's rhetoric and yesterday's policies, many 
in the newspapers helped to give the American people not only

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the information they need but the sense that with that information, 
something profound could be done to change the course of our Nation's 
history.
    I don't think there's any question that the size of the turnout last 
November, the nature of the turnout, with so many people from 
traditionally underrepresented groups in the electorate, including so 
many millions of young people, indicated that the American people wanted 
some fundamental change in the way our Government does the people's 
business. And fortunately for me, I was given the opportunity to try to 
lead that change.
    Now that we have taken office and had almost 100 days to work at it, 
I know that you are about the business of playing your roles, not as a 
cheering section for our administration but as a conscience for the 
Nation, measuring the deeds against the words, reminding us still, 
always, no matter what happens in Washington, of the hurts and the hopes 
and the capacities of the people who do the voting and who challenge us 
now to live up to the promise of America.
    For those who serve in Government and for those who watch Government 
up close in Washington, it's all too easy to concentrate on the daily 
events and the inside stories, to worry about who's up or down or in or 
out, who won or who lost the moment's battle; too easy to forget about 
the real people whose real lives will be changed for better or worse by 
what we do or do not do: the unemployed people, the people who are 
afraid of losing their health insurance, the teenagers who wonder if 
they'll have a chance to work this summer, the families who feel less 
safe on their streets when we don't provide enough law enforcement 
officials, and on and on.
    We can't forget, amidst all the gamesmanship of American political 
life which is a high form of entertainment, that there are real people 
with real stories, and they are what all of our efforts are ultimately 
about.
    Every day, I try to devote some time to looking past the deadlines, 
to look ahead of the headlines, to look beyond the beltway, to go beyond 
the false choices and the failed policies and philosophies that still 
grip so much of the debate that I must confront every day, to go beyond 
the politics of abandonment or the politics of entitlement, to think 
about how we can all be in this together. No more every person for 
himself or herself, and no more something for nothing.
    I am doing my best to offer every American an opportunity to succeed 
and to challenge every American to give something back to our country. 
Everyone who is willing to work hard and play by the rules ought to have 
a chance to be a part of this American community, and I think we all 
know that that is not the case today.
    In the first 96 days of this administration, I think we have begun 
to fundamentally change the direction taken by the Government over the 
past decade, to go beyond trickle-down and tax-and-spend to a new 
approach to our deficit and to Government's role that reduces the 
deficit and increases investment in our future with an economic plan 
that reduces the deficit by over $500 billion in the next 5 years, has 
led to a 20-year low in mortgage rates, which the business writers say 
this year alone, if we can keep the interest rates down, will result in 
refinancings which will put over $100 billion back into this economy; an 
economic plan that includes an attempt to avoid the inevitable conflict 
between the environment and the economy by finding ways to create jobs 
with responsible environmental policy; an economic plan which tries to 
deal seriously with the enormous problems occasioned by the dramatic 
reductions in the defense budget and the impact that's had on high-tech, 
high-wage employment in the United States.
    And I might add that tomorrow here in Boston we're going to have the 
first of five national conferences on that subject here to try to work 
in partnership with the private sector, to use the fact that the cold 
war is over and the defense budget is going down to find new ways for 
these people to work, to bring their talents and their knowledge and 
their enormous experience to bear.
    We've tried to go, in the trade debate, beyond the old debate 
between free trade and protectionism to a new policy rooted in the 
notion that we ought to expand trade to grow our economy and to grow the 
economy of our trading partners. That is driving us as we seek to 
conclude a new agreement on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, 
as we seek to conclude a treaty with Mexico and Canada to integrate our 
economies over the long run, and as we seek to redefine our relationship 
with Japan in the economic area.

