[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[October 13, 1995]
[Pages 1585-1592]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Business Council in Williamsburg, Virginia
October 13, 1995

    Thank you very much. The last time I was with the Woolards we were 
in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the Grand Tetons. And this outfit would 
have been highly inappropriate there. I felt more at home, but I saw Ed 
tonight and I kind of--I'm jealous of the beautiful shirt. I want to 
know where you got it. [Laughter] I'm so glad to see all of you. I know 
some of our administration members have been here--Secretary Rubin, who 
feels right at home.

[[Page 1586]]

I still can't believe Bob Rubin is a Democrat. [Laughter] He told me not 
very long ago we were going to have to change the currency to avoid 
counterfeiting. And I said, ``Well, all right.'' And he said, ``But I 
want to start with $100 bills.'' [Laughter] So that's where we started. 
I have reviewed a little bit about who spoke here today and what they 
said, and, Ed, if Hugh Sidey really said that, he must have been awful 
tough on the people who are running against me. [Laughter]
    I want to talk to you tonight about, obviously, about the major 
controversy presently raging in Washington about the balanced budget. 
But I want to try to set the stage for what this really means and what's 
really going on. And I'd like to begin with what I think is the most 
important thing, which is what kind of country we live in and what kind 
of country we wish to live in and what kind of country we wish to leave 
for our children and our grandchildren. That, after all, is the most 
important thing of all.
    When I sought this job in 1992, I did it because I wanted to restore 
the American dream for all of our people and because I wanted this 
country to go into the next century still as the world's leader for 
freedom and peace and prosperity and democracy. Because I really believe 
that we're all better off in a country where people have opportunity but 
exercise responsibility, where we strengthen work but we also strengthen 
our families, and where we recognize that the real power in America 
should be at the community level where people work together and where 
they deal with each other directly, instead of through the filters that 
exist between me and Washington and you where you live.
    This is a remarkable period f success for America's economy. All of 
you are doing a remarkable job. We've had a great 2\1/2\ years. And I 
believe there are better times ahead if we make the right decisions. 
It's a time of profound change. We're moving from the industrial to the 
information and technology age. We've moved out of the cold war into a 
global marketplace. We have problems, to be sure, but they're nowhere 
near as great as the opportunities we have.
    When I sought the Presidency, I said that I wanted to do three 
things: I wanted to restore pro-growth economics. I wanted to put 
mainstream values back at the heart of our social policy. And I wanted 
to give America a modern Government that was more entrepreneurial and 
smaller and gave more authority to the State and local governments, to 
the private sector, and operated more as a partner with others to build 
a better America.
    I said then, and I believe I have been true to this, that I wanted 
to see new ideas injected into our political life, everything from 
welfare reform to national service to empowerment zones for our inner 
cities to the reinventing Government program that the Vice President has 
done such a good job with. I said I would make a good-faith effort to 
move beyond the partisan labels that had divided people so much in the 
past. And believe it or not, I have done my best to do that. It's a lot 
harder in Washington than it is in the State capitals and the cities of 
the country, but it can be done and it will be done again, I believe, in 
the next few weeks.
    I also believed then and I believe more strongly now that in a time 
of change, it's important that the President make decisions based on 
their long-term impact as opposed to their short-term benefits or 
burdens.
    Now, if you look at the last 2\1/2\ years, you must all be very 
proud. Our country has produced 7\1/2\ million jobs, 2\1/2\ million new 
homeowners, about 2 million new small business owners, the largest 
number of new small businesses in such a time period in the history of 
the United States, a record number of new self-made millionaires. Trade 
has increased in the last 3 years from 4 percent in '93, 10 percent in 
'94, and it's going up 16 percent this year--our exports. The deficit 
has come from $290 billion a year down to $160 billion a year.
    Of course, there are still problems. In any period of profound 
change, there tends to be a big disruption and a significant problem of 
income inequality. We have that in America. We need to get more energy 
and growth back into middle class families' incomes. We have still some 
isolated areas in our country that have not felt the benefits of this 
recovery. And I believe that the budget proposal now in Congress would 
undermine our economic growth in the future unless it's modified 
significantly, and I'll say more about that in a moment.
    I think the policies of this administration have made a contribution 
to that economic record by reducing the deficit; by expanding trade 
through NAFTA and GATT and taking all those outdated cold war controls 
off of our high technology exports; by concluding over 80 trade 
agreements through the efforts of Ambassador

