[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[July 22, 1996]
[Pages 1167-1175]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1167]]


Remarks to the Community in Denver
July 22, 1996

    Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for that wonderful 
welcome. Thank you, Mayor Webb, for your leadership and for your 
extraordinarily powerful personal statement. Thank you, Governor Romer, 
for being my friend for such a long time now and for being a shining 
example of the best in public service. Thank you all for keeping him on 
the job.
    Ladies and gentlemen, before I begin my remarks today, I'd like to 
say just a word about an issue that I believe is on the minds and hearts 
of all Americans, the ongoing recovery operations involving TWA Flight 
800. This is a very long and difficult period for the families and loved 
ones of the people who were on that plane. It is literally an agonizing 
process, made worse by the fact that the weather has been so poor and 
that many of the things that would have been done by now have not been 
able to be done.
    I want the families to know that I am working as hard as I can to 
speed this process and to make it as easy as possible. I've asked the 
relevant Federal agencies to provide pathologists to the recovery teams 
in New York if they're requested by the State. And we are working very, 
very hard to get to the bottom of this. We will do that, and we will 
give them the answers they seek as soon as we possibly can.
    Meanwhile, I ask the rest of you to keep them in your prayers. It is 
this awful hanging fire that is the difficult and agonizing thing for 
them. We can all imagine how we would feel if we were in their place. 
And so I ask you to keep them in your prayers, and I assure you that we 
will do everything we can to get to the bottom of this as quickly as 
possible.
    Let me say I have come here to Denver today, as the Governor and the 
mayor said, to discuss the issue of welfare reform and specifically to 
talk a little bit about the child support issue. But I want to put it 
into a larger context of where we are as a people, why this is 
important, and what we're trying to do together to get ready to march 
into that new century just 4 years away.
    Denver's a good place to do this. This is a city that believes in 
itself and in the future, and America needs to believe in itself and in 
its future. Denver is clearly getting ready for a new century only 4 
years away. I arrived last night at your new airport, the first one of 
its size in 20 years. I now am speaking in this incredible arts complex, 
the second biggest in America, looking at this wonderful auditorium that 
is lined with sandstone that I'm told was hewn right out of the 
beautiful mountains that are just beyond these walls. This is a large-
minded place. And America needs to be large-minded as we stand on the 
threshold of this new century.
    Because the information age is so dramatically changing the way we 
work, the way we live, the way we relate to each other and the rest of 
the world, the next generation of Americans is literally going to have 
more opportunities to live out their dreams than any generation of 
Americans in history. The young people that are in this audience today, 
within a matter of 10 years, will be doing jobs that have not even been 
invented yet. Some of them have not been conceived yet.
    So this is going to be a very exciting time, full of enormous 
possibility. But as is inevitable in the human condition, it will also 
have some very stiff challenges. We know that the very things that make 
the world more exciting, more open--the rapid movement of information 
and ideas and capital and technology and people from community to 
community, from State to State, from nation to nation--all that openness 
and speed that brings so many new opportunities also impose new 
challenges on us that are economic, that are social, that deal with our 
very essence of security.
    We know, for example, that there are more economic opportunities, 
but the people without the education to take advantage of them may be 
left behind. And so, the very prosperity that is coming to our country, 
if we don't work very hard at it, can increase inequality among working 
families, not just poor families on welfare.
    We know, for example, that this great mobility that we have and all 
the choices we have as consumers and our ability to stay before a 
computer or a cable television for hours on end may isolate us one from 
another and further strain the fragile bonds of community. We know

[[Page 1168]]

