[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[May 12, 1993]
[Pages 638-644]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New 
York City
May 12, 1993

    The President. Thank you very much. It always seems to be a good 
thing for me when I'm introduced in New York by Governor Cuomo. 
[Laughter] I must confess to having mixed feelings as I sit on this 
revered stage with all these distinguished citizens. And President 
Iselin made his eloquent remarks and then your fine Mayor spoke so 
forcefully, and the brilliant chairman of the Senate Finance Committee 
brought us back to Woodrow Wilson. And then Governor Cuomo once again 
gave me a hard act to follow, and they all left the stage. I thought to 
myself, pray this is not a metaphor for the battle ahead.
    This is the second thing I have had in common with President Wilson. 
I received a fascinating letter the other day from Johnston and Murphy, 
the shoe manufacturers from Nashville, Tennessee. They have made shoes 
for every President going back to the 1850's, so they made a pair of 
shoes for President Lincoln. And they send you a little catalog, and you 
pick the shoes you want, and they send them to you with your name in 
them. It says ``Johnston and Murphy--every President served.'' And so I 
ordered these rather simple plain black shoes, and they wrote me this 
wonderful letter in which they said, ``We're from Nashville, Tennessee, 
and we know what's in your heart. So here's an extra pair of shoes.'' 
And they sent me a box of blue suede shoes. [Laughter]
    And then in the letter they recounted the choices of all the 
previous Presidents. And they said that in one way my choice was not 
particularly innovative, that five other Presidents had chosen the same 
style I did, including Harry Truman, which made me very proud. But they 
said, ``You do have the biggest feet of any President since Woodrow 
Wilson.'' [Laughter] So you had two sets of big feet here from the 
Presidents.
    President Wilson said in an address that Senator Moynihan quoted: 
``I have been dealing with young men most of my life''--he wasn't so 
gender-sensitive as he should have been--``and one of the things I have 
tried most to impress upon them is not to stay young too long, but to 
take themselves seriously.'' Now at one level I want us all to stay 
young forever, but I do think the time has come for us to take ourselves 
and our purposes more seriously. This celebrated institution and the 
community of scholars and activists it embraces is the result, as 
President Iselin said, of Peter Cooper's determination more than 130 
years ago to create an institution intellectually vigorous with free 
tuition, the first nondiscrimination policy in American history, and a 
genuine commitment to social justice. He believed you could do more than 
one thing at a time. [Laughter]
    Here Mr. Lincoln asked our country to confront the cost of the 
spread of slavery, to ask hard questions about the conditions that had 
plagued our Nation since its beginning. Remem-


[[Page 639]]

ber it was Thomas Jefferson, not Abraham Lincoln--Thomas Jefferson the 
slave owner--who said, ``I tremble when I think of slavery to consider 
that God is just.'' There were people who knew in their hearts the truth 
but had denied it a long time.
    Lincoln said that to continue to do that threatened to tear our 
country apart. He knew the Nation would be destroyed if slavery spread 
and that unless the country's drifting stopped, the very drift would 
carry within it the seeds of our destruction. And so, here at Cooper 
Union he asked those hard questions and gave strong answers. Soon after, 
he won the nomination of the fledgling Republican Party and went on to 
win the Presidency by only 39 percent of the popular vote, receiving 
virtually no votes south of the Mason-Dixon line. Soon after that, the 
war came, and Lincoln's fight for the Union grew into a determination to 
abolish slavery.
    Several days a week I walk alone into the room in the White House 
where Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and try to 
remember the purposes of the United States of America. The fight for the 
Union and the fight against slavery cost Abraham Lincoln his life, as 
well as the lives of hundreds of thousands of his fellow countrymen. But 
America prevailed in form and spirit. And America has endured in form 
and spirit because in times of crisis and challenge, leaders have asked 
the hard questions and given the strong answers. And the American people 
have rallied.
    Look at the condition of America today. How can we avoid asking 
those questions? To be sure, we are still the strongest Nation in the 
world politically, economically, and militarily. To be sure, more than 
anyone else in the world we have accommodated the incredible diversity 
of our land with remarkable harmony. When you look at what is happening, 
the heartbreak in the former Yugoslavia today, where there are three 
ethnic groups that genetically have no ethnic differences at all but 
call themselves ethnically different solely because of the accidents of 
religion and history, it is an incredible tribute that in this country, 
in this great city and across the country in Los Angeles and in all 
places in between, that we live together as well as we do with our 
diversity.
    But still we cannot avoid the hard questions. If we're so great, why 
are most middle class families working longer hours today than they were 
20 years ago for wages that in real terms are less than they were a 
decade ago? Why are one in 10 of our people so impoverished they're on 
food stamps? Why are over 8 million of us out of work if we're in the 
17th month of a recovery? Why are there over 35 million of us without 
health care and millions more Americans terrified of losing their health 
coverage, with 100,000 Americans a month losing their health insurance, 
and millions of others who can never change jobs under the current 
system because they or someone in their family has been sick and so they 
have a preexisting condition which makes them unemployable with health 
insurance elsewhere?
    Why? Why that half the people on welfare not get off of it as a 
safety net after just a few months? Why is there a whole class of new 
poor people, mostly young women and their little children, many of those 
children never born into an integrated family? Why? Why was--only 35 
years ago, only 35 years ago--there conditions even in New York City in 
which there were three police officers on the street for every violent 
crime, and today there are three crimes for every police officer?
    Why does the Government fail to deal with the problems that this age 
has brought to us and engaged the American people in dealing with them? 
Why have we seen the Government's debt grow from $1 trillion to $4 
trillion in the last 12 years, while we reduced our investment in the 
people of America and their promise and their ability to compete? Why in 
the world would we reduce all this defense spending, including jobs for 
engineers and scientists and factory workers, with no plan whatever to 
put that money back to work to create opportunities for them, cleaning 
up the environment or exploring the frontiers of technology here at home 
or helping us to compete with people all around the world?
    The American economy finds itself in the middle of a global 
marketplace, challenged on every hand by nations who have made wise 
investments in their people, their workers, and their technological 
edge. Yes, there is today a global recession which is making our problem 
more difficult. But if you take the long view, those who have made the 
investments in the eighties and those who are doing so now will be 
rewarded over the long run. For a decade or more, we have both expanded 
our debt and reduced our investment in areas key to our future.