[[Page 1587]]

Kantor, including 15 with Japan alone; by investing in technology, 
research and development, and defense conversion; and by working with so 
many of you to manifest the real commitment to the education of all 
Americans, more money but also higher standards, higher expectations, 
and more accountability in education.
    If you look at the question of our social problems and whether we've 
been successful in putting middle class values into our approach, you 
can all be somewhat hopeful there. The crime rate is down in almost 
every place in America. The murder rate is down. The welfare rolls are 
down. The food stamp rolls are down. The poverty rate is down. The teen 
pregnancy rate has gone down for 2 years in a row. Americans are 
reasserting their beliefs in old-fashioned personal, family, and 
community responsibility. And it is beginning to work.
    Yes, we have some problems. We still need to pass a national welfare 
reform plan, I believe. We still need to avoid the tendency that's now 
alive in Congress to believe that all you need to do on the crime 
problem is to put people in jail and we don't need anything to do with 
prevention and giving our young people something to say yes to. But 
basically we are moving in the right direction to reassert and reinsert 
into American life mainstream values.
    And I believe the initiatives of our administration have played a 
role in that: The crime bill, which is putting 100,000 more police on 
the street, keeping repeat offenders off the street; passing the Brady 
bill; passing the assault weapons ban; doing things that enable our 
local communities to help prevent crimes. I think it's making a 
difference.
    I believe the work we've done in what the New York Times called ``a 
quiet revolution'' in welfare--our administration has given 35 States 
over 40 separate approvals to get around Federal rules and regulations 
to move people from welfare to work. When the Congress wouldn't pass the 
bill, we just decided to reform welfare State by State, community by 
community. We have offered all 50 States within any 30-day period a 
complete relief from any number of Federal rules and regulations if they 
will present a comprehensive plan to move people from welfare to work 
without hurting their children.
    I think when we almost doubled the family tax credit that President 
Reagan said was the best antipoverty program the country had ever come 
up with, so that we can now say that anybody who works 40 hours a week 
and has children in the home will not live in poverty, that was a major 
step toward rewarding work and family and helping us to reform welfare 
and get people out of welfare into the work rolls.
    I think the national service program is an important advance. We 
celebrated its first year yesterday with a young woman from Kansas City 
who's working her way through college from an inner-city neighborhood in 
Kansas City with a project of young volunteers who have closed 44 crack 
houses in Kansas City in the last year. And this is the kind of thing 
being done by these young people all over America, whether they're 
building houses with Habitat for Humanity, tutoring kids in rural 
Kentucky where they have increased the grade level in reading by 
threefold in one year, or helping to fight the crime problem.
    All these things manifest our values. And something I know that 
means a lot to all of you, we have tried to give the American people a 
more modern Government. The size of the Federal Government tonight when 
I left Washington was 163,000 smaller than it was the day I became 
President. It's the smallest Federal Government since John Kennedy was 
President. We will reduce it by another 110,000 in the next 2 years, no 
matter what the Congress does with this budget. This Government as a 
percentage of the civilian nonfarm payroll is the smallest Government 
the United States has had in Washington since 1933.
    Now, those are facts. We've reduced 16,000 pages of regulations, cut 
the regulations of the Small Business Administration by 50 percent, the 
regulations of the Education Department by 40 percent. Next year, the 
paperwork time that businesses spend fooling with the Environmental 
Protection Agency will be down by 25 percent.
    More important than all that to me, I think our Government's working 
better. The Small Business Administration has cut its budget by 40 
percent and doubled its loan output. The Export-Import Bank is helping 
small businesses that never knew what it was before to sell their 
products all around the world. The Commerce Department and the State 
Department have done more good for American businesses overseas than any 
Commerce Department and State Department in modern history. And every 
one of you who has worked with them knows that

