[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
[June 22, 1995]
[Pages 920-923]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to Ford Motor Company Employees in Edison
June 22, 1995

    The President. Thank you very much. I like your spirit.
    Audience member. Give 'em hell, Bill!
    The President. You help, and I will. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Denton and Earl and Peter for being here with me 
today. I want to say a special word of thanks to Ford Motor Company for 
being a good partner with the United States of America to build our 
economy and to get a fair trade policy and to do a lot of things we need 
to do in this country. Ford has been a good citizen of this Nation and 
has helped immeasurably to further the aims of this administration. I 
thank you, Peter, and I thank all of you for the contribution you have 
made to that.
    Some of you may know that my main claim to your affection is that I 
own a car that's older than some of the people who work here. I own a 
1967 Mustang, and Mustangs were made here in this plant from '65 to '70, 
here and in San Jose, California. And I own one of them. And I enjoy 
having it.
    I want to talk to you today very briefly about two things: one of 
them has already been discussed, trade; the other is what we can do here 
at home to build up our economy and strengthen our people.
    I ran for the job that I now hold because I was really concerned 
that we were going to raise the first generation of Americans who 
wouldn't do as well as their parents. It bothered me that more than half 
of our people were working a longer workweek for the same or lower wages 
they were making 15 years earlier. It bothered me that we were coming 
apart with all of the social problems and tensions we had in this 
country when we need to be working together.
    You've proved in this plant that if you work together you can 
compete and win and do well. And that's what America has to do. And I 
have done everything I could for 2\1/2\ years to try to restore the 
American dream--not only to create jobs, but to raise incomes and to 
give working families some security, that if they do work hard and play 
by the rules they're going to be all right and our children are going to 
be all right. That, it seems to me, is the most important thing we can 
do.
    There are a lot of things we can talk about, but I just want to talk 
about two today that are very important. The first is, what do we do 
about the economy here at home? The second is, how do we relate to the 
rest of the world?
    And let me talk a little about the economy here at home. When I 
became President, we had just finished 12 years in which we had 
quadrupled--increased by fourfold--the national debt--by fourfold. But 
we were reducing our commitment to the things that make us rich, to 
education, to technology, to building the skills and the technology and 
the kind of partnerships that really generate jobs and incomes in the 
world today. So what I tried to do was to flip that around. I tried to 
bring the deficit down but to increase our investment in education, 
technology, basic research and to form a real partnership with the 
private sector to help to sell American products.
    Now, we have reduced the deficit by about $1 trillion over a 7-year 
period. We have increased our investments in education, research, and 
technology. We are working more closely with business than ever before. 
And we have to show for it a lower unemployment rate and over 6.7 
million new jobs. I am proud of that. But we have to remember that we've 
been getting into the rut we've been in for 20 years. And I'll just give 
you two examples. We created 6.7 million new jobs, the unemployment rate 
went down, but the average income of the American people didn't go up. 
We have to keep working on that. People have to be rewarded for their 
work. We can't expect working people to make a profit for their 
companies unless they can also make a profit for themselves.
    Now, you've got a unique situation in Washington where the leaders 
of Congress want to balance the budget, and that's a good thing. And I 
do, too, and that's a good thing. Why is that important? I'll tell you 
why it's important. Because if it were not for the interest we have to 
pay--I want you all to listen to this--if it weren't for the interest we 
have to pay on the debt this country ran up in just the 12 years

[[Page 921]]

