[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[October 30, 1996]
[Pages 1975-1980]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan
October 30, 1996

    Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to ask right here at the 
beginning that we give another round of applause not only to Irma Elder 
but to Juanita Bycraft Walker and to Gail Davis. The three of them 
represent the whole range of women's businesses in America today. Let's 
give them a hand. They were great. Thank you. [Applause]
    Thank you. Let me say I am delighted to be back at Eastern Michigan, 
where I prepared for one of my debates in 1992. I had a great time here 
then, and I'm glad to be back now. I want to thank both the marching 
band and the concert band for playing for us today. Thank you very much.
    And just on a purely personal point, I first heard of Eastern 
Michigan University a long time ago when I hired a young man from one of 
the poorest counties in America out of the Mississippi Delta, right on 
the river of the Mississippi in my home State, to work for me in the 
attorney general's office and later in the Governor's office, who told 
me he had been given his start in life when he got a football 
scholarship to Eastern Michigan University. And that young man, Rodney 
Slater, is now the Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, 
investing billions of dollars in growing the American economy through 
infrastructure. So you can always be proud of your mission here and what 
you're doing and the opportunity you've given to people.
    I'd like to thank Vice President Juanita Reid for making me feel so 
welcome today, and Michelle Vasquez, the executive director of the Ann 
Arbor Community Development Corporation. Senator and Mrs. Riegle, thank 
you for coming. Congressman Ford, thank you for coming. I'd like to 
acknowledge the presence here of the Director of the Small Business 
Administration, Phil Lader, and the head of the White House Office on 
Women's Affairs, Betsy Myers, who have both done a wonderful job for the 
women business owners of America. Thank you very much. Thank you, 
Senator Carl Levin, for your speech and for your service to Michigan. 
And I have a great deal of confidence that you're going to get your 
service extended in 6 more days.
    And I was looking at Lynn Rivers give her speech, and I thought, I 
wish everybody in America could see this woman give her talk, could hear 
her story. I wish everybody in America could meet her husband who's 
working down at the UAW--Ford plant down the road here and can't be here 
today. That represents what America is all about. The story that Irma 
told of her life represents what America's all about.

[[Page 1976]]