[[Page 1588]]

that is the absolute truth. We are moving forward to give you a 
Government that works.
    The automobile industry has been working with us in partnership to 
produce a clean car. It is a big deal. Nineteen ninety-five was the 
hottest year for the planet Earth since the present temperature system 
was devised. China is growing rapidly. If everybody in China winds up 
with a car and you don't want the atmosphere of this Earth to burn up, 
we had better find an efficient way of moving people around. And this is 
the sort of thing that we're trying to do.
    Now, let me tell you this; this will probably surprise you more than 
anything. Every year, Business Week--hardly an arm of the Democratic 
Party or of my administration--recognizes outstanding businesses for 
performance in various categories. This year in the category of service 
to consumers by telephone, the winner was not L.L. Bean or Federal 
Express but the Social Security Administration of your Federal 
Government. So I think that we have made a contribution to modernizing 
the Federal Government. It's smaller. It's less bureaucratic. It is more 
entrepreneurial. It still has dumb things in the rules, and it does dumb 
things that drive me crazy that I find out about after it's over. But it 
is better than it was before by a very, very long shot.
    The most important thing is, we're trying to help move decisions 
back where people make them. The mayor of Chicago is here. Chicago 
received one of our empowerment zones, a new idea helping to attract 
private investment into inner cities to grow the economy and give people 
a stake in America's future. Chicago received more funds for police not 
because we know how to prevent crime, but they do, if they have the 
means to do it, and funds for prevention to support programs like the 
ones in Chicago that have lowered the crime rate, even though they make 
fodder for congressional speeches like midnight basketball. Better a kid 
on a basketball court than on a corner selling drugs or mugging somebody 
and winding up in jail. We didn't make the decisions; they make the 
decisions at the local level.
    We finally passed a bill to stop mandating costs on State and local 
governments that we don't help them pay for. These are the kinds of 
things that are going on. We are moving in the right direction, your 
country is, and you ought to be proud of it.
    And America has been gratified to be a part of making peace in the 
Middle East, progress in Northern Ireland, the cease-fire in Bosnia, 
making sure that for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age 
there aren't any missiles pointed at Americans or their children 
tonight. North Korea is moving away from its nuclear program, and, by 
the grace of God, we might get a comprehensive test ban treaty on all 
nuclear testing next year. We seem to be headed in that direction.
    Now, what does the future hold? First, we do have to balance the 
budget. It's the right thing to do to take the burden of debt off our 
children and free up capital for private sector investment. I'm really 
proud of the fact that way over 90 percent of the new jobs created in 
this recovery were created not by Government but in the private sector. 
That is exactly what we wanted to happen. So as we reduce the size of 
Government, the private sector is growing more. We have to do it, but we 
have to do it consistent with our values and with our interests.
    The second thing we have to do is to expand trade. We have our 
friends here from the Americas. Mack McLarty, who's here with me, worked 
so hard last December on the Summit of the Americas. And we have worked 
to follow up on that. We believe that our partners in this hemisphere 
are a very, very important part of our future. We believe we have to 
build on NAFTA until we have partnerships with all these democratic 
governments, to reward their moves to democracy, to freedom, to market 
economics with a genuine and respectful partnership with the United 
States.
    In that connection, I say I was very well pleased with the 
remarkable visit I just had with the President of Mexico and the fact 
that they have already paid back $700 million of the loan they received 
through our international financial package ahead of schedule, being 
faithful to their commitment to modernize Mexico politically and 
economically.
    We have to continue to invest in technology and make it our friend, 
not our foe. People cannot afford to be afraid of the technological 
revolution that is sweeping the world. We just have to make sure that 
everybody can have access to it. And we have to give people the tools 
they need to succeed.
    In that connection, let me say I am very grateful for the support 
that we've gotten from

