[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[October 20, 1995]
[Pages 1633-1637]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at the Opening Session of the Midwest Economic Conference in 
Columbus, Ohio
October 20, 1995

    Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President, Mr. Mayor. President Gee, 
you were kind enough to point out that when Ohio State was playing Notre 
Dame, I was meeting with His Holiness, the Pope. I hope that at election 
time the people of Ohio will remember that I single-handedly prevented 
papal intervention in that game. [Laughter] And when they say, ``What 
did Bill Clinton ever do for Ohio?'' you'll have an answer. [Laughter] 
These are--lightning is about to come through that window right now. 
[Laughter] Forgive me, God.
    These are very good days for Ohio, not only because the Buckeyes are 
winning on the football field and Cleveland has become the comeback team 
of the ages, winning 100 games in a shortened season and is now in the 
World Series but because the economy of Ohio has come back. You can 
drive through this city, you see its vibrancy, its aliveness, its 
beauty, and the strength that the university and the other parts of the 
community here give to what is going on. It's very exuberant. And you 
see this throughout the Middle West.
    I want to make a few comments today, if I might, about how what 
we're doing here relates to what is going on back in Washington. But let 
me, first, just follow up on some things the Vice President said.
    Economic policy is very important to this administration. And when I 
became President, I determined to do everything I could to put economic 
policy beyond partisan politics, to forge a partnership between our 
Government and the private sector, to try to support cooperative efforts 
between business and labor, and to try to share ideas and work together 
with people at the State and local level, in other words, to try to move 
America together toward realizing its maximum economic potential in 
creating jobs, in raising incomes, in fulfilling the dreams of the 
American people.
    And I believe that the results of the last 2\1/2\ years point to the 
proposition that every administration from here on out in the 
foreseeable future should seek to put economic policy beyond partisan 
politics and the traditional wrangling that goes on in Washington, 
because that is a very important part of our national security and what 
it means to be an American.
    Everyone knows now that we're in a period of profound change, moving 
from the cold war to the global village, from the industrial era to the 
information and technology era, when even in a State like Ohio, you 
know, even our industries are becoming more information- and technology-
driven. The Midwest is emerging from years of economic trouble with a 
hopeful future built around a very, very diversified economy.
    At the turn of the century, half of the people in this country 
worked or lived on farms. At the midpoint of the century, 4 out of 10 
Americans worked in factories. By the end of the century, just 5 years 
from now, half of all Americans will be knowledge workers. We have to 
find ways to harness this change to make the American dream available to 
all of our people, to keep our country the strongest nation in the 
world, and to help people strengthen their families and their 
communities. That is the great challenge now: How are we going to 
harness the change so it benefits everyone?
    We are engaged in a great debate now over balancing the Federal 
budget. The real issue is not whether to balance the Federal budget. We 
now have broad agreement on that after several years of exploding the 
deficit. The real question is how we should do it. I believe we should 
try to do it as much as possible based on common sense and the way it 
would be done if the decision were being made in a town

[[Page 1634]]

