[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
[February 10, 1996]
[Pages 215-225]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Community in Mason City, Iowa
February 10, 1996

    The President. Thank you very much. Thank you for that wonderful, 
wonderful welcome. I do feel that I have a home in the heartland, and if 
I hadn't felt it before I got here tonight, I sure do now. I thank you 
for your warmth and your enthusiasm.
    Thank you, Dr. Buettner. Thank you, Deo Koenigs. Thank you, Ruth 
Harkin, for doing such a wonderful job in helping to create 
opportunities for our businesses and for our working people through the 
Overseas Private Investment Corperation. And thank you, Senator Tom 
Harkin, for continuing to have a heart and continuing to have the 
stomach and the will to stand up and fight for the interests of ordinary 
Americans when so many others have backed away.
    I have had a wonderful time here already. I landed the airplane just 
in time to catch the snow and the wind coming back. [Laughter] 
Impeccable timing. And then I went over to Clear Lake to the farm co-op. 
And we had a wonderful--anybody here? [Applause] And I had a

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great time there with all the folks who worked there. We brought in a 
truckload of corn, and I said to myself, if corn stays above $3, I ought 
to do all right in Iowa.
    And believe it or not, there were even rail cars there to take it 
away. I saw that. [Laughter]
    Audience member. [Inaudible] [Laughter]
    The President. Well, we're working on it. [Laughter] And then, of 
course, I came here. And I've been hearing all about the advertising in 
Iowa, all these ads, you know. You know. [Laughter] So I want you to 
know I listen to the ads, and I want to show you how in touch I am with 
where I am tonight based on advertising. Of all the places I could have 
been tonight, I chose NIACC first. [Applause] Thank you. Thank you.
    Let me say that it is true I always feel at home in Iowa. I'm always 
glad to be back here. We have had the opportunity, Hillary and I and our 
administration officials, to be here many times. I do think it's fitting 
that I'm here tonight, just as it was fitting that a major portion of 
our first bus tour went through Iowa. I still have vivid memories of the 
people I met along the way. I still have rich recollections of the 
conversations I had with elected officials, like your agriculture 
secretary, and conversations I had with people I just stopped the bus 
alongside of the road and got off the bus and spoke with. And I've 
always tried, in the last 3 years, to get up every day and go to work 
and try to work for you and people like you all over this country.
    So before I say anything else, I want to just thank you for the 
opportunity that I have had to serve as your President for the last 3 
years. I also want to say that being here at this North Iowa Area 
Community College is a fitting place for this event tonight because, as 
you will see as I get into my remarks, the community college in some 
ways is a symbol for what I think we ought to be doing in America. It is 
community-based, nonbureaucratic, sensitive to the needs of its 
customers, the students. It's a place where everybody can come. It's 
changing all the time as the economy changes and as the needs of the 
community and the students change. And it doesn't run on hot air and 
rhetoric; it runs on partnership, cooperation, people reaching across 
the lines that divide them in a society to come together, to build a 
community institution that will take not only the student but the 
community into the future.
    That is what we need to do as a country. That is the central message 
I bring to you tonight. We have got to go forward together. We've got to 
put behind us the petty divisions and the easy cheap shots and the wedge 
issues that tear the heart out of American civic life, and get back 
together to face the challenges we have and to make the future what it 
ought to be for all the American people.
    All of you know that Iowa has an extra responsibility in the 
political process. In an age where national politics tends to be 
dominated more and more by glib sound bites, people are expected to come 
to Iowa to look at their constituents face to face, to listen to their 
concerns and listen to their babies cry. [Laughter] We're not expected 
to have these set, pat, controlled events and just communicate with 
folks through paid ads. And I like it.
    And I hope every one of you will take the time to show up on caucus 
night and make your voices heard. Even if I don't have a named opponent, 
I hope you'll show up for me. For another reason--thanks to the 
wonderful man who introduced me, it was impossible for me to get any 
votes in Iowa 4 years ago in the caucus. And I would hate to retire from 
politics never having done well in the Iowa caucuses. [Laughter] So, for 
purely selfish reasons, I hope you will go on Monday night.