The stories that Juanita and Gail told of their lives represent what 
America's all about.
    I especially want to thank Lynn Rivers for not forgetting where she 
came from when she went to Congress and for voting to give every other 
person in America the same chance to make the most of his or her own 
life that she did.
    I ran for this office 4 years ago with a vision of what our country 
should look like when we start the 21st century, a simple but profound 
one. I want every person in America, without regard to their background, 
to have a chance to live out their dreams if they're responsible enough 
to work for it. I want our country to keep leading the world for peace 
and freedom and prosperity. And I want us--and as I look around this 
room today I feel good about it--I want us to defy the trend that is 
bedeviling the rest of the world and say, we are not going to be 
consumed by our differences; we're going to celebrate our diversity and 
go forward together in an America where everybody has a chance to make 
it.
    As Senator Levin said, we've had a good run of success in trying to 
turn the economy around. We have cut the deficit by 63 percent. We have 
seen America produce 10\1/2\ million more jobs. We have seen an income 
increase of $1,600 for the typical family in the last 2 years. We know 
we have the lowest combined rates of unemployment, inflation, and home 
mortgages in 28 years, the biggest drop in inequality of incomes among 
working people in 27 years, the biggest drop in poverty among female-
headed households in 30 years, the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 
20 years. We're moving in the right direction, and that's a good thing. 
We know that small business has a lot to do with that.
    One of the things that I'm proudest of is that this has happened 
while we have reduced the size of the Federal Government and increased 
the percentage of new jobs in America being created by the private 
sector. In each of the last 3 years, the number of new businesses 
started has reached record levels. This has included a surge in 
businesses owned by all kinds of Americans: more than 220,000 new 
Hispanic businesses, more than 100,000 new African-American businesses, 
the highest rate of business ownership in both minority groups ever 
recorded, and a record number of new small businesses owned by women.
    Women are establishing businesses and creating new jobs at twice the 
national rate of business and job growth. One-third of all the 
businesses in our country, about 8 million companies now, are owned by 
women. They employ one in five of American workers. Here in Michigan, 
over a quarter of a million women-owned businesses employ over a half-
million people. In 1992, women-owned businesses contributed $1.6 
trillion to our economy. Today, in only 4 years, that number has grown 
to $2.3 trillion. I might say, there are a very, very few countries in 
the world that have an annual output of more than $2.3 trillion.
    In every community, in every State, the face of our businesses are 
changing. Every day it looks more and more like the people in this room, 
men and women, people of color, increasingly Americans with disabilities 
are becoming business owners. More and more people are finding ways to 
make the free enterprise system work for them. That supports stronger 
families, more stable communities, and a much, much stronger America 
with a brighter future. Today we received some more good news: Our 
economy is continuing to grow steady and strong, with an annual growth 
rate of nearly 3 percent; real incomes for American workers, after being 
stagnant for virtually 20 years, are rising at nearly 5 percent, with no 
inflation in this economy.
    And the future in many ways looks even better, because in the past 3 
months alone, business investment has risen at 18.9 percent, and the 
rate of investment now is the strongest since President Kennedy was in 
office over 30 years ago. There is an extreme increase in the 
expectation that we can keep our free enterprise system growing, 
flourishing, growing stronger, with rising incomes, more businesses, 
more jobs. And we cannot turn back on that.
    What we are trying to do, of course, goes beyond economics, but when 
the economy improves, it makes our other common endeavors more likely to 
succeed. I think just in the last 4 years we've had 4 years of declining 
crime rates, 4 years of declining welfare rolls, 1.9 million fewer 
Americans on the welfare rolls than 4 years ago.
    I think of the fact that we now have a sense that we can actually 
begin to reform our health care system in a positive way. The Kennedy-
Kassebaum bill says to 25 million Americans, you can't lose your health 
insurance anymore if you change jobs or someone in your family

[[Page 1977]]