that if people have too many individual choices, they may neglect their 
responsibilities to others and to the community at large.
    We know that the more open our society is to good things moving 
around, the more vulnerable we become to the organized forces of 
destruction. We know that you can get on the Internet, for example, and 
if you know how to plug in you can learn how to make a bomb like the one 
that destroyed the Federal building in Oklahoma City.
    So the trick for us is to meet the challenges of this new age and 
protect the values that have sustained America through more than 200 
years of life. That is the way to make the future the best time for 
America.
    When I sought this job, I had a simple vision for what I wanted 
America to do as we stand on the threshold of this new century. I wanted 
us to make sure that the American dream was alive for everybody who was 
willing to work for it without regard to their race, their gender, their 
background, their station in life. I wanted this to be a country that 
was coming together, not being divided by racial and ethnic and 
religious forces that are tearing the world apart in other places on the 
globe. And I wanted our country to continue to be the world's leader for 
peace and prosperity, for security and for freedom.
    Yes, the cold war is over and we are trying to complete its 
unfinished business of reducing the nuclear threat and reconciling 
ourselves to former Communist countries. But we must recognize that 
there are new security threats, and we must recognize that there are 
continuing responsibilities on the United States if we want our children 
to have a safe world to live in.
    Now, to me there is a simple formula that I try to keep in mind 
every day about how we ought to approach this. We need to create 
opportunity for all Americans; we need to insist on responsibility from 
all Americans; and we need to do everything we can to create a greater 
sense of community in this country, a sense that we're all in this 
together.
    Today I want to talk mostly about responsibility, but let me just 
mention a few things about the other issues. This issue of community 
could hardly be more important. I worked so hard to get the Congress to 
create the national service program, AmeriCorps, to give now 45,000 
people, by the end of this year as many as 60,000 young people, the 
chance to serve in their communities, meeting challenges in their 
communities and earning some money to go to college, and opening that 
program to people right across the income spectrum because I wanted a 
symbol of the way we ought to work together. I wanted it to stand as 
sort of a cross between a domestic Peace Corps and a domestic GI bill, 
so that we could pull people together and move forward together into the 
future.
    We worked very hard to help people in our country deal with racial 
differences. I tried to take the affirmative action issue, for example, 
out of politics and into real life, and say we ought to mend it but not 
end it as long as we have continuing discrimination in our country.
    We've tried to find a way to help people with profound religious 
convictions express those convictions even in public forums without 
violating the first amendment. We've worked especially hard with our 
schools on that issue, trying to reconcile the differences between us so 
that we can respect our diversity and grow stronger because of it.
    If you look around in this room today and you see all the different 
backgrounds from which we come, if you watch the Olympics and you look 
at the American team, depending on what sport and what athlete, you 
could think you were watching someone from Europe, from Scandinavia, 
from the Middle East, from Africa, from Latin America, from Asia. They 
could all be on America's team because we are not a one-race nation. 
We're a nation bound together by shared ideals and shared values and 
shared convictions.
    So whether it's abroad in trying to help deal with the ethnic 
problems in Bosnia or the religious problems in Northern Ireland or the 
difficult problems in the Middle East, to the tribal butchery in Rwanda 
where our people went and saved so many lives, we tried to live our 
sense of community and our conviction about it.
    We've also tried to help parents and working people deal with what I 
think is one of the most significant challenges to preserving the 
American community in America today--and that gets me into the other two 
issues--and that is the inherent tension that so many people feel 
between work and family, especially in this economy.
    The truth is that the average working family is now spending more 
hours at work and less hours at home, fewer hours at home, than 25

[[Page 1169]]

