    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [August 30, 1999]
    [Pages 1479-1481]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the State Comptroller's Luncheon in Skaneateles, New York
    August 30, 1999

        Thank you very much. I've enjoyed the program. [Laughter] You know,
    it's pretty nice to go to a lunch like this when you're the only one
    that's not running for anything. Just have a good time. [Laughter]
        I watched Mike do his thing and
    Carl do his thing. Joyce and I were over there handicapping the whole deal. It
    was great. [Laughter] Watched Hillary
    do her thing. It was great.
        But let me say to all of you, I want to begin with a series of
    genuine thank-you's. I thank the people of New York for being so good to
    me and Al Gore, in two elections and a lot of times in between. I thank
    you for being so welcoming and open with Hillary. I thank you for setting so many good examples.
        I want to thank Mike Bragman for his
    leadership. And I want to thank Carl McCall
    for his leadership. You know, the comptroller's lunch--I read up on this
    lunch. [Laughter] And the first thing I read in my notes was, they're
    not going to give you any food. [Laughter]
        But anyway, among other things I learned that this luncheon was
    started by Arthur Levitt, Sr., when he was comptroller of New York. His
    son is now, by my appointment, the head of the
    Securities and Exchange Commission and doing a very fine job.
        I say that because Carl McCall is in that
    tradition of people who have been trusted to manage the collective
    wealth of the people of New York. That's what the comptroller does. And
    in a way, we're here at the State Fair, and it's sort of like being the
    State's chief farmer. You give him the seeds, and you trust him to plant
    them. You trust him to bring in the crop, and you trust him not to waste
    any of it.
        And it's kind of like farming; you've got to be conservative, but
    you have to take a risk. If you don't take a risk, nothing ever sprouts;
    and if you're not basically conservative, it all burns up in the ground
    and is otherwise lost. And I think Carl McCall has husbanded the resources of the people of New York
    and taken advantage of this great economy our country has enjoyed and
    used that to try to find ways, as Mike said, to help you educate your
    children and do a lot of other things that need to be done. And I
    respect that very, very much, and I thank him for letting us crash his
    lunch. [Laughter]
        Now, it is true that Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft might
    have beaten me here, but I'll guarantee you, I've been to a lot more
    fairs than both of them put together. [Laughter] I never met a fair I
    didn't like. [Laughter]
        When I was a young man starting out in Arkansas, you had to go to
    all the county fairs. That's always the biggest crowd, and you'd go out
    in all these rural areas and go to the county fairs. I remember, I
    showed up at a county fair one time; I hadn't ridden a horse in years. I
    wanted to look like I was not taking these rural people for granted, so
    I wore a pinstriped suit, wingtip shoes. [Laughter] I had this young
    man, even younger than me, helping me. And he said, ``I'm going to take
    you to the sheriff. If he's for you, we'll win the county. If he's
    against you, we'll lose, and we can go home.'' [Laughter] ``You don't
    need to shake any hands; you don't need to do anything. If he's for you,
    we win; if he's against you''--[laughter].
        So he takes me to see the sheriff on the night the rodeo opens at
    the county fair. Sheriff's jaw is full of tobacco, holding a horse. He
    said, ``Son, if you ride this horse into the ring when they open the
    rodeo, I'll be for you. If you don't, leave town right now.'' [Laughter]
    I said, ``Give me the reins.'' I got on the horse in my wingtip shoes
    and my pinstriped suit. [Laughter] They played the music. You know how
    they open the rodeo; you know, all you've got to do is kind of get
    behind the horse in front of you, and they'll lope along together. Not
    my horse! We get out in the middle; it stops dead still, rears straight
    up--[laughter]. I'm holding on for dear life. I got out of there in one
    piece. I didn't fall off. The sheriff looked

