    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [September 25, 1999]
    [Pages 1602-1603]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1602]]

    The President's Radio Address
    September 25, 1999

        Good morning. With only 5 days left in the current fiscal year,
    Congress still has a lot of work to do. For almost 7 years now, Vice
    President Gore and I have pursued a new economic strategy that focused
    on fiscal discipline, expanding trade in American products and services,
    and investing in our people and new technology.
        The results are now clear. The past 6\1/2\ years have produced the
    longest peacetime expansion in history: more than 19 million new jobs;
    rising wages; the lowest unemployment, welfare, and crime rates in a
    generation; the highest levels of homeownership ever; a balanced budget;
    and the largest surplus ever. It has given the American people more
    money in their paychecks, lower interest rates for homes and cars, more
    help through efforts like the HOPE scholarship to open the doors of
    college to all. We're on a path of progress and prosperity. The American
    people want it to continue.
        That's why 2 days ago I vetoed the Republicans' risky $792 billion
    tax plan. It was just too big, too bloated; it would place too big a
    burden on our economy and run the risk of higher interest rates and
    lower growth. Also, it didn't add a day to the Social Security Trust
    Fund or a dollar to Medicare. And it would have forced cuts of nearly 50
    percent in everything from education to health care to the environment
    to veterans programs to national security, even in air traffic safety.
        It would have created an untenable choice for the Congress: these
    irresponsible cuts on the one hand; or on the other, diverting ever more
    funds from the Social Security surplus and from debt reduction. We said,
    all of us did just a few months ago, that we shouldn't spend the Social
    Security surplus anymore.
        Today I say again to the congressional majority, we don't have to do
    that. I gave them a plan to expand the life of the Social Security Trust
    Fund 50 years, to extend Medicare over 25 years, and add prescription
    drug coverage, to invest in education and other priorities, to provide
    an affordable tax cut, and still to pay down the debt and make us debt-
    free as a nation for the first time since 1835.
        But the congressional majority continues on a track that doesn't
    adequately fund America's real priorities, while already spending large
    amounts of the Social Security surplus, instead of preserving it for
    debt reduction. A month ago their own Congressional Budget Office
    estimated they'd used $16 to $19 billion of the surplus for Social
    Security, and steps they've taken since then have only made it go
    higher. They have used what the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times,
    and others have called budget gimmicks to give the impression that they
    have simply created $17 billion out of thin air.
        At the same time, they're still not providing nearly enough for
    education and other vital priorities. In fact, the very same day I
    vetoed their budget-busting tax plan, they passed a bill out of
    committee that would seriously undermine our efforts to strengthen
    education. It would eliminate our effort to hire 100,000 quality
    teachers and reduce class size, something they themselves endorsed last
    year at election time. It would deny hundreds of thousands of young
    people access to after-school programs. It would eliminate our mentoring
    program, which is designed to get poor children into college. It doesn't
    improve or expand Head Start. It cuts the successful America Reads
    program, which now involves students from a thousand colleges going to
    tens of thousands of our young children to make sure they can read. It
    cuts our efforts to connect all our classrooms and schools to the
    Internet by the year 2000. And, again, there's not any funding for our
    plan to build or modernize 6,000 schools. All this at a time when we
    need to be doing more, not less, to prepare for the 21st century, for
    what is now the largest group of schoolchildren in our history.
        There's a better way. The Republicans should work with us to create
    a budget that pays for itself with straightforward proposals like our
    tobacco policy. They should work with us to create a real Social
    Security lockbox that would devote the entire surplus to debt reduction
    from Social Security taxes and extend the life of Social Security until
    the middle of the next century, something their plan doesn't do.
        Thursday I asked the Republicans to work with me on bipartisan
    Medicare proposal to

    [[Page 1603]]

    modernize Medicare and provide voluntary prescription drug benefits and
    keep it solvent until 2027. Following a meeting with my advisers, the
    Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Bill Roth, has agreed to engage in serious discussion on meaningful
    Medicare reform.
        I'm reaching out to the Republicans to engage with us on Medicare. I
    want to do the same on education, on Social Security, on paying down our
    debt. We owe it to the American people to give it our best efforts. The
    results could make the 21st century America's best days.
        Thanks for listening.

    Note: The address was recorded at 5:27 p.m. on September 24 in the Oval
    Office at the White House for broadcast at 10:06 a.m. on September 25.
    The transcript was made available by the Office of the Press Secretary
    on September 24 but was embargoed for release until the broadcast.