[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[December 12, 1996]
[Pages 2192-2193]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on the Airline Safety Initiative and an Exchange With Reporters
December 12, 1996

    The President. Thank you. Good morning. I will be very brief, but I 
do want to make a couple of remarks. I want to thank the Vice President, 
first of all, and the people who have worked with him for their 
unflagging efforts to improve airline safety. I want to thank Secretary 
Pena and Mr. Hall and Ms. Daschle and the other members of the 
administration who have worked on this.
    I want to especially thank the airline executives who are here for 
announcing their plan to ensure that their U.S. carriers have smoke 
detectors in their cargo holds whenever they leave the ground. This is 
further proof of what we can achieve when we work together.
    This is a critical part of our long-range plan to make Americans 
more secure and to make sure our skies are safer. After the TWA 
disaster, the Vice President's commission worked around the clock to 
develop an action plan for aviation safety. Just a month later, we made 
nearly every one of their recommendations the law of the land: state-of-
the-art bomb detectors in our major airports, a dramatic increase in FBI 
agents assigned to counterterrorism efforts, background checks and FBI 
fingerprint checks for airport and airline employees, improved mail and 
cargo inspection, and more bomb-sniffing dogs.
    I said in October that we cannot make the world risk-free, but we 
can reduce the risks we face. By putting smoke detectors in every cargo 
hold of these carriers, we take another step to make our people and our 
skies safer.

[[Page 2193]]

    And again, let me say I congratulate especially the carriers who are 
here. I thank them for their leadership and for working with us, and I 
thank the members of the administration, beginning with the Vice 
President.
    Thank you very much.

Director of Central Intelligence-Designate

    Q. Mr. President, is Tony Lake in trouble, and will you go to the 
mat for him?
    The President. No, and yes. [Laughter]
    Q. You don't think he has any problem in terms of the--[inaudible].
    The President. No. Well, we reviewed that, and I think--I believe 
the essential facts of the matter have been reported in the press. And 
the Counsel's Office and others reviewed the facts as they have been 
presented--I believe they have been accurately presented in the press, 
although I did not personally read the story this morning, and we 
believe that it is not a disqualification.

Balanced Budget and Protecting the Poor

    Q. Mr. President, your embrace of the political center seems to 
concern many traditionally liberal Democrats who are afraid this 
priority of balancing the budget is going to hurt poor people. Yesterday 
the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Representative Donald 
Payne, was expressing this kind of concern. How do you guarantee that 
fuel for poor people, subsidies, that housing subsidies, that your 
determination to balance the budget is not going to come on the backs of 
the poor?
    The President. Well, that's what we're working through right now. 
We've been working through that for the last 4 years. Every year in the 
last 4 years we've had to send a budget up to the Hill, and we've worked 
on a budget that would continue to reduce the deficit in a way that 
would be fair to all Americans.
    And I would just say, first of all, there's some evidence here: 
After 4 years we've cut the deficit by 60 percent. There are 2.1 million 
fewer people on welfare and about a million fewer children in poverty 
than there were the day I took office. Poverty had the biggest drop 
among children in 1995 in 20 years. We have the lowest poverty rate 
among elderly people and African-Americans since the statistics have 
been kept.
    A big part of that is a strong economy. If you want to reduce 
poverty, you've got to have more jobs being created, you've got to have 
the economy being stronger.
    But secondly, we have to be exceedingly sensitive--I don't want to 
play games here--we have to be exceedingly sensitive to what policy 
judgments are made so that we don't do the rest of the work of balancing 
the budget on the backs of poor children especially, who are essentially 
defenseless in protecting themselves. We have to be very, very sensitive 
from here on in. And I assure you, we're working on that.
    And Congressman Payne, whom I know well and respect very much, I'm 
sure will be vigorously pressing the interests that he discussed 
yesterday in all of our budget talks together. But we're working hard on 
this budget to avoid that.

Airline Safety

    Q. Mr. President, with the fire detection systems that you're going 
to have in these planes, is it not far enough? Don't you need 
suppression as well, to put out fires when you're at 10,000 feet, simply 
knowing about----
    The President. Would you like to answer that?
    The Vice President. I would. There are fire suppression systems 
installed on all new airlines. And it is true that the original NTSB 
recommendation was for both detectors and suppression equipment. The 
difficulties in implementing the retrofit for suppression systems is 
significantly greater than the difficulty with detector systems. But the 
industry has agreed to work with us vigorously to find solutions for 
this challenge, and we're pressing forward on it.
    Q. How much will it cost the industry?
    The Vice President. A lot. [Laughter] About $400 million. And it is 
a significant commitment that they're making. No one should 
misunderstand the fact that it was not easy for these companies to make 
the decision that they are announcing here today. This is a significant 
step forward. In the absence of a rule, they're doing it voluntarily, 
and every company here has joined together. And so it's an important 
step.
    Q. Are airline tickets up?
    The Vice President. Not because of this.
    The President. Thank you. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:45 a.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the 
White House.