    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [February 9, 1996]
    [Pages 193-199]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Louisiana Economic Development Brunch
    February 9, 1996

        The President. Thank you so much. Senator Johnston, I appreciate
    that, especially since you don't have to run for reelection, that you
    said such a nice thing. [Laughter] Senator Johnston,

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    Senator Breaux, Congressman Hayes, Chairman Livingston--that's a nice
    tie for you. You're going to change your whole image up here. [Laughter]
    Thank you. Lieutenant Governor Blanco, ladies and gentlemen.
        John Breaux told me I should come to this event. He said, ``This is
    the largest number of people in my State that you will ever see at one
    time when they're all in a good humor.'' [Laughter]
        I'm really going to miss Bennett Johnston in the Senate. I always
    find it so helpful to have him there in getting my budgets passed. All I
    had to do was give 40 percent of all the discretionary money to
    Louisiana and--[laughter]--things went right through. It was easy.
        The person in this audience that I really envy today is Buddy Leach.
    I'm a President; he's a king. [Laughter] I have to run for office; he
    doesn't have to get elected anymore. [Laughter] I have to persuade;
    everybody has to agree with him. [Laughter] Do you want to switch jobs?
    [Laughter]
        Let me say to all of you--I want to, first of all, just kind of take
    my hat off to the State of Louisiana for coming up here and doing this
    event every year and for the level of cooperation that you have
    throughout your State in trying to develop your economy. I know we've
    got people here from all over the State, from all the communities, and I
    really think it's a good thing to do.
        I guess if I had to say the thing that surprised me most about
    becoming President when I was elected, as compared with being Governor
    of your neighbor to the north, it is that the atmosphere is much more
    partisan than I expected it to be and that the way we were presented to
    the rest of the country was even more partisan than we are, the way that
    the story sort of spins out across the country. And I went home after
    I'd been President about 4 months, and we were sitting around with a
    bunch of my friends, and I said, ``Shoot, if all I knew about me was
    what I saw on the evening news, I wouldn't be for me either.''
    [Laughter]
        And we have tried to sort of move away from that. Mr. Livingston and
    I tried. We played golf one day, and the course was so hard it took us 6
    hours to finish the round. But by the end of it, I completely lost any
    sense of partisan difference.
        I want to say to you that yesterday we did something here that, to
    me, is the embodiment of what we ought to be doing as we look toward the
    future. I signed the telecommunications bill into law yesterday, a bill
    that was passed almost unanimously with overwhelming bipartisan support,
    the first significant reform of our communications laws in over six
    decades.
        Everyone concedes that it will create tens of thousands of high-wage
    jobs, perhaps hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs for America; that
    it will give vast new opportunities to ordinary citizens for
    communications, for information, for learning, and for entertainment. It
    also embodies some of our most sacred values. The Congress required that
    all new television sets, after a couple of years, carry with it a V-chip
    so that parents will have more control over the content of the programs
    that their children watch, so you can get more information, but you can
    also filter it out for a change. And we're using technology not just to
    rush society ahead but to give basic fundamental control back to
    citizens and families.
        And it was all done not only in a bipartisan fashion, but taking all
    these incredibly powerful and diverse interests--and they are powerful
    and very diverse--that have a stake in how this thing is going to unfold
    and somehow reconciling them.
        And I just--I want to applaud the Congress for what they did and the
    way they did it and the way they worked with me, and it is the way we
    ought to conduct our business, especially now--especially now, because
    when times are changing profoundly--and make no mistake about it, my
    fellow Americans, times are changing now as profoundly as they have in
    this country in a hundred years. The time through which we are living is
    most nearly parallel, in my belief, to the time in our history a hundred
    years ago when we moved from being a rural, agricultural country to an
    urban, industrial country.
        Now we're moving into an economy dominated by information and
    technology and dominated by global markets and a global village in which
    urbanization will still be important because people will want to live
    next to each other and work together but where people, no matter where
    they live, will be able to do almost any kind of work within a fairly
    short time, face to face with others, through the communications
    revolution. And whenever you have a change of time like that, there is a
    great uprooting, so that a whole lot of people do terrifically well and
    other people are dislocated. And if you're

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    not careful, the society, its values, its institutions, get dislocated.
