[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[October 23, 1995]
[Pages 1664-1671]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the AFL-CIO Convention in New York City
October 23, 1995

    The President. Thank you very much for the wonderful welcome. Thank 
you, Tom, for the great introduction. I wish I'd been here to hear it. 
[Laughter] But I appreciate it.
    You know, I've taken so many controversial positions in the last 3 
years, I thought I'd come here and tell you what you ought to do in this 
election. [Laughter] You should elect--listen to this--you ought to 
elect an Irish-American from the Bronx who comes out of the Service 
Employees Union. [Laughter] I just want you to know that whatever you 
do, I intend to be there with you every step of the way. And I know how 
important this is. [Applause] Thank you.
    Let me say before I get into my remarks, I have just come, as I 
think all of you know, from Hyde Park and a meeting with President 
Yeltsin of Russia. We made a lot of progress today in agreeing to work 
toward peace in Bosnia, something that concerns every citizen of the 
world whose conscience has been shocked by all the children and other 
innocent people who have been killed there.
    We also agreed on working together, very importantly, to control the 
spread of nuclear materials, something that is a very serious problem in 
the aftermath of the cold war, to minimize the prospect that terrorists 
will ever be able to get small amounts of nuclear material and make 
bombs out of them.
    And finally, President Yeltsin agreed with me that we should go for 
the strongest possible comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty next year. 
And that means we will probably get it, and the world will be much safer 
as a result of it.
    I know that you have--all of you--and I came here more than anything 
else just to thank you, because I know that you have waged a strong and 
passionate grassroots campaign for a year now to oppose the cuts in 
worker safety and job training, in education and health care, being 
considered in the Congress. The White House mailroom is jammed with 
postcards from union retirees. [Applause] Thank you. This may be the 
high-tech age, but you have got the Capitol Hill switchboards groaning 
with calls from your members. And I say, send more. And I know that 
those ads you're running have gotten some Members of Congress suffering 
with heartburn. And we just need to pour it on a little more. I thank 
you for that.
    I come here today with a simple message: This is a very great 
country. You helped to make it that way. We're on the edge of a new 
century. We're living in a time of great change. No one can perceive 
clearly all the implications of that change.
    We know that we've moved from an industrial age to an information 
and technology age, which, as all of you know in your own experience, 
even industry and agriculture is infused today with more technology. We 
know we have moved from the bipolar world of the cold war to a global 
village in which we have dreamed of new possibilities but also a lot of 
new vulnerabilities because of the changes that are going on.
    And we know we've got to somehow harness this change to benefit 
ordinary people in our country and throughout the world. We have to do 
it consistent with the basic values that made America great and that 
make life worth living, values that your movement embodies: a commitment 
to opportunity for every American; to the dignity of work; to the 
commitment that the family should be strengthened and children should be 
nurtured and parents should be hon-


[[Page 1665]]

