    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [May 17, 1995]
    [Pages 695-699]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on the First Anniversary of the School-To-Work Opportunities Act
    of 1994 in White Plains, Maryland
    May 17, 1995

        Well, Nancy, you may not be famous yet, but you're a lot more famous
    than you were 5 minutes ago. [Laughter] I wish I had thought of that
    Michael Jordan line; I'd throw the whole speech away. [Laughter]
        I want to thank Nancy and Lorrie and the other students who showed
    me around this fine place and showed me what they do here. I thank you
    for that. I thank Secretary Reich and Secretary Riley for the work they
    have done to put this school-to-work partnership together with the
    Education Department and the Labor Department. I thank Senator Kennedy
    for his sponsorship of this legislation and your Congressman, Steny
    Hoyer, for the work he did to pass it. I'm glad to see Mr. Pastillo
    here, and I thank him and all those who have worked so hard on this.
    I'll never forget the conversation I had with the Ford CEO, Alex
    Trotman, about this issue in the White House not all that long ago, in
    urging more corporate involvement in business sponsorship of the school-
    to-work concept. President Sine, I thank you for being here and for the
    work that all the community education institutions in America are doing
    to help prepare young Americans to succeed in the global economy. They
    may be the most important institutions in the United States today, and I
    thank you for that. I want to thank all the State and local officials
    from Maryland who are here. Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy
    Townsend and Senator Miller, I'm glad to see you. And I know that,
    Governor McKernan, you shouldn't feel alone, there are lots of
    Republicans here today--[laughter]--county commissioners, members of the
    House of Delegates, county officials here, the sheriff, and others.
        This ought not to be a partisan issue. And I thank you, sir, for
    your leadership. He wrote a fine book about it, which Mr. Pastillo
    referenced in his introduction. And Governor McKernan sent me a copy of
    it, autographed it, and I read it. And I thought if my dear mother were
    still living, she would wonder which of us were more successful, because
    she always thought whether you wrote books or not was a real standard of
    whether you'd done anything in life. [Laughter] So according to my
    mother's life, you've done something very important. And we are very
    grateful to you, sir, for the leadership you have given this movement
    all across America. The United States needs desperately for every young
    person in this country to have the opportunity that these young people
    have had. And thanks to you and your efforts, more will have that
    chance. I thank you.
        I would also like to thank our host here, Automated Graphics. Thank
    you very much for having us here. We are grateful, and we appreciate it.
        I want to say a little about this in a larger context. What we are
    doing here today to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the school-to-
    work program is really adapting to the information age in the 21st
    century one of the oldest traditions in the United States. Just imagine,
    for example--here we are in Maryland--what if we were here 200 years
    ago? You would be a young person living in a settlement in Maryland
    called Port Tobacco, which was then a big town around these parts. You'd
    be in a promising new country. George Washington would be your
    President. John Adams would be your Vice President. Pretty good lineup.
    [Laughter] And everybody would be optimistic. And most people would be
    like Nancy, they'd get up at 5 a.m. or 5:30 a.m. every morning and go to
    work. If you wanted a better job, you'd probably leave the country and
    come into town, where you would walk down a main street and you would
    look at the people who were working. Two hundred years ago, you'd see a
    blacksmith, a carpenter, and of course, a printer. If you wanted to
    learn how to do those jobs, you'd simply knock on one of the doors and
    hope that in return for hard work, you could get a craftsman to teach
    you those skills. That's the way it was done 200 years ago.
        And for a long time, that's the way it was done, as one generation
    kept faith with the next. Well, we know that we can't exactly do it that
    way anymore, but if you think about it, that's what the school-to-work
    program is all about in modern terms for the modern economy. And it's
    very, very important.

