    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [April 4, 1997]
    [Pages 389-394]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Women's Economic Leadership Forum
    April 4, 1997

        Welcome to Humility 101. Thank you, Betsy, Maria, Linda. Thank you,
    Senator Landrieu, all of you. I'm delighted that you're here for this
    first ever Women's Economic Leadership Summit. Linda, I want to
    especially thank you and the Center for Policy Alternatives for your
    role in this meeting.
        I couldn't help thinking, when Betsy was introducing me, that I--of
    all the things that I have done to try to elevate the status, the
    visibility, and the success of women, the most difficult one for me to
    do was just this week when I permitted Secretary Albright to represent
    me in throwing out the first ball--[laughter]--of the baseball season.
    It was very difficult. But you see, she got a lot more publicity for it
    than I would have. [Laughter] She throws hard, straight, and low when
    necessary--[laughter]--that's good.
        I'm delighted to see all of you here. When I came into office, one
    of the things that I wanted most to do was not only to fashion a new
    economic policy for our country that would move the economy forward but
    to do it in a way that would address two problems that I saw really
    eating away at the heart of America: one, the fact that all Americans
    didn't have a chance to participate in our economy, even when it was
    doing well, and I wanted to change that; and second, the fact that more
    and more Americans were having genuine difficulty fulfilling their
    responsibilities to their children and their responsibilities at work,
    principally lower income working people but not exclusively lower income
    working people, a lot of others as well.
        So we attempted not only to have a big economic strategy on the big
    issues, focusing on cutting the deficit, eventually balancing the
    budget, continuing to invest in education and technology and research,
    expanding trade--all of those things that I think are so important--but
    also to specifically target people and places that had been left out of
    the economic mainstream with initiatives like the empowerment zones, the
    community development financial institutions initiative, the
    microenterprise initiative--which I imagine Hillary will talk a little
    bit about when she comes over in a few minutes--but also with a lot of
    initiatives specifically directed toward women, the things that we've
    done in the Small Business Administration, increasing by 300 percent the
    number of loans to women from the SBA, and a number of other things. And
    of course we have done a lot in the area of work and family.

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        And I think the results have been, conservatively speaking, pretty
    impressive. Just this morning the new unemployment figures were
    announced. Unemployment dropped to 5.2 percent. I now think we have
    persuaded most economists that we could actually have 5 percent or lower
    unemployment in this country without having inflation if we do it with
    discipline. I'm going to do everything I can to get a balanced budget
    agreement this year so that it will send a signal to the markets that
    they can keep interest rates modest, we can keep the markets strong, and
    we can keep creating jobs and bring more and more people into the work
    force.
        Because, keep in mind, this 5.2 percent unemployment rate is
    misleading. There are lots and lots of States that have unemployment
    rates at 4 percent or less now; there are huge numbers of areas in
    States that have unemployment rates of 4.5, 4 percent, or less; and then
    there are places that have unemployment rates of 10 percent or more. So
    it's very important that we keep this effort going. It's also very
    important on the question of whether we can move the number of people
    from welfare to work that are prescribed in the welfare reform bill, and
    I'll say a little more about that in a minute.
        But the point I want to make to you is, number one, it's very
    important to do the big things right. And we have to continue to do
    that. If the overall economy is doing well because more and more women
    are well-educated and well-versed in business and because there are more
    and more groups out there trying to support each other and bring people
    into the economic mainstream, a lot of good things will happen if
    nothing else is done. So it's important to do the big things right.
        But secondly, it's also important to have specific, targeted
    initiatives that open up economy opportunity for everybody. The average
    pay of women is still only 71 cents on the dollar of what men make; for
    minority women it's about 60 cents. It's still more difficult on the
    whole for women to start a business. It's still more difficult on the
    whole for women to rise above certain levels in corporations. And we
    can't stop until we have this whole thing done. That's really the thing
    I want you to focus on today.