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the business community for every education initiative of our 
administration, from expanding Head Start to the Goals 2000 program, 
which focuses on national standards and grassroots reforms, to the 
expansion of student loans.
    And just a couple of days ago--I know the Secretary of Labor said 
this earlier, but I want to emphasize this because it achieved almost no 
public notice, largely because there were only two votes against this 
bill in the Senate, and when there's no controversy, it is often deemed 
not important. But with no controversy, a couple of days ago, the United 
States Senate adopted what I thought was one of the most important new 
ideas that I advocated in the State of the Union message: the ``GI 
bill'' for America's workers, consolidating 70 separate, marginally 
impacting Federal training programs into a big fund and saying to 
unemployed people, we will just send you a voucher, we will send you a 
voucher if you lose your job and you can immediately take it to the 
nearest community college and begin to start your life again.
    Now, that's very important. A lot of you pay a lot of unemployment 
tax. The unemployment system today is not relevant to the times in which 
we live. When the unemployment system in America was developed, 85 
percent of the people were called back to the jobs they were laid off 
from. Today, 85 percent of the people who are laid off are never called 
back to those jobs. If we want people to feel secure about the future, 
to have a stake in the future, we have to increase their sense of 
empowerment about it. That's what this ``GI bill'' for America's workers 
will do. It's a very important idea, and we ought to stick with it and 
support it and properly fund it.
    Now, let me say something in all candor. To have--if we're going to 
continue to move forward in a time of change, you have to expect the 
leadership of the country to do what you have to do in a time of change, 
and that's to make decisions that are unpopular in the short run because 
they're right over the long run. Now, I have found as an elected 
official that everybody is for that in general, but they're against it 
in particular. And let me just give you some examples of the kind of 
things I've faced. I bet I've done five things that have made everybody 
in this room mad in the last 2\1/2\ years, at least five. But I want to 
give you a few.
    When I became President I knew, based on my conversations with Mr. 
Greenspan, with people in the private markets, with others, that if we 
could reduce the deficit at least $500 billion in 5 years, we'd get a 
big drop in interest rates and a big boom in this economy. I knew that. 
And I knew, conversely, if we failed to do it that we would continue to 
lengthen the sluggish economy which I confronted when I took office. So 
I made up my mind, come hell or high water, we were going to reduce the 
deficit $500 billion. In the first week I showed up in Washington, the 
leaders of the minority in Congress, who are now the majority leader and 
the Speaker of the House, told me that I would not get one vote for my 
budget no matter what I did, not a single, solitary vote. The policy was 
going to be ``just say no.''
    As a consequence, I had to raise your taxes more and cut spending 
less than I wanted to, which made a lot of you furious. All I know is, 
we got a huge drop in the interest rates and a big boom in the economy, 
and most everybody who paid more made more than they paid. And it was 
the right thing for the United States. It was wrong for them to refuse 
to cooperate with me, but they were richly rewarded for it later on. But 
our country is better off because we passed a deficit reduction plan 
which, over a 7-year period, is about as big as the one we're debating 
in the Congress today. And that's what got this country going again. And 
we did it without cutting education or investment in technology or the 
environment or our future.
    I'll give you another example that affects the mayor here. When we 
were debating the Brady bill to require people to wait 5 days before 
they got a handgun, and the assault weapons ban, all my political 
advisers said, ``Don't do this; this is crazy.'' And I said, ``Why do 
you think it's crazy?'' And they said, ``Because everybody that's 
against this will vote against everybody who's for it, but all the 
people that are for it, they'll find some other reason to oppose you.''
    That's why things don't get done in your country, because organized 
interests and their intense opposition always overcome the generalized 
feeling of good will, which is not manifest in the same intensity of 
support. But you know what? Last year 40,000 people with criminal 
records did not get handguns because of the Brady law. And it was the 
right thing to do.