meeting in Ohio instead of through the glare of national publicity and 
partisan filters in Washington, DC.
    We ought to do it in a way that guarantees maximum opportunity for 
every American, that preserves and strengthens our families, that 
recognizes that if you live in a country that is a community, it means 
you have obligations to other people and not just yourself. We ought to 
recognize what those obligations are, to our parents and to our 
children, to those who through no fault of their own need our help. We 
ought to be building our great middle class and shrinking the under 
class, not the other way around. And I will say again: We must keep our 
Nation the strongest nation in the world.
    So all the decisions that we make about this budget ought to mirror 
those goals. And everything we talk about today about the Midwest 
economy or what we found about the economy of the Pacific Northwest or 
the economy of the South when we had the other regional conferences, all 
the things we do should be consistent with helping Americans in every 
region fulfill their aspirations. That's what I think we ought to be 
doing.
    You heard the Vice President say that the American economy is on the 
move. In the last 2\1/2\ years, we've not only seen 7\1/2\ million new 
jobs but a record number of new small businesses within that time 
period, 2\1/2\ million new homeowners, the smallest misery index--the 
combined rate of unemployment and inflation--in 25 years, a huge 
expansion in trade. We have seen our exports go from increasing 4 
percent to 10 percent to 16 percent in the last 3 years. And the result 
of all that has been a very good movement for the American economy. It 
has been fueled in no small measure by the fact that the deficit has 
been reduced from $290 billion a year to $160 billion while increasing 
our investment in education, in technology, in research, and in 
partnerships to help promote the economic strength of the United States. 
So I feel very good about that.
    I have to say that, in the aftermath of the great march in 
Washington earlier this week, there is also kind of a renewal of common 
sense and shared values in dealing with social problems in the United 
States. We have--a lot of people don't know this, but generally 
throughout the country, the crime rate is down, the welfare rolls are 
down, the food stamp rolls are down, the poverty rate is down, the teen 
pregnancy rate is down. Now, these problems are still very profound in 
our country, but the American people are reasserting responsibility for 
themselves, their families, their communities. They're moving this 
country in the right direction.
    And I believe that the work we have tried to do with the crime 
bill--and I want to thank your mayor and all the mayors for working with 
us on that in such a bipartisan fashion--to put more police officers on 
the street, to have more prevention programs, to deal with the problems 
of our young people and try to keep them from flowering into lives of 
crime; the work we've done on helping States reform welfare and health 
care on a State-by-State basis; the work we did to try to help families 
that are working for modest incomes by lowering their taxes and passing 
the family leave law--I think these things have supported this great 
movement by the American people to try to bring our country back 
together and move our country forward.
    And that is the sort of thing that we ought to be trying to 
accelerate in this budget debate. And we certainly shouldn't be doing 
anything to get in the way of what you're doing out here and what the 
American people are trying to do in their own lives and their own 
communities. That is the kind of balanced budget I want.
    I have proposed a balanced budget that balances the budget in 9 
years, secures the Medicare Trust Fund, continues to invest more in 
education and research and technology because I think that's important 
to our future, and cuts out hundreds of other programs without unduly 
crippling either the Medicare or the Medicaid program and hurting the 
people who depend on them and without the kind of tax increases on 
working people that are in the congressional majority plan.
    Yesterday I know you all saw that the House of Representatives voted 
for the Medicare plan that reduces projected expenditures and Medicare 
by $270 billion over the next 7 years. And I think that's too much 
because it will hurt working people too much, hurt the seniors too much 
and their children, who will have to pay more to help their parents and 
will have less to educate their children. I think that is a mistake. And 
you should know that the plan I proposed, which has less than half that 
many cuts, has exactly the same strengthening effect on the

[[Page 1635]]

Medicare Trust Fund. So we're going to argue about that. But I think 
it's a mistake.
    This city and many others have huge, huge, interests and investments 
in the health care system of this country. University medical hospitals, 
children's hospitals, medical research facilities, urban hospitals 
dealing with large numbers of poor people, rural hospitals, all of those 
folks are going to be hurt quite significantly if we just jerk $450 
billion out of the health care system over the next 7 years with no 
sense of exactly how these budget targets will be met.
    And of course, a lot of our most fragile elderly people, under this 
plan, will be hurt the worst. A lot of older people living on $300 or 
$400 a month will pay among the largest increases because of the way the 
plan is structured. I believe that that is inconsistent with our values. 
And since it is not necessary to balance the budget, I think it's a 
mistake to do it.
    I think it's a mistake to single out education and the environment 
for deep and devastating cuts. We shouldn't be reducing key programs and 
environmental protections. As I said, we have already eliminated, under 
the Vice President's leadership in the reinventing Government plan, 
we've eliminated hundreds of Government programs, hundreds. We've cut 
hundreds more. We have reduced the size of Government. There are 163,000 
fewer people working for your Government today than there were the day I 
became President. Next year the Federal Government will be the smallest 
it's been since John Kennedy was President and--listen to this--as a 
percentage of the civilian work force, the smallest it's been since 
1933. There is no more big Government.
    The issue is not maintaining some big bloated Government. We have 
reduced the size of this Government more rapidly than ever before. We've 
eliminated 16,000 pages of regulations. We've got some more to do on 
that, and I'm sure we'll hear from some of you about that today. And I'm 
more than happy to help with that. But we shouldn't undermine the 
fundamental ability of the United States to educate our young people, to 
invest in education and technology, to maintain these health care 
programs at an appropriate level, to protect our common environment. 
These are commonsense commitments that are important to achieving a good 
future. And I just believe it's a mistake.
    I also think it is a terrible mistake to raise taxes on working 
families with incomes under $30,000. I mean, after all, these people are 
the ones that we want to reward; we want to say, ``Don't go on welfare. 
Work.'' What we did was the reverse. We dramatically increased the 
family tax credit, the earned-income tax credit, so that I would be able 
to say to you by next year, any American with a child in the home 
working 40 hours a week will not be in poverty. There will never be an 
economic incentive to be on welfare instead of work because we will not 
tax people into poverty; we will use the tax system to lift them out of 
poverty. That is a good, commonsense national goal.
    So I say to you, that is what I'm fighting for. I don't want a big 
partisan fight in Washington, but I am going to stand up for the values 
that I think would be embedded in this budget decision if it were being 
made in this room by the people who live in this community. That's my 
simple test. If the budget decisions were being made by people in this 
room who live in this community, who reflect a broad cross-section of 
the people who work here, the people who go to Ohio State as students, 
the people who teach here, the people who work in the hospitals, the 
people who work in city hall, the people who do all these things, I 
believe they would come up with a budget far more like mine than the one 
that is working its way through Congress. If the crowd was divided 
equally between Republicans and Democrats, if there were more 
Republicans than Democrats in the crowd, that's what I believe would 
happen. And so, I'm going to do my best to do that.
    Now, there are some who say that if I stand up for these commonsense 
values, that they'll just shut the Government down and, for the first 
time in the history of the Republic, refuse to honor our national debt. 
Well, I just showed up there 2\1/2\ years ago, so I didn't have as much 
as some of them did to do with running up the debt in the first place. 
[Laughter] But it does seem to me that if we're going to be good 
neighbors and good citizens, we ought to pay our bills. And I can't 
imagine that the United States would not pay its debt.
    Let me say, again, this just sounds like a rhetorical debate, but 
this could have practical consequences in the Midwest. If we don't pay 
our bills, our interest rates on our own debt will go up. If it goes up 
a tenth of a percent, it adds $40 billion to the deficit over 10 years. 
What does that mean? No balanced budget,