    It's very important to see everything we do up here in that context.
        What are the fundamental changes we're going through? First of all,
    the nature of work itself is changing; there is more mind and less
    muscle in work. You go in any new factory in Louisiana, it wouldn't be
    surprising to see a woman on the factory floor working a computer, doing
    work that 10 years ago was done by 10 big, burly people. Even in
    manufacturing you see more and more work being done by fewer and fewer
    people--more mind, less muscle.
        What else is going on? The work organizations are changing. They're
    flatter, they're less bureaucratic, you don't need as many people in
    middle management passing information up and orders down. That's very
    good, unless you're one of the middle managers that isn't needed
    anymore. I want to say more about that in a minute. So that in every
    year--for 15 years now, in every year the Fortune 500 has reduced its
    total employment in America--every year.
        For the last 3 years, in every year we have set a new record in the
    number of new small businesses being formed. In the last year jobs
    created by businesses owned by women only created more jobs than the
    Fortune 500 laid off. So there is a change in the nature of work
    organizations.
        And finally, there is a change in the nature of our markets, both
    our financial markets where money can move across the globe in a split
    second, and we sell goods and services in the global market, which you
    in Louisiana know very well because of the large size of your port at
    New Orleans and because of the nature of your economic base there. And
    all that means that there are a lot of good things happening but a lot
    of dislocation. And that's how we need to see what our work is up here.
        Our job up here now is to create opportunities for all Americans to
    benefit in this economy, to give people the tools they need to make the
    most of their own lives and to work together to pull this country
    together instead of seeing it split apart, which means that the truth is
    that the nature of the challenges facing America today call on us to
    reach a new consensus, but the easy thing is, since we're all divided
    anyway because all this stuff is up in the air, the easy thing is to do
    the wrong thing, which is to find new ways to divide the American people
    for short-term political advantage. It may be good politics, but it's
    bad for the country, especially now.
        And I want to say a word--I want to thank, again, Senator Johnston;
    he's leaving, and I'm going to miss him. But I also want to thank my
    good friend Senator Breaux for trying to fashion this kind of consensus
    in the Congress as we deal with this budget issue.
        This country needs to balance the budget. We need a balanced budget
    plan. It would be good for the country for two reasons: It would give us
    a sense of discipline up here. You would have a sense that we're getting
    our house in order. We're moving away from the 1980's, which is the
    first time in our history we ever ran a large, persistent, permanent
    structural deficit. We've cut the deficit in half in 3 years. We need to
    finish the job. We also need to do it because it will keep the economic
    recovery going. It will inspire consumer confidence. It will lower
    interest rates. It will increase investment. We need to do this.
        The good news is, we have identified in common to the President's
    plan, the Republican majority's congressional plan, and all of the
    various Democratic options that have been offered--we have now in common
    over $700 billion in budget savings over the next 7 years, more than
    enough to balance the budget and continue our commitments to our
    parents, to our children, to those with disabilities, to our
    environment, to our investments in education. And we should do it. I
    believe we will do it. I believe we will do it.
        When Mr. Livingston was good enough to go to Bosnia with me a few
    weeks ago, we were talking about it, and I believe there will be--this
    is not the conventional wisdom at the moment, but I predict to you that
    there will be a coming together in the Congress and in the White House,
    and that we will do this. It is the right thing to do for America, and I
    hope you will support it.
        And I think you have to ask yourself, well, then what? You still
    have to come up here every year; you still have to keep working to
    develop Louisiana's economy. How are we going to open the opportunities
    of this new age to all of our people? How are we going to bring the
    American people together around our basic values? How are we going to
    continue to lead the world as a source of peace and freedom?
        Let me just mention--if you look at where we are, to try to
    illustrate the general points

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    I made, this country in the last 3 years has produced almost 8 million
    new jobs, a record number of new small businesses. You know, there's
    been a huge increase in the stock market, more than a third; it's way
    over 5,000 now. We've got a 15-year high in homeownership, a 27-year low
    in the combined rates of unemployment and inflation, as Mickey Kantor
    told you earlier, an all-time high in American trade. For those of us
    from farming States, we've got $7 soybeans, wheat is over $5, and corn
    is through the roof, and we think that's pretty good. And a lot of it is
    bad weather, but an awful lot of it is we're selling it all over the
    world. This is a good thing.