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    We seek to go beyond inertia and ideology to experimentation and 
initiative and a reliance on more individual responsibility in social 
policy, with initiatives in welfare reform and national service and 
national health care and community policing. We seek to go beyond 
politics as usual to political reform with a serious effort to reduce 
the influence of lobbying in our political process, to reform the 
campaign finance system, to reduce the Federal bureaucracy and increase 
the amount of your tax dollars that can be invested in ways that 
directly promote the health and welfare and economic well-being of the 
American people. We seek to go beyond the divisive rhetoric of family 
values to an administration that values families, one that gives 
everybody a chance to be part of America's families. That's what the 
Family and Medical Leave Act was all about. That's what repealing the 
ban on fetal tissue research so that we could save the lives of children 
afflicted by diabetes and other dangerous diseases was all about. That's 
what the effort to immunize all of our children is all about.
    There is such an incredible gulf in this country between what we say 
and what we do, it is an awful burden to bear if you're a serious 
American citizen. You hear all this talk about how much we care about 
our children. Well, I'll tell you something. We make over half the 
vaccines in the world in this country, and we have the third worst 
immunization record in the Western Hemisphere. And everybody goes around 
piously talking about how all this Government stimulus program I had was 
a bunch of pork barrel. It wouldn't have been pork barrel for the kids 
we would have immunized against preventable childhood diseases.
    In the aftermath of the cold war, we are trying to fashion a new 
world rooted in democracy and human rights and economic reform, a world 
in which the United States will lead but in which we will continue to 
work with our allies. There is, as we speak now, a Russian election 
which has just concluded. We don't know how it came out. I can tell you 
that I know the polls show that the American people think that the 
President of the United States should not have spent time or their money 
on Russia. But I respectfully disagree.
    I grew up in an age when the biggest threat to my future as a little 
child was whether there would be a nuclear war between the United States 
and what was then the Soviet Union. Historic events in the former Soviet 
Union and in Eastern Europe have given democracy new hope. The START I 
and START II treaties, if they can both be implemented by all the 
nuclear powers, give our children new hope. We cannot afford to withdraw 
from the struggle of promoting democracy, human rights, market reforms, 
and an end to imperialism in that part of the world. And whatever 
happens today, we must engage the Russian people on those fronts, 
because my children and our country's future, all of our futures and all 
of our children's, are at stake there.
    We have other interests as well, in Bosnia. The United States in the 
last 96 days has tried to increase the efforts of the West to bring 
about a settlement. We led the effort to put a no-fly zone and to 
enforce it through the United Nations. We started airlifts of supplies 
to people who were isolated. We got two of the three parties to sign on 
to the Vance-Owen peace process. We have dramatically increased the 
enforcement of tougher sanctions. It has not been enough, and now we are 
considering what our other options are. I say, frankly, it is the most 
difficult foreign policy problem this country faces, but we have to try 
to bring an end to the practice of ethnic cleansing and to bring a 
beginning of peaceful resolution of the conflict there.
    We told the American people, I and the people who work with me, that 
we would restore real, not just rhetorical, responsibility to the 
actions of Government. That's what our education initiative to write the 
national education goals into the law of this country, to have real 
standards, is all about. That's what the initiatives that the HUD 
Secretary, Henry Cisneros, is undertaking to have certain strict rules 
of conduct for people who live in public housing is all about. That's 
what the initiatives we're taking to help people move from welfare to 
work is all about.
    We told the American people we would try to accomplish what no other 
administration has ever been called up to do in the history of this 
country before. We would try to reduce this massive Federal deficit and 
increase investments in areas critical to our future, because, funny 
enough, in the last 12 years we exploded the deficit and reduced our 
investment in areas critical to our future. We have to do that because 
we have to free this economy of the burden of debt we are shouldering. 
And we have

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to invest because while we're doing it, we have to realize that we're in 
a competitive global economy, and we still have technologies and workers 
and students that have to have the benefit of appropriate investments in 
order to be fully competitive.
    Doing these things will expand job opportunities and incomes for 
middle class people and help others to move into the middle class, 
something that has all but stopped in the last couple of years.
