[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
[March 6, 1997]
[Pages 240-249]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to a Joint Session of the Michigan State Legislature in Lansing
March 6, 1997

    Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, Governor. Thank you all 
for that wonderful welcome in this magnificent capitol. I'm delighted to 
be here today with so many of your State officials--Lieutenant Governor 
Binsfeld; your State board of education president, Kathleen Strauss. I 
don't know if Frank Kelley met Theodore Roosevelt, but he did meet me 
when I became attorney general. [Laughter] And some days I feel about 
that old. I want to thank the

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mayor of Lansing, Mayor Hollister, for meeting me at the airport, and 
all the other State officials and dignitaries who are here--
Representative Sikkema, thank you, sir; and Senator Cherry and Senator 
Posthumus.
    I want to thank the Members of Congress and others who flew down 
here with me today--your former Governor, Jim Blanchard and his wife, 
Janet; Congressman Dingell; your Congresswoman from here, Congressman 
Debbie Stabenow; Representative Levin; Representative Kilpatrick; 
Representative Conyers; Representative Stupak; Representative Camp; and 
Representative Hoekstra and Representative Barcia. Did I get them all? 
[Laughter] Nine, we only had nine here. I could only muster nine, but 
that's a quorum--[laughter]--even in the State legislature--of the 
Michigan delegation. I thank them for coming down.
    Thank you, Wendell Anthony, for your invocation, and thank you for 
making me feel so welcome.
    When I came in, the Speaker and I were looking up at this 
magnificent ceiling, and I noticed that the seal of the State of 
Michigan was right next to the seal of my home State of Arkansas. And 
maybe one reason for that is that the Congress approved us coming into 
the Union at the same time.
    I was reading also the account of Theodore Roosevelt coming here 90 
years ago. I know you have partisan differences today. You might be 
interested to know that 90 years ago there were 32 Republicans and no 
Democrats in the Senate. [Laughter] If you clap too much, I've got a 
great closing line--Governor, you'll get mad at it. [Laughter] There 
were 95 Republicans and 5 Democrats in the House. And it was the 
aftermath of the Civil War.
    I say this because our two States have been entwined in an 
interesting way over the course of time. We were allowed together into 
the Union because Michigan was a free State and Arkansas was a Southern 
slave State, and Michigan became the party--adhering to the party of 
Abraham Lincoln, of freedom, and the party of Theodore Roosevelt, which 
the Governor explained. And most of us Democrats are pretty proud of 
those folks, too. They represent the best in America.
    Then, after the Great Depression, Michigan basically became the home 
of tens of thousands of people from my State who simply could not make a 
living anymore on the farm, and the factories of Michigan gave people 
from Arkansas, black and white together, the chance to come up here and 
build a decent, middle class life and educate their children and be a 
part of what was then America's future. So anybody from my roots must be 
exceedingly grateful to the people of Michigan and the history and the 
heritage of Michigan.
    When Theodore Roosevelt was here, he was going to Michigan State to 
address the graduates there, just as I did a couple of years ago. And I 
might say the president of Michigan State is here, and I told him today 
that he gave me a picture of Theodore Roosevelt's address to the 
graduates at Michigan State, and it now hangs on my office wall at the 
White House at the entrance to my little private office off the Oval 
Office, and I look up there and see Teddy Roosevelt speaking every day 
that I go to work.
    Before that, he came here, and when he spoke here I suppose the 
place looked about like it does now, thanks to your magnificent 
renovation, and I applaud you for doing this. People all over America 
should remember it's worth investing a little money to protect your 
roots and your heritage and the beauty and meaning of what we were as 
well as what we hope to be.
    In 1907 when Teddy Roosevelt came here, we were at the dawn of the 
industrial era. This building had been wired for electricity only 2 
years before he showed up. And when President Roosevelt left here to go 
to the college campus, he got in a newfangled contraption called a Reo 
automobile. I read the newspaper article from your local paper from 1907 
this morning, and it said that it was something of a risk for him to get 
into the car, but it was probably the wave of the future, who knew what 
would turn out. [Laughter] Then, like a good politician, I read that 
when he was at Michigan State, at the campus, he learned that there 
were, in fact, two different car manufacturers competing with one 
another in Lansing, so he took the other one back. [Laughter] He took a 
Reo out and an Olds back.