gets sick. I just signed a bill which says that mothers and their 
newborn babies can't be kicked out of the hospital in 24 hours anymore. 
I think that's very important.
    So this thing--we're moving this in the right direction. But I want 
to focus today a little bit on small business because we know that 
increasingly more and more and more of our jobs are coming from our 
small businesses. And I'd like to talk a little bit about that.
    When I became President, it troubled me that there were certain 
critical jobs that previous Presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, 
had typically given to political appointees without regard to whether 
they knew anything about the work they were supposed to do. One of them 
was the Federal Emergency Management Administration. I had been a 
Governor; I'd dealt with a lot of floods and fires and tornadoes and 
natural disasters. And I can tell you when they hit, if you don't have 
somebody who knows what they're doing, you're in a world of hurt. So I 
changed that. I put a person in who knew what to do. And as you know, 
we've had a lot of natural disasters in America in the last 4 years; 
everything but the locusts have hit us. [Laughter] But people know in 
all local communities that we now have a competent, aggressive strategy 
for dealing with it.
    And that was true in the Small Business Administration. I've had two 
Administrators in the Small Business Administration, Erskine Bowles and 
Phil Lader, both of them experienced in starting small businesses and 
running small businesses and understanding how businesses work. We have 
doubled the loan volume of the SBA in the last 4 years while reducing 
the budget. We have cut the regulations by 50 percent in the SBA. For 
loan applications of $100,000 or less, we've gone from an application 
form that is one inch thick to a form that is one page, in 4 years.
    The White House Conference on Small Business asked us to do a number 
of things. We have now, in two different bites, in 1993 and 1996, 
increased the expensing for small businesses who invest more in their 
own business from $10,000 a year all the way to $25,000 a year, the 
number one recommendation we got out of the White House Conference. The 
second thing that we were asked to do was to make it easier for people 
who own small businesses and for their employees to take out 401(k) 
pension plans and to move those plans when they change from job to job, 
and we have done that. And I am very proud of that.
    I signed regulatory legislation which will make it more difficult in 
the future for Government to do things that are dumb to small-business 
people without giving small-business people a chance to stop it in the 
first place.
    We established a network of community development banks, each with a 
mission to have a microenterprise loan program like those which many of 
you have experienced around here. If you think about it, microenterprise 
loans have helped to revolutionize the culture of poverty in countries 
far poorer than America all over the world. Why couldn't we 
revolutionize the culture of poverty in our inner cities and other 
isolated areas with microenterprise loans in America to bring free 
enterprise? Women can lead the way in this.
    And in general, I'm proud of the fact that we have reduced the size 
of Government by about 250,000 to its smallest point in 30 years. We 
have reduced 16,000 pages of regulations. We have eliminated hundreds of 
programs. We have privatized significant chunks of the Federal 
Government that belonged in the private sector--more reduction in size, 
regulation, and programs and more privatization in these 4 years than in 
the previous 12 years combined, giving you a smaller, less bureaucratic 
Government, but one still committed to investing in education, 
protecting the environment, and moving this country forward together, 
giving everybody a chance to live up to the fullest of their own 
capacities.
    Today we are taking two more steps to extend opportunities that come 
from small businesses. First, I want to build on a program that is 
plainly working. We established in 1994 a women's prequalification pilot 
loan program for loan applications of under $250,000 in 16 sites. That's 
kind of a mouthful; you know, I wish I had some fancy acronym for it. 
But what it meant in basic terms was, in these 16 places, we worked with 
women who wanted to start businesses or wanted to expand businesses and 
needed capital, and we worked up the loan application in advance for 
them so we knew it would have a good chance of being approved at the 
bank. And we gave them a commitment on the front end that the SBA would 
guarantee it. Now, since that happened in just 16 sites, 575 separate 
women businesses have gotten over $58 million in loans. We are now going 
to do

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that nationwide. We will make that service available to women in every 
State in the United States.
    The second thing we're going to do relates to another request we got 
out of the White House Conference on Small Businesses for loans above 
$250,000. There we were told over and over, at the White House 
Conference on Small Business, that the biggest problem was finding 
capital, even for worthy enterprises, if the business were small. So we 
are now starting something new that came directly out of the White House 
Conference that does have a catchy acronym--I can say that better--the 
Angel Capital Electronic Network, or ACENET, a new computer website that 
will allow small-business owners to put their prospectus on the Internet 
and match small businesses with sophisticated investors. That will make 
it much, much easier than ever before for people who are in small 
business to get money. I hope a lot of you can take advantage of it. 
This new net site will allow women business owners to go directly to 
investors to avoid confusing rules, lack of information, and their lack 
of access to what we ought to call, I guess, the old boy networks. It 
will work if you will make it work.
    These are just two more things that are part of our ongoing 
commitment. Now, let me say there is a lot more to do. We have a lot to 
do to build a bridge that I want to build to the 21st century, to 
realize the vision that I have. I hope every one of you tonight, 
whatever your political party or background, will take a little time 
before you turn in to do something that I do on a regular basis. Take a 
little time and ask yourself, what do I want my country to look like 
when we start the new century? And what would I like my country to look 
like when my children are my age? It's an amazing thing what that does 
for you when you ask that question and how you answer it.
    But as I said, for me it's simple. I just want everybody to have the 
chances that I had, that Lynn Rivers had, that so many of us had. We 
wouldn't be here today, I think, if we had all been told, ``You're on 
your own.'' Most of us are pretty self-reliant, or we wouldn't be in 
this room. But I still believe that, as someone reasonably close to me 
said, it does take a village to raise our children and grow our economy 
and build our future. That's what I believe.
    So I say to you, we have to balance the budget, and I hope every one 
of you will help lead the demand that we continue to do so, because that 
will keep those interest rates down, it will keep the economy going, it 
will make that money more available to you. But we have to do it while 
we continue to invest in our future and in Medicaid's guarantee of 
health care to families with members with disabilities or poor children 
or the elderly in nursing homes and in the Medicare program. We can 
reform those programs without wrecking them, and we still can invest in 
our future, in education and technology and in research as well.
    When people--I hear people say, ``I'm me, and the Government is 
them.'' I don't know what they're talking about, because the Government 
is nothing but the reflection of the collective choices of the American 
people. And the issue is, what are these things that we do? We've had a 
great debate in Washington for the last 4 years that I think has been 
very healthy for the country: What things should we do together at the 
national level; what things can be better done by States and localities; 
what things can be better done in the private sector; what things can 
better be done by families? And we've had huge differences, which I 
think have been healthy.
    I think we did the right thing on family and medical leave. We're 
stronger because you can take a little time off from sizeable employers 
when a baby is born or somebody in your family is sick, without losing 
your job. If you can succeed at home and at work, the country is better, 
not worse, because of that. That makes us stronger. It makes us 
stronger.
    I think it's a better country because we cut the cost of college 
loans for people that participate in the direct loan program and said, 
``You can pay that loan off as a percentage of your income so you never 
need to be afraid of borrowing money to go to school, because now you 
won't be bankrupted paying it back. Your limited payments every year 
will be limited to a certain percentage of your income.'' I think that 
made us a better, stronger country because we made more people eligible 
to go to college.
    Therefore, I believe we should go forward in that spirit. We should 
be committed to growing our economy. We should be committed to doing it 
through the free enterprise system. We should be committed to continuing 
to make our Government as lean and efficient and as little bureaucratic 
as possible. But there are things we ought to do together.

[[Page 1979]]

    And the education thing is so important to me. I don't believe we 
can afford the big tax plan my opponent has proposed because I think it 
will blow a hole in the deficit and will give it all right back in 
higher interest rates and a weaker economy, and because it will require 
even bigger cuts than I vetoed last year. But I do think we should have 
targeted tax cuts to help families raise their children, to help people 
afford health care and buying that first-time home, and especially to 
pay for the cost of education.
    I believe as strongly as I can say--and I want to give Michigan 
another hand here, or at least one of my friends in Michigan--I got 
interested in the idea that we ought to make college available to 
everyone when Governor Blanchard started the Michigan tuition savings 
plan here. I remember that.
    And so we have given almost 70,000 young people a chance to earn 
money for college through AmeriCorps. We've given the improvements I 
mentioned in the student loan program. We're now selling inflation-proof 
savings bonds for people so they can save, knowing that inflation won't 
eat up the gains. But I'd like to do some more things. I believe that we 
ought to let people save in an IRA and withdraw from it without penalty 
if the money is used for a college education or health care or buying a 
first home--more people.
    I believe--even at this distinguished university let me say that we 
know from the census figures that if people get at least 2 years of 
education after high school in a good community college, they've got a 
good chance to get a job that is a good job with growing prospects. 
Almost every American lives within driving distance of one, so I have 
proposed to give Americans a $1,500 tax credit, the typical cost of 
community college tuition, a dollar-for-dollar reduction from your 
taxes, for the first 2 years of college as long as people go, make their 
grades, and do what they're supposed to do. I think it's a good thing to 
do. And I believe we ought to give everybody a tax deduction of up to 
$10,000 a year for any tuition at any institution of higher education 
anywhere in America for undergraduate or graduate studies--Eastern 
Michigan, anyplace else in the country. It will change the face of 
America if we open the doors of college education to all of our people.
    Now, let me say, since one of the women on the stage with me has 
worked herself off welfare into being a business owner, I am very proud 
of the fact that we've worked hard with the States to reduce the welfare 
rolls by nearly 2 million. I signed the welfare reform bill because it 
now guarantees to poor families health care and nutrition and more for 
child care than ever if they go to work. But it now says to all the 
States and local communities, if you have an able-bodied person, you 
have 2 years to turn the welfare check into a paycheck.
    I like that, but if we're going to do it, what it means is we have 
to create the jobs. I have a plan to give those folks the opportunity to 
go to work: investing in our communities with the microenterprise loans, 
with special incentives to employers. And every one of you--let me just 
say, if you ever criticized the welfare system in your life, which 
includes 100 percent of the American people, I think, and especially 
people who have been on it, and you're now an employer, you ought to 
think about hiring someone off welfare. You ought to think about doing 
that now.
    Under the new law, every State in America can give you the welfare 
check for a year or two while you--as a wage subsidy, under the new law. 
If my new proposal passes, we'll have a special tax credit. If we get 
all the community development banks that I want, there will be 
microenterprise loans for people to do that.
    We can do this. We can break the culture of poverty in America, but 
only if we create opportunity. It's one thing to tell somebody in the 
law they have to go to work and quite another to make sure that there is 
a job there. You have to do that, and I will help you, and I hope you 
will.
    Again, let me say, our country is going in the right direction. I 
thank Senator Carl Levin and Congresswoman Lynn Rivers for the votes 
they cast to put it there. Some of them were awful tough, when we were 
told we were going to bring on a recession and all that. But we're 
better off than we were. We're going in the right direction. We have 
made unprecedented gains in the area of helping women to start their 
businesses, to stay in business, to expand their businesses, and that 
has helped to lift the rate of growth of the American economy and our 
capacity to create jobs.
    I was a little amused today; my distinguished opponent said that we 
had the worst economy in 20 years. Now, 2 weeks ago he said it was the 
worst economy in 100 years, so we're mak-


[[Page 1980]]

ing progress--[laughter]--and I feel good about that. Not everybody can 
make up 80 years in 2 weeks, and I'm proud, you know. [Laughter] But he 
was right in February. In February he said we had the best economy we've 
had in 30 years, and he was right when he said that. And I don't deserve 
all the credit for that. No one does. But our policies have helped you 
to create those jobs. And we are working together. And that's my whole 
theory of how this country should work. And I'll just leave you with 
that.
    No matter what vision you have for the future, one of the things 
that I know in my bones is that the great meal ticket America has to the 
21st century--which will clearly be the time of greatest human 
possibility ever known, where more people will have more chances to live 
out their dreams than any time in history, where the young people that 
are in this audience will be doing jobs that haven't been invented yet, 
many of them will be doing work that has not even been imagined yet--our 
great ticket to that 21st century is our vibrant democracy, our vibrant 
free enterprise system, and the fact that in America we can say, we will 
take anybody from anywhere who is here lawfully.
    We don't have to know much about you--if you were born in Mexico of 
Syrian descent, or we don't need to know how much Cherokee Indian blood 
you have in you. We don't need to know anything about you except that 
you believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration 
of Independence, and you're willing to show up for work or school or do 
whatever you're supposed to do tomorrow. We need to know nothing else. 
We're not going to be like Bosnia. We're not going to be consumed by 
religious hatred as they are in the Middle East. We're not going to be 
fighting battles 300 and 600 years old, as my ancestors' people are in 
Ireland. We're not going to do that in America.
    And when people try to do it, when they blow up Federal buildings or 
burn churches or desecrate synagogues or Islamic centers, we're going to 
say, we are against that because our America has everybody in it. And 
we're going to build a bridge to the future together.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 3:05 p.m. at Bowen Field House. In his 
remarks, he referred to Irma B. Elder, owner, Troy Ford; Juanita Bycraft 
Walker, owner, Production Cleaning Co., Inc.; Gail Davis, president, KDY 
Enterprise, Inc.; Juanita M. Reid, vice president for university 
relations, Eastern Michigan University; and former Senator Donald W. 
Riegle, Jr., and his wife, Lori Hansen Riegle. A portion of these 
remarks could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.