    When I submitted to the Congress the core elements of my budget 
plan, designed to change these policies of debt and disinvestment and 
decline in return for thrift and investment and growth, the Congress 
adopted that budget plan in record time, the first time in 17 years a 
budget resolution has passed Congress on time.
    When people say to me, ``Well, what did you do in your first 100 
days?'' I say, ``What did the other guys do in their first 100 days?'' 
The United States Congress deserves a lot of credit for taking all the 
heat after all these years of antitax rhetoric, ``No such thing as a 
good tax. Taxes are terrible.'' They adopted a budget with 200 specific 
budget cuts, over and above the last budget adopted under the previous 
administration, and some tax increases, 70 percent of which fall on 
people with incomes above $100,000, over 50 percent of which fall on 
people with incomes above $200,000; with an energy tax that the middle 
class will have to help pay that is good for conservation and good for 
the environment and good for the long-term direction this country needs 
to go in. Budget cuts and revenue increases.
    We are already seeing the fruits of that. Because of interest rates 
going down, the deficit this year is going to be less than we thought it 
was going to be. This is something of very significant importance. The 
financial markets have clearly responded. Stock prices are at all-time 
highs, and many key interest rates, including home mortgage rates, are 
at 20-year lows. As I said, this means $100 billion more in money coming 
from refinancing of homes and businesses, credit card rates, and 
automobile interest rates going directly into the economy over the next 
year. And that's not my figure. Those are the figures of the business 
writers who have examined the circumstance that exists. These 
refinancing possibilities mean that farmers and small business people 
and homeowners are going to have a better deal in their ordinary lives, 
but that money will then flow back to more productive purposes in the 
economy.
    Along with the $514 billion deficit reduction program, we're also 
trying to confront the long-term economic problems of this country with 
a lifelong learning package that includes an attempt to devise 
apprenticeship opportunities of 2 years after high school for every 
American who does not go on to college, with initiatives to build a 
21st-century infrastructure that focuses on technology as well as 
physical infrastructure, with efforts to revitalize our community and to 
strengthen our economy.
    As I said, I think to get this done--and we're coming back now to 
try to pass the details of the budget--we will have to begin to see the 
world new, not as tax-and-spend, not as trickle-down, but as invest-and-
grow. We'll have to think of Government not as the sole problem or the 
sole savior but as a partner with the private sector in trying to work 
our way out of the problems that we have. We'll have to think about new 
approaches based on old values like work and faith and family and 
opportunity, responsibility and community. Our success will ultimately 
be measured not by how many programs we've passed but by whether we 
improve the lives of our fellow Americans, not simply by what we do for 
people but by what we help people to do for themselves.
    We start, I think as we must, with honoring and rewarding work. Just 
17 days into this administration, we made family and medical leave the 
law of the land after 8 years of gridlock and delay and two vetoes. 
Hard-working men and women now can know that if they have to take a 
little time off for a genuine family problem, they can do it without 
losing their jobs.
    Again I say, I heard all the clamor about what a terrible bill this 
was. And I looked around the world, and a hundred and some nations have 
found a way to give family leave that we just couldn't find it in our 
heart, our minds, a way to provide before we got around to doing it. 
It's time Americans put their actions where their rhetoric is, and 
that's what this administration is trying to do.
    Forty-four days into the administration we were called upon to 
extend unemployment compensation to hundreds of thousands of jobless men 
and women, something now Congress will do as a matter of course without 
regard to party. Everybody is willing to pay people to remain

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unemployed. But this time we changed the law so that we spend a small 
portion of that money to offer the unemployed new opportunities for job 
training and counseling to try to move them back to work more quickly, 
based on a New Jersey experiment which shows clearly that we can do that 
if we don't just pay people to stay out of work but we take some of that 
money to get them back to work.
    That's why we are trying to dramatically increase the earned-income 
tax credit to working poor people. It is a solemn commitment to those 
who work, who care for our sick or tend to our children or do our most 
difficult and tiring jobs, that we're going to do our best to enshrine 
in our tax law and in our country's life the principle that if you work 
for a living 40 hours a week and you've got children in the house, you 
should not live in poverty. I think that is an important principle and 
one that's worth fighting for.