    That was a rare moment. Just think what happened from that moment to 
this one. Think about the century that that moment and this one spans--
all but 10 years of this century--and why it became the American 
Century, what a big part of it Michigan was, building a great middle 
class; offering a haven to people from

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all over America and to immigrants who would come here from other lands 
to work, to make their way; building an industrial power that could 
prevail in two World Wars and overcome a Great Depression; building an 
ethical power that could live up to the meaning of its Constitution in 
the civil rights revolution and expanding opportunities to young people 
to vote and to women to fully participate in the life of America. Just 
think what has happened in the 20th century.
    When Roosevelt was here in 1907, it was a rare moment. We were 
moving onto the stage as a world power. Everyone recognized it. We had 
by then been a nation for more than 100 years, and everybody knew there 
was something unique about America, a free democracy where people could 
vote and decide and make their judgments. And it was growing and being 
nourished. We were exceedingly prosperous by the standards of the time.
    And Roosevelt knew that you had to make the most of peace and 
prosperity and leadership, and he did. And so did his successor, Woodrow 
Wilson. And because of them together and the work they did with like-
minded members of both parties, we built an era that set the framework 
for America's leadership, growth, and prosperity, and the explosion of 
people into the middle class, which became the hallmark of Michigan's 
greatness.
    When I was a kid in Arkansas, our per capita income was barely half 
the national average. We all knew if you could find your way up here and 
got a job, you could still make a good living. That all began at the 
beginning of this century. It is a very rare thing for a country to have 
peace and prosperity and the possibility of shaping its own future. 
Abraham Lincoln said in the Civil War, ``My policy is to have no policy. 
I'm controlled by events.'' If I said that, I would be ridiculed, 
rightly so. But he was controlled by events. He did have a policy; it 
was to keep the Union together and then to liberate us from the scourge 
of slavery. But he was controlled by events.
    When the Depression came on and President Roosevelt called for an 
era of bold experimentation, he was controlled by events to some extent. 
He couldn't say the major issue in America is the climate or even 
education or anything else. He was controlled by events, and the war did 
that. And to some extent, the cold war did that for us. When Sputnik 
went up and we got into the space race and wound up winning it, we were 
almost forced into it. Now we have peace and prosperity on the edge of 
an era of unimaginable possibility.
    We just finished 4 years where our country, for the first time 
during one administration, has produced 11\1/2\ million jobs. Michigan--
the unemployment rate has dropped, and the Governor said your welfare 
rolls are down 30 percent. You see this kind of progress, this energy, 
this movement, this possibility in America--dramatic new advances in 
science and technology occurring. This is a rare time.
    What happens to people, usually, when they are prosperous and 
unthreatened? Well, they usually get complacent, and then they normally 
find some reason to fall out with one another, usually over something 
incredibly petty, just in the nature of human events. And I come here to 
say to you today, we here in America and you here especially in Michigan 
who have done so much for so long, we cannot afford to do that. We owe 
something better to our children. We have been given this unique 
opportunity, the same sort of opportunity we had when your predecessors 
were listening to Theodore Roosevelt here 90 years ago, except one on an 
even grander scale, and we have to make the most of it. We have to build 
America in the new century. And we also have to know that we have to do 
it as one America.
    I am gratified that Governor Engler said what he did about the 
education program today. I am gratified that this bipartisan State 
legislature has given me such a warm welcome, for we have to forge a new 
partnership for a new time.
    While the era of big Government is truly over--the Federal 
Government now has 285,000 fewer people working for it than it did on 
the day I took the oath of office--the era of big challenges for our 
Nation is not over. And now, we know that national leadership can and 
must point the way, but the real responsibility is one we all share.