    I want to talk to you tonight about the challenges facing our 
country from the perspective of rural communities. I'm fairly sure that 
I am the last American President who will ever be elected who once lived 
in a home in the country without indoor plumbing. I know how far this 
country has come in the last 50 years. I'm not ashamed of it, and I 
survived it, and it makes a good story now, especially when I tell wide-
eyed kids about the snakes that used to get in the outhouse. [Laughter] 
But--oh, there was somebody getting the chills over there. [Laughter]
    I have seen what this country can do in rural America when we pull 
together and work together. Just before I came here--keep in mind, I 
lived when I was a young man for a year or so, maybe nearly 2, in a home 
in the country that didn't have indoor plumbing. I just came from a 
demonstration at this community college of a computer program using 
satellite information that tells farmers the difference in their soil 
composition, their average yield, and gives them all kinds of 
information that they can ac-


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cess that they never could have gotten before. That is how far we have 
come in 50 years.
    And what I want to say to you tonight is that our real obligation to 
work together is to find a way to take these phenomenal changes that are 
going on now, the biggest in 100 years--in the way we work, in the way 
our workplace is organized and the way we communicate with one another, 
in the markets to which we sell, and in the way, therefore, we relate to 
each other--the biggest changes in 100 years. The challenge for our 
country is to harness those things in a way that opens opportunity for 
all Americans and does it consistent with the values of rural America, 
with family and work and community. I believe we can do it.
    We live in an age of incredible possibility. It is literally true 
that the young people here in this room tonight will have available to 
them more options for living out their dreams than any generation of 
people who have ever lived on the face of the Earth. It is literally 
true, as all of you know, that technology and information, the digital 
chip is transforming everything, including agriculture, as I just said. 
It is also true that this opportunity also carries with it, as every 
change does, a lot of challenge.
    If you go back in history to the last period that was more or less 
like this, you have to go back 100 years to the time when most Americans 
stopped living in the country and started living in towns and cities, 
and farmers got productive enough and factories became available enough 
that most people stopped working on the farm and began to work in 
factories or in activities that supported them. You have to go back that 
far to see a change this great. And in many ways, this will be greater. 
But if you study the history of that era you will see the same thing 
happen then that's happening now: enormous opportunities opening up for 
people; vast fortunes being made by people who had nothing; but a great 
uprooting that put new pressures on families, on communities, and called 
into question whether the American dream could really be available to 
everybody who was willing to work for it.
    And if you fast-forward that to today, you see what this election 
should really be all about. It shouldn't be about all the process and 
political things people talk about. It ought to be about you, your 
families, your work, your community, and your future. That's what it 
ought to be about.
    Now, let's just look at for a moment where we are and what's good 
and what's still to be done. In a sentence I would tell you that we're 
better off as a nation than we were 3 years ago, but we've still got 
some strong challenges we have to face. Begin with the economy. Now we 
have the lowest unemployment and inflation rates combined we've had in 
27 years. We have almost 8 million new jobs. Here in Iowa, unemployment 
has dropped to 3.2 percent. Across our country, homeownership is at a 
15-year high. Exports of our products and services are at an all-time 
high. Agricultural exports hit record levels in 1995, over $54 billion, 
$10 billion more than when I took office. We still need to do better for 
the livestock industry, as the people in my home State always remind me. 
But in agriculture you know we have a huge positive trade balance. And 
that's one of the reasons for the corn and the wheat and the soybean 
prices that our farmers are enjoying today.
    Now, that's the good news. But we also know that in this remarkable 
economy that for 3 years in a row has produced a record number of new 
small businesses starting up and a record number of self-made 
millionaires--not people that had it given to them, people that went out 
and by their wits and hard work and made it themselves--most Americans 
have not gotten a raise. Most Americans, when you look at the purchasing 
power of their income, are working for about what they were 10, 15, 18 
years ago. And many Americans have been victims, if you will, of this 
changing economy because they worked for big companies that downsized or 
that were bought out or whatever. Many Americans have been on the 
receiving end of a great company announcing they're going to lay 10,000 
people off. Their stock price goes up, but the price of dignity and the 
price of supporting one's children, if you happen to be one of those 
10,000, goes down.
    So we have to think about how can we take all of this dynamism, this 
wonderful, churning age of possibility, and make it available again to 
every American who's willing to work for it? That's our first challenge.
    If you look at our role in the world, we see America, a positive 
force for peace and freedom from Haiti to Northern Ireland, to the 
Middle East, to Bosnia, all over the world. We also know, from the 
terrible bombing in London yesterday to the assassination of the Israeli 
Prime

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Minister, to the terrorist acts from blowing up the World Trade Center 
to opening up that poison gas in Tokyo, this is still a dangerous world. 
And so we still have challenges we have to face. And much as we liked to 
say, ``Well, the cold war is over, and the Soviet Union is not 
threatening us anymore; we'd like to fold up our tent, come home, and 
just worry about what's in front of us,'' we can't do that either.
    And people in farming communities ought to know that better than 
anybody else. If you want to sell to the rest of the world, you have to 
be a good neighbor and a solid partner, and you've got to stand up for 
peace and freedom and try to remove the threats to decent people living 
good lives in every part of the world, because that affects us as well.
    If you look at the most important thing to me, how are we doing in 
dealing with all this change in preserving and reinforcing our basic 
values, advancing the cause of family and work, of opportunity and 
responsibility, of people working together, I think you'd have to say 
the news is encouraging. In the country as a whole for 3 years, the 
crime rate is down; the welfare rolls are down; the poverty rolls are 
down; the teen pregnancy rate is down. That is good news.
    But if you flip it over, you'd have to say, ``Are you satisfied with 
any of those conditions?'' And to be honest, the answer is no. So it's 
good that we're coming together again around our basic values. It's good 
that we're kind of getting our act together as a country. But we have 
work to do. And I'll just give you one example.
    We all know there will always be crime in any society. You can't 
transform human nature. There will always be some level of violence. So 
people often ask me, ``Mr. President, how would you declare success in 
the war on crime?'' And I have a simple, one-sentence answer: When 
people like you hear about a crime and you're surprised again, when 
crime is the exception rather than the rule again. And it can be in 
America, and we ought to keep working at it until that's exactly what 
happens.
    Obviously, if the nature of work changes, the nature of the 
workplace changes, the nature of communications changes, and the nature 
of markets that we sell our goods and services change, it's going to 
change your life, and it's got to change Government. So how should you 
change, and what should you do, and what should you expect your 
President to do for the next 4 years?
    You have to begin by asking, what kind of country do you want to 
live in? What is your vision of what America should be? My vision is of 
a country where every person, without regard to their station in life or 
where they live, has a chance to have the American dream if they are 
willing to work for it and do what it takes to achieve it. Every person 
has a chance. My vision is of a country where people work together in 
communities, as they do in community colleges, to help each other make 
the most of their own lives and seize their opportunities and face their 
challenges; where we are not constantly looking for ways to look down on 
our neighbors and be divided from them, but we define objectives we can 
reach in common and, in a spirit of honorable compromise that has kept 
this country going for nearly 220 years, we get after working together 
to make America a better place, community by community. That is my 
vision.
    If you say to me, ``Well, what does that mean about the Government, 
Mr. President?'' it would be the following: Government's got to be like 
all these other organizations. We don't need a big, centralized, top-
down bureaucracy anymore. The technology revolution has rendered that 
irrelevant. If people are working in smaller and smaller work units, if 
you don't need a lot of folks in the middle to pass information down and 
orders up or the reverse, we can do better with a smaller, less 
bureaucratic Government, one that costs less and does better.
    But if our mission is to help people make the most of their own 
lives and to help people work together to make the most of their 
situation, then we do not need a weak Government. When Iowa was flooded 
out with that 500-year flood, you did not want a weak FEMA. You liked it 
that you had a strong one.
    If you want corn over $3 and soybeans at $7, you don't need a weak 
trade ambassador. You need somebody who's strong and who can guarantee a 
fair deal for America's products in the global market. You need someone 
who's strong.
    If you believe as I do that every single high school graduate needs 
at least 2 years of post-high-school education and the ability to come 
back to school for a lifetime, you don't need a weak college loan 
program and a weak Pell grant program. You need a strong, strong 
emphasis on education.

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    If you want to reinforce family values, and it makes you sick to 
know that there are thousands upon thousands of mothers and their 
children on welfare solely because the absent fathers don't pay their 
child support, and your heart jumps for joy when I tell you that in the 
last 3 years, each year we have broken records for collecting more and 
more and more child support across State lines, you don't want a weak 
program. You want a strong program that can do the job for America's 
families.
    If more and more of our businesses are being created in smaller 
units and more and more new jobs are coming through small business, we 
don't need a weak Small Business Administration. We've got an SBA that's 
cut its budget by 40 percent and doubled its loan volume, that's cut its 
regulation in half and cut its application to two pages, but they're out 
there making loans. And the consequence of that? Let me just give you 
one. In the last 3 years, businesses owned by women alone--just by 
women--have created more new jobs than the Fortune 500 have laid off. 
That's what we need to be a strong, effective partnership.
    So we need a Government that is leaner, that is more creative, that 
is less bureaucratic, that does fewer dumb things. But we don't need 
somebody that's in the Government and we don't need a Government that is 
so weak it can't help fulfill the mission, to help people make the most 
of their own lives and help people work together at the grassroots level 
to advance our country's cause and to keep our country the world's 
strongest force for peace and freedom.
    Now, it's in that framework that I would like to ask you all to look 
at this great debate that's been going on in the last year about 
balancing the budget. First of all, we ought to balance the budget. This 
country never had--never had--a commitment to running permanent big 
deficits year-in and year-out until 1981--never. It's very important 
that you understand that.
    In the whole history of America from the time we started until 1981, 
we had a trillion-dollar debt, which was a very small percentage of our 
overall income, our earning capacity. And we borrowed money when we were 
in wartime, when we had to mobilize the country in a hurry, when we were 
in a depression and we had to put people to work in a hurry, or when we 
were in a recession and we wanted the Government to spend some money to 
help people who were genuinely in distress and to keep the economy from 
going downhill further. We never had a permanent deficit until the 12 
years before I showed up in Washington.
    Now, in that time we quadrupled the national debt because people 
kept insisting we could spend more money year-in and year-out than we 
were taking in and somehow it would all add up. It violated arithmetic, 
and we're paying the price for it today. And a lot of progressives like 
Senator Harkin and me are agreeing to cut some things we wish we 
wouldn't have to cut out of that budget so we can end this. We have cut 
this deficit in half in 3 years, and we need to finish the job. We need 
to finish the job.
    But remember what our mission is: to provide opportunity, to help 
people make the most of their own lives, to help people solve their 
problems together. That means we have to balance the budget in a way 
that is consistent with our mission and our values.
    You know, you hear these words roll around, Medicare and Medicaid 
and all that. Let me just tell you a few facts. The budget I have 
proposed--the budget I have proposed would hold Medicare spending below 
the projected rate of private health care increases. But it protects 
people on Medicare with the quality of their program and the cost they 
can afford to pay.
    If you'd go to Washington you would swear that everybody on Medicare 
was a millionaire making out like a bandit. Well, I've got news for you. 
Seventy percent of the people on Medicare are living on less than 
$25,000, and people on Medicare are paying the same percentage of their 
income out-of-pocket for health care they were paying 30 years ago, 
before there was a Medicare.
    So I say we ought to save some money. We have to have some savings 
to get the Medicare Trust Fund back in order. We should encourage people 
to save money by going into managed care plans. But we have no business 
doing something that will undermine the economic stability or the health 
care of senior citizens in the United States of America.
    I feel the same way about the Medicaid program. It's not so famous 
because it's more complex. It's a program where the States and the 
Federal Government contribute to help elderly people in nursing homes, 
most of them from middle class families who could never afford

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the over $30,000 a year it costs, on average, for people who have to go 
to nursing homes. It helps pregnant women and little children who are 
either at or just barely above the poverty line. And it helps families, 
including a lot of middle class families, who have people with 
disabilities in their family.
    Now, we all know that Senator Harkin is the father of the Americans 
with Disabilities Act, and we're proud of that. But he would be the 
first to tell you that if we really want people with disabilities and 
their families to have a decent, dignified life and have the opportunity 
to live up to the fullest of their potential, we have got to keep 
Medicaid there to keep middle class families doing the best they can to 
take care of their children and their siblings and their parents from 
going broke. It is a very important thing.
    There's a man with a red ribbon back there; let's talk about that. 
There's all kinds of people in this country that are HIV-positive that 
are able to work, pay taxes, contribute because they have access to 
Medicaid. If you take Medicaid away from them, they will get sicker 
sooner and cost you more money.
    People, you know--again, you hear people talk about it, you'd think 
this Medicaid program was some colossal ripoff. Now, let me tell you, in 
the last 2 years the inflation rate in Medicaid has been way below the 
average inflation rate in the private insurance premiums that most of 
you pay. And we know we can hold it down.
    We know we ought to have more poor people in managed care programs. 
But don't be fooled: Two-thirds and more of the Medicaid budget goes to 
benefit working families who have parents in nursing homes, have people 
with disabilities in their families; and the other third goes to 
pregnant women and their little children. And they're our little 
children, too, and we better give them decent health care and give them 
a chance to get off to a good start in life.
    I feel the same way about investments in education and the 
environment. If you know that these are critical to your future, why in 
the world would you cut them, especially if you don't have to?
    So let me say this: In spite of all the back and forth you've heard, 
I have spent 50 hours working in good faith with the Republican leaders 
and the Democratic leaders of the Congress. And in our private meetings 
we have discussed things openly, honestly, and in good faith. We have 
identified over $700 billion--where I come from that's still money--
[laughter]--over $700 billion of savings that are common to both plans 
that we could put in, have a balanced budget plan, protect Medicare, 
Medicaid, education, and environment, protect our fundamental 
obligations to our rural communities and our other fundamental 
obligations, and even have some left over for a modest tax cut, and 
still balance a budget in 7 years according to the way Congress scores 
the budget. They get to keep the books. We can do that. So why shouldn't 
we do that instead of continuing endlessly to fight over issues that 
divide us that will undermine our security?
    Let me say this: I think there's a good chance there will be a 
budget agreement. But even if there isn't, this deficit will keep going 
down because the American people, without regard to party, have figured 
out we can't keep doing this. We can't keep spending ourselves in a hole 
every year when we don't borrow the money to invest it in something that 
will grow the economy--just spending, deficit year after year after 
year. It is going to go down. We are going to make that yesterday's 
legacy.
    I want to ask you just for a few minutes before I close to think 
about what tomorrow's legacy is going to be. That's what I talked about 
in the State of the Union, the seven great challenges I think that are 
facing us all. And I just want to mention them quickly and ask you to 
think about what you expect me to do and what you should be doing about 
each of these.
    The first of these challenges, clearly, is to do more to strengthen 
our families and to give childhood back to all American children. Too 
many of them have been robbed of it. You know as well as I do that if 
every child in this country had the benefit of a stable home full of 
love and discipline, where they were encouraged to live up to the 
fullest of their capacities and protected from life's cruelest 
developments, that we'd have about half the problems we've got on the 
social front. We all know that.
    The question is, what are we going to do about it? I've told you 
we've done what we could to make sure we collect more child support than 
we ever have. I have taken on this issue of teen smoking. No one ever 
wanted to take the tobacco companies on, but there's something wrong 
with every State in the country saying that smoking's illegal and 
smoking's going up among children. And we know 3,000 kids

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a day start smoking, and 1,000 of them will die sooner because of it. I 
can't stand it anymore. I want to do something about it, and I want you 
to help. I want you to help.
    We know--just last week there was yet another survey, a national 
study saying that if you permit young children to grow up and spend hour 
after hour after hour for year after year after year watching 
gratuitous, mindless, senseless violence on television that they will 
become desensitized to violence. They will come to see it as normal, as 
the rule rather than the exception. And it will mess up the way they 
look at the world, and the chances are greater that it will mess up the 
way they behave. Now, I say the time has come to do something about 
that.
    One of the things that I was really proud of the last week, one of 
the best things that's happened since I've been President is that I was 
able to sign into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A lot of you 
may not know about it; I hope you have seen that. Let me tell you what 
it will do. It also, like this community college, is a symbol of what we 
ought to be doing. It will create tens of thousands of high-wage jobs. 
It will give people in rural areas more access to information, more 
access to learning, and more access to entertainment. But it will 
protect the right of little telephone companies providing long distance 
service, for example, and smaller cable television companies and little 
guys who own radio stations to at least have a chance to compete in this 
brave new world and not be wiped out from the get-go. And it will, among 
other things, require that we provide telecommunications services at a 
discount rate to every hospital and library and classroom in this 
country, so rural America doesn't get left out.
    And it passed almost unanimously, with all the Republicans and 
Democrats finally giving up and voting for it because we worked out all 
the problems in the American way. But the pro-family issue I want you to 
be aware of is it also will require all new television sets to contain a 
V-chip which will permit parents to decide if they don't want their 
young children to watch programs on televisions that are too violent or 
have other inappropriate conduct. And it's a good thing.
    Our second challenge is to renew our schools and to provide 
educational opportunity for every American. That means, among other 
things, in our schools we have to connect every classroom--every 
classroom in the smallest rural hamlet in rural Arkansas or rural Iowa, 
rural Maine, northern California--everyone to the Internet by the year 
2000, so that all of our children, wherever they live, will have a 
world, literally a world of information at their fingertips. And we have 
to make sure the kids have the ability to access that.
    Our public schools should be the province of folks at the grassroots 
local level. That's why yours work as well as they do. But we ought to 
have national standards and national means of measuring achievement so 
that every child has a chance to be in the kind of system that have 
given Iowa such a low dropout rate and a high student achievement rate. 
There's no reason everybody in America can't achieve those same 
standards if we had a system to provide it. And I am committed to that.
    And I will say again, we ought to open the doors of college wider, 
not have them shut. We need to maintain the direct loan program. We need 
to maintain the AmeriCorps program that allows young people to earn 
money by serving in their communities and then use it for college. We 
need to expand the Pell grant program. And I proposed in the State of 
the Union--I want to reiterate it here--that we give a $1,000 merit 
scholarship to every student in the top 5 percent of every high school 
graduating class in the United States of America. I believe--I want us 
to extend the work-study program so that a million young people can work 
their way through college on work-study. And if we're going to cut 
taxes, we ought to cut taxes in the best way we can, to grow the 
American economy and bring the American people together. We ought to 
make college tuition tax-deductible.
    Our third challenge is to provide economic security for every 
American willing to work for it. I don't mean a guarantee; I mean a 
safety net, a sense of framework that will permit people to succeed. The 
first thing we have to do is to keep doing what we're doing right. We 
need to keep creating more jobs at high wages. That's what the 
Telecommunications Act does. We need to keep exporting American 
products.
    But we also need to do some other things. Just before I came to Iowa 
today I signed the farm credit regulatory relief act, which provides 
better credit opportunities to farmers and ranchers. And again, it shows 
what we can do when

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we cross party lines to work together. There's another important thing 
we could do for the farmers, with spring planting on us, we could pass a 
farm bill. It should have been passed a long time ago, and we ought to 
pass a good one.
    Now, the Senate passed a bill this week that has some very good 
provisions in it, but I have some problems with it. Let me tell you what 
I like about it; then I'll tell you what I don't like about it. And then 
afterwards, maybe you can write and tell me what you like about it and 
don't like about it.
    I like the fact that it gives farmers some more flexibility to plant 
to the market and not just to the programs. I like the fact that the 
Senate bill, unlike the House bill, included the conservation reserve 
and the wetlands preservation programs. I like the fact that it included 
the nutrition programs and protected them, which we have to do--the WIC 
programs and the other nutrition programs.
    And I like the fact that the Senate bill took an amendment which 
embodied one of the central recommendations I got at the Rural 
Development Conference at Ames, that we held for all of rural America 
not very long ago here in Iowa at Ames; it creates a rural development 
fund to help diversify the economies of the rural parts of our country. 
I like those things about that bill, and that is good. The fund for 
rural America would invest $300 million to fund development and research 
programs to help us remain competitive. I like that. That's all good for 
America's farmers.
    But what I have real questions about is the way the so-called 
freedom to farm law actually works in practice. They proposed to have a 
7-year period when everybody gets a check every year in the same price, 
no matter what the crop price is. So this year you've got--I mean, today 
I think corn was $3.30 and Iowa soybeans were somewhere between $6.80 
and $7.05, depending on where it was. That's about the range that it was 
today. And people are still going to get a check. Under this bill, if 
you don't plant anything you get a check. It used to be nearly everybody 
thought you ought to have to farm to get a farm payment. [Laughter]
    So I'm worried about that. You know, farmers have never wanted to 
be--and I have fought this battle for years against urban journalists--
farmers have never wanted to be seen as being on welfare. We had farm 
support programs for two reasons only: One is to help us compete with 
people who were subsidizing their farmers a lot more than we were; and 
second, to get family farmers through rough years because they couldn't 
finance their own bad years. That's why we had those programs.
    So I'm worried about that. I'm also worried that in the bad years 
there won't be near enough money in this program to have a genuine 
safety net. I mean, it sounds great: ``We're going to give you a check 
every year for 7 years whether you need it or not.'' That's a pretty 
good deal. Well, this year it sounds great because people don't need it; 
the prices are high. And maybe we can keep them high for a long time. 
There's a fair chance we can because of the growing wealth of Asia and 
the growing population there and because of the changes in their 
production capacity. There is a fair chance that we're in for a few 
years of high farm prices. But we may not be; we may have weather that 
will have high prices and no crop to sell. We've all been there before.
    So I tell you, I will work to get a good farm bill. I will do it as 
quickly as I can. And I just wanted to come here tonight and tell you 
honestly how I feel. There's a lot of things in this Senate bill I like, 
and we do need to let farmers plant more for the market than the 
programs. But I think we have to really think about whether it is 
reasonable to say that we're going to have this flat payment and you get 
it whether you plant or not, you get it no matter how high the crops 
are. And then when the crops go to the bottom, you won't have enough to 
help you and keep you out of bankruptcy.
    I think we have reached a point with the world markets when we could 
actually see young people coming back into farming, when we could 
actually see in America the number of family farmers growing again for 
the first time in forever just because of changes in the market. And I 
think we have to be very careful with this farm bill to meet our vision, 
which is to give everybody who can do it and is competitive a chance to 
be treated fairly and to succeed. That is my only goal.
    I do believe there are two or three other things we ought to do to 
give people economic security. One of them would directly affect this 
institution. We built up over the years a whole lot of different 
training programs in the Government--70, 80, I don't know--a whole bunch 
of training programs. Every one of them was

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passed with the best of intentions to try to solve some little problem 
in the economy as it came up. The truth is now the work force is just 
turning over a lot, and nearly everybody will have to go back for 
further education and training.
    So I have suggested that we take 70 of these training programs and 
create what I call a ``GI bill'' for America's workers, put them in a 
big fund. And if somebody up here in this part of the country loses 
their job, we ought to just send them a voucher and let them bring it 
here to the community college to decide what they need for themselves in 
the form of education and training. I think it's one of the best things 
we could do to get adults back into education and training to increase 
their earnings and get them through the times when they lose their jobs.
    One of the number one priorities, one of the top three, I think, 
priorities of the White House Conference on Small Business was to make 
it easier and cheaper for self-employed people, for small-business 
people and for farmers to take out pension plans for themselves and 
their employees. We have an item in this budget, this balanced budget 
plan, that would do that. And as far as I know, there's no opposition to 
it. We ought to do that. It should be easier. And then people ought to 
know that their pensions are going to be protected; we shouldn't go back 
to raiding pension plans like we did in the eighties. And we ought to 
find a way for people who have to change jobs to take their pension 
around with them so that we will all know that no matter what happens to 
us in life, as long as we're working we'll be able to have a decent 
retirement when the time comes.
    And lastly, on this issue, middle class people, if we're going to 
continue to be the only advanced country in the world where people under 
65 don't have a guarantee of health insurance, then at least we ought to 
have a guarantee that people have access to affordable health insurance 
that they don't lose when they change jobs or when someone in the family 
gets sick. That's simple enough, and we ought to do it.
    I want every one of you to know this because I want you to ask 
everyone in your congressional delegation to support it. There is a 
bipartisan bill in the United States Senate sponsored by the Republican 
Senator from Kansas, Senator Kassebaum, and Senator Kennedy from 
Massachusetts, with 45 sponsors, which simply says you cannot lose your 
health insurance just because you changed jobs or just because you or 
somebody in your family gets sick. And if you're in a small work unit 
you ought to be able to get into a big pool at your option to buy health 
insurance more cheaply, the way Government employees or people working 
for big businesses do.
    The national chamber of commerce, the National Association of 
Manufacturers, all the consumer groups have endorsed this bill. It has 
been voted out of the committee unanimously, and we cannot get it 
scheduled for a vote because the health insurance companies are lobbying 
against it. It is wrong. We've got everybody for it; it ought to pass. 
It will help farmers. It will help small-business people. Ask people to 
vote for it in the Iowa congressional delegation. [Applause]
    I thank you for standing up. I hope the message will go out across 
the country. This is what the election is about. It's about you. It's 
not about tactics and politicians and ads. It's about you and your 
future. And I'm going to try from now until November, whatever judgment 
you make on the election, to keep giving it back to you so you an use 
this opportunity to shape your future.
    Let me just make a couple of brief remarks about the remaining 
challenges. If you want economic security, how can we justify a minimum 
wage that's at a 40-year low in purchasing power? That's where we are 
now. You know, in Washington, there's a lot of talk about family values. 
Well, I'll tell you one thing, it's pretty hard to raise a family on 
$4.25 an hour. But there are millions of people out there trying to do 
it, and they're heroes to me.
    When I think of the people that get up every day, knowing they could 
take a powder and go on welfare and get health care for their kids, and 
they still show up for work and they do their 40 hours and sometimes 
they do a lot more, and they do it for the minimum wage because they 
believe in the dignity of work and they want to set a good example for 
their children, and I can't get anybody to schedule for a vote raising 
the minimum wage to take it from $4.25 just to $5.15 an hour and get out 
of a 40-year low in earning power, that's not my idea of the high-tech 
economy. I think the American people believe we can do better than that. 
And I believe if we're going to honor work

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and family, we ought to do better than that. And I hope you will support 
it.