[[Page 640]]

    We also have in this country a crisis of belief and hope. When 
President Kennedy took office, younger than I was when I took office, 
over 70 percent of the American people fundamentally believed that their 
leaders would tell them the truth and that their system could succeed. 
Now it seems as if half the people just stand around waiting to be 
disappointed, waiting to be told what's wrong and who's failed and how 
the special interests once again have strangled the national interests 
and why they should go on about their business without believing things 
can be different. I believe that the nature of our challenge is this: We 
must both restore our economy and restore the confidence of our people 
in our democracy. And I do not believe we can do one without the other.
    This is a strange and, in a way, wondrous moment in our history when 
citizens everywhere desperately want things to change but still are wary 
of it and reluctant to place their faith in anyone's prescription. We 
must begin with the economy. We must change the way the Government works 
if we expect the economy to improve. And we must rebuild the confidence 
of the American people based on the three words which were the watch 
words of my campaign for President: more opportunity for all, more 
responsibility from all, and the clear understanding that we are a 
community and we're all in this together, going up or down together. 
Whether we like it or not, that is clearly the truth. And we must begin 
to act as if it were.
    How can we reduce the deficit? Let's start with the big problem of 
the debt. Well, the answer is not popular. To reduce the deficit you 
have to reverse what produced the deficit. What produced it? Tax cuts 
and spending increases. Doing what people like. The most popular thing 
in the world is for me to cut your tax and write you a check. And that 
was what was done by Government for the American people for 12 long 
years. I'll cut your tax and I'll write you a check--that's a good deal. 
It used to be known as a free lunch when I was a kid.
    We have to begin to reverse this process. And because Government has 
been at fault, first you should ask Government to change. So I have 
asked in Washington that we begin with significant spending cuts below 
the budget that was adopted last year to reduce the deficit and to free 
up resources for targeted investment in the future of our economy and of 
the young people here present in this hall.
    We should look at every program for possible savings, including ones 
that Democrats have favored for a long time. And there should be no tax 
increase, not a dollar, without the spending cuts. That is the meaning 
of the budget resolution that was passed a few weeks ago in record time. 
It contains the largest deficit reduction proposals in history, over 
$500 billion in deficit reduction over a 5-year period with more than 
200 very specific cuts in programs. Those were tough to make, but 
necessary in the face of a $4 trillion debt that will continue to grow 
until the deficit itself is reduced to zero.
    That deficit is robbing us of our ability to invest in our future. 
More and more of our money just goes to pay interest on the debt. If we 
don't change it, by the end of the decade over 20 cents on every dollar 
you pay in taxes will go just to service the debt. Now, that is also a 
redistribution of wealth away from middle class taxpayers to the upper 
income people who hold the debt, instead of to invest in the jobs and 
the education and the infrastructure of the future of New York and the 
rest of America.
    We made cuts in Medicare, a thing that is difficult to do. We asked 
upper income Social Security recipients to pay tax on more of their 
incomes, a thing that is difficult to do. In spite of the fact that I 
value public service greatly and I believe public employees too often 
have been used as whipping boys for the difficulties and frustrations of 
the moment, still I asked the public employees of the United States of 
America to have a pay freeze for a year and to keep their wage increases 
below inflation and cost of living allowances for each of the next 3 
years.
    I come from a rural State, heavily electrified by the Rural 
Electrification Agency, but I asked that the subsidies to the REA be 
reduced. I asked that certain programs that benefit cities but that 
don't have the accountability of the normal budgeting process also be 
reduced. All these were not easy. But it seems to me essential, if we're 
going to ask the American people to sacrifice, that the Government take 
the lead and show the way.
    We're also fighting, however, to do something no Government has done 
before, to both reduce the deficit and increase targeted investments in 
areas that are designed to secure the future of this country, in the 
ones Governor Cuomo mentioned: in Head Start; in the program to