ored; a recognition that we have to go forward or backward together and 
therefore it is crazy for us to be divided by race, by region, by 
income, in any way that in any way saps our strength; and the 
determination to keep this country the strongest nation on Earth. Those 
are the things which have animated the labor movement in the later half 
of the 20th century. And those are the values that will take us into the 
21st century.
    Three years ago, you helped the American people to send me to 
Washington to uphold these values and to turn our economy around. I had 
a commitment to make the American dream real for all Americans in the 
21st century and to make sure that our country would remain the 
strongest country in the world. I had a simple strategy to harness 
change to benefit all of us. I thought we needed to be faithful to the 
mainstream values I just mentioned. I thought we needed a middle class 
economic strategy to grow the middle class and shrink the under class. I 
thought we needed a modern Government that would be less bureaucratic, 
more entrepreneurial, but still strong enough to take care of the 
business that the people need done.
    The lion's share of the credit belongs to you and the rest of the 
American people, but we're moving in the right direction. And I know 
that our policies had something to do with it. We've got 7\1/2\ million 
new jobs in this country, after the slowest job growth in the country 
since the Great Depression, in the 4 years before I took office. We've 
got 2\1/2\ million more homeowners, 2 million new small business people, 
the lowest combined rate of inflation and unemployment in 25 years. Our 
country is safer and stronger. For the first time since the dawn of the 
nuclear age, there's not a single solitary nuclear missile pointed at 
the people of the United States of America. And I'm proud of that. And 
by the grace of God, from Northern Ireland to Haiti to the Middle East, 
now to Bosnia, the United States is a strong partner in pushing for 
peace.
    Maybe most important of all, this country seems to be slowly coming 
together around its values again. It's hard to turn a great country 
around, but when we get going in a certain direction, we can make a real 
difference. In almost every State, in this great city where you're 
meeting, the crime rate is down; the murder rate is down; the welfare 
rolls are down; the food stamp rolls are down. Believe it or not, the 
poverty rate is down, and the teen pregnancy rate has dropped for 2 
years in a row. America is coming back and moving together.
    And we proved you could do it together. Instead of just condemning 
the Government the way my predecessors did, we made a partnership with 
the Federal employees, and in a balanced and fair and disciplined way, 
we tried to downsize the Government so that this big Government attack 
is a myth today. But we left our Government strong enough for the 
employees that are there to do their jobs. And we just didn't throw 
anybody on the street; we gave them good buyout provisions. We tried to 
protect their retirement. We treated them and their families with 
decency and the honor and the respect they were entitled to after the 
years they had served the United States of America. And that's the way 
this ought to be done everywhere.
    Let me tell you what the Federal employees are doing, just a few 
things. I could talk all day about it. But Federal employees working in 
the Commerce Department, in the Export-Import Bank, in other areas, have 
helped to create good jobs, many of them union jobs, in America by 
increasing our exports 4 percent, 10 percent, and 16 percent this year, 
in the last 3 years. A lot of that was done because of aggressive 
actions by people who work for the United States Government.
    The Federal Emergency Management Agency--we've had as many natural 
disasters to deal with in the last 3 years as any time I can remember. 
And it is probably the most popular arm of the Federal Government 
because the Federal employees have been there in a timely, aggressive, 
effective fashion when they were needed, whether it was for floods in 
the Middle West or fires and earthquakes in the West or anything else. 
And I am proud of that.
    And let me tell you something I'm especially proud of. Business Week 
magazine, which is hardly an arm of the Federal Government or the 
Democratic Party, every year gives awards to businesses that perform at 
the highest level of efficiency in a number of categories. And one of 
their categories is for customer service over the telephone. So the 
businesses that compete, for example, are Southwest Airlines or L.L. 
Bean or, you know, anybody that you call on the telephone. You know who 
won this year? The Social Security Administration of the Federal 
Government won that award.

[[Page 1666]]