    Especially, there are two areas I want to discuss today--educational 
excellence, high standards for all students; and welfare reform, 
breaking the cycle of dependency for everyone capable of independence in 
America--for these issues are at the core of what it means to prepare 
America for the 21st century, giving all Americans not only the 
opportunity but the tools they need to make the most of their own lives 
in this new global knowledge economy.

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    The Governor referred to this in his remarks. When I gave the State 
of the Union Address, I said that during the cold war, because our 
national security was threatened by communism, politics stopped at the 
water's edge. Today, our national security depends upon our ability to 
develop the capacities of all of our people, so politics should stop at 
the schoolhouse door.
    Between 1992 and 2000--think of this--89 percent of the new jobs 
created in this economy will require more than high school levels of 
literacy and math skills, but only half the people entering the work 
force are prepared for these high-paying jobs, even though about 80 
percent of them are high school graduates. Our schools are still turning 
out millions of young people who simply are not equipped for the new 
world of work. That is why our number one priority must be to make our 
system of public education the best in the world, and you must believe 
we can do this.
    A few years ago, almost 8 years ago now, I had the honor of joining 
the other Governors then serving with President Bush at the University 
of Virginia to write the national education goals. I still think they're 
pretty good goals. If you ask me what the consequences would be if they 
were implemented, we could say bluntly that it would mean that every 8-
year-old would be able to read independently, every 12-year-old could 
now log on to the Internet, every 18-year-old could go to college, and 
every adult American could keep on learning for a lifetime. That is what 
I want to be the reality in this country.
    In the State of the Union Address, I laid out a 10-point plan, a 
call to action for American education that describes the steps I believe 
we must all take, beginning with the youngest children, expanding and 
improving early childhood learning. The First Lady and I will be having 
a conference on early childhood learning and the brain to try to deal 
with these enormously significant new findings over the last couple of 
years, what we know about not only when children learn but how they 
learn and what happens if we don't do for them what they should do.
    An enormous percentage of the capacity of the brain to absorb 
information to operate is developed in the first 4 years. I'll just give 
you one statistic: The average child that grows up in a family with two 
parents caring for that child, even if they both work, that have 
reasonably good educations and deal with the basic developmental tasks, 
will give that child 700,000 positive interactions in the first 4 years. 
The average child being raised by a single parent with low self-esteem 
and low self-confidence and no training in parenting will get 150,000 
positive interactions and spend roughly 7 times as much time before a 
television doing nothing, in the first 4 years. This has enormous 
consequences for the way we become. So we're going to talk about that.
    We have to open the doors of college wider than ever. If 90 percent 
of the jobs require more than a high school education, and the 1990 
census shows that the only group of younger workers whose incomes went 
up instead of down after you adjust for inflation were those that had at 
least 2 years of some kind of training after high school, we ought to 
make the 13th and 14th years of education just as universal by the year 
2000 as a high school education is today.
    I know that for years Michigan has been in the forefront of that, 
helping people to save for college. I have a proposal to provide tax 
credits for the cost of a typical community college for 2 years, and tax 
deductions up to $10,000 a year for the tuition cost in any post-high 
school education, and an expanded IRA that can be used for the same 
purpose. We have to do this.
    We also have to give more of our workers the ability to keep on 
learning for a lifetime. For 4 years, through a Democratic Congress and 
a Republican Congress, I have been given equal opportunity to fail to 
pass the ``GI bill'' for American workers. But it seems to me to be a 
simple idea. I just want to take the 70-odd programs that were developed 
with the best of intentions over the years, for this training program, 
that training program, and the other one, put them in a big fund, and 
when a worker becomes eligible for help through unemployment or 
underemployment, send them a skills grant and let them take it to the 
local community college or the nearest education institution. They can 
find out for themselves what they need to do to improve their education. 
We don't need all that stuff in the middle of them, between them and the 
money. Send them the money, let them get the education. I hope you will 
help me pass that in the Congress. I think it is a good thing.