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    And I am tired of picking up the newspaper and seeing kids that are 
honor students in school getting shot down standing at bus stops by nuts 
with assault weapons. And by election time next time, every hunter in my 
State will know that nobody lost their hunting rifle and it was all a 
big canard, there was nothing to it. But people are alive today because 
those decisions were made.
    The teenage smoking initiative--the same thing. Same folks came and 
said, ``Oh, don't do this. By the time the tobacco companies get through 
working on you, they'll convince every tobacco farmer in North Carolina 
and Tennessee that you're going to drive them in the poorhouse; they all 
vote against everybody with a ``D'' behind their name; they will bury 
you. And everybody in America that agrees with you will find some other 
reason not to support you. This is dumb politics.'' Well, it might be. 
But we studied that issue for 14 months. We found out two companies knew 
for 30 years what they were doing and kept on doing it and didn't own up 
to it. We found out that there were still deliberate attempts to 
advertise to young people. And most important, we found out that 3,000 
kids a day start smoking and 1,000 of them are going to die sooner 
because of it. I don't know what you think a thousand kids a day are 
worth, but to me, that's the kind of America I want to live in, where 
another thousand kids a day have longer, better, fuller lives because 
somebody doesn't sucker-punch them into doing something they shouldn't 
do while they are still children. So it may be unpopular, but I think it 
was the right thing to do.
    The same thing--something where most of you agree with me, I think--
the affirmative action issue. Everybody said, ``Oh, you don't need to--
you need to be against this; we need to stop this.'' But there is still 
racial discrimination in America, folks. When five Federal law 
enforcement officials can't even get served in Denny's, there's a 
problem there. And I could give you a lot of other examples.
    I don't favor unfair preferences or quotas or reverse 
discrimination. Our administration has actually joined lawsuits against 
reverse discrimination in States. But everybody has to be considered in 
this country. The great meal ticket we've got for the future is that 
this is the most diverse, big, rich country in the world. Los Angeles 
County has 150 different racial and ethnic groups in one county. In the 
global village, it is a manna from heaven. But we have to learn to live 
together and work together with common values and a common chance to 
succeed. So we said, let's mend affirmative action, but let's don't end 
it. And I hope and believe it made it possible for the people who lead 
large companies in our country to follow the same policies.
    I could give you lots of other examples, but you get the idea. When 
you're going through a period of change like this, you can't even 
predict what's going to be popular.
    Last night we celebrated one year of the restoration of democracy in 
Haiti. Well, when we threw the dictators out of Haiti, hardly anybody 
was for it. But it was the right thing to do. You can't let dictators 
come to the United States and stand in the shadow of the Statue of 
Liberty and promise they're going to leave and then go home and keep 
killing people in the street and never even blink an eye. The United 
States couldn't do that.
    When we helped our friends and neighbors in Mexico, most of you 
probably supported that. But the day I made the decision, there was a 
poll in the paper that said by 81 to 15 the American people were opposed 
to that. Half the people in the country who were for it were in the room 
at the time I decided to do it. [Laughter] But it was the right thing to 
do, because they're our neighbors, because they want to do the right 
thing, because they have the capacity to grow and become our strong 
partners and generate opportunities for you and incomes and jobs for 
America, because our real future here, no matter what happens to the 
movement toward free trade, is with our friends here in our backyard, in 
our neighborhood.
    So I would ask all of you as people who have to make difficult 
decisions to expect people who lead your governmental institutions to do 
the same thing and to be perfectly willing to be held accountable for 
the consequences of them.
    And that brings me to the budget issue. Let me say what this is not 
about, this squabble in Washington. It is not--I say again--it is not 
about balancing the budget. There are two plans to balance the budget, 
both of which have been blessed as perfectly credible by every neutral 
observer.
    Our plan would, now we know, would balance the budget in 9 years and 
continue to increase investment in education, research and develop-