    These Federal employees operate a Medicare program that has a 2 
percent administrative cost, lower than any private insurance program in 
the United States of America, something you rarely hear about in the 
debate going on in Congress today. They have implemented a crime bill 
that's putting 100,000 police on the streets of America, and they're 
doing it on time and under budget. They have implemented the motor voter 
law, the family leave law, both those things that you helped to get.
    They have been able to be much tougher in capturing large quantities 
of drugs before they come into this country. Without going into a bunch 
of immigrant bashing, they have been able to in a disciplined way 
strengthen our ability to reduce the problems of illegal immigration in 
the United States. And they have fought discrimination, something that 
was out of fashion for the Federal Government to do until this 
administration came in. And I thank them for it.
    And guess what? We've been able to prove you can grow the economy 
and be decent to working people, something that the people who were 
there before and the people who are in the Congress today in dominant 
positions apparently don't believe. If you look at what's happened--and 
I'm sure Tom mentioned a lot of this--but when we repealed my 
predecessors' antiunion Executive orders that denied American workers 
their rights from private industry to public service, it didn't hurt the 
economy. The economy got better, not worse. When we said in no uncertain 
terms that you ought to have a fair, decent, effective NLRB, and we did 
our best to provide that, the economy got better, not worse. It didn't 
undermine the American economy.
    When we refused to go along with repealing Davis-Bacon and the 
service contract law, the economy didn't collapse; it helped to create 
more high-wage jobs, not fewer. And when we began to crack down on 
sweatshops where unscrupulous employers make illegal immigrants work in 
prisonlike conditions, depriving them of the minimum wage, overtime pay, 
a safe workplace, and the right to organize, it will make us stronger, 
not weaker.
    And when we have refused to go along with the attempts of some 
people to weaken our ability to provide a safe workplace, it has not 
weakened the economy; it has helped to make the American economy 
stronger. It is time we accepted a fundamental lesson: Treating working 
people in a decent, fair, humane, enlightened way gives you a stronger 
American economy, not a weaker one.
    Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
    The President. Thank you.
    Now, we do have some real challenges before us. You and I know that 
this recovery's benefits have not been spread evenly to all Americans. 
We know that we've been in a time of increasing inequality. By the way, 
this is what usually happens when you move from one economic model to 
another. When we move from the agricultural age to the industrial age, 
the labor movement grew up because there were so many people who were 
being exploited, not benefiting from the benefits of the new industrial 
age. So whenever you change in a huge way the way people work and live 
and relate to each other and the rest of the world, some will be well-
positioned and do well; others will not be.
    That's why people need to come together, because you know in the end 
you cannot sustain progress unless everybody can benefit. That's one of 
the big reasons we had the Great Depression, because people did not 
understand that everybody had to have a stake in the future in order for 
free enterprise to flourish.
    And so we have that happening today, where people who are well-
positioned tend to do well; others work harder for less and become more 
insecure. There are some fundamental things we have to do about it. 
First and most elementally, it is high time we raise the minimum wage. 
It is wrong--[applause]. Thank you. If we do not do that, next year the 
minimum wage will reach a 40-year low in purchasing power. That is not 
my idea of the 21st century America I want our children and 
grandchildren to live in. I want us to go up together.
    It also will be good business. People will have more money to 
consume, and people who are presently out of the work force will be 
attracted to get back into it. There is no evidence, no evidence, and I 
have read all the studies--at least I've read fair summaries of all the 
studies. I don't want to--[laughter]--there is no evidence that the 
minimum wage, a modest increase in the minimum wage, will cause 
unemployment. There is every evidence that it will strengthen America 
and bring us together.
    The second thing I think we need to do is to make some changes that 
recognize that there

[[Page 1667]]

is a fundamental difference in the nature of unemployment today and 
unemployment 30 years ago. The unemployment compensation system, the 
whole setup was designed for people who were laid off when there was a 
slowdown and then picked right back up by their employers when the 
economy picked up again. It was designed to give people a way to just 
get by until they got called back.
    As recently as 30 years ago, 80 percent--85 percent of the people 
who were laid off and collected unemployment were called back to the 
same job from which they were laid off. Today, over 80 percent of the 
people who are laid off are not called back to the same job from which 
they are laid off. All of you know that. Therefore, I have proposed 
having the Labor Department, working with the Education Department, 
create a ``GI bill'' for America's workers, which consolidates all of 
our training programs, puts more money into it, and gives every person 
who loses a job a right to get a voucher to take to the program that you 
want, whether it's a union apprenticeship program, a union training 
program, the local community college. Whatever is best needed for the 
people that are unemployed, they ought to have it. And I think we ought 
to do it immediately.
    The second thing that we ought to do--if we're going to have a tax 
cut we ought to target it to working families and what they need the 
most, which is help raising their children, paying for their child care, 
and getting an education. So I think we ought to have a tax deduction 
for the cost of all education after high school. Now, that would help 
working people a lot. That would help.
    The third thing I will say is--and I know we have sometimes 
disagreed on this--I believe that we win when we expand trade. So it's 
not enough to have more free trade, which I favor, we also have to have 
more fair trade. That's what the Japanese auto agreement was about. And 
thank you, Owen Bieber, for supporting us and for finally giving us a 
chance to crack some of those markets that have been denied American 
workers for too long. And we're going to keep doing things like that all 
the way down.
    Against that background, this is how I think you ought to see this 
balanced budget fight. What has worked for us the last 2\1/2\ years? 
Mainstream values, work and family and responsibility and community and 
treating people with dignity, all people, without regard to their race 
or their region or income; believing that you have to lift working 
people up if you want other people to do well: That has worked for us. 
What's worked for us? Middle class economics, help the small business 
people, help the entrepreneurs, also help to grow the middle class 
working people and shrink the under class: That's what works. That's 
what is at stake in this budget battle.
    This is not--I want to say this, and I want you to go home and tell 
everybody you know this--this is not a battle about balancing the 
budget. That has nothing to do with what is going on in Washington 
today. I gave the Congress a balanced budget. You'd be better off if we 
could balance the budget. When we quadrupled the debt in 12 years before 
I showed up, what happened? We had to spend more and more money on 
interest on the debt. We had less and less money to invest in worker 
training, in new technology, and the kinds of things that will grow the 
economy, raise incomes, educate our children.
    It would be a good thing to do. But we have to do that, like 
everything else, consistent with our values and our objectives. That is 
what is at stake. It is, what kind of America are we going to live in?
    I've given the Congress a balanced budget. It cuts all kinds of 
spending. It eliminates hundreds of programs. But it increases our 
investment in education, in technology, in research. It protects instead 
of hurts the old, the poor, the disabled, the little children on 
Medicare and Medicaid. It supports investment in worker safety and in a 
clean environment and in the kinds of national treasures that we share 
together. That is the kind of balanced budget we need.
    And that is what I want to talk to you about. I am not about to do 
something that I think will prevent us from doing what I ran for 
President to do: giving every American a shot at the American dream and 
making sure this is the strongest, finest country in the world in the 
21st century. I am not going to do that. And you shouldn't put up with 
it. You shouldn't put up with it.
    Now, here's what I mean. I'm going to give you the 10 greatest hits 
or so of this present budget. This is not the Letterman show, and so it 
won't all be funny. You may have to laugh a couple of times to keep from 
crying, but here's what this is really about. Here's what the real 
contract is.