        And what I'd like to do is just to summarize very quickly some of
    the things that we've tried to do that directly or indirectly bear on
    this, the major initiatives outstanding that we're trying to implement
    in this Congress, and then again say that I hope that one of the things
    that will come out of the summit is that you will give us some more
    ideas about the road from here and where we go.
        If you look at the world we are living in and the one we are certain
    to live in for the next few decades, it will be a world in which the
    flexibility of all human potential in a country will determine its
    capacity for success--the ability to learn, the ability to work, the
    ability to change, and the ability to reconcile competing obligations.
    The biggest competing obligation for any great society as a whole is,
    how do you balance the need to be highly competitive with the need to
    adequately reward work and provide a decent amount of security, without
    which people feel so disoriented it's hard for them to be productive?
    How do you strike the right balance? That requires us to forge a whole
    new synthesis in economic policy and to break out of old ways of
    thinking.
        At a very personal level, we have to do the same thing with work and
    family. How do you enable people to succeed in the work place, to find
    personal fulfillment, whether it's in a for-profit or a not-for-profit
    or a public environment? How do you get the maximum number of able-
    bodied people in the work force and never forget that any society's most
    important task is raising good children who are successful and wholesome
    and happy and able to grow into successful people?
        And so when we look at the future, we have to analyze every issue in
    terms of those two things. So that, if you take, for example, the
    struggle that I've waged here for the last 4 years to get people to
    accept, respect, and indeed rejoice in the fact that we are becoming an
    ever more multiracial, multiethnic society--that also, parenthetically,
    is necessary if we're going to reconcile these economic issues properly
    and if we're going to reconcile work and family properly, because we're
    not going to be able to raise successful children unless they fell
    comfortable not only with their own heritage but in respecting and
    dealing with people of different heritages. So this is very, very
    important.
        I'd just like to start with that, because it's very important that,
    you know, when anybody brings something to me and they say, ``Mr.
    President, we ought to do this,'' or ``We shouldn't do that,'' or ``We
    should try to stop the other thing,'' I try to see it through that
    framework. And I try to ask myself more and

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    more, how will this affect America when our daughter is my age? What
    will this country look like in 30 years? How will we maintain the
    American dream? How will we maintain a sense of one America with genuine
    respect for our differences? How will we maintain the leadership of this
    country?
        Just this morning I had a wonderful event with a number of leading
    Republicans and Democrats who have worked in arms control for years,
    endorsing the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which, by
    the way, is a very big thing not only in terms of national security but
    in terms of our economic well-being that we do this. But the most
    important thing to me is, it will help to provide the right balance
    between change and security for the American people 30 years from now if
    we do it. And if we don't, we'll pay a terrible price for it. And I
    think every one of you--we all need a kind of a framework for the future
    that we think about.
        I'll just say this one other example. I had a very successful summit
    meeting in Helsinki with President Yeltsin. But the only way it
    succeeded was that he was able--not just me but he was able to think
    about a future that is very different from the immediate past and not to
    be imprisoned by the categories of the past but to think about, you
    know, ``What do I want Russia to look like in 30 years? What do I want
    the men and women coming of age in Russia to be like? What kind of life
    do I want them to live? How should they relate to the United States and
    to the rest of Europe?'' And this sort of courageous thinking is really
    required of all of us. And we may have to give up some things we'd just
    as soon not give up in the short run, but we're going to be able to
    embrace a much richer future if we do it.
        Now, to come back to the subject of the meeting, it seems to me that
    we have to stay with the proposition that in the near term, that small
    business will be the most powerful engine of opportunity for the largest
    number of women who are trying to move into the economic mainstream,
    either as employees or owners. When I became President--I think this is
    right--I believe that woman-owned businesses contributed about $1.6
    trillion to our gross national product. It's up to $2.3 trillion now.
    One in five employees in the country are working for a business owned by
    a woman. That's a stunning statistic.