        Now, if I had told you 3 years ago these things could happen and
    more than half the American people still wouldn't get a raise, you'd
    have a hard time believing that. But that's true; that's the other side
    of this change. With low inflation, high productivity, intense
    competition, and a lot of people not well-positioned for a world where
    the changing nature of work and the changing nature of work
    organizations is creating winners and losers, we've got to worry about
    those folks.
        Then you've got a lot of people who are my age--I got a letter just
    the other day from a guy I grew up with who finally got another job
    after 9 months of looking--50-year-old white male, engineer, fixing to
    send three kids to college, and he lost a job with a Fortune 500 company
    because all of a sudden he wasn't needed anymore. Their stock price went
    up, but his life stock went down. So we have to worry about that.
        And if you look at our social problems, the news is good. The crime
    rate is going down. The welfare, the food stamps, the poverty rate, the
    teen pregnancy rate, even the divorce rate, they've all gone down for
    the last 2 years. American people are getting their act together. That's
    the good news. The bad news is, they're still way too high.
        And they will be--if you just take crime for an example, they will
    be too high until--the test for you--there will never be a time when
    there's no crime and violence. The test for you should be, the crime
    rate will be low enough when crime is the exception rather than the rule
    in your community again. When people are surprised when something bad
    happens, then the crime rate is about as low as it can get. And that
    ought to be your test. And until it is the exception and not the rule
    again, we should keep working on it.
        So if you look at it in that context, I believe there are seven
    things that we ought to be working on, not the Federal Government, we
    together. One is the most important job in this country is still to
    raise good children and support families. That's what we did with the
    Family and Medical Leave Act. That's what I hope we will do with any tax
    relief we give coming out of this budget battle. That's what I thought
    we were doing when we required the V-chip in the telecommunications
    bill, so parents can choose for themselves what their children are
    exposed to. We should be supporting good childhoods and stronger
    families.
        The second thing we should be doing is recognizing that in a world
    where work is more mind and less muscle, you have got to have more
    education, and it's got to be better. And we all have to work on it.
    That's why I am doing my part to see that the Federal Government is a
    partner in making sure that by the end of this decade every classroom
    and every library in America is hooked up to the Internet with good
    computer equipment and good software, skilled teachers, the kind of
    things we need to really make this work.
        The third thing we have to do is to deal with this economic
    insecurity. If we're going to have work organizations changing, if
    people aren't going to be able to rely on the company the way they used
    to be able to, what do people need to be secure without wrecking the
    dynamism of this economy, whether it's in Louisiana or Seattle,
    Washington, or New York City? What do they need? How can we give
    families security without wrecking the dynamism?
        Well, people have to have access to lifetime education and training.
    They have to have at least access to affordable health care. If the
    decision has been made that we will continue to be the only country in
    the world with a rich economy that can't figure out how to give every
    family under 65 health insurance, at least we ought to be smart enough
    to figure out how to give every family access to affordable health
    insurance that they don't lose.
        And there is a bill in the United States Senate right now with 45
    cosponsors that's been passed out of its committee unanimously,
    sponsored by Senator Kassebaum of Kansas and Senator Kennedy, which
    would basically say you won't lose your job--you won't lose your health
    insurance

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    if you change jobs or if somebody in your family gets sick. Now, that
    may seem elemental, but millions of people lose their health insurance
    arising out of those two conditions. And I hope very much that the
    Senate will pass it and send it on to the House. It is a good thing. The
    national chamber of commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers
    have endorsed it. It has broad bipartisan and broad-based economic
    support.
        The third thing we've got to do is to figure out what to do about
    people who don't have pensions anymore. One of the most important things
    that all sides have agreed to in this budget debate is a minor provision
    which would make it much easier for small-business people and self-
    employed people to take out pension plans for themselves and their
    employees. It doesn't cost a lot of money. It was one of the top three
    priorities of the White House Conference on Small Business, and we ought
    to do that. So we have to find a way to give people more economic
    security. We'll do our part, but you have to do yours. We've got to keep
    the economy growing in order for these other things to make sense.