[[Page 1668]]

    We all say we believe in honoring our parents for what they have 
done for us. And Medicare is a way of honoring our parents. We have to 
slow the rate of growth of medical inflation. We have to secure the 
Medicare Trust Fund. I presented a budget which will do that.
    We have to recognize that health care is changing. I have no problem 
with giving seniors the option to join managed care plans if they can 
get lower costs or better services. I think we should do that. I'm 
sympathetic with doctors and hospitals and their need to have some 
changes in the law so they can work together to compete with insurance 
companies to provide managed care. I'm not against that. But I'll tell 
you what I am against. I'm against this budget that was passed that, 
believe it or not, makes it easier to commit waste, fraud, and abuse. 
When the Federal Government says up to 10 percent of the money may be 
wasted, they passed a budget to make it easier to commit waste, fraud, 
and abuse but harder for the poorest, the oldest, and the sickest 
seniors to make sure their health care needs are met. That is wrong. I 
don't like it. I won't support it. And if it passes, I will veto it. It 
is wrong.
    I want to talk to you about the Medicaid program. There's a lot of 
AFSCME workers here who work in health care institutions that depend 
upon Medicaid. New York City has a whole health care network that 
depends not just on Medicare but Medicaid. Most people think Medicaid is 
the welfare health program. Let me tell you--70 percent of the Medicaid 
money goes to the elderly and the disabled for nursing home care, for 
in-home care, for physician care. Thirty percent of the Medicaid money 
does go to poor people, not all of them on welfare, some of them even 
working for very poor wages. And most of that money goes to take care of 
the little children. Over one in five children in the United States of 
America is eligible for Medicaid help for health care. And all those 
kids, they may not be in your family, but they're your kids. And 20 
years from now, they're either going to be in jail or in school or in 
the workplace. And they're going to be a big part of our future. And I 
don't know about you, but when I retire, I want them out there working, 
making lots of money, taking care of me. And I want to take care of 
their health right now.
    So my idea of the 21st century is not a Medicaid program that takes 
away the money that helps the poorest seniors to pay their part of the 
Medicare program. That's right; they get rid of it, $10 billion. We help 
the poorest old folks pay their copays. We help them pay the fees they 
owe under Medicare because they don't have any money. There's a lot of 
old folks out there. There's folks still living on $300 a month. This 
budget takes it all away. And there's been a study which estimates that 
it may take at least a million elderly people out of the Medicare 
program.
    I was in Texas the other night at a fundraiser, and a doctor came up 
to me. A doctor came up to me, and he said, ``You keep fighting on 
this.'' He said, ``I've been a doctor a long time. I remember when I did 
not have any older patients, before Medicare, before Medicaid, when I 
had no older patients, because older people were too proud to come to 
the doctor if they couldn't pay their bills. So a lot of them just 
stayed home and got sick and died.'' It is wrong. I will not put up with 
it. It is not right. And you shouldn't put up with it either. It is not 
right. It is not right.
    I want to tell you one more thing about this Medicaid plan. It says, 
``Oh, we're going to block-grant this to the States. We're going to get 
these terrible Federal rules and regulations out of the States' hair.'' 
I was a Governor for 12 years. I used to sing that song. [Laughter] I 
believe in that.
    Our administration--don't you let anybody tell you this is about 
States' rights--our administration has given more waivers, more freedom 
to get out from under Federal rules to State governments to experiment 
with moving people from welfare to work or serving more people, getting 
health insurance to more people, than the last two administrations 
combined. More in 2\1/2\ years than they did in 12 years. This is not 
about giving the States flexibility.
    But let me tell you the kind of things they want to let the States 
do and what they don't want to let the States do, and it will tell you 
what's really behind this. They've adopted their Medicaid programs. And 
among other things, they say that the State ought to get Medicaid block-
granted and they ought to have the right to get rid of the so-called 
spousal impoverishment rule. That's Government language. You know what 
that means? That means if an elderly couple lived to be 78 years old and 
they've been married 50 years and they're living on their Social 
Security and one of them gets so sick that he or she needs to go in the 
nursing