        It also means that we have to do more to try to help women have
    access to the credit markets, to move in, to succeed. And we have tried
    to do that with the SBA and with other things. But secondly, it means
    that we have to be sensitive to the fact that if more women work in
    small businesses, they will be more vulnerable unless we have other
    mechanisms to enable them to succeed.
        That's one of the big reasons I thought it was important to raise
    the minimum wage. It's one of the big reasons that one of the most
    important provisions of the 1993 deficit reduction act in our economic
    plan was a huge expansion in the earned-income tax credit for working
    families. So it's a very good thing to do. By the way, what that means
    is now that all families with two children with incomes of under $30,000
    a year are now paying markedly lower taxes than they would have been
    paying if that bill hadn't passed. So it has made a difference.
        It's one of the reasons that I was proud that the Family and Medical
    Leave Act was the first bill I signed. We have millions of people who
    have now taken advantage of that, and we know that it has not hurt our
    economy. And again I will say, I know that it is somewhat inconvenient
    for some businesses on occasion, even though the surveys show that way
    over 80 percent of the businesses say there's been literally no cost.
    But in the end it has to increase the productivity of a society when
    people feel that they can do a good job at work and they're not worried
    sick at work about either their children, their parents, their spouses,
    or someone else because they can't even have a basic amount of time with
    them when they need it. So these are things it seems to me we need to
    focus on in the future.
        We changed the pension laws in the last couple of years in ways that
    I think are very important, especially to a lot of women workers who
    have been employed by companies that were vulnerable. When I became
    President, they told me that the pension system of the country was going
    to be the next S&L crisis. And the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
    was in terrible trouble and had been in debt for 16 years. Well, now
    it's running a surplus for the first time in over 20 years, and over 40
    million workers have had their pensions secured. We made it easier for
    millions and millions of people to take out 401(k) plans and to keep
    them when they move from job to job and made nonprofits

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    eligible for 401(k) plans, hospitals, educational institutions, other
    health care institutions. This affects 4 million women.
        And we now know that while we have to be determined to preserve the
    stability and the integrity of the Social Security system, it is really
    not adequate to maintain the lifestyle of people when they get in their
    retirement years. We have to have higher savings rates for people in the
    work force. And since more and more retirement plans that are funded by
    employers are going to define contribution plans instead of define
    benefit plans, it is absolutely essential that we continue to move
    forward with both the integrity and the accessibility of savings plans
    for retirements for women in the work force. And we have some more
    things that we will propose to the Congress this year to try to
    strengthen the integrity as well as the accessibility of retirement. I
    think it is very, very significant.
        In addition to that, we have tried to improve, as Betsy said, the
    operation of the Federal child care programs and how they interface with
    those at the local level. And in the welfare reform bill, one of the
    best things about it was we put up $4 billion more for child care. But
    let me say, I still believe in some ways that's the most underfunded
    employee support program in the United States. And I urge you to take a
    look at that--about the delivery system and how it works.
        One of the things that I think should be done intensely in every
    State--and I'm going around to State legislators, along with the Vice
    President and the First Lady, to talk to them about education reform and
    welfare reform, and one of the things that I think every State should do
    is to target the establishment of child care centers and the training of
    child care workers for moving people from welfare to work and then
    giving people on welfare who do become certified child care workers
    either free or discounted service for their own children in the child
    care centers where their parents work.
        If you look at it, we have a window here of significant opportunity,
    because the States got a block grant under the welfare reform bill,
    targeted to how much they were getting when the welfare rolls were at
    their highest. The welfare rolls have now dropped by about 2.5 million,
    the biggest drop in history. So they have some extra money here until
    the next economic recession comes along.
        And I believe that one of the most significant things that can be
    done--and I urge all of you to ask your States to consider doing this
    and to lobby at the State level to do this--is to focus very sharply on
    the opportunity this welfare reform bill plus this extra cash to the
    States gives us to set up for the first time a genuinely comprehensive,
    well-trained, well-staffed, properly funded child care network in the
    country in a way that will move people from welfare to work and make
    child care available to lower wage working people who have never been on
    welfare in their lives but can't afford decent child care for their
    kids. It's a terrific opportunity, and we should be doing it.