        The next thing we have to do, as I said, is to continue the fight
    against crime and violence, drugs and gangs. I am proud of the fact that
    the crime rate has gone down. In my hometown of Little Rock, we had the
    biggest drop in years and years last year. New York had the lowest crime
    they've had in years and the biggest drop they've had in 25 years in
    crime. New Orleans had a 20 percent drop in the murder rate last year,
    in the first 6 months of '95. I haven't seen the last 6 months'
    statistics yet. But you see this going everywhere. We know what works.
    We know that if you put more community police and they work with their
    neighbors and you put them on the street and they're walking the blocks
    and they know the school kids, we know you can do something about that.
        Last weekend I was in Manchester, New Hampshire, where the chief of
    police and a beat policeman stood there with community leaders and said,
    ``We have taken our neighborhoods back. The crime rate is down. The
    drugs are gone. The gangs are gone. People can safely walk the streets
    at night. The police know the names of the children in the schoolyard.
    This is our town again.'' That is the song I want to hear every American
    singing. And they said they were able to do it because the United States
    Government and the crime bill of 1994 gave them more police officers and
    the resources they need to do that. We didn't tell them how to do it,
    but we said, ``Here is a national problem, and we're going to help
    you.'' That's the sort of thing we need to do.
        And in Louisiana and Arkansas, let me say, the next big challenge we
    have is we have got to continue to fight these environmental battles in
    a way that grows the economy. There is this idea still abroad in the
    land that we have to accept some environmental degradation in order to
    grow the economy. That cannot be the case. If you look--one of the major
    news magazines had a big cover story a couple of weeks ago saying that
    this horrible winter we've just gone through, which has paralyzed one-
    third of our economy for nearly 2 weeks, was the direct result of global
    warming. Last year was the hottest year on record ever. This is not some
    conspiracy. Guys won the Nobel Prize for proving how it is working.
        I met with the--in the interest of Senator Johnston, I met--he cares
    a lot about our relationship with China--I met with the President of
    China in New York a few months ago, and we were talking about our
    differences. And I said, ``You think that I'm really worried about your
    politics?'' I said, ``You know what the biggest threat to our security
    is that you present?'' I said, ``You got 1.2 billion people, and you all
    want your folks to be as rich as Americans, and so do I. But if you get
    rich in the same way we do and every one of you drives a car, you're
    going to burn up the atmosphere. You won't be able to breathe, and
    that's a threat to our common security.'' And he laughed, and he said,
    ``You might be right.'' That's why we're working with Detroit to get a
    clean car, because I think it's important.
        So I say to all of you, we can find ways to nurture the chemical
    industry, nurture the energy industry, nurture these industries in a way
    that creates more economic opportunity by figuring out how to use energy
    in a way that is good for the environment.
        Let me say two other things very briefly, and some of you will agree
    with this, at least on the trade message, but one of my biggest
    challenges as President is convincing the American people that all these
    changes we're going through require us to be more involved with the rest
    of the world, not less. And now that

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    I've been here awhile, and we've been able to do some things in foreign
    policy, and people see that there are no Russian missiles pointed at our
    children for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, and we've
    got continued progress on that front and others, I get the feeling
    sometimes when I make a decision like Bosnia, the American people say
    something like, ``Well, okay, that's your job. We hired you to make it.
    I wish you wouldn't fool with it, but if you're going to do it, we'll
    let you do it. But we're not very interested in that.'' Let me just say
    to all of you, if you could see this from my perspective, you would see
    that all the things we hope to gain from trade, for example, would be
    impossible if we were to withdraw from the world in other ways.
        Let me just give you a few examples. We know that our safest big
    market for the future is everything south of New Orleans, is in Latin
    America. There will be a billion people there soon. It's the second
    fastest growing area of the world, next to Asia. Every nation but one is
    governed by an elected--democratically elected leader. Now, if we want
    them to buy our products and we want to have good relationships with
    them and we want them to try to help us stop the drug problem, we have
    to be a good neighbor.
        You know that we have arrested in the last 2 years seven of the
    eight top leaders of the Cali drug cartel in Colombia. That's something
    we can be proud of, but I didn't have to put my life on the line to do
    it. The people in Colombia that helped us, they risked their lives to do
    it. You can't tell them to do that and don't put drugs in the veins of
    America's kids and not be a good partner. You can't do it.
