    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [February 3, 1998]
    [Pages 158-160]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 158]]

    Remarks in Albuquerque, New Mexico
    February 3, 1998

        Thank you. I want to begin by thanking the University of New Mexico
    Band. They have been wonderful tonight. And I might say, I saw the end
    of your basketball game the other night; it was pretty impressive, too.
        Mr. Mayor, Senator Bingaman, Secretary Pena; Evangeline
    Trujillo, thank you for your
    wonderful remarks and your even more important example. Didn't she do a
    terrific job tonight? [Applause]
        I'm also delighted that we are joined tonight by Congressman
    Redmond, Attorney General Udall, Treasurer Montoya, Secretary
    of State Gonzales, State Auditor Robert
    Vigil; former Governors King, Anaya, and Apodaca--all friends of mine--thank you for being here; Sam
    Vigil, Commissioner of the President's Advisory
    Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Education; and at
    least two of our tribal leaders, Governors Pasqual and Tortalita.  Thank you
    all for being here tonight.
        Let me say there is one person who would love to be here who can't
    be, and I promised him that I would say hello to you, New Mexico's own
    and America's very great Ambassador to the United Nations, Bill
    Richardson.
        I'd also like to recognize two New Mexicans who work at the Sandia
    National Laboratories in Albuquerque, who have not been properly
    recognized. Chris Cherry and Rod
    Owenby, in 1996, assisted FBI and ATF agents
    during the search of Theodore Kaczynski's residence in Montana. They, at considerable risk to
    themselves, helped lead to the capture and the conviction of Mr.
    Kaczynski and put an end to his deadly attacks. They live among you.
    They have never gotten credit for what they did, and I think we ought to
    express our thanks to them tonight.
        Thank you for coming out. I want to especially thank the children
    for being here tonight. Thank you for coming, and all of you who brought
    them. I'm glad to be back in New Mexico and on this very spot to talk
    about how we are going to strengthen our Nation for a new century by
    balancing the budget while investing in our people and preparing for our
    future.
        I'll never forget back in 1992, on election day, at 3 a.m. in the
    morning, what Hillary and I saw at the hangar at the Albuquerque
    International Airport. That hangar was filled with people who were tired
    and cold but warm with hope. At 3 o'clock in the morning, Bruce
    King brought me a Mexican breakfast, which I
    loved. And I was saying to the people there in the early morning hours,
    before the polls had opened and when the outcome of the election was
    still uncertain, that America faced a profound choice between hope and
    fear, between whether we would or would not have the courage to change.
    In 1992 the people of the United States and the people of New Mexico
    gave Bill Clinton and Al Gore a chance to chart a new course for
    America's future. I thank you, and I believe it is working.
        We have worked hard to move past the sterile debate between those
    who say that Government is the enemy and those who claimed it could
    solve all our problems, to build a new kind of Government; to take what
    some have called a third way; to give you a Government that is smaller,
    that is more flexible, that is less bureaucratic, that promotes new
    ideas and, most of all, tries to give all of you and all your fellow
    Americans the tools you need to make the most of your own lives in a
    very new world.
        Ladies and gentlemen, we are committed to building a 21st century
    America with an economy based on opportunity, a society full of
    responsibility, an America that lives together across racial and
    religious lines as one American community.
        I think that we all know this approach is working. Compared to 5
    years ago, our deficit is down by more than 90 percent. We have 14
    million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 24 years, the lowest
    inflation in 30 years, the highest homeownership in history. And
    yesterday I submitted to Congress the first balanced budget in 30 years.
        Not so very long ago our deficit was so large it had 11 zeros. Now
    it is going to be simply zero. And you should all be proud of that.
    Balancing the budget can mark the beginning of a new era of opportunity
    for America, a new era of achievement, a new era of wholeness

    [[Page 159]]