    I want to help for the very first time through an innovative program 
to use Federal funds to

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lower the interest rates on local bond issues to help schools with 
enormous building problems to repair their broken infrastructure or 
build new facilities when they are doing their part. This is a very 
important thing. We have the largest number of schoolchildren--as 
Secretary Riley never lets me forget--we have the largest number of 
schoolchildren in history in our schools this year, the first time we've 
ever had a bigger group than the baby boom generation. I have been to 
schools where the buildings were falling down. My wife was in a school 
this week where some of the floors were closed, and the kids were going 
to school on some floors and couldn't go into other floors or other 
rooms because they didn't comply with the building codes. I have been 
into other schools with beautiful old school buildings surrounded by 
temporary facilities to hold the children.
    So I think it's an appropriate thing for us to do, not to try to 
take over this function and not to try to substitute for people assuming 
responsibility, but when there's a terrible problem and people are doing 
their own work, if we can, by a prudent and limited investment, lower 
the cost of that so that more people can afford to do more construction 
and repair, I think we should.
    I'm also strongly committed--the Vice President and I have been 
working on this very hard--to getting every classroom and every library 
in the country hooked up to the Internet by the year 2000. And I want to 
thank your Congresswoman, Debbie Stabenow, for the work that she's done 
in supporting that.
    Secretary Riley has awarded Michigan a grant of $8.6 million for the 
technology literacy challenge to help your classrooms move into the 21st 
century, and I ask all of you to support that. There is enormous 
willingness in the private sector to help us get this done, and it can 
revolutionize--just think of it--if we can hook up every classroom and 
every library to the Internet by the year 2000, for the first time in 
the history of the country ever--ever--children in the poorest district, 
the richest districts, the middle class districts, all of them will have 
access to the same learning in the same way in the same time.
    And those of you who have children or know children who are already 
proficient in using the Internet, it's a stunning thing. The other day, 
my daughter picked a topic to do a research paper on, and she said, 
``Dad, can you get me a couple of books on this out of the library?'' I 
came home with four books, and she had eight citations she had gotten 
off the Internet--eight articles and things. So my labors were one-third 
of her research project.
    This is an incredible thing. If we make this available to all 
children, it will change in a breathtaking way what people can become, 
what our children can imagine themselves becoming. And I ask you to help 
us do that.
    I thank you, Governor, for what you said about our support for 
greater discipline and safety and character education in the schools. I 
have proposed funding 1,000 new community school programs across the 
country to help our schools stay open after school, on the weekends, in 
the summertime, to try to give those children who need some positive 
place to go, some support, some help to stay out of trouble, a place to 
do that.
    I have studied very carefully this problem of rising juvenile crime 
when overall crime has been going down dramatically in America. And the 
communities that are reversing that trend, that had juvenile crime going 
down are the places that make sure that all those kids have something 
positive to say yes to, even as they're being told to say no to the 
wrong things. So I want the schools to be able to do that in every 
community where it's needed in the United States.
    We have to make sure that we do everything we can to help our 
classroom teachers be the best they can be. For years, educators worked 
to establish nationally accepted credentials for excellence in teaching 
through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which is 
headquartered here in Detroit, Michigan.
    Now, Michigan has the third highest number of board-certified master 
teachers in the country, and that's a good thing. But there are still 
only a few hundred who have been board certified. My new budget will 
enable 100,000 teachers all across America to seek certification as 
master teachers. And our goal should be to have one certified master 
teacher in every single school in America. That will make more master 
teachers we need for those schools, and I hope we can do it.
    As has already been said today, I do believe that we need a strong 
system of public education that gives parents and communities more 
freedom and flexibility. I think we should work

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together to give parents more choices for what public schools their 
children attend all across America. I think we should help teachers, 
parents, museums, and others to create new public charter schools.