    That is why I tried for several weeks to pass an emergency jobs 
program through the Congress which, I want to point out, I did not 
campaign on in the campaign of 1992. I ran a fiscally responsible 
campaign. I did not offer to do anything that we did not pay for in the 
moment we did it. And this jobs program was a responsible approach based 
on the fact that the American economy was not producing new jobs, even 
though we were allegedly into the second year of a recovery.
    We're supposed to be in the 24th month of a recovery, according to 
the economic statistics. But jobs have increased by only eight-tenths of 
one percent. And private sector jobs have not increased in that period. 
If we were following the trend of typical past recoveries, jobs would 
have grown by more than 7 percent. We are still 3.5 million jobs behind 
the rate generated in a normal economic recovery. And we have reclaimed 
only one-half the jobs we lost in the last recession. This past week, 
jobless claims went up yet again. At a time in which 16 million men and 
women are out of work or looking for full-time work with part-time jobs, 
I'm fighting to give them a chance to earn a paycheck, to do useful 
work, to support their families, to contribute to their communities.
    Now, the stimulus package that I offered, the jobs plan, would not 
have revolutionized the economy. It was a $16 billion program in a $6 
trillion economy. The purpose of it was to do just exactly what it would 
have done. It would have lowered the unemployment rate by half a 
percent. And it might have sparked a new round of job creation in other 
sectors of the economy.
    I decided to do it, even though it was not part of my campaign, 
because the economy was sluggish and because as I looked around the rest 
of the world, I discovered that all of the advanced industrialized 
countries were having great difficulty creating jobs even in recovery. 
If you go back and look at what happened to Europe in the last decade, 
they had two different economic recoveries that have produced virtually 
no new jobs in many of those countries. And all I wanted to do was to 
try to find a way to deal with what I think is the number one problem. 
If everybody in this country who wanted a job had one, we wouldn't have 
half the other problems we've got. And I think every one of you, without 
regard to party or philosophy, would agree on that.
    There were two objections raised to the program. Some said, ``Well, 
you ought to pay for it all right now.'' Well, we had a 5-year deficit 
reduction plan that reduces the deficit by $514 billion. And Congress 
pays for things all the time over a multiyear period, number one. Number 
two, because of unpredicted reductions in defense, if we'd spent every 
penny I recommended, we'd still be under the spending levels approved by 
the Congress for this year.
    The other thing people said, well, was, ``There's a lot of pork in 
this plan.'' Well, I don't know how you define that. I think if you put 
700,000 kids to work this summer, particularly under our plan, which for 
the first time said that the at-risk kids had to do some education as 
well as take jobs--we tried to take more pork out and put more standards 
in--it would be a good thing. I think if you open these immunization 
centers this summer, I think if you had more kids in summer Head Start 
and you paid people to work in that, I think if you rehired 20,000 of 
these police officers who were laid off because of tough economic times 
and made the streets safer, I think if we accelerated funding under the 
highway program, which has always had enormous support from the other 
party as well as from the Democrats, and I think if we gave some more 
money to the Mayors and the Governors of this country for job purposes, 
that would be a good thing. I don't think it would be a lot of pork.
    It was amazing to me to listen to some of

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the debate about the community development program. I was a Governor for 
12 years. I used that program. You might quarrel with some of the things 
we did, but usually what we did was good for creating jobs in my State. 
And the Republican Party had always supported community development 
block grants before. They thought Mayors and Governors were smart enough 
to make the decisions. I wanted to give money to Governor Weld, a 
Republican Governor of Massachusetts--I thought he had enough sense to 
figure out how to best spend the money here for the Massachusetts 
economy--or the Republican Mayor of York, Pennsylvania, or the 
Republican Mayor from Indiana who's the head of the Republican Mayors 
Association. You know, all we did was change the occupants of the White 
House. We didn't change the party or the personality of the Governors 
and the Mayors. I don't know what happened that made that program such a 
bad idea all of a sudden. It was a good idea.