    to our public national life in the 21st century. What are we going to do
    with this opportunity? That's what I want to say to you again tonight.
        First, we must know we can balance the budget and save Social
    Security in the 21st century. And that is important. Now, all of you
    here know that when the baby boomers--and I know about this because I'm
    the oldest of the baby boomers--that when we retire there will be a lot
    more people retired, compared to people working, than there ever have
    been before in American history. And we know that will put new burdens
    on the Social Security system. But if we begin now to prepare for that,
    with all we know and all we can find out, and if we don't make this a
    political thing, if we make it an American crusade across party lines
    and age lines and income lines, we know that we can save Social Security
    for the 21st century in such a way that my generation does not expect to
    bankrupt our children to take care of us and impair our children's
    ability to take care of our grandchildren. We can do that.
        And all I have asked of the Congress is that when we balance the
    budget--it is then projected that we will begin to run surpluses for the
    first time in a coon's age, since anybody can remember. Nobody can
    remember when that happened. It is projected now that we could have
    surpluses as high as $200 billion over the next 5 years. And what I say
    to you is, the easy thing is for us to take the money back in tax cuts
    or spending programs. But I want you to commit to me that you will
    support the Congress in saying, don't do anything with the money until
    you fix Social Security first.
        We can balance the budget and give Americans the finest education in
    the world. Perhaps the proudest achievement of the balanced budget
    agreement last year was that it opened the doors of college to all
    Americans: over 200,000 new Pell grants in the last 3 years; 300,000 new
    work-study positions; education IRA's you can save for a college
    education for yourselves or your children and withdraw from them tax
    free; a $1,500 tax cut; a HOPE scholarship tax credit for the first 2
    years of college; and a lifetime learning tax cut for the 3d and 4th
    years, for graduate school, for adults who have to go back for job
    training. If you want to go to college, you can go now. Don't let
    anybody tell you you can't.
        But now we have to make sure that the years of education before
    college are as good as the college education is in America. Everybody
    knows America has the finest system of higher education in the entire
    world. I will never be satisfied until we know we have the finest system
    of elementary and secondary education in the entire world.
        We can balance the budget and put 100,000 more teachers in the first
    3 grades to lower average class size to 18, so all our kids have a
    chance to learn. We can balance the budget and build or repair 5,000
    more schools, because if there are more kids and more teachers, you have
    to have more classrooms. We can balance the budget and help the poorest,
    most underprivileged communities in rural and urban areas to achieve
    high standards of excellence, to end social promotion but to get a
    second chance to really learn what all our children are fully capable of
    learning.
        We can balance the budget and make an unprecedented commitment to
    improving the quality of Hispanic education and reducing the
    unacceptably high dropout rate among Hispanic-American students. This
    commitment--hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several
    years--will build on the progress of the President's Advisory Commission
    on Excellence in Hispanic Education to lower the dropout rate and help
    young Hispanic-Americans to succeed in school. I want to thank Sam
    Vigil, who is here with us today, and Senator
    Bingaman, who has worked so hard on this
    issue. We cannot have an America where there is a huge racial disparity
    in the dropout rate. All of our kids need to finish high school, and all
    of our kids can finish high school.
        We can balance the budget and deal with the challenge that Mayor
    Baca talked about earlier. I am very happy and proud of the work that
    our administration has done in partnership with local law enforcement
    and citizen groups to have a big 5-year decline in the crime rate. But
    if you have been following it closely, you know that the juvenile crime
    rate has not gone down as much as the adult crime rate has. There's
    still too many of our kids getting in trouble, and most of that trouble
    happens between the time school closes, about 3, and the time all the
    parents get home, about 8, from work. We must give our children
    something positive to do in those hours, and we can balance the budget
    and do that and keep our kids out of trouble.

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        We can balance the budget and help millions of Americans to provide
    child care to their children that is of good quality, that is
    affordable, and that helps people to balance the demands of school and
    work. We can balance the budget and extend health care coverage to more
    hard-working Americans. I'll bet you anything there are people in this
    audience tonight, between the ages of 55 and 65, where your spouse has
    gone on Medicare but you're not old enough for it yet; or you lost a job
    and you haven't gotten another one, so you don't have health care; or
    you took early retirement from a company that promised you health
    insurance coverage and then didn't deliver. I say we should let those
    people have the opportunity to buy into the Medicare program early. It
    won't cost Medicare a dime, and it will be worth all the money in the
    world to them.
        We can balance the budget and continue to clean our environment.
    Compared to 5 years ago, the air is cleaner; the water is cleaner; the
    food is safer in America; there are fewer toxic waste dumps. But we have
    more to do. We have got to deal with the crisis of climate change, do
    something about global warming, and bring our people the benefits of a
    growing economy and a cleaner environment. In New Mexico, you know we
    can do that. Help us lead the way in America.
        And we can balance the budget and invest in the science and
    technology that can revolutionize our way of life; whether it is in
    cleaning the environment, finding cures for diseases, solving practical
    problems in America, we can do it. I announced today at Los Alamos that
    our balanced budget will put over $500 million into developing the
    fastest supercomputers in human history, 1,000 times faster than the
    fastest one when I took office 5 years ago. We are going to develop a
    computer that will do more calculations in a second than you can with
    your hand-held computer in 30 million years. That is on the verge of
    reality.
        But the last thing I want to say to you is, we can balance the
    budget, and we can do all that, but we have to remember we're living in
    a smaller and smaller world where we're more interconnected, whether we
    like it or not, with people all around the world, not just economically
    but also in terms of the spread of disease or our vulnerability to
    terrorism or drug traffickers or our vulnerability to common, shared
    environmental problems. And yet we can do so much more when we work
    together.
        In a world like this, there is no nation better suited to do well in
    the 21st century than our United States. Why? Because here the price of
    citizenship is believing in America. It is not a function of your race;
    it is not a function of your religion; it is not a function of where you
    were born; it is not a function of how much money you have; all you have
    to do is to be willing to work hard, obey the law, and say you believe
    in the things that have made our country great.
        And I'm telling you, folks, you just look around this crowd today
    and you think about what it means to be in a global society. I tell you,
    we can build one America. We can balance the budget. We can invest in
    our future. And if we do, all these little children today, they will be
    living in the greatest days the United States has ever known. Help us do
    that.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:25 p.m. at the Civic Plaza. In his
    remarks, he referred to Mayor Jim Baca of Albuquerque; Evangeline
    Sandoval Trujillo, director, Mathematics, Engineering, Science
    Association, who introduced the President; New Mexico State Treasurer
    Michael Montoya; New Mexico Secretary of State Stephanie Gonzales;
    former New Mexico Governors Bruce King, Toney Anaya, and Jerry Apodaca;
    Acama Pueblo Governor Reginald Pasqual; Santo Domingo Pueblo Governor
    Tony Tortalita; and convicted Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski.