    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [January 25, 1995]
    [Pages 86-90]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pennsylvania
    January 25, 1995

        The President.  Thank you very much. You all sit down and relax.
    Cold outside, warm in here. I want to thank Dr. David McFarland for that
    introduction and for making me feel so very welcome here at Kutztown.
    I've had a great time already.
        I know that before I came out, your mayor, Mayor Schwoyer, and
    Congressman Holden, who came up from Washington with me today, Secretary
    Reich, and Secretary Riley talked, and I thank them for what they said.
    And I thank, especially, my colleagues Congressman Holden and Secretary
    Reich and Secretary Riley for what they have done for the cause of
    education.
        I am so happy to be here with all of you today. There are a lot of
    reasons I came here. One is, I'm beginning to feel old, and I heard that
    you've got a guy my age on your football team, and I wanted to--where is
    he? Where is Chuck Roseberry? Where is he? Stand up. Where are you?
    [Applause] I know he's here somewhere. Where are you? Yes. That's good.
    You know, it's all I can do every morning to get up and go jog, and I
    resent you. I can't believe it. But I'm impressed.
        I'm also glad to be joined here by your former Congressman, Gus
    Yatron, and your former Senator, Harris Wofford. I thank them both for
    being here along with Catherine Baker Knoll, our State treasurer. Thank
    you, Catherine Baker Knoll, for coming--our State treasurer. I'm glad to
    see you, too. And our neighboring Congressman, Paul McHale, wanted to
    come but he could not. There's a very important vote this

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    afternoon in the Congress, and Congressman Holden has already gone back;
    besides, he's heard this speech before. [Laughter]
        I want to say how very proud I am to be here, because this is a time
    of great challenge for our Nation, and I believe that this institution
    represents a big part of the answer to that challenge.
        You know, just a few months ago, I had a brief roundtable with a lot
    of your community leaders, business people, teachers, and students, who
    are associated with the efforts of this fine institution to help solve
    the problems of this area, to get an education to people, to help the
    businesses grow, to help start new businesses.
        I wanted to come here because I was very, very impressed with your
    entrepreneurial development and global education center, the work you've
    done for small businesses, the work you've done for minority businesses,
    the work you've done to try to bring together people of all ages and all
    backgrounds who want to get an education and who want to serve and who
    want to help. And I'd like to ask all these folks who just met with me
    to stand up, because I learned a lot from them, and I'm grateful for
    what they did. Would you all stand up, please? Thank you very much.
    [Applause]
        There's one other group of people I'd like to acknowledge who are
    here who represent a lot of what I talked about last night, who are
    young people trying to serve our country at the grassroots level by
    helping people solve their problems. They are the members of the
    Pennsylvania Service Corps, part of AmeriCorps. [Applause] They're
    working to help people build housing, to reduce neighborhood violence,
    to clean up the local environment, to help people with AIDS. Busloads of
    them are here, and you just heard from them. [Laughter] I thank them for
    their enthusiasm, their devotion to their country, and for symbolizing
    what I think all of us have to do more of: learn and gain by serving and
    giving.
        You know, this is a beautiful rural area. I understand I am the
    first President since 1948 to come to this county, and the first person
    ever to visit this community as President. And I am delighted to be
    here.
        Pennsylvania as a whole and this area have been through dramatic and
    sweeping economic changes in the last several years. The economic
    opportunity that made Pennsylvania one of the great manufacturing States
    of America and one of the great economic powers of the entire post-cold-
    war world have changed; those forces have changed dramatically. And as
    those of you who are younger enter your adult years and look forward to
    the future, you know that we have moved from an industrial age to an
    information age; you will hear it everywhere.
        What you may not hear is that it does not mean that manufacturing
    will be less important. Quite the contrary, if we do it right, it means
    that America will continue to be the leading manufacturing country in
    the world. But more and more and more, manufacturing will require more
    knowledge, higher skills, a better education, fewer people producing
    more things, which means that education will be important, and it will
    also be important for us to continually be able to start more and more
    new businesses.
        Big enterprises are like the Federal Government: We're downsizing.
    We're making the Federal bureaucracy smaller so we can give the money
    back to you to educate people, to provide tax relief, to bring the
    deficit down, to fight crime. That's what we're doing. That is very,
    very important. It matters to your future that Federal debt is now
    $10,000 a family less than it would have been if our deficit reduction
    plan had not passed. It matters that the economic programs have helped
    to contribute to this enormous rise in productivity in America. And we
    have over 6 million new jobs in our country now in the last 2 years,
    with low inflation and with every prospect of continuing our growth.
        But what's going to enable us to solve our problems over the long
    run is the ability and strength of the American people to solve their
    problems at the local level, to make the most of their own lives, and to
    work together in communities. I said last night in my speech, and I will
    say again today, that I believe what our country needs is a New Covenant
    based on an old idea, the idea that, with opportunity must come
    responsibility. They have to go hand in hand. If you don't have both,
    you can't solve the problems of America.
        If you tell people to be responsible all the time and they never get
    any benefit out of it, pretty soon they get tired and quit. But if
    people just always say, I want my rights, and we don't think about what
    responsible conduct is for ourselves and our friends and neighbors, then
    pretty soon our society comes apart. We have to have both. And we have
    to base our efforts in com-

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    munity after community after community where people can sit down, the
    way these people did with me today, and talk to each other and work with
    each other to develop the God-given potential of all of our people.
        In the world we are moving into, the success of the United States as
    a whole will be more dependent than ever before on the success of every
    community to educate and develop the capacities of every person who
    lives in the community, everywhere and everyplace. We don't have a
    person or a community we can walk away from and turn our backs on.
        That's why, even though we've been cutting Government spending--and
    last year for the first time in 25 years, we cut both defense and
    domestic spending, except for Medicare and the health programs of the
    Government and Social Security, of course--we cut domestic and defense
    spending for the first time in 25 years to deal with the deficit.
        But we did not cut education. We expanded Head Start. We expanded
    our efforts to help our public schools achieve educational excellence.
    We set up a program to try to support networks like the ones I saw
    today, for businesses to work with schools to help young people who
    don't go to 4-year colleges at least get some education and training
    after high school, so they can get better jobs and have higher incomes.
    We reformed the college loan program so that student loans now are less
    costly to middle class students, have better repayment terms, and they
    actually cost the Government less in terms of tax dollars. It is a good
    program.
        And with all of that, let me remind you of what the fundamental
    facts are in this economy and why these efforts are so important. Even
    though we had 6 million new jobs in the economy in the last 2 years,
    even though we had more high-wage jobs coming back into our economy in
    1994 than in the last 5 years combined, most Americans are working a
    longer work week than they were working 15 years ago for about the same
    income once you make adjustments for inflation.
        Most of our people have found that this new exciting global economy,
    which moves with lightning speed and opens up vast opportunities for
    people who can take advantage of it, has left them working harder for
    less, with less security. All these changes are great if you can always
    get a new job, but if you're the one losing the job, the change doesn't
    look very good.
        So what our job is, is to make more success stories, like the
    programs I see here. It is to empower more schools to do what this one
    did, to drop their categories and open their walls and reach out to all
    kinds of people, and make education a community enterprise and a
    lifetime enterprise. That is what we must do.
        And that is why I say to the American people and to the Congress, we
    have gotten the deficit down, and we have gotten the economy going, and
    there are more cuts we can make in Government spending, and we can
    afford to provide some more tax relief to hard-working Americans, but we
    should do it with a focus on education so that we can raise people's
    incomes who have worked harder for less in the short run with the tax
    relief, but in the long run with better education, which is the only way
    to raise people's incomes over the long run.
        You think about the things that this country's done in our past that
    really did something for the economy. I think you can make a compelling
    case that, at the end of World War II, the passage of the GI bill did
    more to explode the American economy than any other single action,
    because it made it possible for our returning servicemen to go back to
    school and to get an education. And that money has repaid itself many
    times over.
        So I have said that that's the kind of thing we ought to focus on
    now. The middle class bill of rights that I proposed last night to the
    American people and to Congress--and as I said, it might better be
    called a middle class bill of rights and responsibilities because you,
    by definition, have to be responsible to take the benefits of it--
    focuses heavily on education in three ways, and I want to emphasize
    them.
        First of all, I think you ought to be able to deduct the cost of
    education after high school from your taxes. You think about it: If you
    own a home, you can deduct interest from your taxes. And in the early
    years of a home mortgage, it's almost all interest. Why do we do that?
    Because we want people to be able to own their homes. If you run a
    business and you invest in new equipment, you can deduct the cost from
    your taxes. Why do we do that? Because we want our businesses to
    modernize. You know, the stories I heard over here before I came out
    were, the cost of equipment is going up dramatically, but now we can
    produce more with fewer people. We've got to support that.

