[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[May 4, 1994]
[Pages 834-838]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks Honoring the Small Business Person of the Year
May 4, 1994

    The President. Thank you very much, and welcome to the White House. 
Ladies and gentlemen, you have just seen an example of Clinton's first 
law of politics: Whenever possible, be introduced by someone you've 
appointed to high office. [Laughter] I say that in good humor. You know, 
when I met Erskine Bowles in 1992 when I was out running for President--
and our wives had gone to college together and had known each other 
many, many years ago, and his wonderful wife was and still is one of the 
most successful textile executives in the United States--and I talked to 
him about what he had done over the last 20 years, starting small 
businesses, helping them to expand, helping them to get involved in 
trade, I thought to myself, you know, this is the sort of person that 
ought to be head of the SBA, somebody that actually made a living 
helping other people with their small businesses, someone that actually 
knew something about it and had some idea of what the practical 
realities of daily life were like, somebody that would be recognized by 
people without regard to their political party. This

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ought not to be a political agency. It ought to be an agency committed 
to the economic interest and the advancements of the Small Business 
Administration.
    And at the time, of course, I had no way of knowing whether I'd even 
be nominated, much less elected, or whether he would ever be willing to 
leave his good life in North Carolina and come up here and do this. But 
I want to tell you that I think he's been one of the best appointments 
I've made as President. And I thing he's made a difference in the small 
business community. And I think we have set a standard that I hope 
future administrations will follow of not politicizing the SBA but 
instead appointing someone who actually knows what it's like to start 
up, finance, expand, and deal with the problems and the challenges of 
small business in America today. And I want to thank him for that.
    Today is a happy day not just for Erskine but for me because we get 
to honor the national Small Business Person of the Year and the second 
and first runners-up. We all know that those of you who will be 
recognized today as winners and those who have won in each of their 
States really represent people just like you, thousands, indeed, 
millions of people all across America. Nonetheless, it's a very happy 
thing to do.
    Let me begin by saying what I guess political leaders always say, 
but something that's increasingly true in this country, and that is that 
the small business economy is critically important to the future of 
America. You have only to look at just what's gone on in the last 15 
months, where we have seen a dramatic expansion of new jobs in America. 
In the first 14 months of this administration there were 2.5 million new 
jobs created, which were together more than in the previous 4 years. And 
2.3 million of those jobs were in the private sector, which is more than 
twice as many private sector jobs as in the previous 4 years. But big 
companies in America, in large numbers, continued to downsize, which 
means that in the small business sector, in the new and growing and 
entrepreneurial sector of our economy, even more jobs were created.
    And if you look at the way the world is going, where jobs are being 
created more and more and more in cutting edge technologies, and 
opportunities are more and more and more in the refinement of certain 
products and services, if you try to imagine what the world will be like 
10 years from now or 15 years from now, it is impossible to draw any 
conclusion other than that if we're going to continue to be the engine 
of job growth in this country and for the world, it will have to come 
through small business people.
    It's an exciting prospect, but it means that we have to reorient a 
lot of our thinking toward what would be necessary to try to support 
small business as the primary engine of new job creation. A lot of the 
big things that we do in Government, which make a difference for all 
business, obviously help small business.
    Last year, we had the biggest deficit reduction package in history, 
$500 billion. It helped to drive interest rates down; it helped to 
trigger home-building and automobile buying and a lot of other things 
that got this economy going again.
    This year, the Congress is dealing with a budget that I gave them 
which does some very interesting things I want to talk to you about. It 
eliminates outright 100 Government programs; it cuts over 200 others. If 
adopted as it is, it not only continues to reduce defense--and I want to 
say a little more about that in a minute and just ask you for a little 
help--but it not only continues to reduce defense, but for the first 
time since 1969 it would have our Government reducing aggregate domestic 
discretionary spending for the first time in 25 years.
    And we do it while we actually increase funding for Head Start, for 
nutritional programs for poor children, for new technologies for the 
21st century, for defense conversion efforts, and for worker training, 
because we cut out so much other stuff. And if it's adopted, it will 
give us a budget, which for the first time since Harry Truman was 
President, in the aftermath of the Second World War, when it had to 
happen just naturally--when the Government has reduced its deficit 3 
years in a row. And the United States will have a deficit that as a 
percentage of our annual income is smaller than that of any major 
industrial country in the world, which is a huge sea change from the 
last several years. And it will begin to give us some control over our 
financial destiny and the future of the little children that are in this 
audience today.
    I say that because I want to emphasize that it's important that this 
budget pass. It's also important that we not posture with it at the end. 
Last night--I don't know--no reason that