[[Page 641]]

get children off to a healthier start in life with immunizations and 
nutrition; in better programs for apprenticeship training for our work 
force; in opening the doors of college education to all Americans 
through reforming the student loan process and a program of national 
service; in new incentives for our industries to develop new technology. 
These are things which other countries do as a matter of course and take 
for granted and which lead to huge increases in productivity. The case 
for them should be plain in America once inessential spending has been 
cut.
    The cuts, however, must be credible. And credibility is difficult to 
come by in Washington today. They must be legally enforceable. They must 
be plain to the American people. After 12 years of rising deficits and 
Americans feeling deceived about the issue, I don't blame the people of 
this country for being distrustful about what they hear from Washington 
when it comes to bringing down this deficit. That is why I have decided 
today to propose that we establish a deficit reduction trust fund and 
put every penny of new taxes and the budget cuts proposed in my budget 
into the trust fund so the American people know that it has to go to 
deficit reduction.
    There are several members of the New York congressional delegation 
here today. I thank them all for being here, and I thank especially 
Congressman Schumer for his leadership on this issue. I thank Senator 
Moynihan for his support of this issue. Senator Moynihan said on the way 
up here that he thought we ought to do it to win a victory for the 
clarity of our determination to reduce the deficit. Senator Bradley had 
an op-ed piece in the paper today endorsing the idea. The time has come 
to prove that when we say we're going to do something with the people's 
money, we actually do it.
    Let me repeat what this means. We will create a trust fund in which 
every dollar that is raised will go to deficit reduction and in which 
all the net budget cuts which have been approved will do so also. This 
is very important. This seriousness, however, should not relieve us of 
our obligation to recognize that over the long run we must also bring 
down the investment deficit in this country. I am as dedicated to that 
as I ever have been. I know that long-term economic growth depends on 
high-quality and comprehensive education and training, converting the 
workers and the investments from defense that is being cut to new 
technologies which must be increased, establishing new and innovative 
partnerships with the private sector and, as I said earlier, opening the 
doors of college education to all Americans. But bringing the deficit 
down will give us the freedom to do that.
    This budget saves, as I said, about $500 billion. And the trust fund 
will ensure that we do just that. It will be a change in the way 
Washington does business. It has broad support. But I also want to 
emphasize that it will only confirm the direction on which we have 
embarked. The financial markets here in New York have already understood 
the seriousness of this administration. Look what's happened to long-
term interest rates just since the election, just since the election: 
mortgage rates at a 20-year low, many other interest rates at record 
lows. All the analysts say that if this can continue a few more months 
in this period, we will see about $100 billion freed up for investment 
in America through people refinancing their home loans and business 
loans and taking out car loans and consumer loans at lower interest 
rates. This is a job stimulus program that is big and important. And 
bringing the deficit down so that the huge overhang of private and 
public debt of the 1980's can be refinanced is a great strategy to begin 
the economic renewal of America, and we must stick with it.
    More can be done. But to do more we have to actually rethink the 
whole way the Federal Government operates: How does it operate on its 
own terms? How does it relate to the States and the private sector? I 
asked the Congress to give me some more money for technology so I could 
run the White House with many fewer people than my predecessors had. I 
asked that we have a 14-percent across-the-board cut in the 
administrative costs of the Federal Government over the next few years: 
100,000 reduction in the payroll by attrition, over $9 billion in 
savings simply by administrative changes alone. But that is just the 
beginning.
    I have also asked Vice President Gore to head a task force which 
will reexamine every agency of the Federal Government, every program of 
the Federal Government, and the whole way it is organized. Every major 
company in America had to go through a wrenching reexamination process 
in the 1980's. The Federal Government had many of its Departments cut, 
but the way it operated continued to be largely unexamined.