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        But if our people today can't get an education--not everybody needs
    a 4-year college degree--but if they can't get an education, if the
    systems aren't there for that education, they may not get to the
    homeowning. They may not have the American dream that we want. So I say,
    if education is the most important thing for personal success in the
    21st century, we ought to permit people to deduct the cost of it from
    their taxes: Raise your income in the short run; raise your income in
    the long run.
        Audience member. That's right, Bill!
        The President. That's right. You know, we flew that person up here
    from Washington, and I was beginning to think they weren't going to say
    anything. [Laughter]
        The second thing I want to say is, we want to broaden the number of
    Americans who can invest tax-free in an IRA, an individual retirement
    account, but we want to let people withdraw from the IRA, tax-free, to
    pay for education expenses, so that you can take better care of
    yourself.
        The last education component is, we want to take about 70 different
    programs the Federal Government runs in training, which require enormous
    administrative costs, collapse them and give the money to the American
    people who are eligible for them. So if a person loses a job and is on
    unemployment, or if a person is in a lower wage job so they're eligible
    for Federal training help, instead of having to figure out which of 70
    programs you qualify for, you just get a voucher of $2,600 a year--up to
    that--for 2 years, and you take it to this school or take it to a local
    community college or take it wherever you choose if you're eligible to
    get it. It's a kind of a ``GI bill'' for American workers. It will make
    a huge difference. And it's the kind of thing Government ought to be
    doing: less bureaucracy, more direct help to people to get the education
    and training they need to grow and to learn.
        I want all of you to help me do this for you. We are trying to
    change the focus of the National Government to the grassroots of
    America. There are a lot of other things that I will be talking about
    over the next few weeks that are part of this New Covenant, welfare
    reform, what we're going to do in crime to lower the crime rate and
    implement the crime bill, what we're going to do to try to grow the
    economy, and other ways. But nothing, nothing can make a bigger
    difference than trying to get more education to more people in more
    ways. So I hope that you will do two things: first, I hope you will say,
    with your voices, without regard to your party, ``Cut the deficit. Cut
    spending. Reduce the size of the Federal bureaucracy. Keep on doing what
    you're doing, but do not cut education. Increase investment and
    education so we can grow this economy and grow America.'' And I hope you
    will support the middle class bill of rights, and I hope you will
    support the AmeriCorps program in Pennsylvania, and I hope you will
    support the programs at this school to develop entrepreneurs because
    they're all grassroots community-building programs that develop the
    ability of people to fulfill their own dreams and bring us together
    across the lines that divide us.
        You know, I don't have an--literally, I don't have a clue about
    which of the people I was sitting and talking with this morning were
    Democrats, which were Republicans, who was an independent. I don't have
    any idea who they voted for in the last election. I probably should have
    checked. [Laughter] I mean, I don't. Why? Why? Because they are
    organized around developing the potential of the people here. They have
    built a community of interest where everybody wins by helping everybody
    else. Now, that's what makes America go. That's what makes America grow.
    I see it when I visited these community services programs.
        I see it, as I said last night in my speech, when I go out after a
    disaster. I mean, it's a terrible thing to say, but if you go to one of
    these places where they're putting sandbags on a levee against a flood
    or where they're trying to help people deal with the aftermath of the
    fires, as I saw in California, the earthquakes, people have their
    shoulders back and their heads held high, and their eyes are clear, and
    their voices are strong. Why? Because they know they matter. And when
    Americans get in trouble, you know, we would take the shirt off our back
    for people. And we fight, and we work in these things, because we know
    we matter, because we're doing something that makes us feel better and
    stronger and we're helping other people as well. We have to return that
    spirit to our country every day, in every way, in all of our activities.
    That is what this is all about, and we can do that.
        So what I want to say to you is, we've got a lot of economic
    challenges, and we've got some profound social problems. But we can deal

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    with them, we can solve them, we can move on them. I see it--I have seen
    all over this country. I am telling you, there is not a problem this
    country has that is not being addressed in a way that all of you will be
    proud of by somebody, somewhere. What we have to do is to figure out a
    way to galvanize and organize and energize all of that work so that it
    spreads across our whole country.
        The New Covenant is a way of thinking about that. Responsibility in
    return for opportunity, building this country at the community level,
    that's what I'm committed to doing. My role in that will be in this
    coming Congress to try to pass the middle class bill of rights, to try
    to emphasize education, to try to keep downsizing the Federal Government
    and controlling the deficit and cutting unnecessary spending, but
    building up those things which will enable people to make the most of
    their own lives. That is my job.
        Your job is to support institutions like this to get all the
    education you can to break down the walls between business and
    government and education at the grassroots level and to try to help me
    pass this. Would you do that? I need you. I hope you will, and I want
    your support for it. [Applause]
        Folks, the best days of this country are still before us. This is
    the most exciting era we have ever known. You are going to see
    opportunities in the next 20 years for people to make a living in
    exciting and interesting ways that we could not have imagined 20 years
    ago. But our job is to make sure that, as President Kennedy said, ``the
    rising tide lifts all boats.'' We can't have an America where 20 or even
    40 percent of us are the only ones that really do well in this global
    economy, and it need not be that way.
        But if we want our best days to lie ahead, we have got to--we have
    got to say we are going to get an education for all of our people. It's
    going to be a lifetime project. Our educational institutions are going
    to become the center of our communities. We're going to tear down the
    walls that divide us. We're going to make education available to
    everybody, and we're going to use the power of Government not to expand
    or create a new bureaucracy but to empower people at the grassroots
    level to chart their own future and to make their own lives in this new
    and exciting age.
        That is our mission. If we do it, our best days are ahead. I want
    that more than anything for you, for our children, and our grandchildren
    and our country. And I can tell you, the world still needs that. There
    are a lot of things out there in the rest of the world that are still a
    threat to decency and humanity and progress. You saw this terrible
    terrorist attack in the Middle East the last couple of days. The world
    needs a strong America, and Americans deserve it. And we're going to get
    it with your help.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:36 p.m. in the fieldhouse. In his
    remarks, he referred to David McFarland, president of the university,
    and Mayor James Schwoyer of Kutztown.