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    at me and said, ``You didn't fall off; that's worth another 5 percent.''
    [Laughter] So I've had a lot of experience.
        We used to have senior day at the State Fair, and I always had
    Governor's day, so I always did it on the day we had senior day. And
    what Hillary said is true; that lady had 14 children, and they had 40-
    something children, and they had nearly 100 children, those 40, already.
    So she had 150 in her family.
        I also used to hold my own listening sessions at the State Fair on
    Governor's day. I'd just go into one of the exhibition halls and set up
    a little stand, like everybody else, and people would come by.
        And I remember, in 1990 at the State Fair, I was thinking about
    running for a fifth term--this is what's great about the fair; I can't
    wait to get out there and see some of the exhibits--this old boy in
    overalls came up to me and said, ``Are you going to run again?''
    [Laughter] I said, ``Well, if I do, will you vote for me?'' He said,
    ``Yes, I guess so, always have.'' I said, ``Well, aren't you sick of me
    after all these years?'' He said, ``No, I'm not, but everybody else I
    know is.'' [Laughter] And so I said--you know, that's what fairs are
    for. So I said, ``Well, don't you''--I was kind of hurt--I said, ``Don't
    you think I've done a good job?'' And he said, ``Yes, you've done a good
    job, but you got a check every 2 weeks, didn't you?'' [Laughter] He
    said, ``That's what we hired you to do.'' Very important lesson for
    anyone contemplating running for any office. Remember that. That's what
    we hired you to do.
        I say that because I want to close with just 2 minutes of serious
    talk. I am profoundly grateful for the good fortune and the good times
    our country has enjoyed. I'm profoundly grateful that we live at a
    moment in history where we don't have, as we did during the cold war,
    one big threat to our common existence.
        But we're sort of like farmers sitting on a good crop. We had a
    great crop last year, and we got a lot of money in the bank. Now what
    are we going to do with it?
        And when you're at the State Fair, you need to think like that. If
    America is a farm and we're the farm family and we've had years of great
    crops and we've got a lot of money in the bank, what are we going to do
    with it?
        Well, I think that we ought to take the chance of a lifetime to face
    our big challenges. The next 30 years, the number of people over 65 is
    going to double. I hope to be one of them. [Laughter] It'll change
    everything, everything. You'll have fewer people working, more people
    retired. The economics of retirement income from Social Security and
    Medicare and other things will dramatically change.
        I think we've got to use all these good years we've had to try to
    secure Social Security and Medicare to meet the basic needs of our
    seniors and to get the seniors' children, the baby boomers' children,
    through the retirement of the baby boom years. Because we don't want--I
    can say this; I'm the oldest of the baby boomers--we don't want our
    children to have to take money they should be investing in our
    grandchildren to take care of us, because we didn't take care of the
    challenge of the aging of America. And so we've got to think about that.
        We've got to think about the children of America. Hillary said that,
    and you clapped, and I appreciate it. But I just want to--we finally
    have a group of kids bigger than the baby boomers, over 53 million
    children in the schools of America. A higher percentage of them come
    from families whose first language is not English than ever before. Now,
    in a global society, this is a very good thing, if but only if, we give
    every one of them a world-class education and recognize that we need
    them all.
        The Governor of California is a great friend of Hillary's and mine,
    Gray Davis. And he said, ``You know''--he's about
    a year older than I am--he said, ``You know, by the time we get retired,
    there'll only be two people working for every one person drawing Social
    Security. And I don't want my two workers to be D students today.''
    [Laughter] That's pretty good. Interesting thing.
        He says it to make the point that we all, whether we have children
    in the schools or not, whether we have one child or 10 or whatever, we
    all have a vested interest in the children of America. We have a real
    opportunity now. We know what works. We know what helps our schools to
    make sure all our kids can learn.
        The third thing I'd like to say, I'd like to allude to something
    Hillary said. You know, even though we've got the longest peacetime
    expansion in history, the largest number of jobs ever created in this
    period of time, the lowest minority unemployment rate ever reported, new
    records in small business formation every year,

    [[Page 1481]]

    in spite of all that, the hard, cold truth is that this economic
    prosperity has been very uneven.
        And you know it in central and upstate New York. These regions know
    it. There are parts of New York City that know it. In my home area, in
    the Mississippi Delta, they know it. In Appalachia, they know it. On the
    Indian reservations, they know it.
        We've got the chance of a lifetime now, when we're all debating how
    we're going to keep this economy going without more inflation. How can
    we keep it going? I can tell you how we keep it going without more
    inflation: Bring jobs and investment to the areas that have not yet
    participated in the recovery. That gives you growth.
        And one of the things--this is the only specific thing I'll
    mention--one of the things I have asked the Congress to do is to pass a
    law which would give the same tax incentives to investors to invest in
    areas with higher unemployment in America we give them to invest in
    developing areas in the Caribbean and Latin America and Africa and Asia
    and other places in the world. And I think we ought to do it.
        I also believe another thing that will help every area is just to
    keep this thing going, because the more you keep it going, the more it
    will reach into more and more neighborhoods. And one of the reasons that
    I have been opposed to, in effect, giving away, today, the long-term
    benefits of the economic recovery, which is what I think an excessive
    tax cut would do, is: If you have a real big tax cut, you don't have
    money for education; you don't have money to extend the life of Social
    Security and Medicare. There will be an increase in interest rates,
    because people will think we're going to overstimulate the economy, and
    that way all of you who care about interest rates will lose your tax cut
    in higher interest rates.
        And what I want to do is to have a tax cut that is modest and
    targeted, so that we save enough of this surplus, not only to save
    Social Security and Medicare and invest in education but also to get
    this country out of debt in 15 years, for the first time since 1835.
    That's before Teddy Roosevelt and Taft came to the fair. [Laughter]
    Andrew Jackson was President in 1835. That's how long it's been.
        But again, think like a farmer. If you're a family farmer, chances
    are you've got an amount of money every year to bring the crop in or to
    replenish the herd of cattle or whatever it is you do. America is like
    that.
        And if you want this economy to continue to grow, we have to keep
    interest rates as low as possible. I can't think of anything that would
    guarantee the children in this audience a generation of security more
    than essentially taking America's Government out of debt, taking America
    out of the competition for borrowing money, leaving the money there for
    you to borrow and our children to borrow, at the lowest possible
    interest rates, for business loans, for home loans, for car loans, for
    college loans, for you name it. I think this makes a lot of sense.
        So I say to you, when you leave here today, I want you to think
    about that. I want you to think of Carl McCall as somebody who's been like a good farmer, who's taken
    good care of your resources. He hasn't squandered the seed. He can bring
    in a crop next year for you because he's done it. And I want you to
    think of the challenge and the opportunity, the phenomenal opportunity
    your country has right now.
        I won't be around for a lot of these decisions which have to be
    made. But we can make them now. And if we stick with them, we literally
    can meet the challenge of the aging of America, the challenge of the
    children of America, the challenge to spread the economic bounty of
    America to communities that haven't had it. We can get this country out
    of debt, and we can continue to lead the world for peace and freedom and
    justice. We can do that. But we have to think like the people we're
    coming here to this fair to celebrate today.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:12 p.m. in the Empire Room of the Art and
    Home Center Building at the Syracuse State Fairgrounds. In his remarks,
    he referred to State Assembly Majority Leader Michael J. Bragman; and
    State Comptroller H. Carl McCall's wife, Joyce Brown.