    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [January 7, 1998]
    [Pages 6-9]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks Announcing Proposed Legislation on Child Care
    January 7, 1998

        Thank you very much. Welcome to the White House. You know, I was
    listening to the Vice President and
    Tipper and Hillary speak, and I was looking at all these people out here,
    and I was thinking about all the great joys of being President. And one
    of the greatest joys of being President is that you get to stand up and
    make an announcement on which other people have done all the work.
    [Laughter]
        I want to begin by thanking the Cabinet, especially Secretary
    Shalala who has done so much work on this.
    But I thank them all. I thank the Congress, not only the Women's Caucus
    of Republican and Democratic women in the Congress but the few errant
    men who are here--[laughter]--and those who are not here who care so
    passionately about this issue in the Senate and in the House.
        I thank the children and families who are here and the child
    advocates who are here. I was looking around this room--there are some
    people in this room that I have been listening to on this issue for way
    over 20 years now.

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    They have waited a long time for this day. [Laughter]
        I thank the Gores. You know, they started their family conference
    every year in Nashville even before we began our partnership together,
    and it was a brilliant and unique idea, the idea of every year focusing
    on the American family and some aspect of challenge or opportunity and
    bringing people in from all over America to talk about it. There's
    really no precedent for it as far as I know in our public policy, and
    it's a remarkable contribution that they have made.
        And of course, I thank my wife, who has been talking to me about all
    these things for more than 25 years now and is sitting there thinking
    that I finally got around to doing what she has been telling me to do.
    [Laughter] I was thinking it would be nice to have something new to talk
    about for the next 25 years. [Laughter] That's one of the major reasons
    for this event today. And even if the rest of you can't appreciate it as
    much as I can, you'll just have to live with the truth. [Laughter]
        But mostly I thank these children, for they remind us of our
    fundamental obligations as Americans and as human beings.
        You know, throughout our history, our Founders told us that they
    organized our country in order to form a more perfect Union. And one of
    the most important ways we have done that now, for more than 220 years,
    is to always apply our most fundamental values to the circumstances and
    challenges of each new age. And the reason we have made it is that we
    have never forgotten that there is no more fundamental value than the
    American family, than its strength and its integrity. There is no more
    important job than raising a child. There is no more important
    responsibility than to create the conditions and give people the tools
    to succeed at raising their children. But I think we would all have to
    admit that as a nation we have not done what we should have done to
    enable all of our families to meet the challenge of the era in which we
    live.
        For some time now, we have been, at least with one foot, in the 21st
    century. We know that the 21st century will be dominated by
    globalization and by information and technological revolutions. And we
    know that it has brought us many great benefits.
        We as Americans should be very grateful today for the prosperity we
    enjoy. Even though all of you and your fellow Americans have worked hard
    to earn it and we've made some tough decisions in Washington to help
    bring it about, we should still be grateful for it. But we know that
    this new economy, with all the unprecedented prosperity it has brought
    us, has also imposed some significant new challenges.
        We know, for example, that the average working family is spending
    more hours a week in the workplace than 25 or 30 years ago, with all the
    benefits of technology. And we know that more and more parents of young
    children are in the workplace, either because they're single-parent
    households or because both parents have to work to make ends meet or
    because both parents choose to work--and they ought to have that choice.
        But there is no more important responsibility on us to apply the
    values of America, the timeless values of America, to modern
    conditions--none is more important than making sure every American can
    balance the dual responsibilities of succeeding as parents and
    succeeding at work. There is no more significant challenge. Indeed, one
    of the biggest debates we had when we were working through the welfare
    reform issue was how we could require people to be responsible and go to
    work without creating conditions which would require them to abandon
    their first responsibility to be good parents. That is the universal
    obligation of every parent, and it should be the dominant concern of our
    Government.
        That's what this is about. I don't believe I have ever talked to a
    parent who was also in the workplace who has not been able to cite at
    least one example, and oftentimes many, many more, of a conflict
    between--that he or she felt between the obligations of parenthood and
    the obligations to the job. And that includes, of course, people who
    work in the White House--when the President makes them work too late at
    night. [Laughter] But you just--you know that. Everyone--I saw a lot of
    you nodding your heads. You just know that. It's part of the fabric of
    American life.
        We know that the Government cannot raise or love a child, but that
    is not what we're supposed to do. What the Government is supposed to do
    is to help create the conditions and give people the tools that will
    enable them to raise and love their children while successfully
    participating in the American workplace.