years ago, a stunning statistic. So much for the proposition that there 
are a lot of lazy Americans.
    But what we want is to be able to succeed at home and at work. And 
what we want is to understand that our most important job is raising our 
children, but we also have to do a good job at the other work of America 
so that we can create opportunity for people, to give them the 
opportunity to raise their children and have their lives and live out 
their destinies.
    And reconciling those two things has been very difficult indeed. 
That's why I fought so hard for the Family and Medical Leave Act. That's 
why I fought to give families some tools they might need to help their 
childrearing efforts in the V-chip and challenging the entertainment 
industry to rate television programs and trying to stop television 
advertising or--excuse me--trying to stop advertising across the board 
from being aimed at children to get them to buy tobacco products, which 
is illegal and the biggest public health problem in the country.
    If you look at the problem of community in a microcosm as the 
problems of families in neighborhoods trying to succeed at home and 
succeed at work, it leads you to the other two issues, opportunity and 
responsibility. The first responsibility of Government, after providing 
for the security of the country, is to try to create an environment in 
which people have the ability to succeed and then give people the tools 
they need to succeed, so that when I became President we had to, first 
of all, get our economic house in order. We had, 4 years ago, the 
slowest job growth since the Great Depression. We had a very stagnant 
economy; unemployment was nearly 8 percent. We had quadrupled the debt 
in 4 years. The deficit was at $290 billion a year and going higher.
    And so we, first of all, said, look, we have to turn this around. 
And we had a simple strategy: Get the deficit down to get interest rates 
down, so people would invest in America; expand trade to sell more 
American products; and invest in the basic things that Americans need to 
succeed.
    Now, 3\1/2\ years later, the deficit has been cut from $290 
billion--this year it's projected to be $117 billion--more than a 60 
percent cut in 4 years. This is the first administration in which the 
deficit's been cut in all 4 years since the 1840's. And I'm proud of 
that.
    The interest rates dropped. The economy produced 10 million jobs, 
over 300,000 here in Colorado. The unemployment rate has dropped, and 
the combined rates of unemployment, inflation, and home mortgages is at 
the lowest they've been in almost 30 years. So we have turned the big 
economy around. It is the soundest it's been in a generation.
    Nothing reflects that more than what happens to homeownership. In 
the 12 years before I took office, believe it or not, the rate of 
homeownership in America had actually gone down significantly, partly 
because of the enormous pressure on interest rates and home mortgage 
rates aggravated by our massive debt. We have been determined to give 
the American people more chances to live out their dreams. The deficit 
cut helped drive interest rates down and the homeownership strategy that 
Secretary Cisneros devised in partnership with the homebuilding 
interests around our country was designed to broaden and deepen the 
ranks of homeowners.
    Among other things, one of the things that we did that I'm proudest 
of is that we have cut $1,000 off the average closing costs for the 
average first-time homebuyers, young couples trying to get into their 
homes for the first time. It's made a real difference.
    Today we know we've got almost 4 million new homeowners in the last 
3\1/2\ years. We've got 8 million homeowners who have refinanced their 
mortgages because of lower interest rates. And the Department of 
Commerce reported that homeownership is at its highest rate in 15 years. 
And over the past 2 years it grew at its fastest rate in 30 years. This 
strategy is working for the benefit of ordinary Americans, and we need 
to keep on the path we're on. We need to keep working for this.
    Now, we certainly have more to do. We need to balance the budget, 
but do it in the right way. We don't have to destroy our commitment to 
the environment or to education, or wreck the Medicaid program or create 
a two-tiered system of Medicare that's unfair to the oldest, the 
poorest, and the sickest elderly Americans. We don't have to do that. 
But we do have to balance the budget.
    We ought to pass the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill to basically guarantee 
what you've tried to do here: You don't lose your health insurance if 
you have to change jobs or if someone in your family gets sick.

[[Page 1170]]

