[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
[May 19, 1997]
[Pages 627-628]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Dinner
May 19, 1997

    Thank you very much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you, 
Steve, for that very eloquent introduction. I almost wish you'd just 
stay up here and give the rest of the speech. It was beautiful.
    Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here tonight. I will be 
quite brief because I want us to have a chance just to sit around the 
table and visit, but I thought it might be helpful for me to just say a 
few things that everyone would hear, and it might inform our discussions 
going forward.
    The first thing I want to say is that your country is moving in the 
right direction, and we should be glad of that. When I came here after 
the 1992 election, I had a simple strategic notion of what I wanted to 
do to prepare America for the new century. I wanted to change the 
economic policy of the country to create opportunity for everybody who 
was willing to work for it and get away from the endless deficits and go 
back to reducing the deficit, increasing investment in education and 
research and technology and the things we needed more of, and expanding 
trade.
    I wanted to change the social policy of this country in ways that 
would bring us together instead of driving us apart, focusing on 
bringing the crime rate down, reducing the welfare rolls, putting family 
at the center of social policy and helping people juggle family and 
work, and bringing us together across the racial and religious and other 
differences that we have in this country.
    And the third thing I wanted to do was to chart a course that would 
keep America's leadership in the world alive and well for peace and 
freedom and prosperity.
    Now, we have pursued that for 4 years now. And I believe the wisdom 
of the economic course, the course on crime, the course on welfare, the 
course of our leadership in the world is no longer open to serious 
debate. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years, the lowest 
inflation rate in 30 years, the highest business investment rate in 35 
years. We have the smallest Government in 35 years, and as a percentage 
of the civilian work force, the Federal Government is the smallest it's 
been since 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt took office, before the New 
Deal.
    But we continue to invest more in education, more in science, more 
in technology, more in environmental protection, more in children. We're 
moving in the right direction. The welfare rolls have seen their biggest 
drop in 50 years. The crime rate has gone down 5 years in a row. We are 
moving in the right direction. The country has plainly done a great deal 
to expand trade and to promote democracy and freedom and peace 
throughout the world. I'm proud of that.
    Just in the last 4\1/2\ months, we've seen the Chemical Weapons 
Treaty. We now have an agreement between NATO and Russia to try to work 
together for a democratic, undivided Europe. We had a telecommunications 
trade agreement which will open 90 percent of the world's markets to 
America's telecommunication services and products and will create 
hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs in this country.
    We had a Summit of Service in Philadelphia in which all the former 
Presidents and I and General Powell challenged every community in 
America and every citizen in America to give every child in America a 
good education, a safe place to grow up, a healthy start, a mentor, an 
adult role model, and the chance to serve for themselves. And I think we 
have a chance to make that work in a profoundly positive way.
    And of course, finally, we got this great budget deal. The budget 
deal, in brief, would provide that the budget would be balanced in 5 
years. It contains the largest increase in educational investment since 
the sixties and the biggest expansion of higher education opportunities 
since

[[Page 628]]

the GI bill in 1945. It would insure half--5 million of the 10 million 
kids in this country who are in working families who don't have access 
to health insurance. It would restore virtually all of the cuts made--
wrongly, I think--by the Congress last year in aid to legal immigrants 
who come here and, through no fault of their own, have misfortunes. It 
would provide funds to clean up 500 of the worst toxic waste dumps in 
the country and to do other important environmental projects, including 
preserving the Florida Everglades, which is a profoundly important 
endeavor for the United States. It contains, in short, 99 percent of the 
investments I recommended myself in the budget I sent to the Congress 
and is better--better now than the one we started with for poor 
children.
    It also contains--as it had to if we were going to have any kind of 
agreement--a provision for tax cuts that include some things that we 
wanted, like a tax cut for children and working families to pay for 
child care and other costs, and a tax credit and a tax deduction for the 
cost of education after high school, which I believe will make it 
possible for us to say we're making 2 years of college as universal as 
high school is today. And it contains some form of capital gains tax 
relief, some form of estate tax relief, which were the things that the 
Republicans cared about.
    But we also will not refight 1995 because they have pledged not to 
try to reduce the earned-income tax credit--which is a tax benefit that 
low-income working people get--not to try to repeal the low-income 
housing tax credit, and not to raid workers' pension funds to pay for 
any of these tax programs.
    This is a good deal. It's a good thing for Democrats. It's a good 
thing for Republicans. But most importantly, it's a good thing for 
America. It will keep interest rates down and growth going in a way that 
also will promote long-term growth.
    So I am very happy about it. I hope you're very happy about it. And 
I hope Congress will be happy enough about it to pass it quickly.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 8:23 p.m. in the East Room at the Mayflower 
Hotel.