[[Page 1669]]

home, they want to give back to the State governments the right to tell 
the one that doesn't go to the nursing home, ``You want your wife or 
your husband to get any help? You've got to sell your car, sell your 
house, clean out your bank account, give it to us, and then we'll give 
you a little help. We don't know how you're going to live.'' I don't 
like that. That is not my idea of the 21st century I want to live in.
    But you know what? In the next breath, do you know what they did? 
They took away from the States--they say, ``We're going to give you lots 
of flexibility and a little less money. And we want you to run it 
however you want to, but, oh, oh, there's one thing you've been doing 
we're not going to let you do anymore. Right now you can bargain with 
the drug companies to get the lowest possible price for drugs for 
elderly people and little kids. And we're not going to let you do that 
anymore, because the drug companies don't want us to. So I'm sorry, you 
will have to do more with less money, but here's something you can't 
do.'' I don't know about you, but I don't get driving up the price of 
drugs and driving old folks into the poorhouse. I don't think that's 
right. That's not the America I want to live in. And I'm going to do 
everything I can to stop it. And I want you to help me.
    Now, I want to talk to you about education. Everybody's for 
education. You ask anybody in the Congress, are you for education? They 
say, absolutely. But you've always got to ask the next question; the 
first question is never enough. I'll tell you--you know, the best story 
I know about that--you know, there's a--this minister was sort of a--not 
a very effective minister, and people would go to sleep in his sermons. 
And he was overcome, and he prayed day-in and day-out for inspiration so 
he could finally give a barn-burning sermon and everybody would stand 
up. And their hearts would be purified, and their spiritual zeal would 
be great.
    So he worked so hard on this. And he showed up, and he gave the 
sermon of his life. And people were stomping and clapping and even in 
this staid church were shouting amen. And he got to the final line of 
his sermon; he said, ``I want everybody that wants to go to heaven to 
stand up.'' And the whole congregation stood up, except one woman that 
hadn't missed church in 45 years. And he was crestfallen. He said, 
``Sister Jones, don't you want to go to heaven when you die?'' And she 
leapt up, she said, ``I'm sorry, I thought you were trying to get up a 
load to go right now.'' [Laughter]
    So you always got to ask the next question. Everybody's for 
education. Our budget balances the budget and increases our investment 
in education by $40 billion--by $40 billion over 7 years--by making 
choices and setting priorities. Why? Because if 22 percent of the kids 
in this country are poor enough to be on Medicaid, they need a little 
extra help through Head Start to get off to a good start in school, 
because a lot of schools are too poor to have the class sizes they need 
or the computers we want them to have; because a lot of kids are in 
danger going to and from school, and we need to give schools more help 
to remain safe and drug-free; because we want to make it possible for 
everybody to go to college.
    When I ran for President, I came here and I made a specific 
commitment. I said if you will vote for me and get me elected, I'll do 
everything I can to cut the cost of college loans, to improve the 
repayment on college loans, and then to be tougher on people who 
default. We cut the default rate in half, but we also cut the cost of 
college loans. We made repayment easier. And to boot, we added more 
scholarships.
    And enrollment is going up, but nowhere near what we need. I want 
every middle class family in this country and every poor family in this 
country to be able to send their kids to college. And I don't want 
anybody ever from now on to have to walk away from a college education 
because of the cost. That's my idea of the 21st century.
    So when the Congress presents a budget that says, ``No, it's all 
right if several thousand more kids--20, 30, whatever it is--more kids 
don't get to go to Head Start and we have to remove them; it's all right 
if we don't help as many schools with safe and drug-free programs as we 
were; it's all right if a whole lot of schools now can't use that money 
for their poor kids for the smaller classes and the computers; it's okay 
if because the people that lost money on the direct loan program, the 
special interests, want their money back, so we're just going to kill 
this program that the Government's running that's got lower cost college 
loans and better repayment terms. We're going to get rid of that, and to 
boot, we'll get rid of somewhere between 150,000 and 380,000 
scholarships.'' I don't know about you folks, that is not the kind of 
America

