[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.