before I became President--forget about the other 200 years--just those 
12 years, our budget would be in balance today, and we would have more 
money to spend on your children's education, more money to spend on the 
health care of elderly people through Medicare and Medicaid, more money 
to spend on new technologies to guarantee Americans good jobs in the 
future. So we need to get rid of this deficit.
    But the question is, how should we do it? Keep in mind, every day my 
objective is more jobs, higher income, more security for people who are 
working hard. That's what I go to work and try to guarantee. So there's 
a big difference between my budget and the one the leaders of Congress 
have proposed because I think mine will do more for jobs, incomes, and 
security of families.
    Here's what the differences are. First, we cut spending, except for 
defense, Social Security, and medical costs, about 20 percent across the 
board, except for education; we increase spending on education. I think 
your children should be able to go to college. They should be able to 
get good training programs. They should be able to be in good preschool 
programs. I think that's important.
    Second, we want to slow the rate of growth in the medical costs the 
Federal Government pays; that's Medicare and Medicaid, which is mostly 
for elderly people and disabled people. But I don't want to charge 
middle and lower middle income elderly people on Medicare more money for 
the same health care, and I don't want to see them have to give up their 
health care. So we cut medical costs less than the Congress does because 
I think it's important to protect Medicare and to protect the people who 
are on it who have paid into it and who don't have enough money to live 
on as it is.
    Third, we have a much smaller tax cut than they do, and ours is 
targeted not to upper income people but to middle class people and 
focused on education and childrearing. I think everybody ought to get a 
tax deduction for the cost of sending their kids to college. I am for 
that.
    The fourth thing we do is to save money on welfare spending. But I 
want to be honest with you, we don't save as much money as the Congress 
does because I think we should hold some money back to give to the 
purpose of education and training and child care for people on welfare 
so you can actually get them to work. We don't want to cut these kids 
off and put them in the street. We want people to go to work and be good 
parents and good workers. So we ought to invest enough in child care and 
education to get that done. So we do that.
    And the fifth thing that my plan does is to balance the budget over 
10 years. They balance the budget over 7 years. If you go to 10 instead 
of 7, you can increase education, not cut it; you can protect elderly 
people on Medicare; you can invest enough in welfare to get real welfare 
reform to put people to work; and you don't have to risk a recession.
    The Wharton Business School over in Philadelphia, not far from here, 
did an analysis of the congressional budget and estimated that they're 
cutting so much out of the economy so fast it would drive unemployment 
up and slow the economy down. We want to lower interest rates, free up 
money, balance the budget in ways that grow the economy.
    So when you hear these debates--I want to work with the Congress. I 
don't want a partisan fight. I want to put America first. I want you to 
know, if somebody tells you that we don't need to balance the budget, 
that's not true, because every year we don't balance the budget, we're 
spending more and more of your tax money on interest payments and less 
money on things that we all want. We do need to do it, but the aim is 
your jobs, your incomes, your family security. And the test of every 
decision we make should be, is it going to increase those? And I think 
my budget does that.
    Now, the second point I want to make is we can't grow the American 
economy alone if we don't have the right kind of relationship with the 
rest of the world. We know--you sell these trucks here all over the 
world, don't you? And we know that your earnings are above the national 
average, aren't they? And we know generally that jobs related to trade 
in America pay better than jobs that have no relationship to the global 
economy. We also know that because of all the changes you and others 
have been through, millions of people like you in America in the last 15 
years, we are the high quality, low cost producer of many, many, many 
products that can be sold all over the world.
    So I have done my best to negotiate agreements that would open 
markets around the world and make everybody else's market as open as 
ours. We're opening markets to the south of us in Latin America, and 
you're selling some

[[Page 922]]