    I have proposed to double the budget of the program so that we can 
increase by tenfold the number of charter schools we have by the year 
2000, to create--[applause]--and I think it's important to emphasize 
what we want. We want high standards, schools that are open to all 
children regardless of their backgrounds. We want an example of 
accountability which will then spread to all other public schools. But 
we want to say to them, you can stay open only as long as you do a good 
job. That's what the charter means; that's what a charter is.
    Ultimately, what we want to do is to prove that we have a model here 
that can be used everywhere else. It is simply not true that if you have 
a few public schools that all the rest of them can't be good, if some of 
them are good that they all can't be good. That is not true. It is not 
true that because it's a public institution we can't achieve excellence 
everywhere. If that were true, we'd have some good Army units and some 
bad Army units, and we'd be afraid to go to war, and you wouldn't sleep 
well at night. Isn't that right?
    So you do not have to accept the feeling that you know this 
wonderful principal, and if only everybody else could be that way. That 
is simply not true. Leadership can be taught, leadership can be trained, 
and 90 percent of the children in this country plus--99 percent of 
them--can learn what they need to know to succeed and triumph in the 
modern world. They can do it, and we have to do it. [Applause]
    Now that you've clapped, I will say they are capable of it, but they 
don't know it today. Let's face the facts. The truth is that 40 percent 
of the fourth graders in this country still cannot read a book on their 
own. In Germany or Singapore, students learn 15 to 20 math subjects in 
depth every year. Typically in the United States, we run over 30 or 35 
every year in a superficial way. Then we have these comparative tests. 
They normally win, especially since they stay in school longer than we 
do, day-in and day-out, year-in and year-out.
    But without these skills, children will not be able to develop the 
capacity to think and to reason and to analyze complex problems. All 
these skills will be essential to succeeding in the world of the 21st 
century in jobs that have not been invented or even imagined yet.
    Now, what do we have to have? We have got to have high standards, 
high expectations, and high levels of accountability. That is why I have 
challenged our Nation to meet these national standards in the basics, 
not Federal Government standards but national standards, representing 
what every child, wherever he or she lives, however poor, rich, or 
middle class he or she is, must know to do well in the world of the 21st 
century. And I think we should begin by having every State test every 
fourth grader in reading and every eighth grader in math by 1999 to make 
sure these basic standards are met.
    We already have widely accepted rigorous standards in both reading 
and math and widely used tests that are based on these standards. 
They're just not given to everyone or designed to be given to everyone. 
Michigan and more than 40 other States have participated in a test 
called the National Assessment of Education Progress. The education 
committee members in the audience call it the NAEP test. It measures a 
State's overall performance against a high national standard of 
excellence. Just last week we released the annual assessment of math 
performance and it shows, across the country, that our 4th, 8th, and 
12th graders are doing better. And as the Governor said, Michigan's 
score is among the most improved in the Nation.
    Tens of thousands of students across the country have also taken the 
Third International Math and Science Survey, a test that reflects world-
class standards our children must meet in math and science. The 
headquarters for that test is just down the road at Michigan State. And 
I want to thank Dr. William Schmidt at Michigan State for his leadership 
of this important study. I think he's here with us today. Where are you, 
Dr. Schmidt? He's here somewhere. Thank you very much, sir.
    If you saw the State of the Union Address, you know there are a 
group of children in northern Illinois that took this test in 20 school 
districts north of Chicago, and they finished tied for first in science 
and tied for second in math, I think--very impressive.
    Unfortunately, these tests also don't provide scores for 
individuals; they simply measure how an entire area or group of people 
are doing. What we need are exams that will literally measure the 
performance of each and every student

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in each and every school. That way, parents and teachers will know how 
every child is doing compared to other students in other schools, other 
States, and other countries. And most important of all, they will know 
how the child is doing compared to what you need to know to go forward.
    And I want to make it clear what the difference is. It doesn't 
matter if your child makes the highest grade in the class if nobody gets 
over the standards bar. Conversely, in this sense it doesn't matter if 
your child makes the lowest grade in the class if everybody gets over 
the standards bar. That's the difference. We have a lot of these 
standardized tests. We need tests that test to the standards, that say 
whether you have crossed the threshold of what you must know to do well 
in the world of tomorrow.