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        This year, we are seeing grants that involve over 100,000 students
    nationwide, over 40,000 employers, including very large and very
    powerful employers in this country but also some very, very small ones.
    And there are over 2,500 schools all across America involved in this
    program. The act was a genuine partnership. It set up no bureaucracy
    whatever. It simply made grants to local partnerships, many of them in
    poor areas, and gave students the chance to show what their hard work
    could do.
        This year, we are doubling the school-to-work funding for the eight
    pioneer States that already have programs. Seed grants will go out to 20
    new States so that all 50 States will have some participation in the
    school-to-work program. By 1997, every State in America will have a
    school-to-work program up and running.
        One thing that I want to emphasize that is very important is that
    the school-to-work program rests on a few very big ideas. One of the
    ones that's most important to me is that there is no choice to be made
    between practical workplace skills and academic knowledge, that the two
    reinforce each other and go hand in hand. When I was growing up, there
    was always this bright line between what was a vocational practical
    skill and what was an academic skill. It was probably a mistake then; it
    is certainly a mistake now. We have to abolish that line.
        School-to-work is for all kinds of students. After high school, some
    will go straight to a job. Some will go on to a community college.
    Others may go to a 4-year college. Some who hadn't planned on getting
    more education will get more education because they were in the school-
    to-work program and because they see it will help them in their work
    lives.
        Our country has enormous potential and a few very large problems.
    You know what they are as well as I do. You know we have too much crime
    and violence. You know we have major pressures on the family and the
    community in our country. What you may or may not know is that
    underlying a lot of this is the fact that more than half the people in
    this country today are working a longer work week than they were 10
    years ago for the same or lower wages. And the reason is we have not
    created in this country the kind of education and training programs we
    need to adapt to a global economy, where everybody's earnings are to
    some extent conditioned on the pressures being put on us from around the
    world and where everybody's earnings more and more depend upon not only
    what they know, but what they are capable of learning.
        In the last 15 years, for example, earnings for high school dropouts
    in the work force have dropped at breathtaking rates. They're about 25
    percent lower than they were 15 years ago. Earnings for high school
    graduates are not down that much, but they're also down significantly.
        The only people for whom earnings have increased in the last 15
    years are people who get out of high school with usable skills and have
    at least some kind of education and training for about 2 years after
    high school. It can be in the workplace; it could be in the service; it
    can be in a community college; it can be in a college. But you have to
    create this sense of ongoing upgrading of the skills if we're going to
    grow the middle class and shrink the under class in this country. If we
    could do that, a lot of our other problems would be smaller.
        I want to emphasize again that this has been a bipartisan effort,
    which perhaps ought more properly to be a nonpartisan effort. After all,
    in the post-cold-war era, there are certain things that are critical to
    the American dream; growing the middle class and shrinking the under
    class and giving people the chance to help themselves is clearly that.
    We ought to have partisan differences over how best to achieve that
    goal, but we ought to be committed to that goal. And if you're committed
    to a goal, very often you wind up agreeing on the details.
        For example, there's been a remarkable amount of bipartisan support
    in the United States Congress and in the administration on what the
    defense budget ought to be at the end of the cold war. Everybody knows
    it has to go down, and everybody knows it shouldn't go down too much
    because every time in our history we've taken it down too much, we have
    wound up getting ourselves in trouble, and we have to build it up all
    over again. Better to spend enough money to maintain the strongest
    military in the world to prevent bad things from happening. So we argue
    a little bit around the edges, but more or less we are moving in the
    same direction, because we understand that's important to our security.
    The same thing could be said today about the other problems we have.
        We have two big deficits in America today. We've got a huge
    Government deficit, a budget deficit. But we also have an education and
    training deficit. And we can't solve one without the

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    other. We ought to bring both into balance. We ought to get rid of both
    deficits. And I think we can.
        In the last 2 years, we've made a remarkable amount of progress.
    Over a 7-year period, the budgets that were adopted in the last couple
    of years reduced the deficit by $1 trillion. Your budget deficit would
    be gone today, we would be in balance today, were it not for the
    interest we have to pay on the debt we ran up in just the 12 years
    before I took office. So this is a--what I want to say to you is that
    this idea of having a big structural deficit in America with our budget
    is a new idea, but it didn't happen overnight. And we can't solve it
    overnight, but we have to solve it. And we are moving on it, and we will
    continue to do so.
        We also see in the last 2 years, thanks to Senator Kennedy and
    others, a remarkable bipartisan assault on the education deficit: big
    increase in Head Start, the Goals 2000 initiative, which is designed to
    see that more of our schools meet really high standards and that we
    measure them and tell people the truth about how our schools are doing,
    but that we help our schools to achieve those standards through
    grassroots reforms. We've reformed the student loan program, to lower
    the cost of college loans, make the repayment terms easier but be
    tougher on collecting the bills so that the defaults have gone from $2.8
    billion a year down to $1 billion a year, but we're making more loans to
    more young people at lower costs. Those are the kinds of things that we
    did, all in a bipartisan manner.
        Now we've asked the Congress to collapse a lot of these training
    programs into a big voucher so that when someone loses a job or if
    someone's working for a very low wage and they need to go back to the
    community college or participate in a program like this, they can just
    get a voucher from the Government and use it for 2 years to get training
    throughout a lifetime. Because all of you who are in this program,
    you'll have to continue to upgrade your skills over the course of your
    working life if the objective is to have good jobs, good jobs, good
    jobs. These are all things that we have been doing together, and we need
    to continue to do it.
        There is this bill that I have spoken about, this rescission bill. I
    want to tell you about it. A rescission bill is a bill that cuts the
    budget in the year where you're in right now. That's what this
    rescission bill--the rescission bill proposes cuts to the present budget
    year. I believe we ought to make some more cuts. We've got to keep
    bringing the deficit down. The problem I have with the rescission bill
    that was reported out of the conference committee between the Senate and
    the House is that it makes the education deficit worse. And it doesn't
    even make the education deficit worse to reduce the budget deficit; it
    makes it worse to increase pork barrel spending.
        Earlier this year, I worked with the United States Senate on a
    rescission bill which would cut exactly the same amount in Federal
    spending as this bill does and provide needed funds to the Federal
    Emergency Management Agency to deal with the horrible problem in
    Oklahoma City, to help to finish the work of rebuilding California after
    the earthquake, to help us to fight domestic terrorism, to do things
    that really need to be done and still reduce the deficit.
        But there's a right way and wrong way to do it. I think you have to
    cut pork barrel projects before you cut people. Unfortunately in this
    conference committee, what was, I think, a pretty good bill became a bad
    bill. It cuts our efforts to help people and puts pork back in the bill.
        I want more than $16 billion in spending cuts, but there's a wrong
    way and right way to do it. This bill that came out of the committee
    cuts our efforts to make sure our schools are safe, drug-free, which is
    a big deal in a lot of places in America. It cuts our efforts to help
    our schools meet new higher standards through innovative reforms, cuts
    our efforts to provide college aid to young people who will work in
    community service projects in AmeriCorps, the national service program,
    and, yes, it also cuts the school-to-work programs.
        Now, in this bill, they found a way to pay for $1.5 billion worth of
    courthouses and special-interest highway projects and other low-priority
    spending. They kept in the law an unforgivable tax loophole which lets
    billionaires beat their U.S. taxes by giving up their citizenship after
    they've earned the money as American citizens. But they cut more from
    education, away from the Senate bill that I had already agreed to.
        Now, I believe a bill that cuts education to put in pork is the
    wrong way to balance the budget, and I will veto it. We should be
    cutting pork to give more people like these young peo-