        Let me also say that we've done a lot of other things here that
    only--at least indirectly impact the economy, but have a huge impact on
    women: the Violence Against Women's Office, which I think has done a
    great job in the Justice Department; the Women's Health Office; the
    White House Women's Office that Betsy heads; the White House Interagency
    Committee on Women's Business Enterprise. We have dramatically increased
    medical research in areas that disproportionately affect women and
    involve women in testing protocols in a way they were not involved
    before I became President, which dramatically compromised the medical
    research effort of the country in terms of how it affected women. And I
    think that has been changed substantially, and I'm very proud of that.
        Now, there is still a lot to do, and let me just mention some of the
    things that are my priorities. First of all, in the health care area.
    While the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill did a good thing saying that you
    couldn't be denied health insurance if someone in your family got sick
    or when you changed jobs, it's only good if you can still afford to buy
    your health insurance. And we know there are 10 million children who
    still aren't insured and that a huge percentage of them aren't insured
    because their parents lose their insurance when they lose their jobs or
    when they're between jobs.
        We have a proposal on the table which we think, with the money we
    now have available, will cut that number to 5 million. There are other
    proposals which have been offered in this Congress by both Republicans
    and Democrats alike. I would just urge you to do whatever you can and
    say whatever you can to whomever you can to tell us to do the best we
    can. I

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    mean, we do have a sense that--I think a sense--there's a majority I
    think in the Congress now committed to doing as much as we can on this.
    And if we could get the kids of this country insured, it wouldn't be
    long before we'd figure out how to fill the rest of the gaps. That's
    what I believe. And so I hope that we can make progress there.
        With regard to welfare reform, the problems that I see in the bill
    are as follows. Number one, the biggest problem has nothing to do with
    welfare reform, and that is that they cut aid to legal immigrants too
    much. And I'm not talking about people who come here and don't tell the
    truth when they come to America and immediately try to get on welfare.
    I'm talking about people who work, pay taxes, have children. Many of
    them are women and, through no fault of their own, get sick, are victims
    of crime, have accidents, and now won't be able to claim any access to
    Medicaid or any other public benefits. Our budget corrects that, and I
    hope you will support that.
        Furthermore, and right on point here, I believe that women business
    owners are more likely than men business owners to be sensitive to the
    extra effort that will have to be made to move people from welfare to
    work. But we know that most of these jobs are going to have to come from
    the private sector.
        Now, let me just describe to you what the dimension of the problem
    is in welfare reform. In the last 4 years, our economy produced 11\1/2\
    million jobs. We had never done that before. That's the most we ever
    produced. In that 11\1/2\ million jobs, there were one million people
    who moved from welfare to work. Of that one million people who moved
    from welfare to work, my Council of Economic Advisers estimates that
    about half of them moved from welfare to work because the economy got
    better and if nobody had lifted a finger, they would have moved from
    welfare to work because people don't like to be on welfare. They want to
    go to work if they can.
        The other half--of the other half, most them moved from welfare to
    work because of special efforts that had already been made in the States
    and localities under welfare reform initiatives that were already
    underway. Some of them moved off the welfare rolls because we had a 50
    percent increase in child support collections in 4 years, something that
    I'm very proud of. And we have provisions to do better even, and we're
    going to do better.
        But here's the rub: under this new law, 40 percent of those who are
    able-bodied and able-minded enough to be in the work force have to move
    from welfare to work some time in the next 4 years. And to cut to the
    chase, that's about 900,000 more. But that's 900,000 more that have to
    move from welfare to work whether we can produce 11.5 million jobs for
    another 4 years or not. If we did it back to back, it would be
    wonderful, and we might. But if we do, we will sure enough set some
    records. It has not ever been done before.