    That's why I'm presenting a plan to help the States meet and measure 
these standards. Over the next 2 years, the Department of Education will 
support the development of new tests for the fourth grade reading and 
the eighth grade math, to show how every student measures up to high and 
widely accepted standards. They'll be developed by independent experts 
in consultation with leading math and reading teachers. The Federal 
Government will not require them, but these tests will be made available 
to every State that chooses to administer them. That is the significance 
of the announcement that the Governor made. I want to create a climate 
in which no one can say no, in which it's voluntary but you are ashamed 
if you don't give your kids the chance to do this.
    Together we are saying this. This is not a partisan issue. There is 
no Democratic or Republican way to teach. There is no Maryland or 
Michigan way to learn. Reading is reading; math is math. No school board 
or State legislature can rewrite the rules of algebra in Alaska to make 
them different than they are in Arkansas. It cannot be done. Every State 
must put politics aside, work in a bipartisan fashion, test our children 
in the same rigorous way. Politics should stop at the schoolhouse door.
    This will not be easy. Some of our children won't do very well at 
first. We don't need to make them feel like failures; we need to make 
them understand we're doing this so we can know how to measure their 
success. If they don't do very well at first, it's probably more our 
fault than theirs. And a lot of it, I will say again, is because when we 
see people in difficult circumstances, sometimes out of the goodness of 
our heart, we exercise our compassion by expecting less of them. And we 
are selling their future right down the drain every time we do it.
    I can tell you, over the last several years--you know, I was a 
Governor a long time. I served with Governor Engler; I served with 
Governor Blanchard; I served with Governor Milliken. I have been all 
over this country to schools. I have seen schools in areas with high 
murder rates, where it was unsafe to get in the school, where there were 
no guns, no knives, no dope, no dropout, and test scores were above the 
State average. I could go through example after example after example. 
And every time I see one, I get more hopeful and more angry, because if 
you can have one good school where the kids are learning against all the 
odds and all the obstacles, then you know when you leave that school 
there is no excuse for that not happening everywhere. This will help 
that happen everywhere. This will help that happen everywhere.
    Let me make a comment now about one other part of this education 
program that I think is very important, and that's our America Reads 
program. We announced it here in Michigan last August in Wyandotte, when 
I was there on my train trip. And I did it with the help of two 
elementary school students, Justin Whitney and Elizabeth Schweyen. We 
announced the America Reads challenge. We set a goal mobilizing a 
million volunteer tutors to help every 8-year-old learn to read 
independently. We're going to use 11,000 of our AmeriCorps volunteers to 
mobilize and train the army. We're going to get at least 100,000 college 
students to help. And I might say in the last budget we added 200,000 
more work-study slots, and there's another 100,000 in this budget, so 
we'll go to a million kids on work-study, and I want 100,000 of that 
extra 300,000 to help teach our children to read. And I'm pleased that 
16 Michigan college presidents have already pledged to provide their 
fair share of those students.
    I don't know if you remember what we did that hot August day, but 
Elizabeth and Justin read ``The Little Engine That Could'' to me, and I 
said I want every child to be able to do this and say, ``Here's this 
book, and I can read this all by myself.'' Today Elizabeth and Justin 
are here with us, and I would like to ask them to stand up. Where are 
they? They're

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out there. There they are. [Applause] Thank you.
    I will do what I can to help your young people be ready to be 
tested. I am asking the Department of Education and the National Science 
Foundation to identify and coordinate resources throughout the Federal 
Government and through the nonprofit sector that can be used to help 
students to meet the math standards. I want to help young people learn 
more science as well and to make the Government a resource. The Federal 
Government has some of the world's most esteemed laboratories and 
research institutions. We ought to make sure every high school math and 
science teacher has easy access to the work of these laboratories and 
the experts there through the Internet, and we're going to do our best 
to set up that kind of system and make it available to all of your 
teachers so they can in turn make it available to your students. We can 
do this. We can do this.