[[Page 1636]]

even with this plan, just by letting--or even with their plan, it means 
no balanced budget if you let the debt limit expire.
    I also want you to know that there are $400 billion worth of 
mortgages held by between 7 and 10 million American homeowners that are 
tied to Federal interest rates. So if we don't pay our debt on time, if 
we let this debt limit expire, you have friends and neighbors with home 
mortgages tied to the Federal interest rates whose monthly mortgage 
payment could go up. This is not a good idea, either.
    We do not need to overly politicize this debate. We need to settle 
down and pass a budget that will bring our budget into balance, based on 
commonsense values. That is my commitment.
    So I will say to you again, I cannot in good conscience sign a 
budget that cuts thousands of young, poor children out of getting in the 
Head Start program, or that makes it harder for young people to go to 
Ohio State because we raise the interest rates on their loan or charge 
them fees, or that makes it harder for single mothers out there really 
working hard to raise their kids because we're going to charge them a 
bigger fee for collecting the child support they're legally due, or that 
says to a senior citizen who is living on $300 a month, we're not going 
to help you with your copays and deductible anymore, even if you drop 
out of the Medicare system. I can't do that.
    I signed on to protect the fundamental interests of the American 
people, and it has nothing to do with partisan politics. I'm just not 
going to do it; it's not right.
    But there are other economic issues. We gave out the scientific 
medals--the Vice President and I did--gave out the annual medals for 
science and technology this week. Do you know that nine of the Nobel 
Prize winners this year--nine of the Nobel Prize winners in science and 
technology, of those nine, seven were Americans. Seven were Americans, 
seven. And all seven benefited in their work from research grants from 
the United States Government.
    Now, this is a small part of our budget. I cannot in good conscience 
watch us cut 30 percent of our research and development and basic 
science budget when I know it is critical to our economic future and I 
know the Japanese just voted to double theirs. They just voted to double 
theirs. We shouldn't cut ours by 30 percent. That's not right. It defies 
common sense. It's not necessary.
    Secretary Brown--is he on this panel? Secretary Brown got back from 
China at 11:30 last night. The Commerce Department is a central reason 
for why exports have increased 4 percent, 10 percent, and 16 percent in 
the last 3 years. Ohio needs that. That's a good thing for you. The 
Middle West needs that. Michigan, a State a long way from Mexico, is 
like the fourth or fifth biggest exporter to Mexico. We've got a lot of 
people from Michigan here today. It would be a mistake for us to shut 
down the operations of the Commerce Department and to undermine the work 
they're doing in technology, especially to help people who lost their 
defense contracts but are looking for ways to put all these 
technological benefits to work in the post-cold-war world. It is not 
necessary to balance the budget, and it would be wrong.
    It would be a mistake to cut back on education and training when so 
many people are having to change jobs more rapidly. We are going to have 
to redefine security. The most important initiative we've got up there 
in the Congress today, arguably, is the one that Secretary Reich and I 
and Secretary Riley have pushed so hard to collapse a lot of these 
education and training programs and create a large pool so that anybody 
who loses a job or anybody on welfare can just get a voucher, instead of 
having to figure out how to get in the Government program, and take it 
to the nearest community college and immediately begin to get in a 
program that will give them a skill that will lead to a good job.

