    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [May 3, 1997]
    [Pages 538-541]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    The President's Radio Address and an Exchange With Reporters
    May 3, 1997

        The President. Good morning. Yesterday we took a dramatic step to
    prepare America for the 21st century, and we got the best evidence yet
    that the new economic policy we adopted in 1993 is working for our
    people. Yesterday morning, we learned the unemployment rate has dropped
    to 4.9 percent, the lowest in 24 years. And yesterday afternoon, I
    reached an historic agreement with the leaders of Congress to balance
    the budget by 2002, with a plan that ensures we will balance the budget,
    invest in our future, protect our values and our obligations to our
    children, our parents, and those in need.
        Four years ago when I took office, the economy was stagnating; job
    growth was sluggish; the budget deficit threatened to drown our economy.
    I believed it was time to change course with a new economic strategy:
    Invest and grow, cut the budget deficit, sell more products overseas
    through tough trade agreements, and invest in the skills of our people.
    In 1993, we put our economic plan in place. It wasn't easy; it required
    hard choices. But now, the deficit has been cut for 4 years in a row,
    falling from $290 billion in 1992 to about $80 billion this year--more
    than two-thirds of the way home to our first balanced budget since the
    1960's. All this has spurred lower interest rates, more investment, and
    stronger growth.
        And the good news goes beyond low unemployment: Economic growth is
    at its highest in a decade; core inflation at its lowest in three
    decades; the largest decline in income inequality since the 1960's; and
    thanks to the hard work of the American people, 12 million new jobs. It
    is now clear that our economy is the strongest it's been in a
    generation.
        Now we have to keep this economic growth going. We have a great
    opportunity to build a world for our children better than any America
    has ever known. But my fellow Americans, we must prepare. We have to
    give Americans the education and skills they need to compete in the
    global economy. We have to invest in science and technology. We have to
    continue to get and keep our economic house in order.
        To keep our economy growing, we must stay on the path of fiscal
    responsibility. To make sure all our people can share in this
    prosperity, we must make sure that a balanced budget also invests in
    their future. Balancing the budget, investing in our people: we must do
    both these things. In 1993, many people doubted that it could be done.
    We have shown that it can be done. And with this budget agreement, a
    bipartisan budget agreement, we will prove that we can actually balance
    the budget and continue to invest in our future.
        It took weeks of intense negotiations to lead to an agreement that
    protects our values. A balanced budget with unbalanced values and
    priorities would not have been enough. There were times when it seemed
    that we perhaps would never reach this agreement, times when it appeared
    that we could not secure a balanced budget true to the principles and
    priorities essential to our future and bringing Democrats