    We can also meet the challenge of welfare reform, and I can't leave 
here without talking to you about it for a couple of minutes, because I 
want to make it clear where we are now, and this is something else we've 
got to do together. In the last 4 years, the welfare rolls went down by 
2\1/2\ million people, the largest drop in the history of the country. 
Now, how did that happen? And Michigan had a reduction of 30 percent, 
above the national average. How did that happen?
    We know that about half the drop was the result of the economy 
producing 11\1/2\ million jobs. We know about 30 percent to a third of 
it was the result of the fact that 43 of our States had vigorous welfare 
reform experiments, and the ones that were statewide, like yours, had 
better results. We know that there was some result from the fact that we 
increased child support collections, working together to get really 
tough within the States and across State lines. Child support 
collections went up by 50 percent in the last 4 years, and we know that 
helped some people to get off welfare.
    Now we have a new law, and the new law says there should be time 
limits for how long a person could be on welfare; there should be time 
limits for how long a person could be on welfare consecutively--2 years 
before getting a job. There are tough work requirements. We leave the 
medical aid and food aid to poor children and their families in place. 
We increased the aid going in child care at the Federal level, and then 
we give the States the flexibility to decide how to design the program 
to move people from welfare to work and support them at an appropriate 
level in the meantime.
    Now, that's what it does. I signed the bill, and I thought it was 
the right thing to do. But I also want you to know that we have to do 
now something else; we have to make it work. That law was not the end of 
welfare reform; it was the beginning. It gave this problem to you. You 
remember what that old country musician Chet Atkins said: ``You got to 
be careful what you ask for in this old life; you might get it.'' And so 
now you have it.
    Now, we have been telling poor people they have to be more 
responsible: ``If you can work, you have to work. You've got to succeed 
at home as parents and in the work force.'' Now we have a 
responsibility. You're telling people they've got to go to work; we've 
got to make sure there's a job there for them if they go to work.
    Let me say precisely what this means, because I want to be precise. 
I think it's very important that since the States have responsibility 
here, every State needs to know exactly how many jobs have we got to 
create in Michigan only for people to move from welfare to work, how 
many jobs in Arkansas, how many jobs in Arizona, how many jobs, and how 
many jobs would that mean we'd have to do by county, and how are we 
going to do this.
    Basically, if you look at the law's requirements and the fact that 
it's phased in, the requirement for States to put a certain number of 
people at work, you will have to--as a nation, we will have to create 
about another million, a little bit less, maybe 900,000 jobs for welfare 
recipients only, and move approximately another 2\1/2\ million people 
off welfare in the next 4 years to meet the requirements of the law.
    Now, in the last 4 years, we did it with 43 of the 50 States having 
welfare reform experiments, but only some of them were statewide. But we 
also had 11\1/2\ million jobs. We never had that many before. Maybe 
we'll do it again. I'd like that a lot, and I'll work on it hard. But no 
one can predict with any certainty what will happen.
    So you must imagine, how will we make it more attractive--and we 
don't have the money to have big public service employment. I do have 
some money in my budget to give to the urban areas especially and to 
isolated rural areas

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with high impact unemployment to help them do work that needs to be done 
anyway in their cities. But that won't get the job done. Most of this 
will have to be done by private employers.
    Our plan will give tax credits of up to 50 percent of the salary up 
to $10,000 a year for people that hire people right off the welfare roll 
and do not replace someone else; they hire them for a real new job. It 
will give other incentives for businesses to hire people off welfare and 
incentives for job placement firms and for States to create more jobs 
for welfare recipients. You'll get more money if you create more jobs 
for them. And if your past is any indication, you'll be one of those 
that will be claiming the incentives, and that's a good thing. And it 
does provide more money for training and for child care, and in our 
budget for the new transportation bill, more money for transportation, 
because that's a big issue in a lot of places for moving people from 
welfare to work.