    The fourth thing we've got to do is continue the crime fight. We 
talked about that earlier. I just ask you to remember, when you see the 
things that we're doing and they're debated, we shouldn't stop our 
program to put 100,000 more police on the street. We shouldn't weaken 
the program that your former attorney general Bonnie Campbell now heads 
to try to reduce domestic violence and violence against women. We 
shouldn't--we shouldn't back up from the clear truth.
    We've now been through a bunch of hunting seasons. We've been 
through deer season and duck season, at least in my home, and just about 
everything else we hunt. Every hunter in my State now knows that the 
people who told them back in 1994 they were going to lose their guns did 
not tell them the truth. We killed a bunch of ducks with the same guns 
we were using 2 years ago in Arkansas this year. But I'll tell you one 
thing, over 40,000 criminals did not get to buy their handguns because 
of the Brady bill. We were right about that, and we should stay with it.
    The fifth thing we have got to do is to rid ourselves of this notion 
that we can advance our economy at the expense of our environment. For 
the next 20 years, we will be growing jobs by protecting the 
environment. That's why I supported ethanol and why I still do. That's 
why I supported natural-gas-powered vehicles. That's why I supported 
electric-powered vehicles. That's why I supported the ``Big Three'' in 
Detroit with our clean car initiative. That's why I am against these 
attempts to weaken the enforcement powers of the EPA or to weaken our 
commitment to safe food, clear air, and clean water. We have to grow 
this economy while protecting the environment of the United States for 
our children.
    As I said before, and I will say it again just briefly, we cannot do 
this if we divorce ourselves from the world. I intend to continue, and I 
ask you to support me, to try to keep this country on the forefront of 
the work for peace and freedom. We have a chance this year to get a 
comprehensive test ban treaty so that there will be no more nuclear 
testing. That will dramatically reduce the chance that any kind of 
nuclear weapon will ever be used against anybody in the entire world 
again. The United States will have to lead that fight if it's going to 
get done. That's one example.
    And the last challenge we face is to make our Government inspire 
more trust and work better. We're going to continue this reinventing 
Government move that the Vice President has led so brilliantly. We are 
going to continue to downsize the Government. It's already the smallest 
it's been in 30 years. But we're going to try to keep it strong.
    I read today something that my friend James Carville wrote in his 
new book, which will be coming out pretty soon. He said, ``You know, 
people always say the Government can't do anything right.'' He said, 
``Well, for 30 years we spent half your money--half your money for 30 
years--on just three things: defense, Social Security, and Medicare.'' 
You be the judge. We won the cold war. We cut the poverty rate among 
seniors in half. And if you get to be a senior citizen in America today 
because of Medicare, you have a higher life expectancy than any group of 
elderly people anywhere in the world. I think we got our money's worth, 
and I think we have to continue to give the American people their 
money's worth for what we do in public life.
    We do have more to do. I hope the Congress will finally give me that 
line item veto they've been promising in their Contract. That's one 
thing in there I like. And I hope they will finally pass a genuine 
bipartisan campaign finance reform bill to give even more power back to 
the American people.
    I want to leave you with this. I want you to think about it Monday, 
when you try to figure out whether you want to go to the trouble to go 
out or not. We can pass campaign finance reform. We can pass all kinds 
of reforms. But whether this country really works depends upon you, 
what's in your mind and what's in your heart.
    There is no call for the cynicism which exists in America today. 
This country is doing some things that are very important better than 
any other country in the world. This country has problems; as long as 
people exist on the face of the Earth, there will be problems. Cynicism 
is a cheap and poor excuse for inaction and the evasion of personal 
responsibility. As long as you're cynical about somebody else, you don't 
have to pick up your own shovel and start digging. And it's wrong. It's 
wrong.

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    So I say to you, for the United States of America, the best is yet 
to come. For the children in this audience, the age of possibility will 
give them more chances to live out their dreams than any generation of 
Americans has ever had. But it won't work unless we make sure everybody 
has got a chance at that dream, unless we give our people the power to 
make the most of their own lives, and unless we remember that we cannot 
afford cynicism and we have to go forward together.
    It's the most important lesson I have learned again and again and 
again in 3 years as your President. I will never knowingly do anything 
to see the American people divided again or to coddle the cynics again. 
We need to stand up, rear back, and seize our future.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 5:25 p.m. at the North Iowa Area Community 
College. In his remarks, he referred to David Buettner, president of the 
college, and Deo Koenigs, Iowa State representative. H.R. 2029, the Farm 
Credit System Reform Act of 1996, approved February 10, was assigned 
Public Law No. 104-105.