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    and Republicans together across all their differences. But everyone
    understood that the stakes were too great and the cost of failure too
    severe to give up.
        So, yesterday, we reached an agreement on just such a plan. It is a
    significant breakthrough for our country. And it proves that our
    political system can work when we put our partisan differences aside and
    put the American people and their future first.
        This budget honors our duty to our parents and to those in need by
    securing Medicare and Medicaid and extending the life of the Medicare
    Trust Fund for a full decade. It honors our duty to our children,
    expanding health coverage to children who don't have it, up to 5 million
    more of them. It keeps my pledge to continue the job of welfare reform
    by providing tax incentives to businesses to move people from welfare to
    work and restoring some of the unwise and excessive cuts included in
    last year's welfare bill. It cleans up 500 toxic waste dumps and
    strengthens enforcement for a clean environment. It gives the American
    people tax relief for education, for help in raising their children, and
    to spur investment in our future.
        And perhaps most important of all, this bipartisan agreement
    reflects our commitment to make education America's top priority on the
    edge of a new century. Here are our goals: Every 8-year-old can read;
    every 12-year-old can log on to the Internet; every 18-year-old can go
    on to college; every adult can keep on learning for a lifetime.
        This balanced budget is a breakthrough toward those goals. It's the
    best education budget in three decades. It will give families tax cuts
    to pay for college, and it will include our HOPE scholarship, a tax
    credit for tuition for the first 2 years of college to make those first
    2 years as universal as a high school diploma is today. The budget also
    includes the biggest increase in Pell grant scholarships for deserving
    students in 30 years. It funds our America Reads challenge, which will
    mobilize a million volunteer reading tutors to make sure that all our 8-
    year-olds will be able to read independently. It will help to connect
    all our classrooms and libraries to the information superhighway. And it
    will support our move to develop genuine national standards in education
    and, by 1999, to test every fourth grader in reading and every eighth
    grader in math to make sure we can compete in the world of tomorrow.
        This balanced budget plan is in balance with our values. It will
    help to prepare our people for a new century. It will help to propel our
    country into that century stronger than ever. I urge Members of Congress
    in both parties to pass it.
        Yesterday morning, I had a chance to think about our country, its
    history, and its destiny, when I was privileged to join in the
    dedication of the new memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt here in
    Washington. It is a tribute to him, to Eleanor Roosevelt, and to the
    generation that changed America, conquering depression at home,
    defeating tyranny abroad. We've come a long way since then, and we can
    go much, much further if we work with the same faith, commitment, and
    confidence that FDR's generation showed as they met the challenges of
    their time.
        In words from his last speech, which he wrote shortly before he
    died, President Roosevelt said, ``The only limit to our realization of
    tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong
    and active faith.''
        My fellow Americans, the news on the economy, the balanced budget
    agreement, they should give us confidence; they should validate our
    faith; they should erase our doubts. Let us now reach across party lines
    and seize our chance to balance the budget and maintain that strong and
    active faith that will ensure that our best days as a nation lie still
    before us.
        Thanks for listening.

    [At this point, the radio address ended, and the President took
    questions from reporters.]

    President's Visit to Mexico

        Q. [Inaudible]--with our requests on drug enforcement, their
    policies with immigration and trade, as you know. And some are
    characterizing your trip as kind of a visit of reconciliation. How would
    you characterize it, and how is the cooperation, specifically on drugs?
        The President. First of all, I don't see it as a visit of
    reconciliation. I see it as building on an ongoing partnership between
    two great nations that share a huge border and a common future, have
    some common problems, and inevitably some disagreements. We should look
    at this as a regular part of our building a common future. We will have
    some disagreements, but we've got an awful lot in common. But I think
    that the people of Mexico and the Government

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    of Mexico know that the United States and that our administration wish
    them well and want to help them build a better future.
        We also know we have some common problems. This drug problem is as
    big or bigger a problem for Mexico as it is for the United States. They
    will, in the end, not be able to maintain the fabric of an orderly,
    democratic, free society if the narcotraffickers come to dominate huge
    sections of their country. On the other hand, we have to understand the
    pressures that they are under, and we have to help them to beat back
    those pressures. And we'll work through it as well as we can.
        On immigration, we will continue to have some tensions because what
    we have done as a country is to have a very broadminded view of legal
    immigration. I would remind you--all those that think that we somehow
    have a narrowminded view--we let in almost a million people legally into
    this country last year. But if we're going to have a broad attitude
    toward legal immigration, we have to increase our intolerance for
    illegal immigration. We can--if we have laws and people wait in line,
    sometimes for years, to come to this country, it is wrong not to try to
    be tough to stop those who seek to evade those laws and come in ahead of
    their ordinary time. That's not right. So we'll work through that. I
    think our policy is right, and I think it will be a productive trip.
        Q. Mr. President, what's your reaction to the British election?