    But you are going to have to get help. And the private employer 
community and the community nonprofits community and the religious 
community, they're all going to have to help. You also have the option 
to do something else: You can, totally at your own discretion, let 
people take some or all of the welfare check and you can give it to the 
employer as an employment and training subsidy. And some States are 
going to have to do that because their training dollars are inadequate, 
so they're going to have to depend on on-the-job training. Missouri is 
doing this now in the Kansas City area; Florida has adopted a version of 
it; a number of other States have. I urge you to look at that. I think 
it's a legitimate thing to give a private employer, for a limited period 
of time, a subsidy for training and for hiring people who are otherwise 
very hard to hire.
    That's another point I want to make. Keep in mind, about half the 
welfare caseload gets off on their own. It's the other half that we have 
to liberate from permanent dependency, and it's harder for them to get 
into the work force and harder for them to stay and harder for them to 
learn the basic things. And so we're going to have to go out to our 
employers and say, ``Hey, we want to help you.'' Or in the case of the 
churches and the nonprofits, the tax credit is not worth anything to 
them because they don't pay taxes anyway, but the wage subsidy would be 
worth something to them to get them to enlist.
    So, you know, I have really collected--how many employers are there 
in America with more than 100 employees? How many nonprofits are there? 
How many religious institutions are there with more than 100 members in 
the congregation or more than 200 members? Every State needs this 
information. Every community needs this information. And those folks 
need to be hit up to do their part, especially if you ever heard anybody 
in your local neighborhood cussing the welfare system who works people. 
Go back and say, ``Okay, we got rid of it. Now what are you going to do? 
What are you going to do? We need your help.''
    The last thing I wanted to say is--and this may be a moderate 
problem in Michigan, will be a huge problem in some States--I signed the 
welfare reform bill, but I said when I signed it I thought we made a 
mistake to eliminate all aid to legal immigrants. Now, when an immigrant 
comes to America, they say--they have to promise that they won't try to 
get on welfare and they won't take any public money. That is true. But 
it's also true it takes 5 years to become a citizen; meanwhile you work 
and you pay taxes. And in a country like ours that lets in a significant 
number of immigrants--in your largest county now, you have people from 
over 140 different racial and ethnic groups--bad things are going to 
happen to good people just when they show up every day. There will be 
car wrecks; there will be serious illnesses; there will be crime 
victims; and I personally think it's wrong to either dump that problem 
on the door of the State legislature or, in the alternative, just tell 
them to do without. And this is a great nation of immigrants. I think 
this is unworthy of us, and I'm going to try to change it, and I hope 
that you will support that. It would be good for you if you do.
    Thank you for making me feel so welcome today. Let me say again, you 
ought to go back and get the local paper and read the article about 
Teddy Roosevelt. You ought to think about what happened in the 
intervening 90 years. You ought to realize that we have an even greater 
opportunity now, and with it a greater responsibility to forge a new 
partnership to deal with the new possibilities of this bright new era. 
And if we seize this responsibility of ours, there is no telling what 
can happen--good and wonderful and positive for America.

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    So it is our duty, but it is our good fortune. You ought to go home 
tonight and thank God that you got a chance to serve the public at this 
moment in time. It is a rare time. And you ought to wake up tomorrow 
determined to do it with greater energy and enthusiasm and dedication 
than ever before.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:36 a.m. in the House of Representatives 
Chamber at the State Capitol. In his remarks, he referred to Speaker of 
the House Curtis Hertel, House Majority Leader Ken Sikkema, Senate 
Minority Leader John Cherry, and Senate Majority Leader Dick Posthumus, 
Michigan State Legislature; Gov. John Engler, Lt. Gov. Connie Binsfeld, 
and Attorney General Frank J. Kelley of Michigan; Mayor Dick Hollister 
of Lansing; Rev. Wendell Anthony, Fellowship Chapel, Detroit, MI, who 
gave the invocation; William Schmidt, professor, Michigan State 
University; and James J. Blanchard and William Milliken, former 
Governors of Michigan.