    And again, I tell you that it is not nearly as important as the big 
picture budget that has already passed. But it is symbolic of the idea 
battle that we have to fight. We have to be prepared to think anew. Now, 
if no western country is creating jobs, even in the midst of economic 
recovery, it is not readily apparent that the $100 billion we're going 
to put back into the economy with lower interest rates are going to lead 
to a whole lot of new jobs. They may. It depends on how the money is 
invested.
    That's the big deal, the fact that we've got interest rates down, 
we've passed the budget resolution, it's going. All I wanted to do was 
to strike a little match to that and see if we couldn't put several 
hundred thousand people back to work in useful places and see if that 
would help the economy to get going on the job machine. I think, still 
think, it was a worthwhile effort. And I'd a lot rather get beat trying 
to put people to work than get beat fighting putting people to work.
    Let me also tell you that I regret the partisan tone of the rhetoric 
of the last several days, because a lot of the things that I support 
have a lot of support among Republicans. I'm for the line-item veto. 
There are Democrats that are against it and Republicans that are for it. 
I'm for the crime bill. I hope we can pass it with bipartisan support, 
the Brady bill and more police on the street. I'm for cuts in the budget 
that a lot of people in my own party won't support. But a lot of them 
voted for cuts in the budget, because they thought it was a responsible 
way to go overall.
    There are lots of things that I think we need to do that I hope we 
can get bipartisan support, toughening the child support system, having 
a national service program that will give every young person in this 
country a chance to borrow the money to go to college and pay it back, 
either as a percentage of their income at tax time so they can't beat 
the bill or by working it off and giving something to their country. 
These are things that ought to have bipartisan support. We cannot solve 
the problems of this country if every last issue that comes up, just 
because the President recommends it, becomes a source of a filibuster in 
the Senate or, frankly, attracts only members of my own party. I don't 
want that. I want us to debate these ideas anew, to look at them anew, 
to take our blinders off. And I'm not going to be right about everything 
I recommend, but at least I want us to be up there all working together 
fighting for change.
    Let me say one thing in particular about the work that two very 
important people in my administration are doing, the Vice President and 
the First Lady. I met with a lot of you before I came out here, and 
several of you said, ``Well, I generally support what you're doing, but 
you ought to bring that deficit down more.'' And I will say to you what 
I say to everybody: Send me a list of the things you want cut, because 
we found 200 things that we were cutting that weren't cut in the 
previous budget, and we're not done yet.
    But I want you to know what this Government is like now. In my 
judgment, if you want further meaningful cuts, you have to do two 
things: You have to look at the whole way the Federal Government is 
organized, because there is a limit to how much you can get just out of 
cutting defense unless you deal with the way it is organized, like 
procurement and issues like that, structural things. And that's what the 
Vice President is involved in, this whole initiative to reinvent the 
Government. We've got hundreds of gifted people from all over America 
coming to work with us in Washington now, reexamining every last 
Government program, every last Government organization, committed to 
thinking about it anew.
    This fall, when we come out with our program, we're going to ask the 
American people

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to think about the role of the Federal Government: What it should do; 
how it should be organized. And it's going to be a very challenging 
report. I hope all of you will read it and give it a lot of publicity. 
And on the tough things that we recommend, in terms of changes, I hope 
we can get some good support without regard to party, because a lot of 
the things that we have to do now require us to rethink how this whole 
thing is organized.
    We've already cut 14 percent in administrative costs, 25 percent of 
the personnel in the White House, and a lot of other things that we can 
do symbolically and substantively that will save billions of dollars. 
But to get more, we're going to have to literally rethink the whole 
Government.