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any of you necessarily would have seen it, but I did an hour-and-a-half 
press conference on CNN with people from all over the world. There were 
people from 200 countries and territories watching that press 
conference, looking to us for leadership. And what I tried to do was to 
explain what I thought we had to do in leading the world and what we 
obviously could not do, because we can't do everything; we can't afford 
to do everything. There are a lot of problems out there in the world 
that do not affect our vital interests. And even though our values are 
aghast at some things that happen, we can't do all this. On the other 
hand, there is a limit to how much we cut our national defense and still 
protect the security of America and the vital interests of America.
    And I tell you that I think we have reached that limit. We have cut 
defense all we can. I imagine most people in this room and most people 
back home in your civic clubs and your churches and synagogues and other 
places think we ought to do more to bring this Government spending down 
and like the fact that we're reducing the deficit. But I also would ask 
for your support for a reasonable defense budget. We, after all, still 
have--there are no nuclear missiles pointed at us from the Soviet Union, 
but there are other countries trying to develop nuclear programs. And we 
have to maintain our commitments in Asia and in Europe.
    So I would ask you to support what we're doing to bring the deficit 
down; but say, look, there is a limit; we do have a national defense; we 
do have obligations here. And we do have to retrain workers, and we do 
have to help move these technologies from defense to commercial 
technologies. So we need to spend some money on that.
    Secondly, let me say, there's some things that are specific to the 
SBA I want to emphasize. Since Erskine Bowles has been the Director of 
the SBA, we've increased our lending program by $3 billion, and they've 
introduced a one-page application that takes 2 days to process. That 
alone was worth me appointing him, wasn't it? [Laughter]
    I also want to say a word about this health care debate which is 
going on in Washington which is doubtless not only important to you but 
occasionally must be somewhat confusing because it's an extremely 
complex subject. First, let me say that people say, ``Well, Clinton's 
bill's 1,300 pages long. Nothing that complicated should ever be passed 
by Congress. By definition, they'd mess up a one-car parade.'' I've 
heard it many times.
    You should know that if that bill passed in its entirety, it would 
replace even more pages of Federal law now in existence, that is, that a 
lot of this so-called complexity deals with issues not of direct concern 
to you but of indirect concern to you like, well, how are we going to 
deal with the major medical schools, and how are they going to get their 
funding? And what about the public health clinics of the country? What 
about the people that live way out there in rural areas who have no 
access to health care unless there's not a clinic?
    But fundamentally, when I asked Erskine Bowles to come into this 
debate early, and I said, ``Look, the biggest bone of contention to 
providing health coverage for all Americans will be what are the 
obligations directly or indirectly of small business, because that's 
where the problems in affording coverage are. So make sure we design 
something that provides enough protection for small business so that we 
continue to grow jobs, not shrink jobs.'' It's also true that the 
biggest problems in health care come to small business, paying on 
average 35 percent more for health care premiums than larger businesses 
do, and being subject to a lot of problems of--my wife and I have a 
friend that she grew up with, and she and her husband and their children 
have become great friends of ours over the last 20 years. He only has 
four employees in his small business. And he provides coverage for all 
of them. And one of these young men, has been with him a long time, has 
a child with Down's syndrome. And this fellow--it's time really for him 
to move on and to broaden his horizons and to do something else in his 
life, and he simply can't do it because no other business can afford to 
hire him because he's had a sick child under the present system.
    The reason the system is so complicated in America is that we're the 
only country that has a financing system organized around 1,500 separate 
insurance companies, writing thousands of different policies with 
different coverages, all in fairly--many of them in fairly small pools. 
And at the same time we have two Government programs, Medicare and 
Medicaid, one for the poor, one for the elderly and disabled, that have 
different coverages, so that the whole mechanism of financing requires 
massive numbers of people to figure out when you're not covered