        We can't ask Pakistan and other countries to go arrest suspected
    terrorists when people come into this country and blow up buildings and
    kill innocent Americans--and I want to put them in jail--if we're not
    willing to be good partners with them in other ways and be engaged with
    them and help them to realize their dreams.
        A lot of people thought that this Haiti thing was something we
    shouldn't be involved in. I heard a lot of people say that. Well, 2 days
    ago they had the first democratic transfer of power in the 193-year
    history of Haiti, and there are no illegal immigrants, full of boats,
    besieging the shores of the United States, because we were involved.
        So I say to you, this matters. If you want the Europeans, which will
    soon be the biggest economy in the world collectively, if they all
    unify, to open their doors to our products more instead of become more
    protectionist, which is a big deal for farmers and a big deal for high-
    tech telecommunications people, then we must be prepared to be their
    partners in places like Bosnia.
        So I ask you to go home and talk to your friends and neighbors about
    this. If we're going to have all-time high trade figures, if you want 4
    or 5 more years where exports grow faster than imports, the United
    States cannot walk away from the fact that we are the only superpower in
    the world and people look to us to be leaders for peace and freedom.
        The last thing I want to say is, we have big decisions to make about
    what kind of Government we're going to have in Washington. What are we
    supposed to do? What are you supposed to do in Louisiana? What should be
    done in the private sector? And I just want you to know that from my
    perspective, that the old debates are no good anymore. This is not about
    big Government and small Government. This Government here in
    Washington--you're sitting in the Commerce Department at a time when
    your Federal Government is the smallest it's been since 1965. Next year,
    it will be--by the end of this year, it will be the smallest it's been
    since 1962, and it's going to get smaller still. Two hundred and five
    fewer thousand--205,000 fewer people work here than they did the day I
    showed up. The big Government issue is not there.
        It's not a question about Government versus the marketplace. We
    needed a Government action, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, to
    unleash the power of the marketplace. The issue is whether we're going
    to do this together.
        Now we're trying to give you better Government here, not just
    smaller but better. The SBA has doubled its loans and cut its budget.
    Last year--I'm really proud of this--in Forbes or Fortune, one of those
    business magazines--depending on the outcome of these primaries, I'll
    have to figure out which one--[laughter]--but anyway, one of those
    business magazines gives awards every year to the best performance by a
    business organization in a lot of categories, and one of them is
    telephone service to consumers. And this year, the nominees were Federal
    Express, Southwest Airlines, L.L. Bean, pretty

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    distinguished group. Do you know who won? The Social Security
    Administration--not by a Government determination, by a business
    magazine. I'm proud of that.
        So we're trying to give you that. But let me just say, you have to
    decide, because you will determine the tenor of this election and more
    importantly, you will determine where we're going in the future, whether
    you believe what works to bring you here when you all get together and
    work together is what should work in the country. This is not big
    Government versus small Government anymore. It is not the Government
    versus the private sector anymore. This is about whether we are going to
    work together to solve our problems or whether we are going to continue
    to treat politics like a sport which makes the people more and more
    cynical and more and more divided. Those are luxuries we cannot afford.
        The best days of this country are still ahead of us if we are
    willing to meet our challenges and if we're willing to meet them
    together. We are going through a period of great change which will give
    us the greatest age of possibility the American children have ever
    known. But we have to do it. And if we do our job up here in the way
    that you are doing your job where you live by working together, this
    country is going to be in great shape for the future.
        Thank you very much.
        Senator J. Bennett Johnston. We want to make the President an
    honorary Louisianian so he can properly celebrate Mardi Gras, so I'm
    going to give him my beads which I wear every day. [Laughter]
        The President. When I am no longer President--and I have been making
    this little list of all of all the things I wanted to do in my life I
    never got around to doing, and if God leaves me healthy and I can do
    it--when I'm taking time off of paying my legal bills--[laughter]--I've
    got this list of things I want to do. And one of the things I want to do
    is go to the Mardi Gras and play my saxophone with a group like that. If
    I live long enough, I'll wear these beads.
        Thank you. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:10 p.m. in the auditorium at the
    Department of Commerce. In his remarks, he referred to Lt. Gov. Kathleen
    Blanco of Louisiana and Claude (Buddy) Leach, king of Washington Mardi
    Gras.