    The second point I want to make is, you can do all that, and unless 
we address this health care crisis, the Government's deficit cannot be 
erased. Under every scenario we saw, from every political source--that 
is, the Republicans and the Democrats agreed, the bipartisan 
Congressional Budget Office agreed, everybody agreed--no matter how much 
we cut the deficit, we could bring it down for 5 years. But after that, 
it would start going right back up again because of the breathtaking 
increase in health care cost.
    The estimates are now that over a 5-year period, Federal spending 
for Medicare and Medicaid alone will go up by 67 percent in 5 years. 
Taking away the defense cuts, taking away the interest savings, taking 
away the cuts in other Government programs, taking away the cuts in farm 
support programs, taking away, you name it, anything you want cut, 
you're just transferring the money to health care and not new health 
care, more money for the same health care. So that this is not only an 
incredibly compelling human issue--how do you give coverage to those who 
don't have it? How do you give courage to those who want to change jobs 
but can't because they had somebody in their family sick, and the 
preexisting condition keeps them from getting any health insurance? But 
how do you restore sanity to the Nation's budget? And by the way, how do 
you restore health to big chunks of our economy, a lot of our biggest 
and best companies striving to be more competitive. We say, ``We 
desperately want you to start investing in America and stop investing so 
much of your money to create jobs somewhere else.'' And they say, ``Give 
me a break. I'm spending 19 percent of payroll on health care.''
    This country is spending 15 percent of its income on health care. No 
other country is up to 10 percent. Only Canada is over 9 percent. So 
when people say--you'll hear it all--they'll say, oh, they're dealing 
with health care again, there they go again; it's all taxes and terrible 
and everything. You figure out what you're paying right now. Every one 
of you figure out what you're paying for health care, in taxes, 
premiums, uncompensated care that gets shifted on to your health 
insurance bills.
    And so I say to you, we have got to face some other big fundamental 
issues. Not just this budget but how the Government is organized, what 
it delivers, whether it needs to deliver what it does, whether it needs 
to stop doing some things altogether. And then, what are we going to do 
about health care? We cannot go on ignoring the fundamental problems. If 
you've got it, it's still the best health care system in the world.
    There are a lot of things about it that are wonderful. I want the 
delivery system to stay in private hands. I want people to still be able 
to pick their doctor. I want the best things about this health care 
system to stay just as it is. But you cannot look at it as long and hard 
as we have without concluding that we are spending a dime on the dollar 
on unnecessary paperwork and bureaucratic and regulatory expenses.
    People say to me all the time, ``You've got to do something about 
doctors' fees.'' Let me tell you just one little interest number. In 
1980, the average doctor, working in a clinic, took home 75 percent of 
the money that came into the clinic. By 1990, that doctor was taking 
home 52 percent of the money coming into the clinic. Where did the rest 
of it go? Mostly to paper, to regulation, mostly from the proliferation 
of insurance policies, but some from what the Government did.
    We can do better. We must. And we're going to bust a gut trying in 
this administration. We're going to do our best.
    The last thing I want to say about this is, I ask for your scrutiny 
and your understanding as we get into the difficult business of 
political reform. I intend to ask the Congress to pass a tough campaign 
finance reform law. I intend to ask the Congress to adopt some 
restrictions on lobbying and some disclosure requirements that are not 
there now. We had the toughest ethics rules any President ever imposed 
on his appointee that prevent people from leaving my

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administration and going to work anytime in the near future to make 
money as lobbyists in the areas in which they worked for us.
    These things are important. It may never be possible to be perfect, 
but it is important that we take these things on and that the voters of 
this country understand what is at stake as these matters begin to be 
debated.
    And finally let me say--I think it's important to talk about today--
I'm doing my best to restore a sense of real community in this country. 
As I said right when I came to you last year, we'd just seen Los Angeles 
racked by riots, and we were all talking about how we had to learn to 
live together without regard to race or income or region. I want to 
reiterate what I said to you a year ago: We don't have a person to waste 
in this country, and we're wasting them by the bucketful. We're letting 
people go, this way, that way, and the other way. And that's one of the 
reasons that I have said that we have to fight for a society that is not 
at all permissive but that is tolerant.