[[Page 1670]]

I want for the 21st century. And I'm going to do everything I can to 
stop it. It is wrong. And it's bad for our economy. It doesn't make 
sense.
    And we're getting a little closer to home now. You say to people, 
are you for family values? Why, of course we are. Who could be against 
it? Most of those who were there last time--they're in the majority 
now--when we asked them to stand up for family values by adopting the 
family and medical leave law, they said no. And we said yes. And there 
are families that are stronger today because of the family and medical 
leave law because they don't lose their jobs when there's a kid sick or 
a parent dying or one of them gets sick. It's a better country. It's a 
stronger country. And it's a stronger economy because of that.
    So what do we mean? Well, family values to me means safe streets, a 
clean environment, economic opportunity, fair taxes, secure pensions; 
let's just start there. Well, at least one House of Congress wants to 
eliminate our program to put 100,000 police on the street and to give 
communities--the only block grant they don't like is the one we passed 
to give communities the power to do what they can to prevent crime, to 
give our children something to say yes to instead of something to say no 
to, the one all the mayors love, all the Governors love, everybody 
thinks is great--they don't like that. Well, making us less safe is not 
my idea of family values.
    Then they want to put 315 of our national parks and other national 
facilities up for sale, including Franklin Roosevelt's home where I was 
today. I know you find some of this unbelievable, but it's true. That's 
on the list. They have proposed to do all kinds of things to make it 
harder to preserve clean air, clean water, safe food. That's not my idea 
of family values. In economic opportunity, there's not a company in 
America that if they could avoid it in 1995 would cut research, 
technology, or training. But this budget cuts research, technology, and 
training. That's not my idea of how to build strong families. And worst 
of all, there's $148 billion of hidden taxes and fees on working 
families while they propose to give people in my income group a tax cut. 
And that's not my idea of the kind of 21st century I want to live in.
    Now, I want you to listen to this. The Wall Street Journal--hardly 
an arm of the Democratic Party--[laughter]--reported the other day that 
if this budget passes with all of the taxes in it and all the tax cuts 
in it, with all the tax cuts in it the group of Americans as a group who 
make less than $30,000 a year, which is 51 percent f the American 
people, will have greater tax hikes than tax cuts. I get a tax cut, and 
we're going to soak people like that?
    You know, in 1993, one of the best things about our economic program 
was that we doubled the family tax credit, the earned-income tax credit, 
which had bipartisan support, signed into law by Gerald Ford, supported 
by Ronald Reagan, increased by George Bush, and we doubled it. Why? 
Because I wanted to be able to say to the American people, ``Look, 
you've got to choose work and family over welfare and dependence. And 
anybody who'll work 40 hours a week with children in the house--I don't 
care how low their pay is--we will not tax them into poverty. We will 
use the tax system to lift them out of poverty.'' That is the principle. 
That is the principle. And it's the right thing to do.
    I mean, I thought the game plan was we were supposed to be growing 
the middle class and shrinking the under class. They want to cut this by 
more than I increased it. They want to kick people out of the middle 
class and then pull the ladder up so poor people can't work their way 
into it. You want to get more people on welfare? Raise taxes on people 
with two kids making $11,000, $12,000 a year, and they will say, no 
thank you. This does not make sense. It violates our values. It violates 
our interest. It is bad for the economy. It is wrong for America. And if 
I can stop it with a veto pen or with my voice or whatever it takes, I 
am going to do everything I can to stop it. And I want you to help me, 
too.
    Audience members. Veto! Veto! Veto!
    The President. This is the last issue I want you to focus on. These 
are great hits. I want you to remember this. I want you to go home, I 
want you to talk to friends in the workplace, and I want you to talk to 
friends who aren't in your union. I want you to talk to people at 
church, at the bowling alley, at the ball park, wherever two or more are 
gathered. I want you to talk to people. I want people to know about 
this. This is their country, ju st like it's your country. This is not 
about me or the Republicans in Congress. It's about the future of the 
American family, the future of the American workplace, the future of the 
United States. And so I want you to listen to this. This is the greatest 
last hit.