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ment, technology, and the environment. It would invest enough in things 
like the Commerce Department, the State Department, and our aid programs 
to maintain our world leadership, which is very important. You see what 
happens when we have a chance to exercise it. It would lengthen the life 
of the Medicare Trust Fund just as much as the Republican budget. It 
would slow the rate of medical inflation but not as much as their 
budget. Why? Because nobody I know in the health care field believes 
that we can take $450 billion out of Medicare and Medicaid over the next 
7 years, based on what we now know, without causing serious problems to 
the medical schools of the country, to the children's hospitals of the 
country, to the ability of the elderly poor to get into nursing homes or 
their middle class children to have them there and afford to educate 
their children, and devastating problems to our ability to care for the 
over 20 percent of America's children who are so poor they qualify for 
medical assistance under the Medicaid program.
    We do have to slow the rate of medical inflation. I've been working 
at this for 2 years. We do have to bail out the Medicare Trust Fund. But 
we have to recognize that we have to listen to the people who do this 
for a living and have some sense of the practical implications of how 
much we can cut. My budget has a tax cut, but it's smaller than the 
congressional one. The congressional budget balances the budget in 7 
years. It cuts education, research and development, technology, 
investment in the environment. It drastically cuts back on our ability 
to exercise world leadership through the Commerce Department, the State 
Department, and the aid programs. The tax cut they offer is bigger, and 
there's a big tax increase on the lower income working poor--a big one.
    I think one of our values ought to be to grow the middle class and 
shrink the under class. I think it's not a very good idea, on the edge 
of the 21st century, to grow the under class and shrink the middle 
class. That is not my idea of what kind of country I want my child and 
her children to grow up in.
    So, can we resolve this? You bet we can. Here's the practical thing; 
this is what I want to ask you to do. There are four or five big issues 
where there's a lot of money involved. One is, we differ on how much we 
estimate we'll grow. I picked a conservative figure, 2\1/2\ percent, 
because that's what the economy has grown for the last 25 years. They 
said, ``Oh, no, we're not going to grow that fast.'' Well, why are we 
balancing the budget and giving a capital gains tax cut and doing all 
this stuff if we think we're going to get lower growth than we've had 
for the last 25 years?
    I don't want to argue it either way, but I mean, I think my growth 
estimate is not a rosy scenario, it is lower than what a lot of you pay 
for. The blue chip forecast is for a higher economic growth and, 
therefore, more revenues than I estimate.
    Then we are arguing about the rate of medical inflation. Then 
there's the question of whether we should reassign or redesign and 
recalculate the amount of inflation in the Consumer Price Index, which 
determines how much we increase Social Security and retirement. And 
we're talking about the size of the tax cut.
    We can work this out, folks. The only thing I won't do--I will not 
do this--I will not let balancing the budget serve as a cover for 
destroying the social compact, for cutting back on education, wrecking 
the environment, or undermining our obligations to help protect our 
children and treat our elderly people decently, because it is not 
necessary to balance the budget.
    Now, I don't want you to take my side or theirs on any of these big 
questions. Here's what I'm asking you to do. What I want is to get 
together with the Congress and get a budget out that is an honorable 
compromise that is better than theirs and better than mine. That's the 
best kind of get-together, where everybody puts their ideas together and 
you come out with something that's better than what anybody had. I'm not 
the source of all wisdom. But I know this: There's not a single one of 
you looking at the 21st century and the position of your company that 
would knowingly cut back on research and development or investment in 
technology or education and training. You wouldn't do it, not if you 
didn't have to, and we don't have to.
    So all I'm asking you to do is to say, ``Just get together; come up 
with something. If you do it in good faith, it will be better than the 
President's budget, and it will be better than the Congress' budget. 
Because when people get together, that's what they do.''
    I am prepared to make some decisions that I think are right over the 
long run, and I believe they are. There is no earthly reason why we 
shouldn't do this. America needs and deserves

[[Page 1592]]

a balanced budget. America needs and deserves a balanced budget 
consistent with our values that will give us the kind of world that we 
would be proud to have our children and our grandchildren and their 
children grow up in.
    This country is doing well, and it's going to do better. And a lot 
of it is because of what you are doing. And a lot of it is because of 
what mayors are doing all over the country. And a lot of it is because 
of what plain old American citizens are doing. We are moving in the 
right direction. And there is no country on Earth better positioned to 
do well in the 21st century than the United States of America. And 
ironically, all we have to do to get there, I believe, is to be faithful 
to our basic values and what we know is right.
    That's a commitment I make to you. And I'm asking you tonight to do 
what you can, because you have more influence with most of those folks 
than I do, to make sure that we get together and do this, do it right, 
do it for America, and do it for the future.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 7:34 p.m. at the Williamsburg Inn. In his 
remarks, he referred to Edgar Woolard, chairman and CEO, E.I. Dupont de 
Nemours & Co., Inc., and author and journalist Hugh Sidey.