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        Today I am proud to propose the single largest national commitment
    to child care in the history of the United States. It is a comprehensive
    and fiscally responsible plan to make child care more affordable and
    accessible, to raise the quality of child care, to assure the safety of
    care for millions of American children.
        This is an issue that touches nearly every family, and I believe it
    must rise above politics and partisan interests. I welcome the
    bipartisan effort to improve child care that is already going on in the
    Congress. I thank the Members who are here and many who could not come
    today for their leadership and for demonstrating that this is an
    American issue that both Democrats and Republicans are embracing.
        This proposal will be an important part of the budget I send to
    Congress next month. It will be the first balanced budget in 30 years.
    It will build on the achievements of the year just passed, one that was
    very good for working families. As has already been mentioned, last
    summer's historic balanced budget agreement provided working families
    with a $500-per-child tax credit; it made the first 2 years of college--
    community college--virtually free for almost every American family and
    made college more affordable for American families; expanded health
    coverage to 5 million uninsured people; advanced the cause of placing
    more children into solid, adoptive homes; and continued our efforts to
    collect more child support.
        Over the past 5 years, we have worked hard to abandon the false
    choices of the past, including the false choice of having to choose
    between responsibilities at work and responsibilities at home. Our new
    economic strategy is designed in no small measure to get over that
    divide. From the Family and Medical Leave Act, to the earned-income tax
    credit, to the minimum wage increase, we have tried to demonstrate that
    it is not only possible but imperative to the survival of the American
    dream to help people meet their responsibilities at home and at work.
    Strengthening child care has always been a part of this strategy. Since
    we came here, we've helped a million children and their families to
    afford the child care that they need, but we have to do a lot more.
        Now, this new proposal has three fundamental goals: first, to make
    child care more affordable and available to all Americans. With
    increased block grants to States, we will double the number of children
    receiving child care subsidies to more than 2 million. One of the
    reasons welfare reform has worked as well as it has is because of the
    increased investment in child care. Now we have to help the lower income
    families who have never been on welfare in the first place but still
    struggle to pay for child care. We also will help more than 3 million
    working families to meet their child care expenses by dramatically
    expanding the child care tax credit. These tax credits will mean that a
    family of four making $35,000 and saddled with high child care bills
    will no longer pay one penny in Federal income taxes.
        I'm also supporting new tax credits to encourage more businesses to
    provide child care for their employees. When I met the Members of
    Congress before coming in here, that's the first thing Congresswoman
    DeLauro said. She had just come from the
    opening of a corporate child care center. We need more businesses to do
    more, and we need to help the smaller businesses who can use this tax
    credit and cannot afford to do it on their own without a little help
    from the public.
        Second, we must make sure that every child has a safe and enriching
    place to go after school. As the Vice President said, there are simply
    too many children who, through no fault of their parents, are left to
    fend for themselves in the hours between 2 and 6 o'clock--too many
    children roaming the streets, idling in front of the television, or
    getting into trouble.
        I cannot emphasize the importance of this too much. The crime rate
    in this country has dropped dramatically in the last 5 years. All
    Americans should be proud of that. The juvenile crime rate has not
    dropped so much. And where it has dropped, almost without exception, it
    has dropped because people have found something positive for children to
    do in the hours between the time school ends and the time their parents
    come home at night. We do not need to keep building jail after jail
    after jail to house children who wouldn't be there in the first place if
    we took care of them while they're out free and able to build
    constructive, law-abiding, positive lives.
        I am proposing the expansion of before- and after-school programs to
    help some 500,000 children say no to drugs and alcohol and crime and yes
    to reading, soccer, computers, and a brighter future for themselves. I
    thank the Vice President especially for his
    hard work on this issue.

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        Third, we have to improve the safety and quality of child care and
    make sure that child care advances early childhood development. I am
    proposing an early learning fund to help to reduce child-to-staff ratios
    in child care centers, train child care workers, and educate parents. We
    have to also strengthen the enforcement of State codes and licensing
    requirements, weed out bad providers, and through tougher criminal
    background checks, make sure that the wrong people aren't doing the
    right mission that we all need done properly. Finally, we ought to offer
    scholarships to talented caregivers.
        Now, let me take a minute to thank our State leaders, from North
    Carolina to Washington State, from Rhode Island to Minnesota, for their
    efforts at improving child care and promoting early learning across
    America. I know Governor Almond of Rhode
    Island is here, and I want to especially thank him for Rhode Island's
    child opportunity zone program. It is a national model.
        We are living in what may well be the most exciting era of human
    history. But the globalization, the information and technology
    revolution, they continue to alter the way we live and work, the way we
    do business, and the way we relate to each other and the rest of the
    world. They make some jobs easier; they render others obsolete. But
    nothing must be permitted to undermine the first responsibilities of
    parenthood.
        No raise or promotion will ever top the joy of hugging a child after
    work. Nothing can be more bittersweet than sending a child you once
    cradled off in your arms off to college for the first time. [Laughter]
    Nothing weighs more heavily on a parent's mind than the well-being of a
    child in the care of others. No issue is more important to any family.
        You know, a lot of us have had our own experiences with child care.
    I've often wondered how my mother, when she was widowed, would have been
    able to go back to school if I hadn't been able to move in with my
    grandparents. I was lucky, and it turned out reasonably well for me.
    [Laughter] But how many children are out there with exactly the same
    potential, who never got the same break by pure accident of family
    circumstance? You don't know the answer to that, and neither do I. But
    we know what the answer should be. The answer should be, not a single
    one.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:27 p.m. in the East Room at the White
    House. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. Lincoln Almond of Rhode
    Island.