    The minimum wage bill that Mayor Webb mentioned has been passed by 
both Houses of Congress, but they haven't both passed the same bill and 
sent it to me. So it's not a done deal yet. But you should know that 
that bill is important to me for two reasons, not just one. In addition 
to the minimum wage, the bill also increases incentives to small 
businesses to invest in their business, because that's where most new 
jobs are being created, and passes most of the retirement reforms I 
asked for to make it easier for people in small businesses or self-
employed people to take out and maintain retirement even when the 
business is down or when they have to change jobs.
    We have to make available a secure retirement not just for those of 
us who are fortunate to work for bigger businesses or for government, 
but for people who work in small business as well. So that bill needs to 
pass for the minimum wage and the retirement reforms and the investment 
incentives for small businesses. These things need to be done and done 
now.
    But I have to tell you, of all the opportunity initiatives we could 
take--and I'm betraying my long partnership with your Governor now--the 
most important thing we could do is to increase the quality and the 
availability of education to all Americans. For as long as we've been 
around, educational opportunity has been an advantage to most people. 
After World War II, the GI bill literally helped us to build the biggest 
middle class in the history of the world. But today--today--education is 
critical to the ability of families to keep up, much less to move ahead.
    Now, we've made a lot of proposals, but I just want to emphasize two 
today. First of all, it is imperative that we give the same standard of 
educational opportunity to people in isolated rural areas and inner city 
poor schools that others have. And one of the ways to do that is to 
connect every classroom in the country to the information superhighway 
by the year 2000 and train the teachers to use it, so that all that 
information will be available to all of our children.
    The other thing I believe we have to do is to continue to break down 
the barriers to people going to college and staying there until they get 
an education. I believe strongly that one of the most important things 
our administration has done is to change the college loan system so that 
people can borrow money at lower costs with less hassle and then pay it 
back as a percentage of their income. So there is never an incentive not 
to borrow money to go to college because you can limit your annual 
repayment rates.
    But I think we should do more. I have recommended that we give a 
deduction of up to $10,000 a year for the cost of college tuition for 
people without regard to their age. And I believe we should make 
universal--universal--the availability of at least 2 years of community 
college to every American, which means a tax credit of $1,500 a year for 
2 years.
    Now, if we were to put in place that structure of opportunity, it 
would be easier for people to succeed at home and at work and for us to 
realize our vision of an America with the American dream alive, coming 
together instead of being divided, strong and self-confident enough to 
lead the world toward peace and freedom.
    The other thing we have to do, however, is to put in place a system 
in which we get more responsibility from all Americans. We have to 
continue to work to take our streets back from guns and gangs and drugs 
and violence. We can never eliminate crime and violence altogether. And 
sometimes people ask me--they say, well, the crime rate has come down 
for 4 years in a row. And I say, that's very good, but it's still too 
high. I'm glad it's down 4 years in a row, but it's still too high. And 
I'm worried about the fact that violence, random violence among young 
people between the ages of 12 and 17, continues to go up. Cocaine use is 
down by about a third, but random drug use among people between the ages 
of 12 and 17 has been going up since 1991, so that concerns me.
    And my test will be--you ought to figure out what your test would 
be. I guess your test would be when you feel safe walking on your 
streets in your neighborhood. But my test will be, is when we can all go 
home at night and turn on the evening news, and if the lead story is a 
crime story, we are shocked instead of numbed by it; we're actually 
surprised because we've reached a point in our country where it is the 
exception, not the rule. And I'm here to tell you we can make violent 
crime the exception, not the rule, in America again if we do the right 
things. And I am determined to do it.
    Our anticrime strategy: Put 100,000 police on the streets in 
community policing. Increase neighborhood watch patrols; involve 
neighbors

[[Page 1171]]

in their own efforts. Do more things to help people deal with the 
problems that juveniles have. Support community curfews. Support 
stronger truancy laws. Support summer jobs and activities and drug 
education and prevention programs as well as punishment programs. 
Support positive things for young people to keep them out of trouble in 
the first place. Ban the assault weapons that we banned, and enforce the 
Brady bill. And follow a comprehensive strategy against crime that is 
tough on crime but tries to prevent young people from becoming 
criminals.
    That is our strategy. And it is working. The crime rate has come 
down for 4 years in a row. We had the awfullest hullabaloo you ever 
heard when we passed the assault weapons ban and the Brady bill. And to 
hear the folks on the other side tell it, we had brought an end to an 
American way of life--never be another hunting season in Colorado or 
Arkansas. [Laughter] They had people so lathered up in the election 2 
years ago you couldn't talk to them. But you know what? All those same 
folks got it figured out now because they've had two more hunting 
seasons and nobody lost their rifle. But 60,000 felons, fugitives, and 
stalkers could not buy a handgun because of the Brady bill. It was the 
right thing to do.
    The other day we had an announcement in Washington with the Vice 
President and members of the cellular telephone association in which 
they committed 50,000 telephones--just the first installment--programmed 
to call the local police department, fire department, and hospital, to 
give to neighborhood watches. We now have 20,000 neighborhood watch 
associations in America. We have millions of people in it. I challenged 
another million Americans to join.
    We have to do our part, too, as citizens. But I'm telling you, we do 
not have to live with intolerable crime levels. We do not have to live 
with juvenile crime rates going up. We have to find ways to be very 
tough with people who do terrible things, but we also got to give these 
kids something to say yes to. We can't let them raise themselves and 
then wonder why they turn out to be in trouble.
    Now, it is in that context I want you to see the welfare reform 
debate, because welfare reform is about responsibility, all right, but 
it's also about opportunity. What do you want from all these poor folks 
that are on welfare? What do you want from them? They all have kids. Ask 
yourselves, what do you want? You want them to have kids that turn out 
to be the mayor of Denver, right? Isn't that what you want? This is what 
I ask Congress to think about when they think about welfare reform. We 
want those families to be able to do what we want middle class families 
to do and they're struggling to do as well: succeed at home and at work. 
That's what we want.
    Now, it's true that I have vetoed two previous bills that had the 
label ``welfare reform'' on it because I didn't think they were welfare 
reform. And it wasn't because they were too tough on work; it was 
because they were too tough on kids. And if you don't succeed at home, 
whether you're poor or rich or somewhere in the middle, then your 
worklife won't compensate for it in terms of the impact on your own 
family and on society at large. But if you don't succeed at work, then 
it's very difficult to build a network of successful homes.
    That's why this is so hard. So we decided we would take a different 
tack while trying to work with Congress, and that I would use the power 
given to the President under the 1988 welfare reform law to just waive 
Federal rules and regulations for States that wanted to find new ways to 
move people from welfare to work in a way that helped them raise their 
children. Colorado was one of 40 of the 50 States to get welfare reform 
experiment waivers. There have been a total of 67 of these issued now, 
with more to come.
    Now, the results have been pretty impressive. Already--this is 
something hardly anybody in America knows--but three-quarters of the 
welfare families in America today are under new rules requiring them to 
make extra efforts to move from welfare to work. And the results have 
been significant. The New York Times said that we had effected a quiet 
revolution in welfare. Sometimes I wish it weren't so quiet. I wish more 
people knew about it. But the fact is there are 1.3 million fewer people 
on the welfare rolls today than there were the day I took the oath of 
office and about a million fewer on the food stamp rolls. In Colorado, 
the rate has dropped by 18 percent in 3 years. That's astonishing, 18 
percent in 3 years.
    Now, some of that is due to the improving economy, but that's a good 
argument for good economic policy. But some of it is due to our learning 
what it takes to move people trapped