    Budget Agreement

        Q. It seems that the budget deals hinge on this $225 billion
    windfall from the new economic forecast. What if that doesn't pan out?
    What does that do to you?
        The President. Well, first of all, let me remind you that--and I
    want to compliment both sides here--we have known for some time that--
    even before the last figures came in--that economic growth was at 5.6
    percent in the last quarter, which is extraordinary, and that--then
    these new unemployment figures. We have known that the economy was
    performing well enough that our outlays would be lower, because more
    people would--fewer people would depend on Government assistance, and
    our revenues would be higher. The CBO's preliminary estimates--they
    don't file their final report until August--was that over a 5-year
    period, that might generate about $226 billion in new revenues.
        There were some problems in this budget; there still are some
    discipline problems in this budget. Keep in mind, we're still going to
    have to downsize the central Government. We're still going to have a lot
    of agencies that will grow at less than the rate of inflation. We are
    concentrating our new money in education, in science and technology and
    research, in environmental cleanup, in things that will build our
    future.
        But what I want to compliment the budget negotiators on is, they
    didn't try to spend that money. They only spent about 11\1/2\ percent of
    the money that we're now pretty sure will come in. All the rest of the
    money will go to reducing the deficit. So, if they're wrong, even quite
    a bit wrong, this budget will still balance in 2002 because they spent
    just a little over 10 percent of the money. If they're right, it will
    balance before 2002 because of the work and the growth and the
    productivity of the American people.
        So the real story here is not that they've spent $26 billion to stop
    what could have been a terrible problem in the Medicaid program for
    States with high disability costs or large numbers of poor people and
    poor children especially; or that they want to invest a little more
    money in infrastructure, which is good for our long-term economic
    growth; or that we're going to alleviate some of the extreme cuts in the
    food stamp program last year--that's not the real story. The real story
    is, they looked at this pot of money that appeared before them and said,
    ``We're going to leave nearly 90 percent of it there for deficit
    reduction and try to balance the budget even quicker.'' And to me, that
    is the real story. And they deserve a lot of credit for that.
        And that's the way I look at this. Yes, we took a little of the
    money. It gets us a few more votes for the plan. But it's also good
    things to do. We also put a little money back into the last year of
    defense, especially in the authorizing funds, simply so we could plan,
    because the Defense Department has to be able to plan long-term for the
    continuing restructuring of the military but increase reliance again on
    research, development, new technologies, and new weapons.
        So that small amount of a big pie shows, in fact, that we probably
    will balance the budget even sooner. But we don't intend to spend money
    that hasn't been realized yet.

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    Elections in the United Kingdom

        Q. Mr. President, what's your reaction to the British election?
        The President. Well, I think it's obviously a big vote for change. I
    think it's a validation of the themes that Mr. Blair struck. I think it
    once again proves that the people do not want political parties and
    political leadership tied to the rhetoric of the past. If you go back to
    the section of President Roosevelt's speech to the Commonwealth Club
    that I quoted--in 1932--yesterday, he said that if you have new times,
    you have to have new policies. You don't have new values, but you do
    have new directions. And so I thought it was a case where the people
    made that decision.
        I must also tell you though that this is my first chance to comment
    on this, and I'm looking forward to serving with Prime Minister Blair.
    He's a very exciting man, a very able man. I like him very much. But I
    also think that the people of the United States and the people of Great
    Britain should know that John Major represented that nation very well in
    the world. I have obviously no experience and no judgment about what
    happened domestically, because I wasn't there and I'm not a British
    citizen, but in all of our dealings over these last 4 years and several
    months, I was profoundly impressed by his patriotism, by his willingness
    to take tough decisions, especially in Bosnia where they were with us
    all the way. And so the British people can be proud of this stewardship.
        And the Conservatives had a good, long run. Nothing lasts forever,
    and they were in for a very long time. But I hope that Prime Minister
    Major and I hope the British people will always feel a great deal of
    pride in what they did in the way they related to the rest of the world
    in his stewardship because I was very impressed by it. And I also was
    impressed by the fact that he had the courage to start the peace process
    in Northern Ireland. And I hope and pray, now that the British election
    is over, that Prime Minister Blair will take up the torch, that the IRA
    will declare a cease-fire, and that we can get back on the road to
    resolving that problem. It is high time, and I can tell you, that's what
    the people of Northern Ireland want.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:06 a.m. from the Oval Office at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to newly elected Prime Minister
    Tony Blair of the United Kingdom.