    Today in Washington, many Americans came to demonstrate against 
discrimination based on their sexual orientation. A lot of people think 
that I did a terrible political thing--and I know I paid a terrible 
political price--for saying that I thought the time had come to end the 
categorical ban on gays and lesbians serving in our military service and 
that they should not be subject to other discrimination in governmental 
employment.
    Let me tell you what I think. This is not about embracing anybody's 
lifestyle. This is a question of whether if somebody is willing to live 
by the strict code of military conduct, if somebody is willing to die 
for their country, should they have the right to do it? I think the 
answer is yes, if somebody is willing.
    But in a larger sense, I want to say to you that I think the only 
way our country can make it is if we can find somehow strength out of 
our diversity, even with people with whom we profoundly disagree, as 
long as we can agree on how we're going to treat each other and how 
we're going to conduct ourselves in public forums. That is the real 
issue.
    It's very ironic to me to see that the traditional attacks on the 
position I've taken on this issue have come from conservatives saying 
that I am a dangerous liberal. I took on two issues like this as 
Governor of Arkansas, and I was attacked by liberals for what I did, and 
I want to tell you what they were.
    One was the leadership role I took in crafting a bill that permitted 
people to educate their children at home, consistent with their 
religious beliefs and their educational convictions, as long as the kids 
could take and pass a test every year. And people say, ``Oh, that's a 
terrible thing. All those kids should be required to be in a school. How 
can you do that?'' And I said, ``Because at least these people have 
coherent families and that's still the most important unit of our 
society, and people ought to have a chance to try other things. And it 
wouldn't do the schools any harm to have a little competition, 
unsubsidized by the taxpayers, just letting people do it.''
    Two, when the fundamentalist religious groups in my State were 
confronting a legal issue that swept the country in the mid-eighties, a 
bunch of them came to me and said, ``We do not mind having our child 
care centers subject to the same standards that everybody else is 
subject to. But it is a violation of our belief to have to get a State 
certificate to operate what we think is a ministry of our church. Don't 
make us do that.'' I don't know if you remember this, but in one or two 
States there were preachers that actually wound up going to jail over 
this issue, the certification of child care centers.
    We sat down and worked out a law that permitted those churches to 
operate their child care centers without a certificate from the State as 
long as they were willing to be subject to investigation for health and 
fire safety, and as long as they agreed to be in substantial compliance 
with the rules and regulations that those who were certified observed. 
And people said, ``How can you do that?'' You know how many complaints 
we've had coming out of that, to the best of my knowledge? Zero. Not a 
one. Why? Because they were good people, and they were willing to play 
by the rules, and they wanted to have their religious convictions, and 
they wanted to stick up for their minister, and they desperately love 
the children that were in their charge. And we protected the public 
interest.
    But all the criticism I got was from the left, not the right. This 
doesn't have anything to do with left or right. This is about whether we 
are going to live in a country free of unnecessary discrimination. You 
are free to discriminate in your judgments about any of us, how we look, 
how we behave, what we are. Make your judgments. But if we are willing 
to live together

[[Page 505]]

according to certain rules of conduct, we should be able to do so. That 
is the issue for America. And it has ever been unpopular at certain 
critical junctures. But just remember this: A whole lot of people came 
to this country because they wanted a good letting alone. And that's 
what we ought to be able to do today.
    That's it. I've already talked longer than I meant to. I'll still 
stay and answer the questions for the allotted time. We've got to change 
the direction of the country. We've got to compete in a new world we 
don't understand all the dimensions of. But we ought to be guided by 
three simple things: How can we create opportunity; how can we require 
all of us to behave more responsibly; and how can we build a stronger 
American community. And I don't believe that the answer necessarily has 
a partisan tinge. And I hope we can begin tomorrow the business of going 
forward with what this country urgently needs to do.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 4:14 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the 
Marriott Copley Place Hotel.