[[Page 1172]]

in dependency to independence and interdependence with the rest of us so 
they can raise their children and succeed in the workplace.
    I do believe we need to finish the job. We can do some things with 
waivers. I'll give you some other examples. Oregon, Missouri, and most 
recently Wisconsin have asked for permission to take the welfare check--
this is quite interesting--because they know that there's not enough 
money to just have the Government pay for jobs for people who can't get 
jobs in the private sector, so they've asked for permission to take the 
welfare check and actually give it to private employers as a wage 
supplement for 8 or 9 months to encourage people to hire folks at a 
decent wage and train them. And they figure, and I think they're right, 
that even if when the supplement ends, somehow the employers can't 
afford to keep folks on the payroll, at least they will have had 9 
months of work experience, something on their resume, learning how to 
succeed in the workplace. And a lot of people will be kept full time. I 
think that's the kind of idea we want.
    And Wisconsin has proposed to go further and to give these folks 
continuing health care and child care support and actually to extend 
child care and health care coverage to low-wage workers who have not 
been on welfare, to keep them from falling into welfare. Now, these are 
good ideas.
    In return for that, the sort of hammer they want, the tough thing 
they want, is to require people to enroll and to be available for jobs 
from the day they sign up for welfare, not a year or two later. I think 
that's fine, if you're going to give somebody a job and health care and 
child care. What more can you ask?
    But these are the kinds of things we can do with the waiver system. 
But it's not enough. We would be better off if we could pass a welfare 
reform bill in Congress. And I want to explain why. Number one, it would 
be good to end this waiver process and simply set up a framework to the 
States and say, here's your money; do these things, and you figure out 
how to do them. Don't come to us for permission. You know more about it 
than we do. Figure out how to do them. But you ought to require strict 
time limits; you ought to require work; you ought to provide child 
support; and you ought to enforce the child support laws of your State 
better. Now, that's what I think the framework would do.
    We are very close to this agreement on these basic elements. And we 
shouldn't let the opportunity slip from our grasp. But neither should we 
pass a bill that says welfare reform at the top but really winds up 
still being very tough on children, including children from already 
working families.
    So what I'm doing now is working very hard with the Congress. I hope 
and expect to sign legislation that does move people from welfare to 
work and does support instead of undermine the raising of our children.
    This should not be a party issue. All Americans ought to want this 
system changed. And I hope very much that Congress will pass a 
bipartisan bill that meets those standards. If it does, I think it would 
have almost unanimous support from the American people. And I believe it 
can be done before Congress leaves for town for its vacation in August.
    So I want you to join me in saying to the Members of Congress, 
whether you're a Democrat or Republican, get together, don't be hard on 
kids, be tough for work, be good for the kids. Let's try to help all 
families succeed at home and at work. We've got enough experiments. 
We've moved enough people off welfare. We know what works. Let's pass 
this bill and get on with it and do it now. That's what we need to do.
    I want to mention one thing that's very important that's often not 
talked about in welfare, although the mayor and the Governor talked 
about it, and that's child support enforcement. There's no area where we 
need more personal responsibility than child support. The best 
provisions of the welfare bill moving through Congress are those that 
relate to child support because they would give us greater capacity to 
collect child support across State lines. About--well, slightly more 
than a third of all the child support cases where child support is 
delinquent in America today are cases that cross State lines. That's one 
of the main reasons we need this national legislation.
    This is a big hidden social crisis in America today. If every person 
in this country paid the child support they're legally obligated to pay 
and that they can pay, we could move 800,000 women and children off the 
welfare rolls today. That's what a problem it is.

[[Page 1173]]

    So let me just echo what the mayor and the Governor said. 
Governments can do a lot of things, but they don't raise children; 
people raise children. And if parents don't do it, very often the kids 
are left out there on the streets raising themselves with absolutely 
horrible consequences.
    And there are a lot of single-parent families in this country today 
where the single parent's doing a fine job. And since I lived in one for 
a time in my life, I'm proud to say that I know that can happen. I also 
know that no child gets here with one parent alone. And no one should be 
able to escape responsibility for bringing a child into the world. That 
is the first and most important responsibility. We cannot talk about how 
we need more responsibility from all of our citizens when we've got a 
child support collection system that is a national scandal and people 
believe they can bring kids in the world and turn around and walk off 
from them and never lift a finger to help them make their way through 
life. That is wrong, and we have to change that.
    And we can change it in the beginning by simply collecting the child 
support that is owed, that is payable, that people can pay that they 
don't pay. There's a lot more work we need to do with young parents, 
principally young fathers, by helping them understand what their 
responsibilities are and then structuring opportunities for them to 
fulfill it. But we can just begin by collecting the child support.
    You cannot imagine how many women and children are thrown into 
poverty simply because the responsible parent, usually the father, walks 
away and leaves them without any money and won't help. This puts mothers 
who are trying to raise their kids under terrible pressure. A lot of 
women out there working two jobs, working at night, worried sick about 
their kids, can't afford the child support--I mean, excuse me, can't 
afford the child care. All of the other problems working families face 
are aggravated many times over by families that have a single parent 
raising the kids with no help from child support, every other one.
    And if you're in a position where you've had these problems, trying 
to raise your child and work and do all these things, you know how much 
worse it is if child support is owed and not paid. This is a moral 
outrage and a social disaster. It is simply--and it's wrong when people 
say, well, the taxpayers will pick up the bill. Well, the taxpayers may 
pick up the bill to some extent, but it's rarely enough. And secondly, 
it is a cold, inadequate substitute for having a parent do the right 
thing.
    So let me tell you, this legislation would help us to make it easier 
to collect child support across national lines. It would require every 
State in the country to follow Colorado's lead in the revocation of a 
driver's license. It would get us employers' help when people change 
jobs and move across State lines because there would be an employer 
registry that we could refer to for the collection of child support 
that's due across State lines. That's why this legislation is needed.
    There are a lot of things that can be done now. We're now tracking 
down deadbeat parents so that they can't skip out by crossing the State 
line. We're requiring States to establish programs at hospitals to find 
out the identity of fathers at the time a baby is born. Two hundred 
thousand fathers have been identified through this program. Earlier this 
year I took action to require mothers to identify the fathers or risk 
losing their welfare benefits.
    I signed an Executive order to make sure every employee of the 
Federal Government pays his or her child support. We ought to be setting 
a good example in the Federal Government before we preach to others to 
do the same. We are now a model employer in that regard.
    We've been working with States to do more. And one of the reasons I 
wanted to make this statement here today is that Colorado has one of the 
finest programs in the country to find deadbeat parents and make them 
pay. I want every State to do as well. Together, we can all do better.
    Now, all these efforts are making a difference. Compared to 4 years 
ago, child support collections are up 40 percent, from $8 billion a year 
to $11 billion a year. That's the good news. Paternity identification is 
up 40 percent. That's the good news. The bad news is we could double 
that increase again and still be under what is strictly legally owed. 
We've got to keep going on this issue.
    I'm pleased to announce today that the Postal Service is going to 
work with States to post wanted lists of parents who owe support. I 
challenge every State to develop such a list if they don't have one 
already. That may seem cruel to you, but think of it this way: Keep in 
mind, if there's an order outstanding, a judge has made

[[Page 1174]]

a determination that the payment can be made, that is, that the parent 
can actually physically afford to make the payment. Now, that may seem 
cruel to you, but people take it as routine to walk in a post office and 
see somebody who robs a bank or a 7-Eleven. As bad as that is, if 
nobody's hurt it's not as bad as robbing our children of their future. 
That's the biggest robbery of all.
    I've also directed the Justice Department to work with States to 
strengthen their own penalties and prosecutions for those who don't pay 
child support. I want the prosecutors to be able to track down these 
parents and tell the courts to make them pay and if necessary, even to 
be able to send them to jail if they refuse.
    The third thing we're doing is to harness the potential of the 
Internet. This is amazing; 19 States--19 States--have websites whereby 
just literally clicking with your mouse, families can find out how to 
collect and look for the most wanted deadbeat parents. Today, the State 
of Colorado is announcing that it will start a web page. This page will 
be connected like the others are to the computer site that's run by the 
National Government.
    There's a lot of things the Internet can be used for, and they're 
not all good. This is a good thing we can use technology for, to 
instantaneously get this information out all across America and make it 
available to anybody who can access a computer.
    And finally, let me say I want to renew my challenge to every State 
to follow the lead of Colorado with the driver's license revocation. The 
statute we're working for, if we get welfare reform, will require it 
anyway, but the States ought to do it because it's right.
    Now, we are saying by these strong actions and our efforts to pass 
welfare reform, you have to behave responsibly. And if you owe child 
support, you better pay it. If you deliberately refuse to pay it, you 
can find your face posted in the post office. We'll track you down with 
computers. We'll track you down with law enforcement. We'll find you 
through the Internet, not because anybody has a particular interest in 
humiliating someone but because we have got to find a way if we want to 
go into the 21st century as a great nation to succeed at work and at 
home. And it has to begin with parents doing their part. The Government 
can never substitute for that.
    The last thing I'd like to say about this whole thing is that, as 
you know, there are limits to how much all these enforcement mechanisms 
can do. We need to find a way to move into the modern world taking 
maximum advantage of all the changes that our age offers and still 
getting back to the basic sense of right and wrong that we know about 
our obligations to our children and to our future.
    In the 1830's when Alexis de Tocqueville came here, he said, 
``America is great because America is good. If America ever stops being 
good, she will no longer be great.'' That is still true.
    When I visited our Olympians with Hillary a couple of days ago and 
we met young people from other countries, all they wanted to talk to me 
about was what they thought about America--an Irish athlete thanking me 
for our efforts to end the violence in Northern Ireland; a Croatian 
athlete thanking me for Secretary Brown's trade mission that ended so 
tragically just because he and these business people were trying to help 
those folks put their lives back together and thanking me that Secretary 
Kantor had finished the mission; a Palestinian athlete saying that his 
people were an old people, but they never had an Olympic team until they 
made peace with Israel, and saying that a lot of them wanted to keep 
that peace and keep it going.
    These are things that we represent to other people, things that are 
good, things that make people whole, things that enable people to live 
out their dreams. And somehow with all this excitement of the modern 
world and all these personal choices and all these personal challenges, 
we have to find a way to remember that in the end what makes us great is 
living out our dreams in a way that builds strong families, strong 
neighborhoods, strong communities, and a strong country.
    And if we could just keep in mind every day that the choices we make 
as citizens and as workers and as parents will affect what this country 
looks like when our children are our age, I think we'd make the right 
decisions. And America's best days, therefore, are still before us.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:35 a.m. in Buell Theater at the Denver 
Center for the Performing Arts. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor 
Wellington E. Webb of Denver and Gov. Roy Romer

[[Page 1175]]

of Colorado. He also referred to his memorandums of June 18 and July 21 
on child support enforcement. A portion of these remarks could not be 
verified because the tape was incomplete.