    This is a practical thing. This has nothing to do with partisan 
politics. Half the community college board members in America are 
Republicans. This is not a partisan deal. This is the difference between 
the way Washington looks at the world and the way the world works on the 
ground where you live.

    So I say to you, my fellow Americans, look what's happened in the 
Midwest. Look at the renaissance that's occurred here, the resurgence of 
manufacturing, the infusion of high technology, the strength of 
agriculture still in this region, something that's often overlooked--
this is a huge agricultural region for our country--and the way this 
region is doing compared to the rest of the country and compared to the 
rest of the world.


[[Page 1637]]


    All I want to do is to pass a balanced budget that will strengthen 
our economy, that will continue the good things that all of you are 
doing, and that doesn't get in the way of our fundamental values but 
permits them to continue to advance. That is my commitment. And I don't 
want to see, after all the progress of the last few years, I don't want 
to see us get in the way of what we have to do.

    And let me just mention, there are three or four things I think we 
have to do. I think we have to accelerate our ability to innovate. I 
think we have to accelerate our ability to give people a lifetime of 
educational opportunity, starting with young children and going through 
adults who need retraining throughout their lives. I think if we're 
going to have a tax cut, it ought to be focused on childrearing and 
education, helping people to finance their education and training. That 
ought to be the emphasis; there can be other things in it, but we ought 
to help that. And we ought to pass this ``GI bill'' for America's 
workers. I think we ought to do some more for small businesses and for 
the areas that have been left behind, either in inner cities or rural 
areas. We began that in the last 2 years, but we ought to do more.

    In the last 2 years, we also helped to bail out a lot of the pension 
systems in the country that were in trouble. Last December, we passed a 
bill that saved 8\1/2\ million pensioners their pensions. We now have a 
bill working through Congress that would make it much easier for small 
businesses to take out retirement plans for themselves and their 
employees. That would be a huge deal. Most of the new jobs are being 
created by small businesses now. It's much more difficult for small 
business to provide for health care and retirement and things like that 
than it is for bigger business or for Government. So I'm hoping that 
this is one bill we'll have strong bipartisan support on to help.

    The last point I want to make is this. I went to the University of 
Texas earlier this week and gave a speech about race in America. The 
racial and ethnic diversity of this country is one of the two or three 
most important assets we have in the global economy. If we can prove we 
can have a democracy that is a multiracial, multiethnic democracy, where 
people work together, get along and are honest with each other, we are 
going to do very, very well in the 21st century. We are going to do 
very, very well.

    That's the last point I want to make to you. We have got to--whether 
on this issue or any other, we have to learn as Americans to be honest 
with each other, both in what we say and in how well we listen. We've 
got to bridge these gaps. Most of the problems we have in this country 
today, most of the challenges we have are not ideological, they are 
practical. There is no reason in the wide world to let the country be 
split in two over most of the real challenges we face. They are 
practical problems, and they are human problems.

    And since I believe most people are good people and most people 
share the same values, if we learn to speak more clearly and more 
honestly, if we learn to listen more openly and we learn to sort of 
leave our ideological blinders at the door, I believe that the next 50 
years, even though the United States will not have the same percentage 
of wealth in the world we had in the last 50 years, in the next 50 years 
we can have a better life for Americans and in profound ways we can have 
a more positive influence on the world, because we can prove that all 
the things other people say they believe in and say they want, we 
actually are living and doing. That is my goal. And today I want us to 
focus on what we're doing here in the Middle West and what more we can 
do to help you to achieve those goals more quickly.

    Thank you, and thank you for coming.

Note: The President spoke at approximately 10:10 a.m. in the Fawcett 
Center Dining Room at Ohio State University. In his remarks, he referred 
to Mayor Gregory Lashutka of Columbus and E. Gordon Gee, president, Ohio 
State University.