trucks down there. We're opening markets with Europe and other 
countries. We have had all kinds of new trade agreements.
    Even with Japan, we have had 15 new trade agreements, so that we're 
selling rice and apples and cellular telephones over there for the first 
time. This movement toward open trade now that America is competitive is 
a good thing for us. Why? Because we have open markets. So we can't stop 
some people from being at risk from low cost competition if it's 
generally low cost and good quality. We can't stop that. But if we don't 
get a fair deal going the other way, then we get it coming and going. We 
don't have a chance to create the high-wage jobs from trade to replace 
the low-wage jobs that we lose. And we don't have the chance to give 
people the security they deserve if they are competitive in the world 
market. That is what is at stake.
    Now, here's the problem. Our relationship with Japan has simply been 
different than that with everybody else. And their system of protecting 
their products and their markets is different from the things you can 
normally reach with a trade agreement. They're not necessarily tariffs; 
they're not necessarily quotas. It's a highly complicated system of 
doing business that works to freeze us out.
    You know, your leader has said he didn't know the exact numbers. 
I'll tell you what the exact numbers are over the last 20 years. Twenty 
years ago we had less than one percent of the Japanese market in 
automobiles. You know what it is today: 1.5 percent. Big deal. Since we 
have been trading cars both ways, we have shipped a total, cars and 
trucks, of 400,000 vehicles to them. They have shipped a total of 40 
million to us.
    Audience members. Boo-o-o!
    The President. Now, that's a hundred to one. Now, if all this were 
fair and they didn't want to buy anything we had produced and we were 
buying what they had to produce, it would be fine. In auto parts--forget 
about what you do here; let's just talk about auto parts--with the whole 
rest of the world, we have a $5.8 billion surplus. That's a huge number 
of jobs. Every billion dollars is about 17,000 more jobs; it's a lot of 
jobs. With them, we have a deficit in auto parts of over $12 billion a 
year.
    Now, you say, well, if it were fair it would be all right. These 
luxury cars that are at issue here in our trade dispute, you can buy 
some of them for $9,000--they're made in Japan, right--you can buy some 
of them for $9,000 less here in America than they pay in Japan for them. 
A carburetor made in Japan costs 3 times as much there as it does here. 
I am for free trade, but I am for fair trade, and that's not fair. And 
you know it's not fair.
    And guess what? It's not good for them. They're rolling in dough, 
but their economy is not growing. Their people look like they're making 
more money than you are, but they're paying 40 percent more for all of 
their consumer products. So the average working stiff in Japan is not 
doing much better than a lot of people in other countries, not doing as 
well as many American workers, and would be doing much better if they 
had free and open competition and it drove down the prices that their 
consumers are paying, because as you well know, when you pay the bills 
every month, every worker is also a consumer.
    What I am trying to do is not just good for us; it's good for them. 
They're a great democracy. We work together on a lot of things. But you 
know we had to change; all of us did. A lot of you went through gut-
wrenching changes in the last 20 years to make sure this plant would be 
recognized for its low error rate and its high quality production. We 
all have to change. Their system is not fair. And that is what we are 
trying to get done. We're trying to open it so that you will have free 
access to their markets like they have to ours. And it's a fight worth 
making.
    Now today and tomorrow, in Switzerland, the representatives of our 
Government and the Japanese are talking, and they're trying to avoid 
what's going to happen next week. But on the 28th, if we don't have an 
agreement that will take us toward opening their markets and fair 
treatment for American products and American workers, then I have 
ordered the U.S. Trade Representative to put tariffs of 100 percent on 
13 of their luxury cars.
    I want to say again, I think you can compete with anybody where you 
get a fair shot. If people don't want what we produce, that's a 
different story. But I think it is wrong for America to be leading the 
way in opening our markets and putting our workers at risk in 
competition and not have the same rights in every other major market, in 
countries that are as rich as we are. That is not right. You deserve a 
fair chance.

[[Page 923]]

    So I want you to think about this. Every time you wonder what we're 
doing up there or you see a fight going on in Washington, you just 
remember my test is: Will it create jobs; will it raise incomes; will it 
make working people more secure if they're doing their part? That's what 
I think about every day. If everybody in this country had a job, if 
every job paid enough to support children, we wouldn't have a lot of the 
problems we have today.
    You know, there's a lot of talk about how angry voters are--or angry 
men are. Well, you know, one reason is that 60 percent of the hourly 
wage earners in this country are working a longer workweek for about 15 
percent less than they were making 10 years ago. If that wouldn't make 
you mad, I don't know what would.
    Now, you can lead the way. The auto companies now can lead the 
world. And they can lead America back toward a high-wage, high-growth 
economy. I don't want any special breaks, but I do want a fair deal. If 
you get a fair deal, if you have a Government that works for you, that 
invests in your education, that gets rid of this deficit, that looks 
toward the future, I think you can take care of your families and your 
communities and the future of our country. But I'm going to be in there 
plugging for you. You stay with us, and we'll get the job done together.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 4:19 p.m. In his remarks, he referred to 
Denton Grenke, plant manager, and Peter J. Pestillo, executive vice 
president, Ford Motor Co.; and Earl Nail, bargaining unit chairman, UAW 
Local 980.