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    ple standing behind me a chance to be at school-to-work.
        I want to make it very clear: I am not against cutting spending. I
    have a bill right here which will cut out their pork, restore education,
    and reduce the deficit by more than the bill they're sending to my desk.
    So, yes, I'm going to veto that bill, but I want them to pass this bill.
    Let's cut the deficit and put education back.
        I want to say this again: I have no problem with cutting spending.
    I've been doing it for 2 years. We've got to keep doing it. This
    proposal cuts the pork, restores education, and reduces the deficit by
    more than they propose to do it. So, yes, I will veto the rescission
    bill, but I want to cut the spending. And I will send this to Congress
    immediately. We shouldn't--we shouldn't be cutting education to build
    courthouses. We should be cutting courthouses to build education. That
    is the right way to do it.
        Let me also say that in the bill that went into this conference
    committee between the House and the Senate there was a so-called
    lockbox, which I supported, which basically said, if we're going to cut
    this spending, let's reduce the deficit. Let's don't spend--let's don't
    take these cuts and put them into paying for tax cuts when we've still
    got a big budget deficit. The lockbox was taken out in the conference,
    too, and I think that was a big mistake.
        You know, we cut some other things that weren't all that easy to cut
    because we thought we had to bring the deficit down. I don't think we
    should start by getting our priorities reversed.
        And finally, let me just mention, I was with Congressman Hoyer on
    Earth Day not very long ago, and I was in Maryland. We talked about the
    environment. There's another thing which is in this bill which I really
    object to, which would basically direct us to make timber sales to large
    companies, subsidized by the taxpayers, mostly in the Pacific Northwest,
    that will essentially throw out all of our environmental laws and the
    protections that we have that surround such timber sales. It will also
    put us back into the courts. So it would seem to allow to cut more
    timber, but actually it means lawsuits and threats to the environment.
        I don't want to spend too much of your time on it, but this kept our
    country tied up in court for years and years. We finally got out of
    court with a plan that would cut trees, save the environment, and help
    communities in logging areas to go through economic transformation to
    diversify their economy. That is the right way to do this.
        So let's go back and make this bill what it ought to be, a deficit
    reduction bill that also takes care of Oklahoma City, the California
    earthquake, the terrorism threat, and reduces the deficit and keeps
    programs like school-to-work in place. That is the proper way to do it.
        Remember, we have two great deficits. It is true that for the first
    time in our history we let the budget deficit get out of hand. That is
    true. We are bringing it down. We've got to bring the budget to balance.
    That is true. But you cannot do it by ignoring the fact that one of the
    reasons that we're hurting is that people aren't making enough money.
    And when they don't make much money, they don't pay much taxes, and that
    also increases government deficits not just in Washington but at the
    Statehouse in Maryland, in the local school districts, in the local
    communities, in the local counties.
        We have to attach both of these deficits together. And we can do it.
    This is a very great country, and this is not the biggest problem in the
    world. This is not the Second World War; this is not the Great
    Depression; this is not the Civil War. We do not need to throw up our
    hands. We do not need to get into a shouting match about it. And we
    ought to be able to agree, just as we agreed on the goal of national
    security to win the cold war, that we are going to win the war for the
    American dream in the 21st century by getting rid of both of these
    deficits, the budget deficit and the education deficit. You have helped
    us by being here today.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:28 p.m. at Automated Graphics Systems,
    Inc. In his remarks, he referred to school-to-work students Nancyann
    Kesting and Lorrie Long; Peter J. Pastillo, executive vice president,
    Ford Motor Co.; John Sine, president, Charles County Community College;
    and former Maine Governor John McKernan, Jr., chairman, Jobs for
    America's Graduates.

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