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It is time that we impose the same sort of reexamination process on the 
National Government. When we do it, we will find more savings, and more 
importantly, we will increase the quality of service to the American 
people.
    Finally, I want to compliment the House of Representatives last week 
on passing a bill with the mind-boggling title of ``enhanced 
rescission.'' But when you strip it away, what it amounts to is a 
modified line-item veto, which is enjoyed by most Governors and which 
will enable the President to strike out spending items that he believes 
are unnecessary but will give the Congress the freedom to put them back 
in after voting on them individually so, that the people can make their 
own judgment and so can the Members of Congress.
    These things will make the Federal Government more efficient and 
will set us on the path to long-term reform. We ought to also think 
about our partnership with the private sector and our partnership with 
State and local government. Mayor Dinkins mentioned it. I was gratified 
to see a couple of mentions in the press recently about the fact that 
our administration had tried to give cities more relief from unnecessary 
regulations and States more leeway in promoting various kinds of reform 
in health care. I just told Governor Cuomo that I was very excited about 
the health care reform package that he put forward in New York, and 
Hillary's task force has been very much influenced by the New York 
reforms.
    We believe that a lot of the problems of America can be solved by 
cities and States if the National Government will have targeted 
investment and then will give people their head to do what they know 
needs to be done. You'd be amazed how many programs have quite a bit of 
money in them, but most of the money, or a great deal of the money, 
never reaches the ultimate beneficiaries at the State or the city level 
because of all the layers in between. You'd be amazed. I was in Chicago 
a couple of days ago, and the Mayor of Chicago told me that there are 
one or two programs that his staff wouldn't even let him try to get for 
Chicago because the administrative hassle of securing the funds was so 
great. We're going to change that. We're going to have a new and 
different and vibrant process that trusts the people of New York and 
their elected leaders, and the State of New York and their elected 
leaders, and people throughout the country to have real innovation in 
the same way that I think we want in the private sector in the United 
States. But finally, let me say--[applause]--the Mayor, the lone 
clapper.
    We also have proposed to change the relationship between the 
Government and the private sector in a tax reform package that Senator 
Moynihan will soon take up if it passes the House, and I hope it does. 
There will be significant incentives for businesses, large and small, to 
increase their investment in this country and to be rewarded for it. We 
will have initiatives that will empower neighborhoods and give people 
significant incentives to go into neighborhoods in small towns and rural 
areas and in big cities to put real investment there to create real 
jobs. We'll provide people real incentives to end welfare as we know it 
and require them to move forward with that. We will do things that are 
different from what either party has done before to try to empower 
people to live up to their God-given potential in a new and different 
partnership between the United States and people in the private sector.
    When you strip it all away, there's still one more tough question 
that has to be answered. If you want the deficit brought down, we have 
to face the fact that in 1981, taxes were cut by 6 percent of the 
national income of this country, twice what President Reagan originally 
recommended when he was elected President. And that gap has never been 
made up.
    David Stockman, President Reagan's Budget Director, has an interview 
in a magazine called the New Politics Quarterly this month in which he 
says, ``I don't agree with all of President Clinton's spending plan, but 
at least he's telling the truth. You cannot fix the deficit without a 
tax program, because we cut taxes more than twice as much as we proposed 
to do it when we came in. We got into a bidding war. We got carried 
away. What we did was irresponsible. And then all the politicians since 
then never had the stomach to tell the American people the truth. And it 
was just more fun to cut taxes and pass out money than to do the 
reverse.'' Now, that is the hard truth.
    I really believed in the campaign that we could raise revenues 
modestly on upper income people, close some corporate tax loopholes, and 
do some other things, do the spending cuts, and bring the deficit down. 
After I was elected, the Government announced that the annual deficit 
was going to be $50 billion a year bigger