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or what is not covered. And furthermore, to be fair to the people in the 
insurance business--we're not talking about bad people here, we're 
talking a system that's broken, to be fair to the people in the 
insurance business--requires them to charge people more or have higher 
deductibles if there's somebody in their family that's been sick in the 
past, with a so-called preexisting condition or there's a big age 
differential in workers, because if they insure people in small pools, 
if there's a couple of hundred people in the pool, one person with AIDS, 
one kid with a bad diabetes condition, one woman with breast cancer, one 
man who has a premature heart condition can throw the whole thing out of 
whack and make it impossible for them to make a profit.
    So what we're trying to do up here in the simplest terms is this: 
Figure out a way to let the forces of competition work, to hold health 
care costs down, figure out a way to let those things work for small 
business and self-employed people as well as big business; because 
what's happening now is, people in big business and Government in the 
context of this debate have done a good job of slowing down medical 
inflation, but it still leaves big problems for the small business 
sector and the self-employed people.
    How do we propose to do it? By giving you the chance to be in 
cooperative buying pools so you can buy on the same terms as big 
business and government; by providing discounts to small businesses with 
low margins and low average payrolls on the insurance premiums and by 
eliminating some of the practices, the discriminatory practices.
    Why is that causing a problem? Partly because it will require a 
substantial reorganization of the health insurance industry and require 
them to bid on business in much bigger pools, which means a lot of the 
smaller policies and customs will go away. And that is a problem. And 
there's no way to resolve that problem if we're going to try to deal 
with this.
    But I just wanted to say to you, without trying to resolve all the 
specifics, that what we need here is a very reasoned debate in this year 
in the Congress about how to deal with this problem in a way that 
enhances the long-term economic security of small businesses instead of 
undermining it. But if we walk away from it and we don't deal with it, 
what we'll continue to see is a bigger differential in premiums as more 
big business and Government have access to managed care and more and 
more people permanently without insurance, which means they'll show up 
at the hospital, the emergency room, when the care is too late, too 
expensive, and they'll shove their cost onto everybody else, and we will 
all pay it. So the price of doing nothing is also quite high for you. 
That's the point I want to make. And Erskine has done his best to be a 
very good advocate.
    We also propose in our plan to go to 100 percent deductible for 
self-employed people, which would mean a lot of people with very small 
businesses will actually be able to pay something for their employees 
and insure their families at lower costs than they're now paying for 
themselves by the time they buy into a big pool and get the 100 percent 
deductible. So, we're working on it. And I urge you to work with him 
because we understand there's no way to solve all these problems, and 
we're continuing to learn about it every day. But we need a very 
reasoned debate to face this issue.
    Now, let me say, it is my happy responsibility to recognize this 
year's winners. And I want to talk a little bit about each of then and 
to congratulate all of you who are here. The second runner-up is Earl 
Kashiwagi. Stand up. There he is. You'd never guess where's he's from, 
would you? Earl and his wife, Chris, cut short their honeymoon in 1973 
to work on his uncle's produce farm in Kauai. When one uncle became ill, 
he became manager and began to build a wholesale side of the business. 
He helped teach farmers how to diversify local crops. He fashioned 
innovative shipping techniques and created a broad new distribution 
network. He's beaten the effects of many hurricanes. In 1990 he bought 
his business, which employs more than 30 people and is the largest 
produce wholesaler in Kauai with sales exceeding $4.5 million. He is our 
second runner-up. Let's give him another hand. [Applause]

[At this point, Mr. Kashiwagi presented the President with a lei.]

    The President. I like this, but, you know, I probably should take it 
off because we can't have all three winners from Hawaii. [Laughter]
    Our first runners-up are Francis Voigt and John Dranow. Are they 
here? Where are they? Stand up. Come on up. They left their chosen 
fields to begin the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont. Their 
wives, both poets, were

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their first support system. However, they later received less poetic but 
equally public-spirited support from the SBA. They prepared people for 
success in the food business through hands-on training and with the 
lowest teacher-student ratio in the entire Nation. They offer lifelong 
support and financial aid to their students. They now have a 100 percent 
placement record. Starting from nothing, they now have 188 employees, 
400 students, and revenues of nearly $100 million. They are our first 
runners-up. Give them a hand. [Applause]
    After I leave you today, I'm going over to sign the school-to-work 
bill, something that has immense significance to the small business 
community. It begins to establish a Federal partnership for a network of 
training young people who graduate from high school, don't want to go on 
to 4-year colleges, but do need further training. All of our competitors 
have much more well-organized systems, particularly the Germans, than we 
do in providing further training. One of our first school-to-work 
trainees, I guess the first one we've been involved in, and someone they 
trained who now works at Blair House, so you want to--come on up, 
Francis--explain this.
    Francis Voigt. She's right out here, Karen Webber. Karen, come on 
up.
    You know, entrepreneurs can't help themselves; we're always looking 
for opportunities to promote our organization. We just visited the Blair 
House yesterday to see how our student was doing. The executive chef 
arranged for her to come by this morning and present a hat to the 
President.
    The President. You all probably know this, but Blair House is the 
official guest residence for the President. That's where--when foreign 
leaders come to stay, for example, they all stay in Blair House.
    So, are you doing a good job over there? [Laughter]
    Karen Webber. Absolutely.
    The President. Thank you. You all go over there and stand, and we'll 
do this.

[Ms. Webber presented the President with a hat.]

    The President. I'll use this, this weekend. [Laughter]
    Our winner is Lorraine Miller from Salt Lake City, the president of 
Cactus and Tropicals. Come on up here. You stand here while I talk about 
you.
    Lorraine is president of Cactus and Tropicals in Salt Lake City, 
Utah. She began with just a love of growing plants, half of her $2,000 
life savings, and a dream. She found a boarded-up building, lived above 
it, and worked 7 days a week. She's overcome reluctant bankers, salesmen 
who refused to believe a woman made the decisions, and the loss of her 
store to eminent domain. One winter, she thawed the frozen ground with 
briquettes to dig the footings for her greenhouse.
    Today, she has 4 greenhouses, 15 employees, over $1 million in 
sales, and a business growing at a rate of 20 percent a year. For her 
job and her persistence and her symbolism of the entrepreneurial spirit 
of America, Lorraine Miller has been chosen the Small Business Person of 
the Year.

Note: The President spoke at 11:44 a.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive 
Office Building.