[[Page 1671]]

    During the 1980's, when--you know, that ``everything goes'' decade 
where everything was going to trickle down to ordinary people--thousands 
and thousands of corporations transferred some $20 billion out of their 
employees' pension funds for buyouts and other purposes. An awful lot of 
workers lost their life savings. Last December, one of the proudest 
things I was able to do in the last Congress, even after the November 
election, the Congress passed a bill that saved 8\1/2\ million American 
pensions and stabilized 40 million others that were in danger of being 
in trouble. I don't know what the retirement income of 48\1/2\ million 
Americans is worth to the strength, the stability of America; to our 
pro-family, pro-work values; to our economic future, but I think it's 
worth an awful lot.
    Now, as if we haven't learned anything from the eighties and didn't 
have to do that, this Republican budget would allow companies to 
withdraw money from their workers' pension funds to use it for whatever 
reason they want.
    Audience members. No-o-o!
    The President. For whatever reason they want, corporate buyouts, 
bonuses, any reason.
    Now, folks, we just had to fix this last year. You know, I don't 
remember as well as I used to; my circuits are kind of jammed. But I can 
at least remember what I did last year. [Laughter] That is not my idea 
of what I want America to look like in the 21st century, taking good 
middle class people that worked hard all their lives, paid into their 
pension, showed up at work, did everything they were supposed to, and, 
``Oh, I'm sorry, your pension is gone.'' One of two things is going to 
happen. Either the Government will have to bail it out again, in which 
case the deficit reduction won't take place. Or we'll throw them into 
the street, and we'll one more time shrink the middle class and grow the 
under class. Say no to that. Say no to looting the pension funds. Say 
no. It's wrong. It's wrong.
    And look, the thing that bothers me about this is that this budget 
would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory This country is in better 
shape than it was 2\1/2\ years ago. We're moving in the right direction. 
What we need to do is build on what we've done, not tear it down. We 
need to build on middle class economics. We need to build on an economy 
that has the largest number of new small businesses in history. We need 
to build on the best time for education in the last 30 years, in the 
last Congress. We need to build on medical reforms that are slowing the 
rate of medical inflation without stripping elderly people of the 
security and dignity of knowing that their health care is there. We do 
not need to tear it down. We need to prove we can make the environment 
and the economy go together, not walk away from our common 
responsibilities.
    Folks, this is about more, even more, than all the things that we 
are concerned about that directly affect any of us individually. This is 
about what kind of country we're going to be. This is about what kind of 
people we're going to be. It's about whether we're going to live by the 
values we all say we believe in. It's about whether the American dream 
is going to be alive in the 21st century. And what we really have to do 
is to do what that sign says. If we'll just stand up for America's 
working families, if we'll just do what we know is right, if we'll use 
every tool at our command--I will use the tools at my command, but I 
want you to go home, and I want you to talk to people in the streets and 
say we're moving this country. This country is going into the 21st 
century. Don't let these people take us back. If it takes a veto, you'll 
have it. But I need you in the streets standing up for America's future.
    God bless you, and thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 5:35 p.m. in the Imperial Ballroom at the 
Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers. In his remarks, he referred to Tom 
Donahue, president, AFL-CIO, and Owen Bieber, former president, United 
Auto Workers.