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in 3 of the 4 years that I would serve as President, $50 billion a year 
bigger, and $15 billion bigger in the fourth year. And it became clear 
to me that under those circumstances we could not begin by cutting 
anyone's taxes; that we ought to have a responsible, balanced energy tax 
and that most of the tax burden should be borne by those who had their 
taxes lowered in the eighties while their incomes went up, people in 
higher income groups; but that we ought to have a balanced and fair 
package, not to ``soak the rich'' but to share the burden, to try to say 
this is our job.
    And so I say to you, yes, I will put this money in a trust fund, but 
that does not mean the money does not have to be paid. If you want the 
interest rates to stay down, if you want the profits of lower interest 
rates, you must undergo the pain of the spending cuts and the tax 
increases, because that's the only way to really bring the deficit down.
    Now, the question is, are we going to do this, or not? Are we going 
to do this, or not?
    Audience members. Yes, we are.
    The President. I think we are.
    There are some who say no. Today in Washington there are 80,000 
lobbyists. It's a growth industry. I'll guarantee you one thing, I 
created some jobs since I got to be President.
    But the Congress is now dealing with two bills which will help to 
reform the way our politics work. They just passed the motor voter bill, 
something young people of America really wanted and which I'm very proud 
of, which I hope and pray will continue the trend of increased voter 
participation. But now Congress is dealing with two tough other issues. 
The United States Senate passed last week a bill--finally, believe it or 
not, in the year 1993--finally requiring everybody who actually lobbies 
them to register as a lobbyist and requiring that the gifts that they 
give to Members of Congress or the expenditures they make on trips or 
whatever all be reported. Believe it or not, they weren't done before 
now. The Congress passed that with only two dissenting votes--the Senate 
did. The bill is now going to the House.
    In addition to that, last Friday I proposed a comprehensive campaign 
finance reform law which will lower the cost of congressional campaigns, 
reduce the influence of political action committees, and open the 
airwaves to challengers as well as incumbents for more honest debate. It 
is a tough, good bill. If we can pass these bills, they will help to 
open the system too.
    People are full of hope now. We've received in 3\1/2\ months more 
letters than the White House got in all of 1992. If you haven't gotten 
yours answered, I hope you'll be patient. We've got over 200 volunteers 
coming in just to open the mail and trying to sort it and read it. But 
it is a wonderful reaffirmation, the critical and the complimentary and 
support letters alike, that Americans really want their system to 
respond to them again. And we must do that.
    If the first issue is the economy--or in the vernacular of my old 
campaign sign, ``It's the economy, stupid''--that means deficit 
reduction, investment for jobs and technology, and education. It means 
controlling health care costs and dealing with that crisis. I should 
tell you that no matter how much we reduce the deficit in the next 5 
years, it will go right back up again if we don't address health care 
costs, because that's the fastest growing part of the Federal budget 
deficit.
    It must include all these things, as well as political reform and 
changing the way Government works. And change is hard. It doesn't happen 
overnight. You have to do what Lincoln did: Ask hard questions, give 
strong answers, and hope the American people rally.
    We can move forward. We can have a whole new partnership in this 
country, one that goes beyond the things that normally divide us, beyond 
the dividing lines of party, of race, of gender, of region, of income. 
We can do that. Ideas and energy can replace drift and delay. We can 
grow in wealth and wisdom and liberty.
    But this requires more than good ideas and more than political 
energy. If I may say, if you don't remember anything else I say, I hope 
you'll remember this: The human condition in the end changes by faith. 
And faith cannot be held in your hand. The Scripture that I carry to my 
place of worship every Sunday says, ``Faith is the assurance of things 
hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.'' But make no mistake about 
it, it is by far the most powerful force that can ever be mustered in 
the cause of change.
    Today we are seeing too much cynicism and too little faith, an 
obsession with the moment, an obsession with the politicians and their 
wins and their losses, an obsession with blame and division, an 
obsession with paralysis, an obsession with always pointing out the pain 
of change

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and never embracing its promise. Without faith, in the end we always 
wind up resorting to the easy and the immediate: Tax the other guy; cut 
that other program, not mine; wait for somebody to deliver the goods to 
me, or wait for it not to happen till I can blame somebody else for what 
didn't.
    But faith changes all that. Lincoln's cause in 1860 was to keep our 
house from dividing. Our cause today is to put our house in order. If 
``a house divided against itself cannot stand,'' surely a house in 
disarray will not provide shelter and a home. Surely a house where 
problems are denied or blamed on someone else in the next room can never 
be a home for America.
    To preserve the American dream in our time and for your future, yes, 
our leaders must ask tough questions and give strong answers. But people 
must rally to the cause of change with faith. We have to believe again, 
believe through the ``frustrations and the difficulties of the moment,'' 
as Martin Luther King characterized them, believe through the inevitable 
rocks in the road to the ends of the journey. We must believe through 
the smallness and the spite that conflict always brings out in all of 
us. We must believe through that, to the spirit and generosity and 
courage that is America at its essence.
    Mr. Lincoln closed his Cooper Union speech with the following words: 
``Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us to 
the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.'' My fellow Americans, 
our clear duty is to revive the American dream and restore the American 
economy. And for as long as it takes, with energy and joy and humility, 
let us dare to do that duty.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 3:50 p.m. at the college. In his remarks he 
referred to Jay Iselin, Cooper Union president; Mayor David Dinkins of 
New York City; and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senate Finance 
Committee chairman.