        That means two things: One, we should give some extra help to
    communities with high unemployment to hire people to do community
    service related jobs, and there's something in our budget for that; but
    second, most of these jobs are going to have to come from the private
    sector and from welfare reform efforts. And there are--in my budget,
    there is a special credit which you can get only if you can demonstrate
    (a) that you've hired someone from welfare to work and (b) that they got
    a new job, they didn't replace someone else. But the credit is
    substantial. It's 50 percent of the salary up to $10,000 a year. So that
    is, in effect, an education and training supplement because we know that
    some of these folks who have never had work experience are going to be
    hard to place.
        In addition to that, every State can--and I've been going around
    challenging them to do, and several are starting--can give the welfare
    check to an employer as an education and training supplement. In Kansas
    City, if you pay $1.75 over the minimum wage, they'll give you the
    welfare check. Kansas City will give it to you for up to 4 years. But
    most States would be more like a year.
        But the point is, even if as a private employer, you couldn't hire
    someone for more than the length of the subsidy, if you hired somebody
    for a year, they'd have something on a resume. It would be that much
    easier to get another job. That would be 1 year on their 5 year lifetime
    limit on welfare that wouldn't be used up. So it would be worth doing,
    even if it could just be done for a year.
        And the women business owners of America can have a huge impact in
    doing something that, by the way, will also help the economy if you
    create that many more consumers, bring that many more people into the
    work force, have

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    that many more people being productive, that many more people being a
    positive role model for their own children. This is a huge thing. So I
    hope that you will, all of you, do what you can to try to mobilize the
    women business people of America to try to take an active and aggressive
    role in this effort.
        I have asked the Congress to pass what I think is a good flextime
    bill to give people more options to take their overtime in time or
    money. But I think the important thing is that the employee ought to
    have the choice. It shouldn't be a way around the 40 hour work week.
    [Applause] Thank you.
        I have asked the Congress--I think--I've asked the Congress to
    expand family and medical leave in a very narrow way just to give some
    time off to go to children's conferences at school and to take their
    children or their parents to regular doctor's appointments in a very
    limited fashion. I hope that will pass and find favor. And as I said,
    we've also proposed some other things in the retirement security area.
        The last thing I would say is, I think that there are a lot of women
    who are outside their regular school years who deserve a second chance,
    who could make a major contribution to the economic life of this
    country. And the education proposals that are on the table in this
    Congress would be really helpful. If we pass the $1,500-a-year tax
    credit for the first 2 years of college, it would in effect make
    community college education as universal as high school is today.
        I also proposed a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for the cost
    of any high school--any tuition after high school, easier access to an
    IRA that you could withdraw from tax-free to pay for education, and the
    biggest increase in Pell grants in 20 years.
        But I think these things are important. We need to remind ourselves
    that the average age of people in our educational institutions is going
    higher and higher and higher. Even in the 4 year colleges now, it's up
    to 25--26 in some of our 4 year colleges in America. Most of our
    community colleges, it's higher than that. And so having universal
    access so people can get a second chance, I think, is profoundly
    important. And I hope that you will support that. It's a big deal for
    our economy and a big deal for women's economic opportunity.
        So these are the things that we're going to be pushing. If you have
    other ideas, I hope you will do that and give them to us.
        And the last thing I want to say is I hope you will continue to
    participate as partners with us. I went to a memorial service yesterday
    over at the Commerce Department for Ron Brown and the other people who
    were killed a year ago in Croatia, and I think one of the more important
    things that Secretary Brown did was to make sure that he emphasized
    women business leaders in these trade missions and reaching out to the
    rest of the world and trying to build ties. So I hope you will look for
    other opportunities to participate in that way and to continue to be a
    part of the partnership that we're trying to establish with America to
    create the kind of country we want for the 21st century.
        Thank you very much. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:41 p.m. in the Indian Treaty Room at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to Betsy Myers, Deputy
    Assistant to the President for Women's Initiatives and Outreach, and
    Maria Echaveste, Assistant to the President and Director of Public
    Liaison, White House; and Linda Tarr-Whelan, president and chief
    executive officer, Center for Policy Alternatives.